But slowly production improved, a measure of the eagerness of the young workforce to learn new skills and what amounted to a whole new way of life and their resilience in the face of hardship. By the time the Reuther brothers headed back to the United States after eighteen months at GAZ, most of the other foreign workers already had departed, the skill level of the native workforce had enormously improved, more food and consumer goods were available, and cars and trucks were steadily coming off the line. New York Times Moscow reporter Walter Duranty, a big booster of Stalinist industrialization, in declaring his confidence that GAZ would quickly get up to speed, chided that “Foreign critics sometimes fail to realize two things about Russia today—the astonishing capacity for bursts of energy to get the seeming impossible accomplished and the fact that Russians learn fast.” When two Austin engineers returned to the plant site in 1939, they were “dumbfounded” to see that a city of 120,000 people had grown up around the core residential area they had constructed, with six- to eight-story apartment buildings, paved streets, “quite a few flowers,” and people who “looked better.”41
As a cadre of skilled workers developed, other start-ups became easier. When the Kharkov tractor plant began operations in the fall of 1931, it benefited from a large group of experienced workers who were transferred from its twin in Stalingrad. Also, rather than immediately having to manufacture the 715 custom parts that went into its tractors, the plant could begin assembling vehicles using some parts shipped over from the Stalingrad factory.42
By contrast, the construction and initial operation of the Magnitogorsk Metallurgical Complex made the Stalingrad tractor factory and the Gorky automobile plant look like easy sailing.43 Before the revolution, Russia had only a small iron and steel industry. The First Five-Year Plan called for a huge leap in metal production. Key to the effort was to be a massive integrated steel plant forty miles east of the Urals, next to two hills which contained so much iron ore that they affected the behavior of compasses, giving them the name Magnetic Mountain (Magnitnaia gora) and the city that was to arise with the plant the name Magnitogorsk. By some accounts, Stalin personally called for the creation of the complex after learning about the U.S. Steel plant in Gary, Indiana. Like Gary, the plant was to include every phase of the production of steel products, including blast furnaces, open-hearth converters, rolling mills and other finishing plants, coke-making furnaces, and equipment to make chemicals out of coke by-products. Unlike Gary, the complex included its own iron mine.
Magnitogorsk—“The Mighty Giant of the Five Year Plan,” as one Soviet periodical dubbed it—was but one component of an even larger scheme, a Kombinat, an assemblage of functionally and geographically related facilities, which stretched all the way to Kuznetsk in Central Siberia, the source of most of the coal initially used in the steel complex, and which included the Chelyabinsk tractor factory, 120 miles northwest of Magnitogorsk. Even some of the less-heralded Kombinat factories were huge, like the railroad car plant in Nizhny Tagil, north of Chelyabinsk. A prominent part of the Second Five-Year Plan, which began in 1933, the sprawling factory complex employed forty thousand workers and had its own blast furnaces and open-hearth department.44
Foreign experts helped design Magnitogorsk, but unlike in Stalingrad and Nizhny Novgorod no one firm coordinated the whole effort, creating myriad problems. In 1927 the Soviets retained the Freyn Engineering Company of Chicago as a general advisor in developing its metallurgy industry, and it did some initial planning for Magnitogorsk. Then the Soviets hired the Cleveland firm of Arthur G. McKee & Company to do the overall design, but amid much rancor the company proved unable to churn out plans at the rate the Soviets desired. So its role was cut back and other U.S. and German firms were brought in to design particular components of the complex, with various Soviet agencies playing a part, too. As a result, in the words of American John Scott, who spent five years working at Magnitogorsk, its elements were “often very badly coordinated.” The whole project was late in getting going and took far longer to complete than originally projected.
Even if the planning had been better managed, the scope of work and the challenges of the site would have made the “super-American tempo” the Soviets claimed was being maintained impossible to achieve. When work at Magnitogorsk began, there was nothing in place, no buildings, no paved roads, no railroad, no electricity, insufficient water, no coal or trees to provide heat or energy, no nearby sources of food, no cities within striking distance. Out of the dust of the steppe, Soviet officials and foreign experts had to conjure up a vast industrial enterprise, and do so in the cruel weather east of the Urals, where summers were short and winters exceedingly long and cold. In January and February, the low temperature averaged below zero degrees Fahrenheit. Some winter mornings it was thirty-five degrees below zero. John Scott, while working as a welder on blast furnace construction, once came upon a riveter who had frozen to death on the scaffolding.45
Much like the first English textile factory owners, Magnitogorsk managers had to recruit a workforce to build and operate the complex, which by 1938 had twenty-seven thousand employees, and come up with ways to house it, feed it, and take care of all its needs in an isolated spot where there never had been a large assemblage of people. Some workers came voluntarily, swept up in enthusiasm for the effort to leap forward to modernity and socialism or simply looking for an escape from their village or an unpleasant situation. Others were assigned by their employers to go to Magnitogorsk, like it or not. But such workers were not enough, especially since they flowed out of Magnitogorsk almost as quickly as they flowed in, put off by the extremely primitive living conditions and difficult work. So, again, like the early English mill owners, the Soviets turned to unfree labor, on a huge scale.
The Soviets used forced labor at many big projects, including the Chelyabinsk tractor factory, the Dnieprostroi Dam, and, most famously, the White Sea–Baltic Canal, constructed almost entirely by prisoners. At Magnitogorsk, by Scott’s account, in the mid-1930s some fifty thousand workers were under the control of the security police, the GPU (after 1934, the NKVD), most doing unskilled construction work but some employed in the steel plant itself. Even more than the early English textile mills, Magnitogorsk refuted simple correlations between industrialization, modernity, and freedom.
Forced laborers in Magnitogorsk fell into several categories. Common criminals made up the largest group, over twenty thousand workers, most serving relatively short sentences, living in settlements (including one for minors) surrounded by barbed wire, going to work under guard. A second group consisted of peasants dispossessed during the collectivization drive, so-called kulaks, deported to the steel city. In October 1931, there were over fourteen thousand former kulak workers and twice that number of their family members living in “special labor settlements,” initially enclosed by barbed wire, too. Even by Magnitogorsk standards, conditions for the forced migrants were appalling, with 775 children dying in one three-month period. (By 1936, most restrictions on these workers were eased.) Finally, there were veteran engineers and technical experts, trained under the old regime, who had been convicted of crimes but nonetheless worked as specialists and supervisors, in some cases, especially in the early days, holding very responsible positions, generally indistinguishable from other managerial personnel except for their legal status.46
The use of prison labor constituted just one part of the intertwining of the national security apparatus with the crash industrialization. In Magnitogorsk, as construction and production delays and difficulties stretched on and on, the NKVD became ever more involved with the steel complex, a shadow force with more power than the factory administration and the local government and, at some points, even than the local Communist Party. Problems stemming from poor planning, incompetent management, untrained workers, supply and transportation shortages, and the wear on machines and workers from politically driven crash efforts were increasingly attributed to failure to follow the Communist Party line, to deliber
ate wrecking and sabotage, and eventually to conspiracies involving foreign powers and internal oppositionists, like the “Trotskyite-Zinovievite Center” and the “Polish Military Organization,” which were alleged to be operating in Magnitogorsk. Starting in 1936, all industrial accidents became subjects of criminal investigations. “Often they tried the wrong people,” Scott commented, “but in Russia this is relatively unimportant. The main thing was that the technicians and workers alike began to appreciate and correctly evaluate human life.”
But if technicians and workers developed a greater appreciation of human life, the police and judiciary became ever more cavalier in their treatment of workers and managers, as arrests, interrogations involving “physical measures,” fabricated evidence, detentions, and executions became common. Top factory managers, state officials, and party functionaries toppled into the abyss as real and perceived failures were attributed to treachery and counterrevolution, until finally even the leaders of the Magnitogorsk NKVD, who led the terror, themselves fell to it. Though no exact count is available, according to Scott, in 1937 the purge led to “thousands” of arrests in Magnitogorsk. And it was similar elsewhere; at the Gorky auto plant, during the first six months of 1938, 407 specialists were arrested, including almost all the Soviet engineers who had spent time in Detroit and some of the few Americans who still remained at the factory.47
Watching on the ground, Scott saw the fury of charges, countercharges, and arrests impede production, but in his view only temporarily and to a limited extent. Overall, as managers and workers slowly mastered their jobs, supply and transportation problems were ironed out, and new components of the complex came on line, Magnitogorsk’s output of iron ore, pig iron, steel ingots, and rolled steel all moved upward, as did productivity.48 Some of the gigants built during the 1930s never reached their projected output, but, overall, the First Five-Year Plan (which was accelerated to be finished in four years) and the Second Five-Year Plan that followed led to an enormous leap in Soviet industrial output. Estimates vary, but between 1928 and 1940 total industrial output increased at least three-and-a-half-fold and by some accounts as much as sixfold. The greatest gains were in heavy industry. Iron and steel production more than quadrupled. Machine production increased elevenfold between 1928 and 1937, and military production twenty-five-fold. By the latter year, motor vehicle production approached two hundred thousand vehicles. Electrical power increased sevenfold. Transportation and construction also swelled. By contrast, output of consumer goods—a low priority in the First Five-Year Plan—rose only slightly. Stalin was premature in 1929 when he said, “We are becoming a country of metal, a country of automobiles, a country of tractors,” but a decade later there was much truth to his claim.49
Making Socialist Citizens
The giant Soviet factories were conceived of not only as a way to industrialize and protect the country but also as instruments of culturalization, which would create men and women capable of operating these behemoths and building socialism. Communist leaders often described this cultural project as fighting backwardness—the illiteracy, ignorance of modern medicine and hygiene, and unfamiliarity with science and technology that characterized the bulk of the population of the prerevolutionary Russian Empire. Many Bolsheviks, especially Lenin, defined culture in traditional European terms, as literacy, knowledge of science, appreciation of the arts. Civilization meant novels, chess, Beethoven, indoor plumbing, electricity. But some communists, and to some extent the party and state as a whole, at least through the early 1930s, believed that a distinctly communist culture and civilization should be created out of the revolution. The factory was an instrument to realize socialist modernity.50
The simple act of coming to a factory could launch the process of cultural change. This was especially the case for men and women from peasant villages, and even more so for migrants from nomadic regions of the country. Many newcomers had never seen a locomotive, indoor plumbing, electric lights, even a staircase. Walking into a factory for the first time could be terrifying, just as it had been in earlier years in England and the United States. A. M. Sirotina, a young woman who came to the Stalingrad tractor factory from a village near the Caspian, remembered, “There was an awful roaring and hammering of machines and there were motor-cars whizzing to and fro over the shop. I dodged to one side in fright and took refuge behind a stand.”51
That a young woman was on the shop floor of the Tractorstroi reflected the profound change in gender roles and family relations that accompanied the gearing up of heavy industry. After the revolution, the Communist Party and the Soviet government promoted women’s equality and new familial arrangements, but the changes were especially dramatic in the budding industrial centers, where there was no old order that had to be overthrown. At the start of the First Five-Year Plan, 29 percent of industrial workers were female; by 1937, 42 percent. Women held many types of positions for which they would never even be considered in the United States or Western Europe, such as crane and mill operator. Still, old ways died hard, as some men refused to allow their wives to work, abused them, and abandoned their families without alimony or child support.52
Learning utterly unfamiliar jobs took time. To hasten the process, the Soviets launched a massive educational effort. In addition to informal shop-floor training by skilled workers, supervisors, and foreign experts, formal classes were held after work to teach skills for specific jobs. Victor Reuther recalled that the Gorky auto plant “was like one huge trade school.” Rollo Ward, the American foreman of the gear-cutting department at the Stalingrad tractor plant, noted that while in the United States factory owners tried to keep workers from fully understanding the machinery they operated, in the Soviet Union workers were encouraged to learn everything about the equipment, beyond just what was needed to perform their own particular tasks.53
The educational push was not narrowly vocational. In the new industrial cities, crash efforts were made to build enough kindergartens and elementary schools for the flood of incoming and newborn children. Adult literacy courses were heavily attended, in Magnitogorsk enrolling ten thousand students. To raise the political level of activists, there were schools teaching Marxist theory and Soviet economic and social structure. For workers who had mastered basic skills, there were advanced schools in engineering, metallurgy, and the like. Women made up 40 percent of the students at the Magnitogorsk Mining and Metallurgical Institute.
Many of these programs had some day students receiving stipends and many more students coming after work. John Scott, who attended night school most of the time he lived in Magnitogorsk, reported that virtually everyone in the city between ages sixteen and twenty-six was studying in some sort of formal program, which took up almost all of their spare time. “Every night from six until twelve the street cars and buses of Magnitogorsk were crowded with adult students hurrying to and from schools with books and notebooks under their arms, discussing Leibnitz, Hegel, or Lenin, doing problems on their knees, and acting like high-school children during examination week in a New York subway.” For worker-students, the tremendous dedication needed to get to class, stay awake, and then do homework after a hard day’s work opened a path of upward mobility. For Soviet leaders, the education push, especially in technical fields, liberated the country from dependence on foreign and old-regime expertise.54
Factories tried in other ways, too, to transform worker culture. “Red corners” were common. Somewhat like the reading rooms in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century English and American union halls, these designated spaces had books, pictures of Lenin and other communist leaders, political posters, and room for meetings. Many enterprises sponsored literary groups, with worker-writers producing wall newspapers and broadsheets that were posted at worksites. At the Gorky auto plant, management sponsored a competition among departments for ideas to elevate the cultural level. One department brought in artificial palm trees from Moscow, which were placed alongside the assembly line. The department in which the Reuthe
r brothers worked made dies to punch out metal spoons, considered a cultural advance over the wooden, peasant-style spoons workers used in the plant cafeteria and at home. In Stalingrad, the factory manager, inspired by what he saw in the United States, had trees and grass planted around the tractor plant to keep down dust that might damage machinery and to create a more attractive view for workers as they arrived and left.55
Figure 5.3 The workers’ cafeteria at the Gorky auto plant.
The cities that arose alongside the giant factories were at least as important in promoting new habits and values as the plants themselves. Generally, in the U.S.S.R., local Soviets—the government—owned housing and other urban facilities. But in the industrial boomtowns, factories often filled that role, taking charge of almost all aspects of their employees’ lives. Much as in the early English textile industry, many factories owned stores and farms to supply them, with workers spending a substantial proportion of their wages at factory canteens and shops (with special shops with better goods and lower prices for foreign workers and later on for party officials, top managers, “shock workers,” and other favorites).
In Magnitogorsk, the steel company had four thousand employees in its department of “Everyday-Life Administration,” in charge of housing and an array of social and cultural programs. The factory controlled 82 percent of the living space in the city and sponsored many of its cultural institutions, which included a large theater, two theater troupes, eighteen movie houses, four libraries, a circus, and twelve workers’ clubs, among them one for ironworkers and steelworkers, the Palace of the Metallurgists, which featured a large auditorium, marble hallways, chandeliers, and an elegant reading room. The largest movie house in town, the Magnit, showed foreign as well as domestic films, including Chaplin’s Modern Times, which the local press hailed as “a rarity in bourgeois cinema—a great film,” perhaps missing the irony of its radical critique of Fordist production. Physical culture was not neglected, with two stadiums, many gymnasiums and skating rinks, and an aeronautical club that offered flying and parachuting lessons, popular activities in the Soviet Union. What the city did not have was a single church.56
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