By necessity and design, life in the gigant factory towns was more communal than in Western industrial centers. Especially at isolated sites like Magnitogorsk, but even in Stalingrad, workers initially lived in barracks, without private kitchens or toilets (or often indoor toilets of any kind), sleeping together in large, poorly heated rooms. Town construction lagged behind factory construction; in Magnitogorsk, in 1938, when the population had grown to nearly a quarter of a million, half of the people still lived in barracks or other temporary housing. Planning the steel city turned into something of a fiasco, as a team of modernist German architects, headed by Ernst May, and various Soviet officials went back and forth over designs, while on the ground building began haphazardly, with no plan at all. The first permanent housing in Magnitogorsk, as in the town adjacent to the Gorky auto plant, had utopian-communal features: small living spaces in large buildings with shared toilets and baths and meals to be either eaten at public cafeterias or prepared in a single kitchen serving a whole structure. But a tilt toward more traditional family structures, coming from below and above, led to the adoption of communal apartments as the new norm, with several families, rather than a whole building, sharing kitchens and toilets.57
Within a few years, the most radical cultural ideas associated with the First Five-Year Plan were abandoned. Nonetheless, the giant factory transformed the workforce. The story of G. Ramizov, a die forger at the Stalingrad tractor plant, captured the national arc. From a poor peasant family, he arrived with just the clothes he wore, one change of underwear, and a basket holding all his worldly possessions. His earnings soon allowed him to buy his very first toothbrush, a towel, his first suit and tie, and a winter coat. As time went on, and he switched from construction to production work, he was able to obtain furniture, books, a clock (a symbol in the U.S.S.R., just as it had been in England and the United States, of modernity and industrial discipline), a stove, dishes, and pictures to decorate his living quarters (including portraits of Lenin and Stalin). Conventional, ordinary, unimpressive, unless one came from the poverty, illiteracy, and cultural isolation that was the lot of the vast bulk of people in the Russian Empire before the revolution and the crash industrialization it sponsored.58
Celebrating the Gigant
Soviet writers, artists, and government officials relentlessly celebrated big factories during the decade prior to World War II. Joining outsized infrastructure and huge collective farms in a cult of giantism, they were at the core of national self-understanding and state propaganda. Artists and propagandists commonly equated the struggle to build socialism with the drive to industrialize, making the factory a central site for the fight against backwardness and the plunge into a new type of future.
In literature, the machine often appeared as a metaphor for society. It also appeared more literally. The title character in Lydia Chukovskaya’s novella Sofia Petrovna, written at the end of the 1930s, comments that in Soviet stories and novels “there was such a lot about battles and tractors and factory shops and hardly anything about love.”59
But where the factory truly came to the forefront was in the many documentary projects of the era. The Soviets were in the vanguard of what was a heyday of documentary art and literature in Europe and the United States, helping to inspire and shape the broader movement. While elsewhere documentary art and writing often focused on social ills, including those stemming from the Great Depression, in the Soviet Union documentary work had a celebratory tenor, highlighting the great progress being achieved across the vast nation.60
The most innovative work combined photography and journalism in elaborate, visually striking accounts of the advance of Soviet society through large-scale industry, infrastructure, and collectivization. The magazine USSR in Construction featured many of the most outstanding visual artists in the Soviet Union. Produced by the State Publishing House of the Russian Soviet Republic, with an editorial board that included Maxim Gorky, the large-format journal came out each month from 1930 through 1941 in four editions: Russian, English, German, and French, with a Spanish edition added in its last years. It specialized in the photo-essay, an innovative format often attributed to Life magazine but actually developed earlier in the Soviet Union. The title page of the fifth issue captured the editorial agenda in its subhead: “More Iron! More Steel! More Machinery!” In issue after issue, photo-essays appeared on dams, canals, hydroelectric plants, railroads, auto factories, tractor factories, tractors arriving at collective farms, paper mills, woodworking plants, garment factories, a match factory, shipyards, workers’ housing, technical institutes, and workers’ clubs. Whole issues were devoted to the Chelyabinsk tractor factory, Magnitogorsk, the Nizhny Tagil railroad car factory, and GAZ (“The Soviet Detroit”).
USSR in Construction bore no resemblance to the engineering and trade journals in the United States that documented industry, like Scientific American (in its early years) or Iron Age, with their technical language, tightly packed text, and diagrammatic illustrations. The Russian magazine was gorgeous, with innovative design, selective use of color, and arresting layouts of photographs taken by leading Soviet photographers, including Max Alpert, Arkady Shaikhet, Georgy Zelma, Boris Ignatovich, Semyon Fridlyand, Yevgeny Khaldei, and, perhaps most notably, Alexander Rodchenko. Gorky himself wrote some of the text for the early issues. But the true auteurs of the magazine were the designers, who included Nikolai Troshin, Rodchenko and his wife Varvara Stepanova, and the married team of El Lissitzky and Sophie Küppers. Layouts were complex, varied, and innovative, juxtaposing picture and text in ever-changing ways, making use of unusual typography and montage. Sometimes the layouts were conceived before the photos were taken, with the photographers instructed on the kinds of images that would be needed for the assemblage. Over time, the designs became ever more elaborate, as the magazine began using horizontal and even vertical foldout leaves, inserts, maps, pop-ups, irregularly cropped photographs, and transparent overlays. One issue, devoted to a new airplane model, had an aluminum cover.61
Some of the same photographers and designers were involved in books that used a similar format to exhaustively document the industrialization effort. USSR stroit Sotzsialism (“USSR Builds Socialism”), a 1933 volume, was organized by industry—electric, coal, metallurgy, and so forth—with exquisite photography, montages, and other graphic devices. Like USSR in Construction, it was in part designed as propaganda promoting Soviet achievements abroad, with the main text in Russian but captions in German, French, and English as well. But the most important audience for the celebration of industrialization and the giant factory was at home. In its early years, the press run for the German and English editions of USSR in Construction peaked just over ten thousand (with fewer copies in French), but the Russian edition had issues with print runs exceeding one hundred thousand. The key readership group for this semi-avant-garde testament to industry and infrastructure was the new Soviet elite of party officials, government functionaries, and industrial managers, who no doubt took a proprietary pride in the accomplishments of the new society, at the top of which they sat, much like American industrialists enjoyed the celebration of industry in Fortune and the photographs of Margaret Bourke-White. For the 1935 Seventh Congress of the Soviets, Lissitzky and Küppers produced a lavish seven-volume documentation of “Heavy Industry,” complete with accordion foldouts, overlays, special papers, collages, and incorporated fabric.62
The documentary magazines and books and the many posters celebrating industry drew much of their splendor from the very high quality of Soviet photography. With most of the country illiterate during the first years after the revolution, the Bolsheviks saw photography, film, posters, and heavily illustrated magazines as more effective vehicles of propaganda and enlightenment than the written word. The first issue of USSR in Construction carried a notice that “The State Publishing House has chosen the photo as the method of illustrating socialist construction for the photograph speaks much more convincingly in many cases than even
the most brilliantly written article.” The camera itself became a mark of modernity; “Every progressive comrade,” Anatoly Lunacharsky, the Commissar of Enlightenment, wrote, “must not only have a watch but also a camera.”63
Soviet photographers engaged in fierce debates over the style and to a lesser extent the content of their images, forming rival organizations, but most shared a commitment to the socialist project and willingly followed government injunctions to document the giant projects of the Five-Year Plans. Even sites distant from Moscow and Leningrad attracted top photographers. Dmitri Debabov, Max Albert, and Georgy Petrusov all took extraordinary photographs at Magnitogorsk, with the latter spending two years there as the head of information for the factory. While there were some commonalities between the documentary approach of the Soviets and leading American industrial photographers, like Bourke-White and Charles Sheeler, there were important differences, too. Soviet photographers more quickly adopted the small, light 35-mm camera, introduced by Leica in 1924 (with a Soviet version beginning production in 1932), than the Americans, who largely stuck with their big, heavy, large-format equipment. The 35-mm camera made it easier to shoot from odd angles and unusual vantage points. Uncommon framing, diagonal positioning, unfamiliar angles, and shots taken from very low down or very high up characterized early Soviet photography, including the industrial work. Although by the early 1930s government authorities began to criticize unconventional artistic modes, moving toward an embrace of socialist realism, photography, as art historian Susan Tumarkin Goodman wrote, remained “the last bastion of a radical visual culture,” imparting excitement to the documentation of the giant factory and associating it with modernist trends in the arts.64
Soviet filmmakers, who shared many stylistic approaches with Soviet photographers, also embraced the factory as a subject. In the 1931 film Entuziazm (Simfoniya Donbassa) (“Enthusiasm: Symphony of the Donbas”), the avant-garde newsreel and documentary filmmaker Dziga Vertov portrayed the transformation of Ukrainian towns, wracked by religion and alcoholism, through the development of coal mines and a giant steel mill. Dramatic images of steelmaking contribute to the visual inventiveness and frantic montage typical of Vertov’s films, in this case complimented by the innovative use of sound, then just being introduced. Charlie Chaplin declared Enthusiasm the best picture of the year.65
While the Soviets favored visual imagery in their celebration of the factory, they did not ignore the written word. In 1931, Maxim Gorky proposed a massive project to document the “History of Factories and Plants,” both older facilities and the new giants of the First Five-Year Plan. Reflecting how important Soviet leaders viewed the representation of factories, the highest levels of the Communist Party became involved with the series, which was discussed by both the Central Committee and the Politburo. Bukharin (by then already beginning to fall out of favor) and Kaganovich, one of Stalin’s closest colleagues, composed separate lists of possible editors and Stalin himself crossed off names and added others. Thirty volumes were published before the series was discontinued in early 1938 amid the height of the purges. Some documentary volumes were published in English as well as Russian. An abridged version of Those Who Built Stalingrad, As Told by Themselves, an oral history of the Soviet and foreign workers who built the tractor factory and started up production, with a foreword by Gorky, was published in New York in 1934, an innovative work that had some of the quality of the books Studs Terkel would assemble decades later in the United States, stressing the cultural and political transformation of the workers as much as the operations of the plant itself. A booklet about Magnitogorsk, with an image of a blast furnace embossed in copper on its cover, was sold at the Soviet pavilion at the New York World’s Fair.66
Many American journalists, economists, and academic experts on the Soviet Union also were swept up by what one of the best known of their number, George Frost Kennan, called “the romance of economic development.” Foreign correspondents like Walter Duranty and William Henry Chamberlin from the Christian Science Monitor regularly filed stories about industrial projects and wrote about them in books. Economists and social critics influenced by Thorstein Veblen’s technocratic outlook, like Stuart Chase and George Soule, were particularly enthusiastic. Sharing the equation of progress with economic growth and industrialization, they admired the Soviet embrace of large-scale planning and thought the United States could learn much from it. Though the journalists and academics were well aware of the great sacrifices that were being made by the Soviet people to finance the crash industrial drive, most thought it was a price worth paying. Louis Fischer, the Moscow correspondent for The Nation, later wrote that before World War II he had been “glorifying steel and kilowatts and forgetting the human being.”67
Europeans flocked to the Soviet Union in even greater numbers than Americans. Many brought back positive reports from sites of industry. Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens, who later became internationally famous for directing The Spanish Earth, a pro-Republican documentary made during the Spanish Civil War, spent three months in 1932 camped out in a barracks in Magnitogorsk, filming workers erecting huge blast furnaces. Left-wing Austrian composer Hanns Eisler, who agreed to create the soundtrack for his film, joined him, recording industrial sounds to use, much as Vertov had done in his recently released Enthusiasm. Ivens centered what became Song of Heroes on the transformation of a Kirghiz peasant into a Soviet worker. Complex political and artistic debates swirled around the film at a moment when cultural experimentation was being reined in across the Soviet Union. Premiered in early 1933, it soon disappeared from view. Meanwhile, Eisler and Soviet writer Sergei Tretyakov planned an opera about Magnitogorsk, which was scheduled to premiere at the Bolshoi Theater, but never did, perhaps for political reasons.68
At least in the United States, more than mainstream journalists or avant-garde leftists, perhaps the person most responsible for getting out the story of Soviet industrial behemoths was Margaret Bourke-White, in effect reprising the role she had played for American factories. She was drawn to the Soviet Union, where few foreign photographers had ventured, not out of any particular sympathy for the socialist experiment but by a desire to document rapid industrialization and the transformation of the peasantry into a working class. “I was eager to see what a factory would be like that had been plunged suddenly into being,” she later wrote.
Getting into the Soviet Union proved quite a challenge. In spite of letters of introduction from Sergei Eisenstein, whom she met in New York, it took her unyielding persistence and a considerable wait to finally get a visa. Then came an arduous train trip from Germany carrying her bulky equipment. But when she finally got to Moscow, her portfolio of photographs of blast furnaces, oil derricks, locomotives, and coal freighters worked like a magic wand, opening all doors. “I had come to a country where an industrial photographer is accorded the rank of artist and prophet,” she discovered. In short order Soviet officials organized a five-thousand-mile tour of key sites of the First Five-Year Plan, a kind of Stations of the Cross on the road to socialism, including a textile mill, the Dnieprostroi Dam, a collective farm, a Black Sea cement plant like the one fictionalized in Fyodo Vasilievich Gladkov’s popular novel Cement, and the Stalingrad tractor factory.
Bourke-White published a book, Eyes on Russia, documenting her journey, the first time she complemented her photographs with substantial text. One picture she took at the Stalingrad plant appeared in both Fortune and, in a slightly different version, in USSR in Construction (which published several other of her photographs as well). In the summer of 1931, she returned to the Soviet Union at the invitation of the government, extensively photographing Magnitogorsk. The New York Times Sunday Magazine published six articles by her, accompanied by photographs, based on her trip. The next summer she returned to the Soviet Union yet again, in her first and last effort at filmmaking, a largely failed endeavor that nonetheless yielded two short films distributed in theaters when the United States recognized the U.S.S.R. in late
1933.69
Bourke-White’s photographs of Soviet industry resembled her work in the United States: pictures of machinery that highlighted symmetry and repetition; large-scale equipment and installations set against dramatic skies; molten steel flowing within dark sheds. Her photographs of a textile mill on the outskirts of Moscow were not so different from those she had taken in Amoskeag. The main dissimilarity between her Soviet photographs and her early industrial work is her greater attention to workers, both in industrial settings and in portraits.
Compared to Soviet photographers, with their more unusual compositions, Bourke-White’s Soviet photographs seem a touch old-fashioned: staid, dignified, a bit static. As was the case in the United States, she often staged photographs to capture what she saw as the essence of the processes before her. For her photograph of a tractor at the end of the Stalingrad assembly line, she scoured the plant to find the right figure for the “exultant picture” of industry triumphant.
Bourke-White would become increasingly committed to the political left during the 1930s and 1940s, in part as a result of her experiences in the Soviet Union. But politics, in the usual sense, did not shape her images of Soviet industry. Rather, it was the physical machinery of industry and the people building and operating it that captivated her. In the Soviet Union, as in the United States, Bourke-White saw in large-scale industry beauty, progress, and modernity. It was the giant factory, not its social context, that she documented, and in doing so implicitly suggested a fundamental similarity of the factory as an institution in the communist world and the capitalist one.70
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