The Soviets located the plant in Togliatti, a small city on the Volga River that had recently been renamed for the deceased Italian communist leader. Though the site was not selected primarily because of the link to Italy, both sides made the most of the connection, portraying the new plant as an exemplar of Italian-Soviet friendship. The vertically integrated plant, which included its own smelter, eventually covered more than a thousand acres. When it began operation in 1970, it had over 42,000 employees, including nearly 35,000 production workers, with a majority under the age of thirty. The workforce kept growing, reaching an astounding 112,231 (46 percent female) in 1981.
To house the workers and their families, the Soviets created what amounted to a new city, Avtograd. In something of a reprise of the 1930s, young workers from all over the Soviet Union came to build the plant and city (in this case without prison labor). Like other Soviet factory cities, extensive club and sports facilities, schools, libraries, and day-care centers were provided, with the factory taking charge of everything from the local hockey team to a military museum. What made the city unusual, though, were the extensive accommodations made for cars, a novelty in a country where individual automobile ownership always had been rare.33
The Soviet government launched a second giant vehicle factory, KamAZ, to build heavy duty trucks in Naberezhnye Chelny, along the Kama River in Tatarstan. One hundred thousand workers were mobilized to build the plant. The Soviets purchased much of the equipment to make a projected 150,000 trucks and 250,000 engines annually from foreign firms. Later, the factory added minicar production. The adjacent city grew to a population of a half million.34
The latter-day Soviet vehicle-making giants lasted until the end of the U.S.S.R. itself and beyond. At the start of the twenty-first century, the Togliatti auto company, renamed AvtoVaz, still employed some 100,000 workers (some outside the city). After the company was privatized and looted by managers, oligarchs, and criminal gangs to the point of near collapse, Renault and Nissan eventually obtained majority control. When they began cutting the workforce and reorganizing the plant in 2014, it still had 66,000 employees, far more workers than at any U.S. factory and, with the exception of the Rouge, more workers than had ever been employed at an American auto plant. In a deeply troubled economy, excess staffing served a social-welfare function difficult to disrupt. KamAZ (with Daimler AG buying a minority stake in 2008) kept going, too, producing its two-millionth truck in 2012.35 Stalinist giantism lived on in Russia long after the statues of Stalin, and the country he helped build, disappeared.
First Cities of Socialism
In the late 1940s, as the Soviet Union helped the communist parties of Eastern Europe consolidate their control, it fostered on the region its template of model socialist cities built around large-scale industrial projects. As had been the case in the U.S.S.R., the motive was partly economic, to promote accelerated growth through concentrated investment in heavy industry. Most of Eastern Europe never had much industry, except parts of East Germany and Czechoslovakia, and much of what there had been had been destroyed during the war or, in the case of Germany, taken by the Soviet Union as reparations. But showplace industrial-urban complexes served important political and ideological functions as well. The Eastern European communist parties were very small when World War II ended, able to achieve power only because of the presence of the Red Army. Communist leaders faced a huge challenge in establishing their legitimacy, mobilizing the population for reconstruction (Germany and Poland, in particular, had suffered massive destruction), and winning popular favor for their Soviet protectors. Model industrial cities, forerunners of new socialist societies, were meant to serve all these functions.36
Several of the cities supported new steel plants: Stalinstadt in East Germany, Sztálinváros in Hungary, Nowa Huta in Poland, and Nová Ostrava in Czechoslovakia, part of what one historian dubbed a “cult of steel” linked to the cult of Stalin (whose adopted name meant “man of steel”). Communist leaders saw steel as key to industrial development and arms production, a priority as the Cold War settled in. Breaking the pattern, Bulgaria built its model city, Dimitrovgrad, around a large chemical plant (named after Stalin) and a big power plant. Dimitrovgrad and Stalinstadt also had cement plants, supplying a favored construction material in the Soviet Bloc.37
Launched with great fanfare, the new factories and cities were presented as the first living embodiments of what socialism would be, part and parcel of a valorization of industry and workers seen in the iconography and rituals of the new people’s democracies. The 100-zloty note issued in Poland in 1948 featured a picture of a miner on one side and an industrial landscape, with rather old-fashioned factory buildings and belching smokestacks, on the other (quite a contrast to the American one-hundred-dollar bill, with Benjamin Franklin on one side and a pastoral view of Independence Hall on the other). Governments called for heroic efforts to rapidly build the industrial settlements. Youth brigades were organized for short-term labor and full-time workers recruited mostly from rural areas. Most workers were young, their presence offered as evidence of the promise of the new societies.
Though each model city had distinct features and a distinct history, reflecting national circumstances, they shared many characteristics. Their planners and architects all consulted with Soviet specialists about overall layouts and even individual buildings. The most striking thing about the new cities was not their socialism but their urbanism. Initially, some of the plans envisioned dispersed housing, eliminating a hard boundary between countryside and city and providing green space and areas for growing food. But the planners quickly switched gears, moving toward higher density, with a concentrated population and no garden plots within city boundaries.
Several factors explain the shift. First, cost. Building apartment blocks, often of standardized design and in many cases using prefabricated materials, was cheaper than constructing many small dwelling units, an important consideration for countries with vast housing needs. Second, compact, dense cities made it easier to provide extensive social and cultural services, important features of cities meant to prefigure what socialist life would be like. Third, the urbanism of the industrial cities constituted an explicit rejection of the postwar vogue in the capitalist West for dispersion: British new towns, Scandinavian satellite towns, American suburban sprawl. (Divided Berlin became a showplace for competing planning visions: density and continuous streetwall in the East; greenswards, lower density, and dispersed buildings in the West.) Grand boulevards and large squares were featured as sites for parades and rallies, but there were smaller-scale urbanist gestures, too, like arcades. The industrial cities were meant to represent modernity, newness, gateways to the future. Anything that smacked of the old rural village, with its individual ramshackle houses and garden plots, seemed a reactionary repudiation of the very spirit of the enterprise.
Though they owed their existence to the Soviet Union, the Eastern European showcase cities served as centers of nationalism. Ritualist expressions of friendship with the Soviet Union abounded, in monuments, buildings donated by the Soviets, statues of Stalin, and the naming of some of the cities and factories for Soviet leaders. But the settlements were projected as vehicles of nation-building, albeit socialist nation-building, not of an abstract, generic socialist revolution. Socialist realism, a forced import from the Soviet Union, ironically furthered this by promoting the somewhat vague idea that buildings should be socialist in content but national in form. Accordingly, many of the buildings at the new factory sites and accompanying cities incorporated motifs and styles associated with national pasts. Building socialism, figuratively and literally, was portrayed as a national drama.
Most of the industrial showcases were never finished, at least as originally planned. Stalin’s death in 1953 loosened the Soviet reins in its satellite bloc and ended the need for ritualistic deference to the Soviet dictator. Building large industrial facilities and new cities at breakneck speed proved very expensive. What once s
eemed like economies of scale in concentrating investment on large-scale projects, which were meant to stimulate broader economic development, no longer looked so favorable, as the distorting effects of putting so much financial and political capital into just a few sites became evident. A few years after they were begun, plans for the industrial centers were cut back or abandoned, and what growth did occur generally was improvised and haphazard. Most of the “first cities of socialism” quickly faded into obscurity, renamed and largely forgotten, except as kitschy remnants of the Stalin years.38
But not Nowa Huta (“New Mill”), site of the largest and most important of the new factories, arguably the last Stalinist utopia. The idea for a steelworks in central Poland predated World War II and the communist regime. In 1947, the Polish government ordered plans for a large mill from Freyn Engineering, the same U.S. firm that had done work in the Soviet Union, including at Magnitogorsk. But the intensification of the Cold War led to the cancellation of the contract. A 1948 economic agreement with the U.S.S.R. and the creation, the following year, of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, linking the Soviet Union and the Eastern European states, provided the framework for a new start. This time the Poles worked with the Soviets, who pressed for a very large facility that would serve the whole communist bloc, much larger than the steel plants around which other model cities in the region arose. The U.S.S.R. lent Poland $450 million to build the plant (a substitute for funds that might have been lent by the United States if the Soviet Union had allowed the Eastern European nations to participate in the Marshall Plan), picked a site six miles east of Kraków, designed the equipment and built much of it, trained 1,300 Polish engineers in Soviet steel plants, and sent skilled workers and specialists to help get the factory going, taking on many of the roles foreign companies had played in the Soviet Union two decades earlier.
In the Stalinist spirit, the government made a crash effort to rapidly build the Nowa Huta plant (later named the Vladimir Lenin Steelworks), the lead project in the Polish Six-Year Plan (1950–55). The sprawling enterprise, on a 2,500-acre site, ultimately encompassing five hundred buildings (including its own power and heating plants), grew in stages over several decades. It began operations with its first blast furnace in 1954. More blast furnaces, coke ovens, a sintering plant, and open-hearth and electrical steel converters followed. By the time the cold-rolling mill went on line in 1958, the plant had 17,929 employees, producing 1.6 million tons of steel a year (half of what twenty-three Polish steel mills had produced before the war), much of it exported to the Soviet Union. And the complex kept growing, with more coke ovens and open-hearth furnaces, a pipe-welding operation, a galvanizing mill, and a basic oxygen steel mill (by this time with some of the equipment imported from the West). In 1967, a fifth blast furnace opened, one of the largest in the world and bigger than anything in the Soviet Union, and the plant’s workforce reached 29,110. One Polish account argues that the continued expansion of the plant was “clear evidence of the authorities’ love of grandeur—motivated more by politics than by economy,” with the giant blast furnace, which required anthracite coal, a poor investment. New slabbing and rolling mills followed. Annual output peaked in 1978 at 6.5 million tons of steel and employment a year later at 38,674 (a larger workforce than ever seen at an American steel plant, though smaller than at Magnitogorsk).39
Figure 6.3 Uneven and combined development in Poland, as shown in Henryk Makarewicz’s 1965 photograph of the Lenin Steelworks.
Though like the mill, the city of Nowa Huta stood as a national priority, its construction proved a long, difficult haul. While heavy equipment was used in building the steelworks, limited funds meant that the residential and commercial area was largely built by hand, with shovels, wheelbarrows, and occasional cranes. Material shortages and mismanagement slowed construction, while the poor quality of building supplies led to later problems. Authorities used agitation campaigns, labor competitions (which pitted workers against one another), and extra voluntary labor to push the pace of construction at what was dubbed the “great building site of socialism.” Women were hired in large numbers, at both the mill and in the construction effort, to promote sexual equality and help meet the demand for labor. Many held blue-collar jobs traditionally reserved for men, like the all-female casting crews in the mill and the bricklayers and plasterers in the city. With housing construction lagging behind the growth of the steel mill and the flood of arriving workers, for years most people in Nowa Huta had to live in crude, cold, single-sex barracks, sometimes with over a dozen men or women sharing a single room, lacking basic sanitary provisions. Magnitogorsk redux.40
But by the mid-1950s, the housing shortage and generally miserable living conditions began to ease. Between 1949 and 1958, workers built 14,885 apartments in Nowa Huta, with the original plan essentially completed two years later, as the population reached 100,000. Many residents came to view the city quite favorably.41
The pre-1960 part of Nowa Huta forms half an octagon, with major boulevards radiating out from a central square on one edge (in 2004 renamed after Ronald Reagan). The steel mill gates are a half mile away, far enough so that the plant is barely visible from the center of the city, though, no doubt, in its heyday smoke from the mill, a notorious polluter, could have been seen. A tramline connects the mill and the original housing and commercial district.
A distinct urbanism characterizes the city center, reinforced by the appropriation of elements of Renaissance design, like galleries and squares, a marked contrast to contemporary residential developments in the United States of roughly the same size, like Levittown, New York, and Lakeland, California, with their small, single-family, detached houses and automobile-based design. Apartment buildings line the main avenues and fill the areas between them, organized into clusters designed for five to six thousand residents. From along the avenues, the long facades of the housing blocks, ranging from two to seven stories high, feel ponderous, but behind them are enclosures, quiet and humanly scaled, with little traffic. Lawns, playgrounds, schools, day-care centers, garages, and clotheslines fill the space. Each neighborhood unit was meant to be largely self-sufficient, with stores on the ground floors, health centers, libraries, and other services. Cinemas, a theater, a department store, restaurants, and public institutions generally were within walking distance from the residences, while a tramline provided a connection to Kraków proper (which in 1951 administratively absorbed Nowa Huta). The social organization in effect constituted a more fully realized, if less radical, embrace of communal life along the lines of the early worker housing in Gorky.
Figure 6.4 An aerial view of Nowa Huta.
Plans for Nowa Huta kept being changed, in some ways to the benefit of the city. The first housing units were quite basic, but, keeping with the idea of Nowa Huta prefiguring a new socialist society, many of the estates that followed were built to standards far above the norm for ordinary Poles, with more space, private bathrooms, built-in radios, shared telephones in every entryway, cooling cupboards, and balconies. The blocks completed in the first half of the 1950s had a generic, socialist realist stodginess, but their lower height and smaller scale compared to similar housing elsewhere, like along the Stalinallee (now Karl-Marx-Allee) in East Berlin, avoided the monumentality sometimes wrongly attributed to the city. Contributing to the human scale was the abandonment of plans for an unattractive, towering city hall and a monumental theater, meant to bookend the central axis. Efforts to incorporate traditional Polish elements ranged from the charming, like the octagonal cupolas on the small Ludowy Theater (which housed one of the most innovative theater companies in the country) to the absurd, like one of the two factory administration buildings, built to resemble a Renaissance palace with a “Polish parapet.”
With Stalin’s death, greater variety crept into Nowa Huta housing, including the modernist “Swedish house” apartment block, derivative of Le Corbusier. Cost-cutting, however, led to the elimination of such features as elevators and pa
rquet floors. As the city population grew to exceed original expectations, new housing estates were built on the outskirts of town. Many of these were modernist in appearance but of poor-quality construction, with low- and high-rise buildings separated by green space, with few nearby stores or amenities, the sort of “tower in the park” developments that became the vogue for urban housing in both the communist and capitalist blocs.42
Meant to be a showcase for socialist Poland, Nowa Huta garnered national and even international attention. Over the years, visitors included Khrushchev, Charles de Gaulle, Haile Selassie, Kwame Nkrumah, and Fidel Castro. The steelworks and town figured in numerous novels, journalistic accounts, films, and even musical compositions. The mill appeared on postage stamps in 1951 and 1964. Generally, propaganda and artistic renderings presented Nowa Huta extremely positively, as the start of a socialist future, “the pride of the nation,” “the forge of our prosperity.” But having been elevated by communist authorities to a prominent place in the national narrative, it also became a pole for critiques of the socialist project. Adam Ważyk’s sensational 1955 “Poem for Adults,” openly critically of Polish socialism (by a writer until then known as a communist hardliner), painted an ugly portrait of Nowa Huta (“a new Eldorado”) and its residents (“A great migration, carrying confused ambitions, . . . A stack of curses, feather pillows, a gallon of vodka, a lust for girls”). Andrzej Wajda’s acclaimed film Man of Marble, released in 1977, used Nowa Huta for a wrenching, clear-eyed look back at the history and mythology of Polish communism, prefiguring the revolution that would soon come to the steelmaking city, the nation, and the whole communist bloc.43
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