43.The following account of Magnitogorsk is based primarily on Stephen Kotkin’s brilliant history, Magnetic Mountain, and the first-person account by American John Scott, who worked in the plant, Behind the Urals.
44.“Mighty Giant” from USSR in Construction, 1930, no. 9, p. 14. The Nizhny Tagil plant looked very much like a Kahn factory, but apparently only Soviet specialists were involved in designing, building, and starting it up, including many veterans of First Five-Year Plan projects. See USSR in Construction, 1936, no. 7 (July).
45.“Super-American tempo” from USSR in Construction, 1930, no. 9, p.14. On the weather, see http://www.weatherbase.com/weather/weather.php3?s=83882&cityname=Magnitogorsk-Chelyabinsk-Russia (accessed Jan. 26, 2016) and Scott, Behind the Urals, 9–10, 15. For many Americans besides Scott, cold was a defining feature of their experience in the Soviet Union. When Victor Herman, who accompanied his father to the Gorky auto plant, attended a Kremlin celebration of the first vehicles to come off the line, the first thing he noticed was the warmth in the banquet hall, realizing that he had not been “really all-over warm” since arriving in the country. Victor Herman, Coming Out of the Ice (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), 53.
46.Kotkin and Scott both extensively discuss the use of unfree labor. See, also, William Henry Chamberlin, Russia’s Iron Age (Boston: Little, Brown, 1934), 51–53; Lynne Viola, The Unknown Gulag: The Lost World of Stalin’s Special Settlements (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 101.
47.In addition to Kotkin and Scott (quoted passage on 159), see Melnikova-Raich, “The Soviet Problem with Two ‘Unknowns,’” Part II, 19; Herman, Coming Out of the Ice; and Siegelbaum, Cars for Comrades, 58–59.
48.Scott, Behind the Urals, 204–05, 277–79.
49.Siegelbaum, Cars for Comrades, 45; Andrle, Workers in Stalin’s Russia, 16; Robert C. Allen, Farm to Factory: A Reinterpretation of the Soviet Industrial Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 92–93, 102–06. On the difficulty of obtaining accurate Soviet economic data, see Oscar Sanchez-Sibony, Red Globalization: The Political Economy of the Soviet Cold War from Stalin to Khrushchev (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 12–19.
50.Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 70, 363; Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 79–83.
51.Scott, Behind the Urals, 16; Those Who Built Stalingrad, 168–73.
52.Andrle, Workers in Stalin’s Russia, 35; Scott, Behind the Urals, 144; Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 189. Tensions about shifting gender roles are a major theme in Cement, Gladkov’s widely read novel about the struggle to reopen a huge, prerevolution cement factory.
53.Nelson Lichtenstein, The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit: Walter Reuther and the Fate of American Labor (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 39; Those Who Built Stalingrad, 98.
54.Scott, Behind the Urals, 138, 152, 212–19; Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism, 87; Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 214–15.
55.Scott, Behind the Urals, 40; Katerina Clark, “Little Heroes and Big Deeds: Literature Responds to the First Five-Year Plan,” in Sheila Fitzpatrick, ed., Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928–1931 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), 197; Reuther, Brothers Reuther, 98–99; Those Who Built Stalingrad, 52–53. Oddly, artificial palm trees seemed to have been something of a rage in the Soviet Union; when Ernst May and a team of German architects entered the country in 1929 to design new industrial cities, they found artificial palms common in railway waiting rooms. Ernst May, “Cities of the Future,” in Walter Laqueur and Leopold Labedz, eds., Future of Communist Society (New York: Praeger, 1962), 177.
56.Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism, 49, 55–56, 95–103; Andrle, Workers in Stalin’s Russia, 37; A. Baikov, Magnitogorsk (Moscow: Foreign Language Publishing House, 1939), 19, 30–31; Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 67, 182–92, 290–91; Scott, Behind the Urals, 235–36.
57.Herman, Coming Out of the Ice, 38; Scott, Behind the Urals, 234; Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 108–23.
58.Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism, 80–82; Those Who Built Stalingrad, 212–19.
59.Clark, “Little Heroes and Big Deeds,” 190–92; Susan Tumarkin Goodman, “Avant-garde and After: Photography in the Early Soviet Union,” in Goodman and Jens Hoffman, eds., The Power of Pictures: Early Soviet Photography, Early Soviet Film (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015), 23, 31–32; Lydia Chukovskaya, Sofia Petrovna (1962; Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 4. Chukovskaya’s novella was not published in Russian until 1962 and in English until 1967.
60.For a comparison of documentary photography in the United States and the Soviet Union, see Bendavid-Val, Propaganda and Dreams: Photographing the 1930s in the U.S.S.R. and U.S.A. (Zurich: Edition Stemmle, 1999).
61.Over time, the magazine began covering more varied topics, including political events, the army, ethnic groups, distant regions of the country, and sports. USSR in Construction, 1930–1941; USSR in Construction: An Illustrated Exhibition Magazine (Sundsvall, Sweden: Fotomuseet Sundsvall, 2006); University of Saskatchewan Library, Digital Collections, USSR in Construction, “About” (accessed Feb. 5, 2016), http://library2.usask.ca/USSRConst/about; Goodman, “Avant-garde and After,” 27–28; Bendavid-Val, Propaganda and Dreams, 62–65.
62.SSSR stroit sotsializm (Moskova: Izogiz, 1933); USSR in Construction: An Illustrated Exhibition Magazine (press run data); B. M. Tal, Industriia sotsializma. Tiazhelaia promyshlennost’k VII vsesoiuznomu s’ezdy sovetov [Industry of Socialism. Heavy Industry for the Seventh Congress of Soviets] (Moscow: Stroim, 1935).
63.Goodman, “Avant-garde and After,” 15, 17; USSR in Construction, 1930, no. 1.
64.Goodman, “Avant-garde and After,” 22–27, 38. Leah Bendavid-Val stresses similarities between Soviet and U.S. photographers in Propaganda and Dreams, which includes photographs of Magnitogorsk by Debabov, Albert, and Petrusov. For more extensive collections of Petrusov’s work, see Georgij Petrussow, Pioneer Sowjetischer Photographie (Köln, Germany: Galerie Alex Lachmann, n.d.) and Georgy Petrusov: Retrospective/Point of View (Moscow: GBUK “Multimedia Complex of Actual Arts,” Museum “Moscow House of Photography,” 2010).
65.Entuziazm (Simfonija Donbassa), Ukrainfilm, 1931. Filmmakers like Vertov and Sergei Eisenstein, who used avant-garde techniques to pursue revolutionary themes, drew considerable attention outside of the Soviet Union, but domestic audiences preferred more conventional entertainment. Jens Hoffman, “Film in Conflict,” in Goodman and Hoffman, The Power of Pictures.
66.The Soviets also published in English a collection of letters from foreigners who worked in the Soviet Union. Melnikova-Raich, “The Soviet Problem with Two ‘Unknowns,’ Part II,” 17–18; Cynthia A. Ruder, Making History for Stalin; The Story of the Belomor Canal (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998); Those Who Built Stalingrad; Baikov, Magnitogorsk; Garrison House Ephemera (accessed Nov. 13, 2016), http://www.garrisonhouseephemera.com/?page=shop/flypage&product_id=546; Sixty Letters: Foreign Workers Write of Their Life and Work in the U.S.S.R. (Moscow: Co-operative Publishing Society of Foreign Workers in the U.S.S.R., 1936).
67.Duranty’s articles on Soviet industry are too numerous to individually cite. For Chamberlin, see Russia’s Iron Age. On American academic experts and intellectuals, see David C. Engerman, Modernization from the Other Shore: American Intellectuals and the Romance of Russian Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), esp. 5–6, 9, 156–57, 166, 237 (Fischer quote).
68.Hans Schoots, Living Dangerously: A Biography of Joris Ivens (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2000), 74–81.
69.Bourke-White returned to the U.S.S.R. in 1941, when she photographed Moscow during German bombing raids, Stalin in the Kremlin, and the front line. Bourke-White, Eyes on Russia (quotes on 23 and 42); Margaret Bourke-White, Portrait of Myself (New York: Simon and Schuster, Inc., 1963), 90–104, 174–88; Vicki Goldberg, Margaret Bourke-White: A Biography (New York: Harper &
Row, 1986), 128– 32; Haran, “Tractor Factory Facts.”
70.To compare Bourke-White’s Soviet and U.S. textile mill photographs, see Bourke-White, Eyes on Russia and Bourke-White, “Amoskeag” (1932), reproduced in Richard Guy Wilson, Dianne H. Pilgrim, and Dickran Tashjian, The Machine Age in America 1918–1941 (New York: Brooklyn Museum and Harry N. Abrams, 1986), 234. Bourke-White also took similar photographs at the American Woolen Company in Lawrence, Massachusetts. For an interesting discussion of her Soviet work, see Haran, “Tractor Factory Facts.”
71.A drop in grain production during the first years of collectivization, combined with the export of grain, exacerbated the food crisis. Sanchez-Sibony, Red Globalization, 36–53 (Stalin quote on 51); Bailes, “The American Connection,” 433, 442–43; Those Who Built Stalingrad, 150, 198; Scott, Behind the Urals, 86–87, 174; Melnikova-Raich, “The Soviet Problem with Two ‘Unknowns,’ Part I,” 74–75; New York Times, Mar. 26, 1932; Detroit Free Press, Mar. 29, 1932; Daily Express, Apr. 19, 1932; Detroit News, Apr. 24, 1932; Nevins and Hill, Ford: Expansion and Challenge, 682.
72.Merkle, Management and Ideology, 132; Bailes, “The American Connection,” 442–44; Those Who Built Stalingrad, 54, 198; Michael David-Fox, Showcasing the Great Experiment: Cultural Diplomacy and Western Visitors to the Soviet Union, 1921–1941 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 285–86, 297–99; Melnikova-Raich, “The Soviet Problem with Two ‘Unknowns,’ Part I,” 75–76; Scott, Behind the Urals, 230–31.
73.Bailes, “The American Connection,” 445; Chamberlin, Russia’s Iron Age, 61–65; R. W. Davies, Mark Harrison, and S. G. Wheatcroft, eds., The Economic Transformation of the Soviet Union, 1913–1945 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 95, 155; Figes, Revolutionary Russia, 5, 178.
74.Wikipedia, “Alexei Gastev” (accessed Nov. 12, 2016), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksei_Gastev; Melnikova-Raich, “The Soviet Problem with Two ‘Unknowns,’ Part II,” 17–20; Patrick Flaherty, “Stalinism in Transition, 1932–1937,” Radical History Review, 37 (Winter 1987). Bill Shatov, who had returned home from the United States and supervised the Turksib railway project, was exiled to Siberia in 1937 and executed the following year. Emma Goldman Papers, Editors’ Notes (accessed Jan. 11, 2016), http://editorsnotes.org/projects/emma/topics/286/. For an account of the long imprisonment, Siberian exile, and eventual return to the United States of a young American worker at the Gorky auto plant, see Herman, Coming Out of the Ice.
75.Donald Filtzer, Soviet Workers and Stalinist Industrialization: The Formation of Modern Soviet Production Relations, 1928–1941 (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1986), 126–27, 261–66; Erlich, Soviet Industrialization Debate, 182–83; Allen, Farm to Factory, 152, 170–71; Flaherty, “Stalinism in Transition,” 48–49.
76.After their revolution, the Soviets (like the French) introduced a new organization of time, replacing the weekend with a system of one day off work during every five days (four days in the metallurgy industry), later switching to one day off every six days, before ultimately returning to more conventional timekeeping. Filtzer, Soviet Workers, 91–96, 156; Kate Brown, A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 92–117; Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism, 4, 42–45.
77.Most of the twenty thousand Stalingrad Tractor Factory workers were evacuated as the battle broke out. The factory was rebuilt after the war. The Nizhny Tagil Railroad Car Factory also was converted to military production, and, like the Chelyabinsk plant, continues to produce both military and civilian equipment, employing thirty thousand workers in 2016. Melnikova-Raich, “The Soviet Problem with Two ‘Unknowns,’ Part I,” 68–69, 71–73; Reuther, Brothers Reuther, 102–03; Siegelbaum, Cars for Comrades, 61–62; Jochen Hellbeck, Stalingrad: The City that Defeated the Third Reich (New York: Public Affairs Press, 2015), 89; “History—Chelyabinsk tractor plant (ChTZ)” (accessed Jan. 18, 2016), http://chtz-uraltrac.ru/articles/categories/24.php; New York Times, Feb. 25, 2016; Scott, Behind the Urals, vii–viii, 63–65, 103.
78.John P. Diggins, Up from Communism ([1975] New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 189–98; Christopher Phelps, “C.L.R. James and the Theory of State Capitalism,” in Nelson Lichtenstein, ed., American Capitalism: Social Thought and Political Economy in the Twentieth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006); Filtzer, Soviet Workers, 270–71.
79.Andrle, Workers in Stalin’s Russia, 126–76, 198–201; Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 206–07, 318–19; Filtzer, Soviet Workers, 233–36; Federico Bucci, Albert Kahn: Architect of Ford (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1993), 92.
80.If anything, Freyn thought the Soviets were a bit too democratic; it would be better if “more decisions might be made by responsible individuals rather than by committees and commissions.” Edmund Wilson, “A Senator and an Engineer,” New Republic, May 27, 1931; “An American Engineer Looks at the Five Year Plan,” New Republic, May 6, 1931; Detroit News Apr. 24, 1932.
Chapter 6
“COMMON REQUIREMENTS OF INDUSTRIALIZATION”
1.Many of Burnham’s arguments had been put forth earlier by Bruno Rizzi, but received little notice outside of small, left-wing circles. At roughly the same time, C. L. R. James broke with Trotsky to describe the Soviet Union as “state capitalist,” with productive enterprises collectively owned by a reemerging capitalist class through the government. Ultimately, the United States, too, James argued, would become state capitalist. James Burnham, The Managerial Revolution ([1941] Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1960); Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Outcast; Trotsky: 1929–1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963), 459–77; Christopher Phelps, “C.L.R. James and the Theory of State Capitalism,” in Nelson Lichtenstein, ed., American Capitalism: Social Thought and Political Economy in the Twentieth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006).
2.These paragraphs draw substantially from David C. Engerman, “To Moscow and Back: American Social Scientists and the Concept of Convergence,” in Lichtenstein, ed., American Capitalism.
3.http://brooklynnavyyard.org/the-navy-yard/history/ (accessed Mar. 29, 2016). For a popular overview of the role of private business in wartime defense production, see Arthur Herman, Freedom’s Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II (New York: Random House, 2012).
4.To undertake the war work, Kahn’s firm grew from four hundred to six hundred employees. Hawkins Ferry, The Legacy of Albert Kahn (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1970), 25–26.
5.To expand the labor pool for Willow Run, Ford opened up jobs to women, who eventually made up 35 percent of the workforce. However, in a departure from its policy at Highland Park and the Rouge, the company all but spurned African Americans. Willow Run workers eventually achieved productivity far above the airplane industry norm. The latest use of the Willow Run factory grounds has been as a test site for driverless cars. Sarah Jo Peterson, Planning the Home Front: Building Bombers and Communities at Willow Run (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); Allan Nevins and Frank Ernest Hill, Ford: Expansion and Challenge, 1915–1933 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons: 1957), 242–47; Nelson Lichtenstein, The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit: Walter Reuther and the Fate of American Labor (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 160–74; Gail Radford, Modern Housing for America: Policy Struggles in the New Deal Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 121–32; New York Times, June 6, 2016.
6.Not all the workers at other airplane manufacturers were housed in single plants; Republic and Grumman built auxiliary factories near their main plants to bring work nearer to where workers lived, reducing problems with commuting and housing. T. P. Wright Memorandum for Charles E. Wilson, Mar. 21, 1943, box 7, National Aircraft War Production Council, Harry S. Truman Library, Independence, MO; Ferry, Legacy of Albert Kahn, 25, 127–28; Tim Keogh, “Suburbs in Black and White: Race, Jobs and Poverty in Twentieth-Century Long Island,” Ph.D. dissertation, City University of New York, 2016, 53–56, 77; T. M. Se
ll, Wings of Power: Boeing and the Politics of Growth in the Northwest (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001), 19; John Gunther, Inside U.S.A. (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1947), 142–43.
7.“Bethlehem Ship,” Fortune, Aug. 1945, 220; Bernard Matthew Mergen, “A History of the Industrial Union of Marine and Shipbuilding Workers of America, 1933–1951,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1968, 2–3, 103–04, 134–37, 142; [Baltimore] Evening Sun, Dec. 8, 1943; Apr. 5, 1944; Apr. 20, 1944; May 15, 1944; July 1, 1944; Karen Beck Skold, “The Job He Left Behind: American Women in Shipyards During World War II,” in Carol R. Berkin and Clara M. Lovett, eds., Women, War, and Revolution (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1980), esp. 56–58; Eric Arnesen and Alex Lichtenstein, “Introduction: ‘All Kinds of People,’ ” in Katherine Archibald, Wartime Shipyard: A Study in Social Disunity ([1947] Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), xvi, xxxi–xxxv; Joshua B. Freeman, American Empire, 1945–2000: The Rise of a Global Empire, the Democratic Revolution at Home (New York: Viking, 2012), 21; Peterson, Planning the Home Front, 279.
8.For the impact of World War II on the American working class, see Joshua Freeman, “Delivering the Goods: Industrial Unionism during World War II,” Labor History 19 (4) (Fall 1978); Nelson Lichtenstein, “The Making of the Postwar Working Class: Cultural Pluralism and Social Structure in World War II,” The Historian 51 (1) (Nov. 1988), 42–63; Gary Gerstle, “The Working Class Goes to War,” Mid-America 75 (3) (1993), 303–22. Dorothea Lange and Charles Wollenberg, Photographing the Second Gold Rush: Dorothea Lange and the East Bay at War, 1941–1945 (Berkeley, CA: Heyday Books, 1995).
9.Jack Metzgar, “The 1945–1946 Strike Wave,” in Aaron Brenner, Benjamin Day, and Immanuel Ness, eds., The Encyclopedia of Strikes in American History (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2009); Art Preis, Labor’s Giant Step: Twenty years of the CIO (New York: Pioneer Press, 1965), 257–83.
10.Ronald W. Schatz, The Electrical Workers: A History of Labor at General Electric and Westinghouse, 1923–1960 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), 105–64; Nelson Lichtenstein, The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit, 282–98; Freeman, American Empire,119–24; Labor’s Heritage: Quarterly of the George Meany Memorial Archives, 4 (1992), 28; Joshua Freeman, “Labor During the American Century: Work, Workers, and Unions Since 1945,” in Jean-Christophe Agnew and Roy Rosenzweig, eds., A Companion to Post-1945 America (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002); Ruth Milkman, Farewell to the Factory: Auto Workers in the Late Twentieth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Charles Corwin in New York Daily Worker, Feb. 4, 1949, quoted in Karen Lucic, Charles Sheeler and the Cult of the Machine (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 114; Jack Metzgar, Striking Steel: Solidarity Remembered (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000), 30–45 (quote on 39).
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