File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/97-02-25.170, message 21


Date: Fri, 21 Feb 1997 18:57:38 -0500 (EST)
From: louisgodena-AT-ids.net (Louis R Godena)
Subject: M-I: Re: M-SCI: More on Stalin



Barkley goes on and on about Magnitogorsk,  a subject about which he
admittedly knows very little.   

It shows:

>This was project received special attention at the 
>time, including extra enthusiastic cadres, because of its 
>immense size, the ultimate Stalinist gigantomaniac project 
>(and later base for providing steel for the tanks that won 
>the battle of Kursk, etc.).  Thus, the expressions of 
>idealism and enthusiasm are not typical of what went on 
>generally.

Wrong,  Barkley.    As Kotkin makes clear,  this project came to *typify*
dozens of such projects throughout the period of Stalinist industrialization
(see,  cf., Kotkin's earlier *Steeltown,  USSR* [California, 1991].    A
good account of the origins of these projects is given in Hiroaki Kuromiya,
*Stalin's Industrial Revolution: Politics and Workers,  1928-1932*
(Cambridge,  1990: Cambridge University Press),  and in Roberta Manning (ed)
*Stalinism & Russian Industrialization,  1927-1940* (Washington DC, 1997:
Brookings Institution Press).    Magnitogorsk is remarkable for its *scale*
and pioneering efforts,  not because it was unique in Soviet industry.   


>2)  This plant is a polluting monstrosity that 
>produces crud.  What it produced in the 1930s and 1940s was 
>adequate for building tanks, but by today's standards it is 
>scrap metal and that is what it is sold as.  Thus, all the 
>contradictions of the Stalinist system show up in this 
>plant and this city, its gains and its costs.

This *is* precious.    Soviet industry fell on hard times due largely to the
purposive efforts of the Russian leadership under Khrushchev.    In 1961,
reinvestment in heavy industry (as percentage of GDP) was less than *half*
that of 1949.    Soviet heavy industry embarked on a long but inexorable
period of benign neglect throughout the years 1957-1979 that was only
partially reversed during the later years of the Breshnev regime.    The
Stalinist model of industry worked best under the political conditions we
have come to know as Stalinism (i.e., a bifurcated system of central
planning meshed with the political vagaries of workers councils -- all under
the strict control of the Party).    The "thaw" following Stalin's death
fatally undermined a system that has no equal,  in terms of successful
productivity,  anywhere in the annals of human history.     

Barkley,  as a pedlar of current shibboleths,  should look at Howarth's
*Industrial Ecology under Central Planning: a Reconsideration* (London,
1997: Polity Press).     Howarth scrutinizes the record of Soviet
environmentalism (the beginnings of which he locates squarely in the middle
of the Stalin era),  and,  though he finds it wanting,  compares it
favorably to many areas in the US and in southern Europe until the late
1970s.    Ecology,  of course,  cannot legitimately be separated from
economics,  and the sorry environmental record of the Soviet Union and
eastern Europe was almost a tragic inevitability following the economic
crises of 1973-77.

But,  by then Magnitogorsk and its sister projects lay in the ruins Barkley
describes.

Though for different reasons.

Louis Godena




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