Fracture: Life and Culture in the West, 1918-1938 by Blom Philipp

Author:Blom, Philipp [Blom, Philipp]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780465040711
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2015-04-13T16:00:00+00:00

Life in Amerikanka

THE CONTROVERSIES ABOUT STALINIST OPPRESSION—indeed, full knowledge of the extent of that oppression—was still some way in the future in 1929, despite the questions asked by Lady Astor. After the Wall Street crash, it really did seem as if socialism had won a historic and predicted victory over capitalism and the future belonged to the workers of Magnitogorsk. Arriving there in 1932, John Scott reveled in the feeling of hope and comradeship amid the deprivation. “In Magnitogorsk I was precipitated into battle. I was deployed on the iron and steel front. Tens of thousands of people were enduring the most intense hardships in order to build blast furnaces, and many of them did it willingly, with boundless enthusiasm, which infected me from the day of my arrival.”22

By then, the Magnetic City was indeed operating a huge steelworks, one of the largest in the world and the pride of the Soviet leadership. The hectic choir of emergency calls and sirens announcing fires had been replaced by the epic song of the factory of factories. Socialism had wrought the miracle it had promised, and collective effort and true enthusiasm had transformed the most arid steppe into a thriving and productive socialist city inhabited by vigorous proletarians. The entire story was a homage to the new Soviet man and to the great machine that was communism—a machine in which people had value only as cogs that either functioned or had to be replaced.

The day-to-day reality, however, was very different. There had been trouble from the start, but the accidents, acts of sabotage, and thefts at the gigantic building site had been replaced by an oceanic routine of smaller and larger calamities. Built close to a vast reservoir of iron ore, Magnitogorsk was hundreds of miles away from the nearest coal mine, and the railways were always prone to breaking down, which would slow production to a snail’s pace for lack of fuel or other materials. The management wrote a steady stream of begging telegrams and letters to the central administration in Moscow, but the responses were predictably sluggish and often negative.

In addition to the constant problems at the factory, the town was still little more than an assembly of tents, barracks, and a few brick buildings, despite the fact that the winters could be perishingly cold. Inside these primitive dwellings, Stalin’s policy of collectivization was realized further than Moscow cadres had imagined possible. Living with four times as many people as intended, the inhabitants found that all privacy and all possibilities of retreat had simply vanished. “In the barracks, mud and ceaseless noise,” one of them remembered. “Not enough light to read. The library is poor, newspapers are few. They are stolen to roll cigarettes. . . . Gossip, obscene anecdotes, and songs emerge from the mud-filled corners. At night drunks return to the barracks, stupid from boredom. They disturb the sleep of the others. From time to time traveling artists drop in to Magnitogorsk: sword swallowers, jugglers, comedians.”23

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