Koba the Dread by Martin Amis

Author:Martin Amis [Amis, Martin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Historical, History, Europe, General, Modern, 20th Century, Military, Political
ISBN: 9781407018546
Google: dX_3Aj__WNIC
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2013-07-30T12:00:00+00:00

Heavy Industry

Soviet industry moved forward, and staggered about the place, like a titanic infant, with every manner of thunderous accident (collisions, explosions), with peasant boys twirling off frozen scaffolding, with many deaths, sudden or premature, in the usual atmosphere of myth and coercion, of error and terror – but it did move forward. John Scott, an American volunteer at the Morlock newtown of Magnitogorsk (250,000 workers), wagered that ‘Russia’s battle of ferrous metallurgy alone involved more casualties than the battle of the Marne.’ And there were also fabulous inefficiencies: the regular unavailability, in the whole of Moscow, of a single ‘light bulb or a bar of soap’ (Tibor Szamuely), for instance, or the inability of the White Sea-Baltic Canal, constructed by the ‘fart power’ (Solzhenitsyn) of hundreds of thousands of slaves, to carry heavy shipping. Inefficiencies, when undeniable, had to be blamed on someone; and so Stalin (following Lenin) institutionalized the crime of wrecking – ‘notwithstanding’, as Solzhenitsyn says, ‘the nonexistence of this concept in the entire history of mankind’.14 Whereas the real wrecker, the ‘super-wrecker’ (Tucker), was of course Stalin.

One of the partial and deforming ‘triumphs’ of industrialization was ideological. Until now the Bolsheviks, contra Marx, formed a ‘superstructure’ without a proper proletarian ‘base’. During the decade of the Big Break, about 30 million peasants were forced to find work in the cities. Martin Malia is characteristically panoptic:

[Stalin] launched from above a second revolution that rebuilt Mother Russia as a Soviet pseudo-America and converted her superfluity of peasants into real proletarians. Thus the Party’s supreme achievement was to transmogrify its status as ‘superstructure’ into the demiurge for creating the industrial and worker ‘base’ that was supposed to have created it.

Soviet Communism can look back on two achievements. Industrialization made up for what Malia calls Russia’s ‘deficit of modernity’ – though it deepened the systemic abnormality that led to the state’s collapse. That was one achievement. The other was the defeat of Hitler. Both owed everything to the Russian people: their tears, their sweat, their blood.

14 John Scott did see one case during his several years at Magnitogorsk: some outgoing kulaks spiked a turbine.

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