Social Dimensions of Soviet Industrialization.

In the 1980s, the Social Science Research Council and the University of Michigan sponsored five seminars on 20th century Soviet social history. The result is a wide-ranging set of essays analyzing the social dimensions of superindustrialization of Stalin's five-year plans through 1941. From every angle, the picture painted is one of large-scale movement and chaos made bearable by local groups coalescing, if only briefly, in common interest against threats, usually from the outside. Industrialization and collectivization produced a nation on the move, voluntarily and otherwise, and often a sense of otherness and alienation.

This volume combines social history, theories developed about Western industrialization and modernization, and access to Soviet sources, the latter developed by clever detective work (alas, tales captured only in late night discussions and not in print). The result is a window into a crucial and traumatic period in Russian history, whose study will richly reward scholars of modernization everywhere.

Lewis H. Siegelbaum and Ronald G. Suny provide an overview tracing the historiographic and thematic evolution of Western writing on Soviet industrialization. They correctly emphasize the pioneering contributions of R.W. Davies and the Birmingham Centre for Russian and East European Studies. Sheila Fitzpatrick and Stephan Merl describe the huge rural-urban and urban-rural flows of people, including reintegration and recreation of peasant life in cities and factories and the bureaucratization of agriculture. Merl estimates up to 30% of able-bodied workers (primarily men) did not work physically on collective farms (48). Stephen Kotkin superbly demonstrates the process of continual expansion by tracing the demographic development of Magnitostroi from an empty field to an enormous industrial complex in the course of a few hectic years.

The themes of continuity, change, and active involvement are perhaps best displayed in the studies of management. Don K. Rowney traces the significant similarities of the new People's Commissariat of Heavy Industry to its tsarist and early Soviet predecessors by comparing their scope, authority, and personnel. R.W. Davies refutes the notion of engineers and managers passively receiving and implementing orders in a command economy by showing the continuation of some market mechanisms and managerial entrepreneurialism. Hiroaki Kuromiya explores the management of the coal-mining industry. Although modern technology did not play as important a role as in metallurgy, coal mining more than amply demonstrated the inadequate technical training, worker enthusiasm, and huge waste of resources--human, financial, and technological--that help define. Soviet superindustrialization. Siegelbaum examines how foremen and workers unsuccessfully worked against new management philosophies that diminished their autonomy, paralleling western experience. David Shearer takes a wider look at the vital sector of machine-building factories to explore how the first two five-year plans changed the structure of work and management.

Peter Solomon's exploration of the neglected realm of Soviet law discovers an intriguing degree of independence of the judicial sector against the growing demands of the state, including a tendency to demand at least some evidence of crimes. Often, after an initial period of heavy publicity, the accused quietly received reduced sentences.

Moving from the producers to the portrayers of industry, Katerina Clark explores how cultural models and their creators changed in response to pressures from above and below as well as through the establishment of official venues of publication and support. Geoff Eley looks at the Soviet experience through European eyes in an embarrassing reminder of how US-focused we are to our detriment. To carry the reader further, Steven Coe has compiled a very useful bibliographic guide. Moshe Lewin concludes the essays with a compelling overview of Soviet industrialization as economic planning without economics and a political system without politics. Rosenberg and Siegelbaum have edited an excellent vade mecum for the veteran or novice of Soviet industrialization. We now have a useful work to help integrate the Soviet experience into our knowledge of industrialization and modernization worldwide.

The liberation of archives and other resources should produce a flowering of research. We can look forward to more studies of specific industrial and geographic areas as well as various groups, like the military. Hopefully, this will be complemented by the cross-transfer of theories and analytic approaches from the experience of the Third World as well as Western Europe and North America.

Jonathan Coopersmith Texas A & M University