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Making the Command Economy: Western Historians on Soviet Industrialization

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2008

Lewis Siegelbaum  and
Ronald Grigor Suny
Lewis Siegelbaum
Affiliation:
Michigan State University
Ronald Grigor Suny
Affiliation:
University of Michigan
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Abstract

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Type
Review Essays
Information
International Labor and Working-Class History , Volume 43 , Spring 1993 , pp. 65 - 76
Copyright
Copyright © International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc. 1993

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References

Notes

1. Pravda and lzvestiia, 3 November 1987; and Current Digest of the Soviet Press 39 (2 12 1987):6Google Scholar.

2. Rizzi, Bruno, The Bureaucratization of the World. The USSR: Bureaucratic Collectivism, trans. Westoby, Adam (London and New York, 1985: originally Paris, 1939)Google Scholar For an interesting account of the debates on the USSR among Marxists, see Carlo, Antonio, “The Socio-Economic Nature of the USSR,” Telos 21 (Fall 1974): 2–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3. Friedrich, Carl J. and Brzezinski, Zbigniew K., Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy, 2nd ed. (New York, 1966), 233Google Scholar.

4. Ibid., 237.

5. Rostow, W. W., The Dynamics of Soviet Society (New York, 1954), 133Google Scholar.

6. Ibid., 244.

7. Kerr, Clark, Dunlop, J. T., Harbison, F. H., and Mayers, C. A., Industrialism and Industrial Man: The Problems of Labour and Management in Economic Growth (London, 1966), 46Google Scholar. The totalitarian and modernization-convergence schools are discussed and criticized in Lane, David, The Socialist Industrial State: Towards a Political Sociolog of State Socialism (London, 1976), 44–62Google Scholar.

8. Granick, David, The Red Executive: A Study of the Organization Man in Russian Industry (London, 1960)Google Scholar.

9. Ibid., 18–19.

10. Rukeyser, Walter Arnold, Working for the Soviets: An American Engineer in Russia (New York, 1932)Google Scholar; and Scott, John, Behind the Urals: An American Worker in Russia's City of Steel (Bloomington, 1973: originally New York, 1942)Google Scholar.

11. See, for example, Hindus, Maurice, The Great Offensive (London, 1933)Google Scholar.

12. Carr, E. H. and Davies, R. W., Foundations of a Planned Economy, 1926–1929, vol. 1 (London, 1969). v–vi.Google Scholar Carr used the same metaphor in a published interview (“The Russian Revolution and the West,” New Left Review 111 [September–October 1978], 27)Google Scholar.

13. The titles thus far published are The Socialist Offensive: The Collectivisation of Soviet Agriculture. 1929–1930: The Soviet Collective Farm, 1929–1930; and The Soviet Economy in Turmoil, 1929–1930 (London and Cambridge, Mass., 1980–1989)Google Scholar. More are in preparation. Davies, had earlier published The Development of the Soviet Budgetary System (Cambridge, UK, 1958)Google Scholar.

14. Davies, Soviet Economy in Turmoil, 270.

15. Maier, Charles, In Search of Stability: Explorations in Historical Political Economy (Cambridge, 1987), 5Google Scholar.

16. A parallel interest in Soviet industrialization developed on the European continent, most notably in West Germany. promoted by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and the University of Bremen's project on “Sozialgeschichte der UdSSR 1917–1924. ”For some representative texts, see Kirstein, Tatjana, Sowjetische industrialisierung geplanter oder spontaner Prozess? Eine Strukturanalyse des wirtschaftspolitischen Enscheidungsprozesses bei Aufbau des Ural-Kuznexk-Kombinats 1918–1930 (Baden-Baden, 1979)Google Scholar: Suss, Walter, Der Betrieb in der UdSSR: Stellung, Organisation und Management, 1917–1932 (Frankfurt/Bern, 1980)Google Scholar: and Tatur, Melanie, “Wissenschaftliche Arbeitsorganisation”. Arbeitswissen-schaften und arbeitsorganisation in der Sowjetunion, 1921–1935 (Wiesbaden, 1979)Google Scholar. See also, Bettleheim, Charles, ed., L'industrisation de l'URSS dans les anées trentes: Actes de a Table Rond organisée par le Centre d'Etudes des Modes d'Industrialisation de l'Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (10 et 11 decembre 1981) (Paris, 1982)Google Scholar.

17. Fitzpatrick, Sheila, Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union, 1921–1934 (Cambridge, U.K., 1979), 254CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also, idem., “Cultural Revolution as Class War,” in Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928–1931, ed. Fitzpatrick, Sheila (Bloomington, 1979)Google Scholar; and “The Russian Revolution and Social Mobility: A Re-examination of the Question of Social Support for the Soviet Regime in the 1920s and 1930s.” Politics and Society 23 (1984)Google Scholar.

18. While Fitzpatrick added an important dimension to our understanding of Soviet industrialization, her work to date does not deal directly with industrial production. The struggles and accomplishments that she analyzes occur not so much on the shop floor as in the makeshift classrooms where promotees received their training and the conference halls where militant communists confronted and denounced “bourgeois specialists” and insufficiently militant party members.

19. Lewin, Moshe, The Making of the Soviet System: Essays in the Social History of Interwar Russia (New York, 1985), 257Google Scholar.

20. Ibid., 34.

21. Filtzer, Donald, Soviet Workers and Stalinist Industrialisation: The Formation of Modern Soviet Production Relations, 1928–1941 (London, 1986)Google Scholar. Filtzer has extended his analysis of the system of Soviet production relations into the Khrushchev years. See his Soviet Workers and de-Stalinization, 1953–1964 (Cambridge, U.K., 1992)Google Scholar.

22. Andrle, Vladimir, Workers in Stalin's Russia: Industrialization and Change in a Planned Economy (New York, 1988)Google Scholar.

23. Ibid., 71.

24. Ibid., 154: and Burawoy, Michael. Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labor Process Under Monopoly Capitalism (Chicago, 1979)Google Scholar.

25. Burawoy, Manufacturing Consent, 99.

26. Kuromiya, Hiroaki, Stalin's industrial Revolution: Politics and Workers, 1928–1932 (Cambridge, 1988)Google Scholar: and Siegelbaum, Lewis, Stakhanovism and the Politics of Productivity in the USSR, 1925–1941 (Cambridge, 1988)Google Scholar.

27. Siegelbaum, Stakhanovism, 7.

28. On Stakhanovism and particularly its connection with the Great Purges in industry, see Benvenuti, Francesco, Fuoco sui Sabotatori! Stachanovismo e Organizazione industriale in URSS, 1934–1938 (Rome, 1988)Google Scholar: and Maier, Robert, Die Stachanov-Bewegung, 1935–1938 (Stuttgart, 1990)Google Scholar. Andrle suggests in his concluding chapter that workers were not among the principal victims of the purges, though they had lost the collective capacity to combat the repression of the police and party. The regime understood that appeals to workers expressed in terms of class interests and antagonism to elites retained their power.

29. The papers from the conference, sponsored by the National Seminar on Russian Social History in the Twentieth Century. will be published as Rosenberg, William G. and Siegelbaum, Lewis H., eds., Social Dimensions of Soviet Industrialization (Bloomington, 1993)Google Scholar.

30. Rassweiler, AnneThe Generation of Power: The History of Dneprostroi (Oxford, 1988)Google Scholar; and Kotkin, Stephen, “Magnetic Mountain: City Building and City Life in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. A Study of Magnitogorsk” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, 1988)Google Scholar. Kotkin, has published Steeltown, USSR (Princeton, 1991)Google Scholar, a study of contemporary Magnitogorsk (see the review by Lewis Siegelbaum in this issue of ILWCH). Among other dissertations with a local or sectoral focus are Shearer, David, “Rationalization and Reconstruction in the Soviet Machine Building Industry, 1926–1934” (University of Pennsylvania, 1988)Google Scholar; Strauss, Kenneth, “The Transformation of the Soviet Working Class, 1929–1935” University of Pennsylvania, 1990)Google Scholar; and Hoffmann, David Lloyd, “Urbanization and Social Change during Soviet Industrialization: In-Migration to Moscow, 1929–1937” (Columbia University, 1990)Google Scholar.

31. The papers from this conference are currently being revised for publication in a volume edited by Lewis Siegelbaum and R. G. Suny