"Magnitka' and Beyond
SHUB, ANATOLE
'Magnitka' and Beyond Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970-2000 By Stephen Kotkin Oxford. 245 pp. $25.00. Reviewed by Anatole Snub Former Russian opinion analyst, U.S....
...Machiavelli pointed out long ago that the most dangerous moment for an oppressive regime is when it begins to reform itself...
...All in all, Kotkin is stronger on the Yeltsin decade than on the thousand years of Russian history that preceded it...
...The strongest sections derive from Kotkin's immersion in the gritty life of Magnitogorsk, and his awareness of the plight of thousands of similar Soviet industrial "dinosaurs" built in the 1930s...
...He rightly cites Ecocide in the USSR, the pioneering work by Murray Feshbach and Alfred Friendly Jr., on the degradation of Russian health...
...The elder son of the American radical Scott Nearing, he went to Magnitogorsk as an idealistic volunteer...
...Time and again between 198 6 and 1991, with a few minor exceptions, Soviet officials, including military and KGB officers, shied away from using force against civilians...
...He first attracted attention after spending four months (two in 1987, two in 1989) at the mammoth steel plant in Magnitogorsk in the south Urals, one of the most famous projects of Stalin's first Five-Year Plan...
...As important, Kotkin prompted a welcome reissue of Behind the Urals, John Scott's classic eyewitness account of the steel plant's construction...
...If there ever was a threat of a nuclear holocaust, surely it came closest during the Cuban missile crisis, launched by the very Khrushchev the author stereotypes as a "reformer...
...Kotkin does report an amusing incident: "I shall never forget later escorting Ligachev around New York...
...For that resulted in his writing what his present publisher describes as "an acclaimed two-volume case study on the rise and fall of Soviet socialism": Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization and Steeltown, USSR: Soviet Society in the Gorbachev Era (California...
...My family happened to know Scott well...
...the other by the so-called "Komsomol" or KGB group (led by Aleksandr N. Shelepin and Vladimir Y Semichastny...
...Accounts by Khrushchev's family and that of Anastas I. Mikoyan confirm that by 1964 (as Western journalists suspected at the time) Khrushchev was tired of it all...
...For instance, he confuses the anti-Stalin, anti-Mao 22nd Party Congress (1961), attended by Gorbachev, with the 21st Party Congress (1959) not attended by Gorbachev, at which Khrushchev was compelled to hold de-Stalinization in abeyance—as he had been since the Hungarian "events...
...Kotkin's woolly analysis partly reflects a less than expert knowledge of Soviet politics before 1985...
...Although it is hard to breathe in Magnitogorsk, the air is even worse in Norilsk, Nizhny Tagil and various centers of chemical production...
...What Russians wanted—before Gorbachev, during his reign and afterward—was and is a Western-style, social-democratic welfare state, not a Soviet-type regime, of which AleksandrN...
...In fact, it is not well organized and there is relatively little about the 1970s or early '80s...
...There is no discussion here of arms control negotiations since 1972, nor of the various "brink of war" crises from the Berlin blockade to the Soviet war in Afghanistan...
...Butneither conventional Soviet politicians nor Yeltsin's "reformers" seem to have had the faintest idea of what to do with 500,000 workers, service personnel and family members dependent on the plant—or the millions of people at other "dinosaurs," many of them in the Arctic north...
...Kotkin states several times that Gorbachev did not intend to bring about the collapse of the Soviet regime...
...Armageddon Averted attempts to draw some larger lessons from the author's experiences by reflecting upon them in what he describes as a partly narrative, partly analytical account of the past 30 years...
...This was all window dressing, however...
...In addition to his steel town stays, Kotkin was an exchange student at Moscow State University and has traveled broadly throughout the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, most recently on behalf of George Soros' Open Society Institute...
...explaining the vast universe of private small businesses and immigrantrun eateries...
...iron as well as coal are shipped in by freight from a thousandmiles away...
...It can more persuasively be argued that the impulsive improviser Gorbachev, trying to be all things to all men, was too clever by half and lacked a coherent vision of a humane future...
...But Kotkin is confused in ascribing the collapse to an alleged revival of "humanistic socialism," as represented by Khrushchev's aborted "deStalinization" and regret for the defeat of the Prague Spring of 1968...
...His argument is that the Soviet leaders' nonresistance to the collapse of Communist regimes avoided a possible nuclear holocaust, which—in theory—might have been set off if Gorbachev, Ligachev and other Soviet leaders had behaved like Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia and Franjo Tudjman in Croatia...
...Milovan Djilas once described Suslov to me as a "clerk," in contrast to his predecessor Andrei A. Zhdanov, whom Djilas considered "a serious Marxist...
...Kotkin contrasts the technical backwardness and lethargy at "Magnitka" with the rationalization of production by U.S., British and German steel companies in the 1970s, a move that cut costs sharply and reduced work forces even more sharply...
...Kotkin's references to the pre-perestroika period are marred by other, lesser factual errors...
...But he also reverts to "Gorbymania" in hailing the last Soviet leader as a "virtuoso tactician...
...only to have him ask over and over again who in the government was responsible for feeding the huge urban population...
...Fyodor Burlatsky's memoirs depict Suslov as a prissy nitpicker, who regularly insisted that a hyphen join the terms "Marxism Leninism" and "proletarian internationalism," and who kept an elaborate index file of Lenin quotations for all occasions...
...Kotkin's Armageddon thesis is developed in a 26-page last chapter that has the flavor of an afterthought...
...I first read Scott's book many years ago, and reread it in the summer of 1988 while I was in Magnitogorsk for a month with a U.S...
...Unfortunately, its title doesn't either...
...Some of us also believe the last word on perestroïka and its baneful consequences may have been spoken in Gogol's prophetic Dead Souls (1842...
...He yielded without resistance...
...Kotkin understands, too, the hypocrisies of Soviet-style central planning, the dependence of Russia and other former Soviet republics on oil and gas exports, the roles of ministerial bureaucracies and enterprise managers (before and since the onset of privatization), and the extent to which "market reforms" have magnified rather than addressed the real problems of Russian society...
...The "iron mountain" on which production was first based had long since been depleted...
...It can further be argued that Gorbachev was undone by the seductiveness of Britain's Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, the negotiating skills of Secretaries of State George P. Shultz and James A. Baker, and his own naive expectation of decisive support from the West...
...In this book he reports that he also struck up acquaintanceships with Yegor K. Ligachev and other unnamed Russian leaders...
...In all this, Suslov was not a weighty political player, which is why Khrushchev exempted him from "de-Stalinization" and Brezhnev kept him on for 18 years...
...Russia was not, and is not, Yugoslavia...
...Yakovlev rightly said: "That wasn't socialism...
...Such occasional anecdotes do suggest some of the flavor of the failing regime...
...Western steelmen say the Magnitogorsk plant should have been shut down years ago...
...He holds Suslov mainly responsible for the overthrow of Khrushchev—presumably because Suslov read the majority report at the Central Committee meeting that ousted the Communist Party chief...
...It was slavery...
...Kotkin made his initial trip to Russia in the summer of 1984, to attend a Leningrad language program...
...The attempted coup of August 1991 was closed down after the wife of Defense Minister Dmitri T. Yazov telephoned him and advised him to come home...
...Kotkin's talk of Armageddon is superficial...
...There is no mention at all of the Chinese factor, even though it was increasingly important from 195 7 on and did have a bearing on more serious threats of Armageddon...
...Although he married a Russian woman and retained a deep affection for Russians as people, his disillusionment with Stalinism later led him to become an adviser to Henry Luce and to help launch Radio Liberty...
...the book is mostly about the Mikhail S. Gorbachev and Boris N. Yeltsin periods...
...On the other hand, the author does pass on some grim anecdotes—like the report or rumor that Fyodor D. Kulakov, Gorbachev's predecessor as party supervisor of agriculture, "died [in 1978] at age 60 of an alcohol overdose while recovering from stomach surgery...
...Not surprisingly, he remains most reliable on Magnitogorsk...
...exhibit of information technology...
...The chances of their doing so, though, were close to zero...
...We now know that, a year before this climax, two originally separate conspiracies against Khrushchev were under way: one by the "Ukrainians" (Brezhnev, Nikolai V Podgorny, Andrei P. Kirilenko, et al...
...Thus, he compares the "principled" but "pathetic" Ligachev with a bogeyman view of the hard-line ideologist Mikhail A. Suslov...
...In this larger perspective, however, his cursory account lacks the depth, detail and precision of the much fuller work by Peter Reddaway and Dmitri Glinski, The Tragedy of Russia's Reforms: Market Bolshevism Against Democracy...
...Many would agree with Kotkin that Gorbachev's perestroïka did, as Soviet conservatives predicted it would, undermine the regime and the USSR along with the "outer empire" in Eastern Europe...
...Industrial policy issues posed by the Stalinist "dinosaurs" do not constitute the main focus of this book...
...Information Agency Stephen Kotkin, the Director of Russian Studies at Princeton University, is one of the younger generation of scholars for whom the times of Nikita S. Khrushchev and Leonid I. Brezhnev seem like long ago and the Russia of Anton Chekhov and Fyodor Chaliapin is ancient history...
...The imprecision reflects Kotkin's lack of understanding of the up-and-down political dynamics of the Khrushchev period...
...He says he met with Ligachev at Communist Party headquarters and at his dacha outside Moscow, but the quotations attributed to him all come from his published writings...
Vol. 84 • November 2001 • No. 6
