Product Description

This study is the first of its kind: a street-level inside account of what Stalinism meant to the masses of ordinary people who lived it. Stephen Kotkin was the first American in 45 years to be allowed into Magnitogorsk, a city built in response to Stalin's decision to transform the predominantly agricultural nation into a "country of metal." With unique access to previously untapped archives and interviews, Kotkin forges a vivid and compelling account of the impact of industrialization on a single urban community. Kotkin argues that Stalinism offered itself as an opportunity for enlightenment. The utopia it proffered, socialism, would be a new civilization based on the repudiation of capitalism. The extent to which the citizenry participated in this scheme and the relationship of the state's ambitions to the dreams of ordinary people form the substance of this fascinating story. Kotkin tells it deftly, with a remarkable understanding of the social and political system, as well as a keen instinct for the details of everyday life. Kotkin depicts a whole range of life: from the blast furnace workers who labored in the enormous iron and steel plant, to the families who struggled with the shortage of housing and services. Thematically organized and closely focused, Magnetic Mountain signals the beginning of a new stage in the writing of Soviet social history.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #281280 in Books
• Published on: 1997-02-27
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 639 pages

From the Inside Flap
"A kind of archaeological analysis of Soviet life during the momentous years of Stalinist industrialization."--Lewis Siegelbaum, Michigan State University

From the Back Cover
"A kind of archaeological analysis of Soviet life during the momentous years of Stalinist industrialization." (Lewis Siegelbaum, Michigan State University)

About the Author
Stephen Kotkin is Assistant Professor of History at Princeton University and author of Steeltown, USSR (California, 1991).

Customer Reviews

Excellent Social History
This book is about building socialism, Soviet style. Magnitogorsk was the site of an outcrop of rich iron ore and Soviet economic planners elected to construct a whole new steel manufacturing center with accompanying city on that site. The site lacked easy access to coal, required extensive damming of the neighboring river, was hundreds of miles off the main Russian railroad system, and was sparsely populated. The rational approach would have been to develop an iron mine and expand the rail lines connecting to established industrial centers; a Soviet equivalent of the once important iron mines in nothern Minnesota. In keeping with the goal of erecting a whole new industrial civilization, the new Soviet state treated the site as a physical and social tabula rasa, developing not only a whole new vertically integrated production complex but also a whole new society. Kotkin's book is a social history of that enterprise. Based on extensive archival research and using extensive secondary sources, Kotkin describes the social experience of building the factory/city and life within Magnitogorsk.

This is an excellent book. The quality of writing and documentation is excellent. Readers will get a vivid sense of the Soviet experience during this period of Russian history. The underlying theme of the book is the efforts of the Soviet state to transcend capitalism and totally transform human existence. The resulting efforts to break the social mold and develop rational modes of social organization are described well. The Soviet emphasis on heavy industry, central planning, and subordination of the individual to social goals is demonstrated through close analysis of the system of factory construction, housing organization, and many aspects of daily life. The remarkable brutality, inefficiency, and corruption of Soviet life are described very well. At the same time, Kotkin is careful to point out that the Bolshevik/Soviet system enjoyed a real measure of popular support. It brought full employment and bread to millions at a time when the Great Depression had idled factories all across Europe and North America. The emergence of fascist states in Europe also seemed to vindicate Marxist predictions of the terminal throes of capitalism.

One criticism of Kotkin is that he attempts to emphasize the ways in which common people responded to the actions of the state. To paraphrase Eugen Weber, Kotkin attempts to present common people as subjects of history rather than objects of history. While this is a laudable attempt to avoid presenting most people as mere victims of impersonal forces, readers will be struck with how the Soviet state intruded itself into all aspects of human life. This is not surprising as the avowed goal of the Soviets was to re-engineer human society. A good deal of recent social history attempts to avoid the image of common people as passive victims but I feel that Kotkin has gone a little too far in this direction.

Kotkin is very good at demonstrating the essential nature of the Soviet state. In a section on relationship of the Communist Party to the state proper, Kotkin summarizes the nature of the Soviet state by describing it as the equivalent of a theocracy. Implicit in Kotkin's analysis is the concept that the Soviet state was an ideological construct offering a form of secular salvation mediated by the state. While Kotkin doesn't use the term, a good alternative description would the phrase 'political religion.' The latter term has been used by the historian Michael Burleigh to summarize his analysis of the Nazi state.

Finally, I have to address some of the prior negative reviews of this book published below. Magnetic Mountain is not an apology for the Soviet state. As mentioned, Kotkin is very good at showing the brutality, corruption, and inefficiency of the Soviet State. Kotkin employs rather temperate language. He does not describe Soviet acts as crimes or brutalities. His careful descriptions, however, of the acts themselves and his systematic demonstration of how the Soviet state attempted to control all aspects of life are damning. This dispassionate approach is at least as effective as more emotive accounts. It is also unfair to characterize this book as a post-modern interpretation or as primarily an attempt to settle historiographic controversies. While Kotkin does invoke the name of Foucault and does address important historigraphic issues, Kotkin's primary goal is to describe the social experience of this phase of Soviet history. He succeeds completely.

Facinating story of the history of the city of Magnitogorsk
Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as A Civilization is a fascinating history of the Soviet (now Russian) city of Magnitogorsk. Despite the comments of other reviewers (and the sub-title), the book mostly concerns itself with the building and earliest history of the city and not at all with the glorification of Stalin or Stalinism. The book simply details what life was like in what was supposed to be the protypical Soviet city under Stalin. The depth of research Kotkin has attained is just amazing and his writing is simply superb.

Narrow and Illuminating Study
Kotkin has done excellent work here in Magnetic Mountain. This is a landmark study on the building of an industrial city in the Soviet Union during the Stalinist era. It's extremely bizarre that some have taken the view that it is a pro-Stalin work. I can only conclude that they haven't read Magnetic Mountain but only certain reviews or are so head-in-the-sand dogmatic that they render any view outside of cold war totalitarian model as pro-Stalinist.

Especially ironic is the Stalinist tone of many who oppose any view outside this strict cold war construction. Like it or not the facts are many who lived in the Soviet Union during that era believed in communism as their salvation and future. I've lived in Russia and have seen the older generation protesting in pro-Stalin demonstrations in St Petersburg's Palace Square. Stating this doesn't make Kotkin pro anything. It makes him a historian.

Kotkin's rendering of Magnitogorsk is great history. From the initial idealistic workers that established the city, he quickly shows the disillusionment that occurred when theory and practical organization clashed. Labor shortages abound in this workers paradise ironically because workers couldn't stand the conditions. Kotkin shows how internal passports and party cards gradually began to be used to make sure workers could not move freely or that party members could be monitored.

Not that all was oppression. He correctly describes how many used the opportunities that were available to proceed with gaining an education in the evening technical programs that proliferated in the Magnitogorsk community.

Kotkin does not shy away from the effects of the purges, but he does describe them as being focused particularly on party members. With the benefits of communist party membership came the dangerously increased odds of being targeted in the purges. He's especially effective in his description of how the balance of power was structured between the technical experts running the factories, the local communist organization and the NKVD.

This is good history. It may ruffle feathers, but more importantly it illuminates the complexity of life in the Soviet Union. Citizens in the SU were much more involved, benefited from and bought into the dogma of Soviet marxism much more than the Conquest cold war scholarship of that era showed. Having spoken to many of the older Russian generation myself I've seen the confirmation in the discussions.

Ignore the lock-step cold warriors; if you are a historian of left, middle or right wing views you'll find this is history well worth reading.