Customer Reviews

Peasant Metropolis: Social Identities in Moscow, 1929-1941 (Studies of the Harriman Institute)

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This book recreates the "immigrant" experience of peasant workers in Moscow during the first two Five Year Plans, the era of the "Great Break." Here was laid the foundations of the Soviet system as we came to know and love it for the next sixty years.

As alluded, the story of peasant migrants come to the big city reminds me strongly of immigrants who came to New York, Chicago, and other big industrial US cities a generation before. The same dislocation, the same clannishness, the same rivalries between the established and the greenhorn. What also emerges is the rise of Stalin as political boss and Stalinism as a Russian variant of big-city bossism. The social base - immigrants and their upwardly-mobile offspring - was strikingly identical and goes far to explain Stalinism as a social phenomena, beyond the "cult of personality" or ideological wrangles with right or left party opponents.

At one crucial statement I do disagree with Professor Hoffmann, when he states on page 106 that "The Soviet industrial system, with its undisciplined worforce, weakened management, and Party and police interference, never achieved rationalized and routinized production." These same handicaps plagued American industry some 30 years before, but were overcome by expanding industry and the education and adaption of the workforce. As Stephen Kotkin shows in "Magnetic Mountain," tracing this same Stalinist pattern in the creation of the Magnitogortsk Complex, Stalinism hammered out a very credible industrial civilization; while Michael Burawoy's work experience in socialist Hungary showed a "rationalized and routinized production" regime equal to that of American factories where he'd earlier worked.

But altogether a useful contribution to the school of "Stalinist studies."