Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization

by Stephen Kotkin

This study is the first of its 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 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.

Genres: History, Russia, Nonfiction, Russian History, Soviet Union, Soviet History, Politics

639 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

Stephen Mark Kotkin is an American historian, academic, and author. He is the Kleinheinz Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. For 33 years, Kotkin taught at Princeton University, where he attained the title of John P. Birkelund '52 Professor in History and International Affairs, and he took emeritus status from Princeton University in 2022. He was the director of the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies and the co-director of the certificate program in History and the Practice of Diplomacy. He has won a number of awards and fellowships, including the Guggenheim Fellowship, the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship. He is the husband of curator and art historian Soyoung Lee.
Kotkin's most prominent book project is his three-volume biography of Joseph Stalin, of which the first two volumes have been published as Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878–1928 (2014) and Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929–1941 (2017), while the third volume remains to be published.

Reviews

[Marks54 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Who doesn’t love a good book about a factory? They are big interesting places with entire communities that grow up around them (outside of larger cities of course). I worked in one for a few summers as a teen and never forgot the experiences - although I also never sought to repeat it either.

Stephen Kotkin is a history professor at Princeton and the author of an outstanding two volume biography of Stalin. This book began with his doctoral dissertation and is a history of the enormous Soviet steel facility at Magnitogorsk that was built from scratch on the steppe as an essential part of the first five year plan and the push towards collectivization and forced industrialization. Kotkin’s intent is to provide a social history of the initiative that is as sympathetic to the social context and popular support for the revolution as possible. Magnitogorsk developed when the revolution was young, times were hard, the world was in depression, and the experiences of civil war and struggle were fresh in the minds of many. There was plausibly some hope and a benefit of the doubt towards the Bolshevik regime and the darker sides of Stalin’s regime were only beginning to emerge. So while it may sound a bit hokey that some people were hung ho in the building of Socialism, it wasn’t unbelievable. More than a few western observers were fooled and the details of the great famine were not matters of public knowledge.

This is a long book that covers a lot of ground. There are pictures - lots of pictures. Some different lines of thought come to mind after reading the book.

First, the allure of American industry and Henry Ford (who was popular in Germany too). The big factory was a magical place in revolutionary circles on both the right and left. For an example, look at the Diego Rivera murals of Ford if you go to Detroit. The Magnitogorsk plant was based on the Gary works of US Steel and Kotkin draws fascinating parallels between Gary and the Russian plant. The adulation of big steel in the US was very real too. I remember the large Steel exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago (now replaced of course).

Second, it is tempting to read Stalinist excess into the history, but Kotkin raises the point that the Soviets were faced with the real question of how to build a world class infrastructure from scratch in a peasant economy. They chose an approach of massed reserves pushed towards an heroic and gigantic effort - although it did not turn out well. Fascinating in the story is how the Soviets hired US experts but staffed the initiative with far too many politicals who literally knew nothing of the enormous complexities of building a nation’s steel capacity from scratch.

Third, it is hard not to appreciate the role of forced savings in building socialism. Just imagine being part of a workforce of thousands being forced to live in tents or subpar barracks without heat and plumbing out on the Russian steppe - and those were the workers who were not in political trouble with the regime. You think your workplace is bad? Along this line was the point Kotkin makes about the origins of the internal passport system. Now this has rightly been highlighted as a part of totalitarian rules but it also gained initial traction because of difficulties in literally knowing who was working where as a basis for building, feeding, and organizing.

Fourth, education is a major element in the second half of the book and the paradox of socialist education is made clear - how does one educate the masses in basic literacy and numeracy skills, as well as some western culture, while strictly providing ideological foundations for a regime that is not allowed to admit to error or doubt? This comes up in other totalitarian societies as well.

Fifth, the social and ideological boosting of the regime to foster motivation for heroic work was arguably successful (coupled with Stalinist coercion). But that ideological indoctrination also may have contributed to the extreme delegitimacy and scorn that the regime suffered when it eventually lost out to the west and was unable to maintain a decent standard of living and eventually fell apart.

There is lots more in the book. It is a really good case study of a social planning initiative gone wrong and that encapsulated the entire Soviet experience within the cases confines. The generation affected by this development then had to experience the Great Terror followed by the Great Patriotic War with Germany. It is a really intriguing story, although a long story to work through.

If you are interested in the nuts and bolts of the Soviet economy, this is a book to read.

[Frank Stein · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this book Stephen Kotkin does what might seem impossible. He immerses the reader in the complete world of a Stalinist boomtown in the 1930s. The people in the new city of Magnitogorsk do not come off as Bolshevik caricatures or Soviet myrmidons, but as real humans facing normal and abnormal problems with all the intelligence and grace they can muster. Taking advantage of the full range of published and unpublished Soviet sources, he details what everyday life looked like to people living under one of the most oppressive dictatorships known to man.

Kotkin does not dismiss the horrors of Stalinism, but he does argue with the "totalitarian" interpretation of it, since he shows the innumerable ways individuals escaped its totalizing grasp. For instance, he shows how much of the economy was really a "shadow" economy, where purloined factory parts or cloth went to either independently fulfill the impossible plans of Moscow or into private production that was resold in the official "markets" or even by door-to-door peddling. He shows that despite the attempts by famed German planner Ernst May to design a perfect new "linear town," the city arose haphazardly wherever workers could pitch tents or mud huts. Despite the harsh censorship, the Magnitgorsk Worker newspaper catalogued many of the failures of local elites, including the inability of the Steel Factories KPU living quarters unit to maintain their new barracks, the crime rampant in the "Convict Labor Colony," mistakes in completing the city blast furnace and so on. In a way, pushing a recalcitrant Communist system involved constant criticism which is a cornucopia for a researcher. Of course such criticism was usually leveled at those already pushed out of the system or the Party.

The book also offers the best description I've read of the 1937 Terror. Kotkin shows that the division between an elite Communist Party, whose job was to maintain ideological uniformity and place personnel in appropriate "nomenklatura" positions, and an actual state system, which did the work of running factories and homes and police and so on, led to irreconcilable conflicts. From 1933 onwards the Party engaged in numerous internal "purges" and "verification" campaigns which aimed to expel corrupt party officials or merely those with a false "worker" pedigree, and which spread to failures in state production and soon involved the NKVD (the "state" system which tended to enforce party dictates). Gradually, internal party purges ate up the entire country and led to a classic witch-hunt atmosphere.

By detailing everything from the shrine-like "Red Corners" in the city barracks to the Magnit Cinema (showing movies such as "Party Card" and of course Charlie Chaplin's "Modern Times") to the craze over "French Wrestling" at the local circus, Kotkin enriches our view of life and politics in an otherworldly time and place. It's hard to forget.

[Benemint · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a phenomenal work!! It deserves more than 5 stars. I read this book again while I was doing research on Japanese fascism in 1930s, and it gave me great insight on the problem of 'agency' of ordinary people under a totalitarian state. I really liked the way in which Kotkin deploys the Foucauldian 'subjectivity' analysis yet goes beyond and shows that the state and the people were actually not playing the same game of 'indoctrination vs resistance.' Stalinism was "a way of life" according to which people made their lives meaningful. "Resistance" was a label that the state used to describe the private sphere that the state could not control.

The case itself-- the creation of an industrial city in the middle of nowhere, is absolutely an amazing story. And to our convenience, the case works as a microcosm of the USSR that shows the logic of the state and people's lives under Stalinism.

His writing is very effective as well. I recommend this to everyone who likes history.

[Dimitrii Ivanov · Rating 4 out of 5]

Updated version of M. Malia's thesis about the impact of ideology (here, discourse) on the formation of the Soviet system. Very thorough examination of 1930s Magnitogorsk, with breadth, depth and common sense, but although published in 1995, there seems to have been no attempt to consult NKVD sources made after 1991. The famous chapter and the one on terror are the best ones there.

[Kriegslok · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Iron and steel became the venerated symbols of the Bolshevik s determination and the distinctive industrial age they were determined to bring to the USSR. For this reason, the most celebrated showcase of the new, superior industrial age being realized in Soviet Russia became the Magnitogorsk Metallurgical Complex."

This hefty tome is a number of things. It is a record of incredible human endeavor in the face of overwhelming odds against. It is a detailed analysis of the causes of, the mechanisms of, and the results of, Stalin era industrialisation and social engineering. And it is a critique of scholarship as it stood at the time of writing with regard to the history of the USSR and of the especially controversial Stalin period in particular.
A major strength of Kotkins work is a clear desire to try to explain and understand the events of the time without the baggage of excessive moralizing or judgement of times, ideological system, or events. He has a clear desire to try to understand what compelled people to behave and act as they did. To try to explain why or how people acted against their own interest or the interest of others, and how a system of authority managed to develop that was able to act in the manner that it did and retain significant enthusiastic support in the process.

The book looks at the construction of the Magnitogorsk complex as both a political and social project. The grandiose nature of the undertaking amid a generally chaotic state of administrative affairs is quite overwhelming. Kotkin explains that "...in the best case design and construction went on simultaneously. Not infrequently, construction not only preceded design but was almost always pushed forward without regard to preparation of logistics". The paradoxical impact of increased industrial capacity "far from satiating the hunger for metal, resulted in perpetual shortages" as unlimited demand led to stockpiling and over ordering by factories to guard against the very shortages that their personally logical actions created, is just one aspect of the problems created by central planning that lacked an efficient means to collect, collate and process data.  That anything was achieved in such conditions is perhaps remarkable but that both a gargantuan steel works and city arose from the barren step is remarkable.

It was not a just steel works that was to be constructed at Magnitogorsk but a huge city, its support infrastructure and a new socialist form of social organisation that was to be built. The book explains how workers disembarked on the Steppe to a vision of a city yet to come. Life in the early years could not have been much harder and this is reflected in the almost 100% turnover in labour which found conditions inhospitable and unlivable to say the least in the early years when tents, flimsy wooden barracks and muddy holes in the ground were homes. The conflict between what was dreamed in terms of building homes fit for a victorious proletariat, what was in reality planned, and what was actually built demonstrates the gulfs between what the ideal world might provide and what a struggling infant state could muster. The inclusion of foreign expertise and social progressives in trying to resolve this issue, and their disappointments are an interesting part of the Magnitogorsk story. So too is the huge cultural chasm that peasants arriving to begin their conversion to proletarians faced and the frustrations social backgrounds placed on revolutionaries trying to build their vision of socialist society with humans reluctant to be molded.

Kotkin dedicates a good part of the writing to trying to explain and understand, as the book is subtitled, Stalinism as civilisation. He makes an important point in showing how early purges of the Party and the management of industry were often greeted with popular support from the shop floor. In the immediate post-Revolution years many posts were filled by those keen to carve out comfortable niches for themselves or who were politically suspect and blew with the wind. Scott, an American then working in Magnitogorsk wrote of the time "...officials and administrators who had formerly come to work at ten, gone home by four-thirty, and shrugged their shoulders at all complaints, difficulties and failures, began to stay at work from dawn to dark, to worry about the success or failure of their units, and to fight in a real and earnest fashion for plan fulfillment, for economy, and for the well-being of their workers and employees, about whom they had not previously lost a wink of sleep" which Kotkin states helps explain why "...Stalin was long held in high esteem" by many.
The process by which the weeding out of the "suspect" was carried out is well detailed, including the participatory nature of denunciation and self-criticism. It is easy to see how such a mechanism once instigated was able to develop a life of its own, and become something of an auto-cannibalistic mechanism. Understanding how people came to cooperate with, and feed, this machine can be difficult from a distant perspective. Kotkin offers his own explanation for the mechanism of the terror locating it in an Inquisitorial framework whereby "Counterrevolution" was "a state of mind" bearing a striking resemblance to "...the religious heresy of the Middle Ages", a situation in which the NKVD could justify their actions as doing the equivalent of "God's work". However, the act of "confession" here was not a life saving solution, "...whereas most heretics who suffered did so because they refused to relinquish beliefs contrary to the teaching of the Catholic Church, "counter revolutionaries" often confessed because of their abiding faith in the Communist Party - and were executed all the same".

As Kotkin states in his introduction "Bolshevism itself, including its evolution, must be seen not as merely a set of institutions, a group of personalities, or an ideology but as a cluster of powerful symbols and attitudes, a language and new forms of speech, new ways of behaving in public and private, even new styles of dress - in short, as an ongoing experience through which it was possible to imagine and strive to bring about a new civilisation called socialism". This book is a monumental and convincing effort in understanding Soviet society and its evolution through Stalinism going beyond the usual stereotyping.

The book comes to over 600 pages of text. Of this over 200 pages consist of detailed notes and references in support of the many body of the work. There is also a good bibliography including memories of some who experienced the period in Magnitogorsk's development themselves. "Time, Forward!" by Valentine Kataev, a novel about a Shock Brigade in Magnitogorsk is especially worth a read.

[Ярослава · Rating 4 out of 5]

Якщо вам цікаво, як в перші роки СССР створювали міста з нуля - як вербували робітників? в яких умовах вони потім жили? як вели пропаганду в свіжостворених в'язницях? і тд, і тп - то вам сюди. Радше опис фактів, аніж постановка до них якихось цікавих питань, але це вже кому що треба від тексту. (Як можна здогадатися з назви, це на прикладі Магнітогорська.)

[Omar Ali · Rating 4 out of 5]

A detailed look at how one windswept mountain of ore in the freezing steppe was transformed into the largest metallurgical complex in the nascent Soviet Union.

[Alexandra · Rating 4 out of 5]

God I love urban planning

[Nathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating text that illustrates the project of building a socialist society under Stalinist terms, and how this process was highly experimental and often contradictory. The text suffers from some redundancy, especially in the final chapter, but it is still a worthwhile read that provides an expert analysis of a complicated historical period, all through the microcosm of a planned mining town.

[Kate · Rating 5 out of 5]

This isn't light reading, high interest, or fast-paced, so some may object to my five-star rating. Fair enough. But if you want to see how a historian's mind can weave together seemingly useless documents into brilliant and new conclusions, Kotkin might just deserve a sixth star. What an incredible piece off scholarship.

[Albert · Rating 5 out of 5]

Monumental in every sense of the word. An amazing book, it redefines Stalinism in a subtle and penetrating way. The narrative arch is great, and the chapters are all gripping.

[Austin Barselau · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Magnitogorsk was no mere business for generating profits; it was a device for transforming the country: its geography, its industry, and above all its people. Magnitogorsk was the October revolution itself, the socialist revolution, Stalin’s revolution.” - Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain

Stephen Kotkin, the exemplary Stalin biographer and longtime professor of history at Princeton, began writing Magnetic Mountain in 1985 as archival research and fieldwork became more accessible during the waning years of the USSR. Kotkin was the first Western scholar to live, observe, and publish on Magnitogorsk, the iron-rich “Magnetic Mountain City” at the southern base of the Ural Mountains. Beginning as a Ph.D. dissertation, Magnetic Mountain became a revisionist social history of how Stalinism ordered and molded the masses using the case study of 1930s Magnitogorsk, a mighty Soviet industrial metropolis and “the world’s first newly constructed socialist city” of more than 200,000 people. Forged in the froth Bolshevist political mobilization and Stalinist industrialization during the interwar years, Magnitogorsk became the ultimate reification of Stalinism as a civilization. As Kotkin beams, “nowhere was the euphoric sense of the revolution’s renewed possibilities in the 1930s more in evidence than at Magnitogorsk.”

Kotkin’s historical approach begins by probing the zeitgeist that fueled Magnitogorsk’s development. Bolshevik revolutionaries, inspired by the universalism of the Enlightenment’s vision, undertook a self-described “world-historical mission” to infuse the body politic with new values, social identifies, and behaviors that were distinctly Soviet. These new modes of being would be shaped and sustained by a Soviet state and party apparatus, which channeled these new creative energies into a rapid industrialization project that sought to make up centuries of ‘backwardness” in a decade, while maintaining moral superiority over the West. Undergirding that vision was the quest to build a sprawling concrete metropolis – Magnitogorsk – that would pump out steel that could power that breakneck industrial development.

Kotkin envisions Magnitogorsk as the ultimate microcosm of a Stalinist utopia during the 1930s. As he observes, Magnitogorsk represented multitudes: the triumphalism of Bolshevist revolutionism, an “eloquent monument” to Stalin’s “march for metal,” a sprawling attempt at urban socialist design, and the eventual manifestation of socialism’s fatal flaws. Magnitogorsk was a laboratory for social engineering in the name of grand Soviet state building. In this new slipshod socialist city rife with disease, disorder, and darkness, workers inculcated in the political significance of their work would toil for hours on end in a mission to outduel the capitalist West. The Soviet party-state choreographed this sociopolitical ensemble, embodying what Kotkin likens to a “theocracy” of ritualistic devotion and militaristic hierarchy. Purges became commonplace as the party’s preferred method of exorcising heresy, whereby the Soviet internal security organs embodied a kind of “medieval inquisition” that suspended the rank-and-file in a state of terror and blind obedience. Magnitogorsk, as the pinnacle of Soviet society, symbolized the clash of all of these maddening forces.

In the end, Magnitogorsk, like the broader socialist movement it represented, failed under the weight of its own unrealistic expectations. As Kotkin notes, socialism was unable to best capitalism, its failure representing a “crushing burden” that precipitated its “dramatic self-liquidation.” After leading the USSR’s production of steel in World War II, Magnitogorsk’s industrial quickly atrophied, and has since been buffeted by internationally horrific pollution, urban decay, and financial crises. However, Kotkin’s resplendent ode to the halcyon days of the great Magnetic Mountain City lives on as a memorial to revolutionarily renewed possibilities and the universalism of scientific achievement.

[Hadrian · Rating 4 out of 5]

But then the conductor bellowed, “Magnitogorsk!” Could this barren, windswept wasteland be the famous World Giant? The colorful journalist Semen Nariniani disembarked from the train, looked around, turned to the station man, and asked, “Is it far to the city?” “Two years,” the man answered.

Magnitogorsk was one of the crown jewels of the early Soviet experiment - once an obscure town, it had become a massive steel factory by the 1930s, and would continue to smelt and mine throughout the darkest days of the Second World War, safely away from German bombing. In terms of urban and industrial design, it benefited from foreign expertise, such as the German architect Ernst May, and American industrial engineers, then some of the greatest in the world. Magnitogorsk was a city centered not around a cluster of roads or a market, but on a massive factory complex. It would compare to such cities as Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Cleveland, Ohio. Stalin would personally point out Gary, Indiana. This was a Soviet model of industrialization; of industrial centers, ports, mines, and railroads built by fiat, human effort, and massive expense. Another example of this was the nest of ports, railways and tunnels that formed the Azovstal steel complex in Mariupol.

The first part of the book covers how this city was built from scratch. The first three chapters cover the rapid tempo of life within it up to and past the construction of the Stalin Magnitogorsk Metallurgical Complex. This includes an investigation of Stakhanovite workers, who voluntarily, as the story goes, produced more than their work quotas demanded. As if everything was done to the song "Time! Forward!" One would expect extensive planning, at least based on a perfunctory stereotype of how the Soviet economy worked, but what really struck me is how much was improvised on short notice. The ambitious plans collided with a near-total lack of infrastructure - even basic housing - chronic goods shortages (furniture was for a time made of tin because it was less scarce than wood), and a rapid turnover of workers.

Part two of the book analyzes the society that arose from this project, with a look at domestic life, social life, labor patterns, and personal beliefs; or how an industrial economy began to take shape in the absence of private property or most forms of private organization. This was not a unified "totalitarian" society, as theorized by earlier generations of Sovietologists, but one with profound tensions and divergent interests between the party bureaucracy, factory managers, and local workers. This in turn develops into the grand process of Soviet state building which continued throughout the 1930s. The very last chapter is an investigation of what beliefs and actions drove the purges of the 1930s, and the great upheaval of Soviet society that was the result. Kotkin says that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, though formally apart from some government structures, functioned as a kind of theocracy - and he assumes that everyone believed what they said or wrote. Was this so? In the absence of interviews, we are limited to only assumptions on what these Soviets thought, or worse, second guesses. That's always a difficult task for any archival researcher, but that is especially difficult given the time that Kotkin researches. This is a book about power, institutions, beliefs - Kotkin not only cites Michel Foucault as an influence, the book was dedicated to M. F.

I'm hesitant to make any nitpicks or criticisms of the argument, as I am not in any sense a Russianist. But there is a grand sweep to it, and Kotkin handles his trainloads of material brilliantly. The book dives in to fine details, and he as a director points the camera exactly where it should go. It chronicles a period of great energy, even mania, with all the attention that it deserves.

[Jim Gulley · Rating 3 out of 5]

A critique of Soviet socialism during the Stalin regime using the story of the massive metallurgical factory built in remote south-central Russia by the Bolsheviks. The monograph begins as an even treatment of the merits and demerits of the massive project, which sought to build the first planned “soviet city” out of nothing. The Soviets chose the site due to its proximity to enormous iron ore deposits. Kotkin concludes with a withering evaluation of Stalinism as the socialist economic model collapsed and the regime instituted the “great terror purge” of 1936-7. The research relies on a memoir by an expatriated American, John Scott, and volumes of state-sponsored archives. The book is an interesting read and particularly valuable to students of classic liberal economics who want a case study of the failure of central planning, regulated markets, and irrational pricing.

[Bonita Braun · Rating 5 out of 5]

Monumental study

Scholarly study of Magnitogorsk, the great USSR city of steel in the Urals. Not fun to read and the extensive footnotes make it a slog, but fascinating, nonetheless. Stephen Kotkin combed the now available Soviet archives and interviewed some participants involved in building of The Great City of Steel.

[Peter Håkansson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brilliant book that goes into how Magnitorsk was built up and uses it as a case study of Stalinism.

[marc · Rating 2 out of 5]

I had a hard time getting and staying interested in this book.

The introductions reads like the author's PhD thesis.

[Alex Xu · Rating 5 out of 5]

dude opened my eyes.

[Alexsandre Gvelesiani]

Not nearly as driven and engaging as his biography of Stalin. Nonetheless an interesting read and packed with detail

[loitering outside 711 · Rating 4 out of 5]

10/10 now I want to live in the urals

[Matej Pavkovček · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kniha je brutalnym, faktografickym, historickym, technickym sumarom jednej dejinnej epochy zvanej stalinizmus, skoncetrovanym na jedno miesto v rozlahlej ruskej Sibiri. Premene jednej hory plnej magnezitu, kde nezil nikto, za niekolko rokov na pulzujuce niekolko stotisicove megamesto Magnitogorsk aj za cenu strasnych obeti, ci uz ludskych alebo enviromentalnych. V 30 rokoch 20.stor. Stalin podriadil vsetko industrializacii. Za 15 rokov premenil za cenu desiatok milionov zivotov Rusko a celu ZSSR z polnohospodarskej krajiny na priemyselnu velmoc. A Magnitogorsk alebo Magneticka hora zosobnuje dokonale v malom to co sa dialo za cias Stalina. Kto chce vecne a fakticky spoznat blizsie sovietsky zvaz, tak Magnitogorsk je kvapka vody, ktora zobrazuje cely ocean. V podstate museli zavolat americanov, aby im navrhli a postavili vysoke pece, oceliarne a okolo toho sa potom stavalo mesto. Paralelne sa budoval aj politicky aparat, robili sa stranicke cistky, donasalo sa, medzi jednotlivymi zavodmi, ludia spali v zemlankach a niekedy nemali ani co jest a obliect, ale zaroven propaganda sla na plne obratky a o uspechu Magnitogorsku kde z nicoho za patnast rokov postavili nieco obrovske, pocul cely svet. V casoch akych zijeme, je povinnostou kazdeho gramotneho cloveka, citat knihy ako je aj tato. Ktore do naha vyzliekaju narod Rusov a ich mentalitu, nachadzajucu sa na polceste medzi Europou a mongolskou hordou. Potrebujeme zit v realite a nie snivat o nejakom vybajenom Rusku, ktore chce vsetkym dobre, a ked niekto ich dobro nechce tak mu to pridu velmi jasne vysvetlit trebars aj s kalasnikovmi.

[Grant · Rating 5 out of 5]

A highly detailed yet broadly conceived study of Magnitogorsk, a Soviet steel complex and city created on the steppes of Russia as both a model socialist community and an industrial powerhouse. Kotkin's incredibly thorough research allows him to tell the story of Magnitogorsk from both above - as it was planned, designed, and intended - and from below - how the actual workers and citizens coped with life. Kotkin uses the local study to help explain the broader strokes of Soviet history, and is far from afraid of an historiographic fight.

[Tessa · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book made me want to stab myself in the eye with a sewing needle. Kotkin spent 300 some pages saying what he could have said in 100 (it's thick with repetition) and half of the book was also endnotes (300 pages...yes, you read right...)! His main focus was using the city of Magnitogorsk as a case study to prove the theories of other Stalinist historians wrong. I'm not too big on Stalinist history anyway, so perhaps that was a problem as well.

[Tom Oman · Rating 5 out of 5]

The undertakings of the Soviet Union can be absolutely terrifying when they really set out to do something with the power of the state and the conviction of dogmatic belief. This city was created from scratch, with help from key foreign experts. By the time it was up and running it had such a reputation that citizens would commit suicide rather than accept their transfer to their newly assigned life next to the great magnetic mountain. Great book, highly recommended.

[Joe Zivak · Rating 5 out of 5]

So zvlastnou fascinaciou som pri citani sledoval, ako vznikali socialisticke institucie, ktore poznam z detstva a citania. V podstate vsetko sa utriaslo medzi rokmi 1930 a 1940. U nas to sovieti z Moskvy len nasilne aplikovali. Kotkinov velky interpretacny obluk, ktorym spojil komunisticku stranu s teokraciou, je velmi presvedcivy. O to viac, ze takyto narativ nas priblizuje coraz viac k nasej sucasnej politickej skusenosti.

[Katie · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is what happens when you are one of the first historians allowed into the archives after the fall of the "iron curtain." Likely a very interesting read, but I lacked the time to really get into it.

[Coolguy]

This is a phenomenal study of a Soviet built industrial town. It gives an account of the real lives, the failures and few successes of this Socialist attempt to emulate the corporate town of America.

[AskHistorians]

The book takes the building of Magnitogorsk, an industrial city built from scratch, as a way to show how people learned to "speak Bolshevik" and thus both survive within and use the regime; thus it complicates hugely the usual top-down view of the Soviet Union.

[Kathryn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pretty rough to get through.

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

Unique, extensively detailed history of Magnitogorsk.