Writing about the construction of the future State Automobile Factory (GAZ) in 1930, Boris Agapov, a correspondent for the Commissariat of Heavy Industry's newspaper For Industrialization, lamented bureaucratic bungling and the resultant shortages, shoddy work, and other deficiencies, but dreamed of a time when “one hundred and forty thousand machines […] four in a row [would] come from the assembly shop, the biggest shop in Europe, one and a half kilometers long”. A one-time Constructivist poet, Agapov, also envisioned the new city that would spring up next to the factory, the City of Socialism, as a city with “rectangles everywhere […] each rectangle consisting of a clubhouse, nurseries, kindergartens, cafeterias, libraries, baths and showers working round the clock”.
Boris Agapov's dreams perfectly capture the technological utopianism that Paul Josephson has taken as the subject of this broad-ranging but quite personal and obviously heartfelt book. Josephson evinces a fine appreciation of the emancipatory thrust of the Marxist socialist project but also the fatal error of its leading proponents of regarding technology as value-neutral. Asking at the outset “What was socialist about socialist technology?,” he concludes that the rhetoric of its advantages over technology employed by capitalists – rationally planned rather than market- and profit-driven; solicitous of workers’ safety rather than exploitative of their labor power; environmentally friendly rather than rapacious – masked a reality so awful that it made the record of technology under capitalism look good.
The primary reasons for the yawning gap between rhetoric and reality, he repeatedly notes, were the “hubristic desire” of political power-holders, scientists, and engineers to improve the physical world, and the absence of real democracy whereby producers and others directly affected by decisions about technology could have any legally sanctioned inputs into or controls over those decisions. Wearing a Bluetooth in and of itself is not necessarily condemnable, but when the wearer uses it to pursue Promethean projects that degrade “nature”, the ends cannot justify the means. Trotsky “wore the equivalent of a Bluetooth device […] to overcome the problems of geography, climate, illiteracy, and backwardness that had plagued Russia”. He, no less than Stalin, thus “fell under the spell of the machine”.
Josephson is by no means the first to make this sort of argument. More than thirty years ago, Kendall E. Bailes, Robert Linhart, Steve Smith, and other historians of labor and technology interpreted the Soviet state's adaptation of Taylorism and coddling of “bourgeois specialists” as a Faustian bargain that augured ill for genuine workers’ control, shopfloor democracy, and other shibboleths of the October Revolution. And, at a time when many historians have adopted Michel Foucault's rather more subtle and subjectivist understanding of technology – as in how the “technologies of the self” are integrated into structures of coercion – the mechanistic framework of this book seems a bit dated. What rescues it, among other things, is its radically expanded chronological and geo-political scope, for the book takes in not only technological utopianism displayed during the entirety of the Soviet era and more recent post-communist developments in Russia, but also by Communist Party dictatorships in east central Europe and North Korea. The record of these countries, comprising most of the erstwhile socialist second world, is compared, moreover, to that of the United States and other first-world countries.
If Josephson had to rely on official (overwhelmingly English-language) publications and secondary literature to inform himself about the predilections of Boleslaw Bierut and Kim Il Sung, his chapters on the dangers of nuclear power, environmental degradation (especially in the Urals), lack of worker safety, and the marginalization of women's needs in Soviet Russia bristle with references to all kinds of Russian publications, regional archival sources, and personal anecdotes. One wonders in this connection which was most arduous – poring through the last forty years of Concrete and Reinforced Concrete, the leading journal of the Soviet State Committee for the Construction Industry, to document “hyperbolic discussions of thousands upon thousands of cubic meters of concrete”; perusing the archives of the fisheries, forestry, communications, and transport industries of the far northern province of Arkhangelsk from 1930 to 1964; or traipsing through the grounds of lumber mills in the same part of the country.
The broadness of the scope suggests a broad audience. Certainly, the case for reigning in post-Soviet Russian floating nuclear power stations and reactor parks as well as “nuclear fuel parking lots” and other biohazards in the United States deserves to be heard loud and clear, and in this sense, the book is addressed as much to policy-makers as to students or more casual readers. Its appeal is enhanced by the employment of metanyms such as the “concrete ceiling” encountered by female professionals in the Soviet Union, “from kimchi to concrete” to denote the North Korean experiment in autarchy, and “industrial deserts” to signify what has become of much of the southern Ural Mountain region. It benefits from the extensive and largely effective use of the metaphor of grayness to characterize the standardized, modular, repeatable, stripped-down, prefabricated, environmentally hazardous, and above all, aesthetically dull “proletarian aesthetics” of Stalinstadt (German Democratic Republic), Sztalinvaros (Hungary), Nowa Huta (Poland), and other “socialist” cities. Finally, the definition of socialist realism as a genre “in which heroes were heroes, villains were villains, and nature was a villain too”, and the statement that “[i]n the Urals, money for ecological study or environmental law enforcement did not grow on trees” because “in many places there were no trees” demonstrate that wry humor has a place too.
It is quite clear that much of the socialist world's technological utopianism originated in the capitalist West. Moreover, with the onset of the Cold War it became incumbent on the USSR to devote enormous expenditures on ever more fancy and costly projects, both to avoid the impression of weakness and to impress the rest of the world. With precious few exceptions – the diversion of rivers flowing north to the Arctic to irrigate central Asia, being the best-known – state authorities did not have to contend with domestic opposition to their plans. Hence, the relatively smooth arc from the Volkhov electrical power station project of the 1920s to Chernobyl in 1986.
Alas, this tour d'horizon of the physical and moral devastation caused by technological utopianism has its own excesses. One is the rhetorical use of “socialist workers’ paradise”, the repetition of which does nothing to explain the Bolsheviks’ actual political rhetoric. Another is the repetitiousness of the argument that the technology adopted by socialist leaders, planners, architects, and engineers did not reflect truly socialist goals. But, over and above these matters of style and taste, is the truly extraordinary number of simple errors of fact, wrong dates, and misspelled names that distract attention from the argument the author builds against “large-scale, resource-intensive, symbolically important, yet highly irrational projects”. Better than most, Josephson knows that one needn't wear a Bluetooth to get things right, and it is too bad that neither he nor the Johns Hopkins University Press managed to catch these mistakes before committing them to print.
