346 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE company could not expand production of shells rapidly enough to suit the authorities, who requisitioned it. When France fell, the government managers decamped. Marius Berliet and his son Paul resumed control of the enterprise but had to follow a fine line between keeping it operating and providing employment for thou sands ofworkers and producing as little as possible for Nazi military use. Although they produced less for the Germans than did Renault, Citroën, Peugeot, or French Ford, at the Liberation Marius and his four sons were arrested by extreme left-wing officials of the De Gaulle government and the factories seized. Louis Muron suggests that the motive here was less to punish collaboration with the Nazis, which he believes was not proved, than to institute a regime of worker management in a large industrial enterprise. In a few years worker management degenerated into Communist Party manage ment, and the government returned the Berliet company to the fam ily in 1949. A few months before this denouement Marius Berliet died. Muron is good on the narrow and closed personality of Marius Berliet, but he would have better used his pages for fuller discussions of the auto industry and the Berliet company’s operations rather than inserting textbook accounts of French politics. He presents nothing on factory organization or production methods (Berliet’s greatest achievements) and little on Berliet’s associates. The book’s value rests on a good choice of secondary works and especially on documents from the archives of the Fondation Marius Berliet in Ly ons. (Muron publishes some papers from this depository that have never before appeared in print.) What is missing are inside accounts of what really went on, which might have been gained from inter views with surviving engineers and workers. Allan Nevins used this technique admirably in his classic volumes on Ford. Let us hope that the Fondation Berliet has developed an oral history program in addition to its marvelous collection of French commercial vehicles. James M. Laux Dr. Laux has written extensively on automobile history. His works include The European Automobile Industry (New York: Twayne; Toronto: Maxwell MacMillan Can ada, 1992). Industry, State, and Society in Stalin’s Russia, 1926-1934. By David R. Shearer. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997. Pp. xiv+263; illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $42.50 (cloth); $18.95 (paper). One of the shaping elements of the twentieth century was the “su perindustrialization” embodied in the first Soviet Five-Year Plans. At enormous cost—human, material, and financial—the world’s only TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 347 communist state transformed itself into a semimodern industrial state. At the heart of this transformation was the universal problem of state-shaped modernization: how much should power be central ized or left to local control? As David Shearer repeatedly emphasizes, the reality was not a planned economy but command, control, and (mal)administration from above. Shearer expertlyweaves into a gripping tale the administrative bat tles over organization that shaped industrialization, the motives of the major participants, the legitimizing appeal ofGerman and Amer ican industrialization, the purges that reduced the ranks of engi neers and administrators, the rhetoric that excited so many groups, and the chaos and struggle over control of the shop floor. Hidden under the rhetoric ofindustrialization was a struggle among compet ing versions of state industrial cultures. Syndicates and trusts were closer to the concept of consumers than producers in determining demand. Despite their economic accomplishments, they never cre ated the political coalitions necessary to persevere. The real battle was fought over who would create and command the emerging pow erful administrative state. Should Vesenka (the Supreme Economic Council) or Rabkrin (the Commissariat of Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection) have primacy in allocating resources and organizing state industry? The economic crises facing the Soviet Union were real, not imag ined. But the response, contradictory and motivated by memories of the heroic mobilization and militarization of War Communism, made matters far worse. Shearer convincingly argues that the admin istrative collapse of the Soviet planning system, caused by Rabkrin, was as important as overly ambitious planning in creating the severe economic crisis of the early 1930s...
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Jul 30, 2024
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