Soviet Industry Research Articles

Работа международной авиакомиссии СССР, США и Великобритании в сентябре 1941 г.: записи переговоров

The publication introduces into scientific use and analyses a unique document on the work of the international aviation commission (Moscow, September 1941) that worked at the conference of representatives of the USSR, the USA, and England on the issue of military deliveries to the Soviet Union. The published document has been found when preparing ‘History of creation and development of the defense industry complex of Russia and the USSR. 1900–1963. Documents and materials.’ Presently the fifth volume of the series covering the period of the Great Patriotic War is being prepared. The document published here precedes the publication of that volume. The question of military lend-lease deliveries of planes to the Soviet Union considered by the commission was of great importance to Soviet aviation industry. Evacuation of aircraft manufacturing facilities led to a decrease in production. For a time the aircraft industry continued to work on mobilization stocks and lend-lease deliveries. The aviation commission of the Soviet Union was to secure the necessary quantity of warplanes from the USA and England, which for that end had to curtail their own arms contracts. The published document shows the process of negotiations and its result – how fully the Soviet delegation managed to solve the tasks set before it. In the introduction, the situation in Soviet and American aviation industry at the start of negotiations is analyzed. The published document is stored in the fonds of the Russian State Archive of Economy. It is a typewritten original record of negotiations of even date. It expands source base on lend-lease, shows how the Soviet delegation tried to obtain newest American and English military aircraft equipment, and allows to understand the nuances of interactions of the allies, to analyze their positions and approaches to negotiations.

The Way of the Dissenter: Scientist-Entrepreneurs in Akademgorodok in 1992–2012

Constructed in the 1960s in a wooded area 30 kilometers outside Novosibirsk, Akademgorodok was created as a landmark of Soviet science and industry. The extensive and sparsely populated area in Siberia contained academic institutions and research-and-development facilities that worked on technologies for both civilian and military purposes. The present research addresses the period when Akademgorodok lost its status as a major hub. This study focuses on the cultural and professional transitions of the former Soviet scientists seeking to adapt to a new political, economic, and cultural context.

To the Editors

To the Editors Isaac Scarborough Dr. Miller is to be applauded for his close reading of perestroika-era politics in his recent article for Kritika, as well as for his use of underused sources, most notably the Politburo notes collected by Mikhail Gorbachev’s advisers and published in the last decade.1 His assertion that Gorbachev did have a clear and consistent agenda for Soviet agriculture, moreover, is on its face and in light of the evidence he presents incontestable: much of the same marketizing push very much appears to have been leveled at agriculture over the years of perestroika as had also been directed at Soviet industry. The depiction of Gorbachev’s approach to agricultural reform in Dr. Miller’s article, as well as and his constant belaboring of the “opposition” and “obstruction” that he faced, moreover, provides a very believable and consistent image of a politician dedicated to reform. What Dr. Miller manages to overlook, however, is the glaring mismatch between Gorbachev’s political discourse and the actual fate of Soviet agriculture during perestroika. Part of this oversight is a sourcing issue: Dr. Miller relies almost exclusively on materials collated and selected by Gorbachev and his advisers, which have an unsurprising tendency to emphasize the political struggle in which they were engaged in Moscow over the realities faced by farmers on the ground in the USSR’s agricultural regions. Thus the sources are erroneous, claiming that link farming was rare before 1989 (when in fact it was quite common in many agricultural republics and oblasts), that individual farmers’ production was being pushed off of the local markets (when it in fact made up 25–40 percent of some products sold in the USSR, such as milk and dairy, even before perestroika), that kolkhoz chairmen earned up to 1,200 rubles a month (a salary that would have outstripped even federal-level ministers in Moscow), or that “food subsidies” were somehow provided directly to agricultural producers, rather than to consumers in the form of [End Page 484] lowered prices on basic goods. Dr. Miller, unfortunately, has allowed numerous similar confusions to filter from the sources into his article. There is also, however, an issue of focus. By essentially accepting the (very politicized) narrative promoted by Gorbachev and his advisers, Dr. Miller appears almost uninterested in the fact that Moscow’s description of events increasingly bore less and less resemblance to reality on the ground. Rather than a sector held back by bureaucratic intransigence, Soviet agriculture was throughout perestroika befuddled by the same new problems faced by the entire economy: radical drops in production, the siphoning off of funds to cooperatives, and broken connections between producers and processors as the links previously enforced by Gosplan and Gossnab were severed. Gorbachev’s promotion of the “link” system was part and parcel of these same reforms, and it speaks to the reforms’ implementation, rather than the lack thereof, that Soviet agriculture spluttered just as much as it did in the USSR’s final years. A more complete analysis of agricultural reform under Gorbachev would be well served to consider not only the government’s stated agenda but its actual effect on the economy as well. Dept. of International History London School of Economics and Political Science Houghton Street London WC2A 2AE, UK i.scarborough@lse.ac.uk Chris Miller responds: I appreciate Isaac Scarborough’s kind words and am glad to see an article on agriculture spark some interest. Scarborough is absolutely right to note the vast gap between perestroika-era policies as they were formulated in Moscow and as they were implemented on the ground. Indeed, the differences between policy and practice underscore my argument about the relative weakness of Gorbachev’s government. Scarborough is also right that there is still much to be learned about the various drivers of agricultural change. Fertile ground, in other words, for new research. Program in Grand Strategy Yale University 31 Hillhouse Ave. New Haven, CT 06511 USA cr.miller@yale.edu [End Page 485] Footnotes 1. Chris Miller, “Gorbachev’s Agriculture Agenda: Decollectivization and the Politics of Perestroika,” Kritika 17, 1 (2016): 95–118. Copyright © 2016 “Kritika” and Isaac scarborough

Туристский сервис в Крыму советского периода: проблемы и решения

In the article the author analyzed the basic problems of Crimean tourist service in 1960s-1980s. For this period the maximal numbers of visiting Crimea by domestic and foreign tourists were achieved, a lot of them negatively estimated the quality of local service. On the basis of wide complex of the archived and published historical sources the author proves that the permanent problems of the tourist service were conditioned above all by the institutional model of organization of the soviet industry of hospitality, which was characterized by excessive centralization, monopolization, administrative-command methods of decision-making, low staff motivation. Thus all this complex of problems showed up both during servicing of soviet tourists (Crimean Regional Council for Tourism and Excursions) and unorganized holidaymakers (so-called «wild tourists»), as well as serving foreign tourists (the enterprise system «Intourist» in the Crimea). The considerable negative influence was related to the fact that development of sphere of services (including tourism) was not a priority direction for authorities of the USSR. The centralized allocation of funds and material resources for the hospitality industry often carried out as a residual. However, since the second half of the 1970s the particular activities directed at «conservative modernization» of the Soviet tourist service were carried out. These activities were directed at increasing economic independence of enterprises of industry of hospitality, activation of supplying of additional services to the tourists, growing of material motivation of service workers. But until the late 1980s these transformations were implemented very slowly and conservatively, without affecting the fundamental bases of the soviet planned economy and administrative-command management. Despite the fact that at the present stage market and competitive model of organization of the service is established, the Soviet past continues to indirectly affect the quality of the Crimean tourist product, but the significance of this influence is waning.

'From Chips to Pulp in Minutes': Innovations and Continuous Pulp Cooking in the Soviet Union in the 1940s-1950s

The 1940s – mid-1960s saw rapid developments in the chemical and cellulose industries internationally. In this period, a number of attempts to introduce new technologies were taken by industrial scientists and engineers, some of which happened in different countries simultaneously. In the late 1930s, Swedish engineer Johan Richter proposed the Kamyr digester project to industrialists, and after roughly ten years it succeeded in implementing the technology at an industrial scale. Several years earlier, Soviet engineer Leonid Zherebov proposed a project different from the Swedish one in some technical parameters, but with the same purpose – increasing the production of pulp. This initiative, however, was not introduced as planned. Instead, after more than 20 years, Soviet industry mostly produced pulp using Kamyr digesters purchased from abroad. Following the question raised by historian Loren Graham as to why Russian innovations often remained isolated ideas, this article seeks to investigate the nature of Soviet innovation by examining Soviet modernization through a case study of continuous pulp cooking. It will focus not only on the technological specifics of the innovation, but on social and political conditions. In so doing, this paper will examine the activities of engineers and the interactions of institutions within the Soviet pulp and paper industry.

Combining Contemporary and Soviet‐Era Management Practices to Achieve Excellence at Knauf CIS

Over the past 20 years, Knauf CIS, a subsidiary of an international family‐owned German manufacturer of gypsum‐based and other construction materials, has dominated its market through a creative combination of Western management techniques and workplace practices rooted in the rapid development of Soviet industry from 1955 to 1978. Despite the uncertainties of operating in transitional economies, the company has improved both quality and performance through cautious development of human resources, aggressive modernization of facilities, creative marketing, multilevel outreach to a broad base of stakeholders, and unwavering commitment to training not only production staff but also the end users of its products. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Too Much Is Never Enough: The Cautionary Tale of Soviet Illegal Whaling

Despite being a signatory to the International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling in 1946, the U.S.S.R. conducted a 30-yr campaign of illegal whaling which arguably represents one of the greatest failures of management in the history of the industry. Here, using a variety of sources including published literature, formerly secret Soviet industry reports, and interviews with former biologists and whalers, we provide an overview of the history, scope, and economic origins of Soviet whaling and examine the domestic and international political context in which it was set. At various times from 1933 into the 1970’s, the U.S.S.R. operated a total of seven whaling factory fl eets and several shore whaling stations. We estimate that 534,119 whales were killed, of which 178,726 were not reported to the International Whaling Commission (IWC). In the Southern Hemisphere, the greatest impact of these catches was on humpback whales, Megaptera novaeangliae, where (mostly illegal) takes of more than 48,000 whales precipitated a population crash and closure of shore whaling stations in Australia and New Zealand. The Southern Hemisphere also saw large illegal catches of southern right whales, Eubalaena australis. In the North Pacifi c, the greatest impacts were on sperm whales, Physeter macrocephalus (where data on sex and length were routinely misreported together with falsifi ed total catches), as well as on the two already-small populations of right whales, Eubalaena japonica, across the North Pacifi c, and bowhead whales, Balaena mysticetus, in the Okhotsk Sea. Soviet whaling was driven by the state industrial planning system, which frequently set high production targets without regard to the ability of the resource to sustain the Introduction In this article, we trace the history and details of what might be called one of the 20th century’s more notorious environmental crimes: the global campaign of illegal whaling conducted by the U.S.S.R. between 1948 and 19721, a campaign that, together with the poorly managed “legal” whaling of other nations, devastated many whale populations. It is a story of the sprawling Soviet planning system’s obsession with attaining production goals despite limited and diminishing resources, and of the U.S.S.R.’s desire to do every1In 1972 an International Observer Scheme was introduced and large-scale Soviet unrestricted catches ceased, but some falsifi cations of catch data continued on at least some Soviet fl eets for a few more years (Mikhalev et al., 2009). thing bigger and better than other nations, especially those in the capitalist world. More than anything, this is a cautionary tale of the failure of other whaling nations and the International Whaling Commission (IWC) to react to mounting evidence of declining whale stocks, and to adequately monitor adherence to regulations and catch limits2 as set through international

Критика наукових поглядів теоретиків радянського соцстраху в умовах взяття курсу на модернізацію промисловості

The article traces the changes in the main provisions of the Bolshevik theory of social insurance during the reconstruction of Soviet industry

Farewell to the Caucasus: Regional ethnic clan politics and the growing instability of the ruling elite after the 2012 presidential elections in Russia

One of the most lingering questions about Russian politics that dominates public discourse and media coverage is the future of political regime after the 2012 presidential elections. The answer to this question is inextricably linked to the extent of differences between President Vladimir Putin and Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, how long their “tandemocracy” will last and what can bring about regime change as scarce critics of the Kremlin, from ultra-liberals to communists, have been haphazardly co-opted into the power system, leaving no political ambitions that they would not, in principle, be ready to abandon in return for proper compensation.In sharp contrast to the views of many regional experts and commentators, the present-day Russian Federation is the world's most anti-Soviet state. It is based upon a very different set of values: private ownership, dire individualism, the cult of money, a clan-based political system, and pervasive corruption at all levels of government. The North Caucasus ethnocratic elites, however, do not have access to abundant resources for sale, and are forced to look around for alternative sustenance, as rigid centralism and unification limit their rent-seeking capabilities. Alexander Khloponin, the incumbent presidential envoy in charge of the North Caucasus Federal District, seems to continue the policy of buying the loyalty of regional archaic clan-based elites that aggravates rather than improves the situation.The paper addresses this puzzle: why, against rigorous rhetoric and demonstration of tight grip over the region, neither Putin nor Medvedev has real power to bring change to the North Caucasus? In an attempt to solve this puzzle, the paper examines the triadic relationship among central political elite, who benefited from the massive privatisation of lucrative segments of Soviet industry in the early 1990s, regional clan-based ethnocracy, and non-systemic religious opposition. Drawing on the works of Russian scholars and experts in Russian politics, the paper explores the hypothesis that on-going instability in the North Caucasus can no longer be explained by a well-known set of theories of ethnic violence, because it is carefully negotiated by regional and central political elite, who do not see the North Caucasus as an indispensable part of the Russian Federation and whose clan-based rent-seeking agendas have gradually driven Russian statehood into a complete dead-end. Instead of facing the real challenges that are addressed in this paper, it is only able to make a public show of action on the eve of crucial political campaigns: the 2012 presidential elections and the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi. The paper concludes that the deep freeze in the Russian political system has exhausted its debatable potential for change through the existing tandem model of government with its obscure division of roles between two leaders. What we actually see is an imitation of political reform and the resulting degradation of the entire system of governance. Over the past century, Russian polity has never been as weak as today, because the only legitimate source of power in Russia is corruption.

Soviet Industry in the World Spotlight: The Domestic Dilemmas of Soviet Foreign Economic Relations, 1955–1965

The mid-1950s marked the beginning of tremendous growth in the Soviet Union's foreign economic relations. Based on archival research, this article argues that this growth masked two contradictory processes. On the one hand, Kremlin leaders encouraged ever more economic engagement with the world. On the other hand, the Soviet system discouraged industrial managers from producing for export, and it often caused precious imports to be wasted. This struggle between industry and the Kremlin over foreign trade gave impetus to the treadmill of reforms launched by the Khrushchev leadership.

Top Gun Over Moscow (1996) (review)

Reviewed by: Top Gun Over Moscow (1996) A. Bowdoin Van Riper Top Gun Over Moscow (1996), Directed by Lance K. Shultz and Lynne Squilla. WGBH/Boston: www.wgbh.org, 56 minutes. The title Top Gun Over Moscow is, in a sense, misleading. This one-hour installment of the PBS series Nova deals not with elite Russian fighter pilots, but with Russian fighter-pilot culture in general. The great aces of the past and the top pilots of the present get their due, but most of the hour is focused on—to the extent that such a thing exists—"ordinary" fighter pilots. The title is accurate, however, in another sense. Top Gun Over Moscow reaches for the same audience, and uses the same kinds of images, as its starring-Tom-Cruise namesake. It is aimed squarely at aviation buffs, but also has something to offer historians. The central theme of Top Gun Over Moscow is that Russian and American fighter pilots, though united by a shared love of flying and mutual respect for each other's skills, are divided by national differences in fighter-pilot culture. The film is at its most interesting when it catalogues and analyzes these differences. American airbases are searched, every day, for debris that might be sucked into an air intake and damage an engine. Russian bases are visibly scruffier, but the fighters that fly from them have screens and bypasses to keep debris out of their engines. American fighters achieve high performance through cutting-edge design and sophisticated electronic control systems, while Russian ones emphasize raw power and robust structures. American fighter doctrine emphasizes kills made at long range using high-tech weapons, but Russian doctrine presumes that air combat will always come down to close-in maneuvering and gunfire. The film uses pilots, designers, analysts, and historians from both countries to elaborate on the differences, and allows their voices, rather than the narrator's, to carry the story. The film is less successful at explaining the historical roots of these differences. Its historical survey of Russian military aviation, is too limited in its coverage and too scattershot in its approach to provide the necessary context. It begins in World War I, but ends—a half-century short of the present—in Korea. Its coverage of the intervening four decades, though anchored by noted aviation historian Von Hardesty, spends most of its time on spectacular-but-peripheral subjects: the giant Maxim Gorky propaganda aircraft, deliberate ramming as a combat tactic, and the exploits of all-female "Night Witch" squadrons that harassed German troops with raids in obsolete [End Page 70] biplane bombers. Topics like the capabilities of Soviet industry and the effects of Stalin's purges—meatier, but less photogenic—are brushed off in a few sentences or ignored altogether. Historians of technology have long argued that machines are shaped by the environment from which they emerge, as well as by the demands of the job they are designed to do. Russian and American jet fighters reflect the very different efforts of two very different societies to solve the same basic technological problem. Top Gun Over Moscow is an engaging overview of the differences, if not of the multitude of factors, that underlie them. A. Bowdoin Van Riper Southern Polytechnic State University Copyright © 2008 Center for the Study of Film and History

Antisovietinės apraiškos ir nacionaliniai konfliktai pramonės įmonėse 1965–1985 m.

Soviet industry was an important area for the material activities of part of the Soviet society; it necessarily influenced society’s way of life. Corporate work collectives, as separate communities of production, reflected perfectly the problems, worries and aspirations of society at that time. In the field of industry, Soviet economic, social and national policies, as well as societal controls implemented by the regime, became closely interrelated; they shaped both the reaction of workers and engineers to government initiatives and the relations between the various members of factories and plant work collectives. Changes in these relations were likewise affected. The article analyses conflicts, ethnic relations and anti-Soviet manifestations in plants and factories. During the Soviet era Lithuania underwent major economic and social changes which ushered in tensions and had great significance for the rise of both nationalism and ethnic conflicts. Khrushchev’s thaw allowed political prisoners and deportees, repressed during the Stalin era, to return to Lithuania from exile. At the same time, due to the downsizing of the army and the KGB carried out during the Khrushchev years, former “chekists” (members of the secret service, the Cheka) and soldiers, whose mentality and views differed greatly from those of the former political prisoners and deportees, found ‘sanctuary’ in Soviet plants and factories. Subsequent industrial development and the immigration it caused served to spread and increase nationalism beyond a phenomenon that merely destroyed traditional ties. A factory or a plant was a convenient place for both anti-Soviet expression and ethnic competition. Big factories became favourite places for anti-Soviet proclamations and conversations deemed dangerously ‘nationalistic’. Production and social problems arose; they constantly boiled over into ethnic strife. The inability or the reluctance of the Soviet regime to distinguish between simple everyday conversations about problems and deficiencies noticed by the workers and instances of (excessive) ethnic expression or criticism of the system itself caused great frustration; dissatisfaction grew. Social competition frequently acquired the characteristics of an ethnic conflict. Many people who were not faithful to the regime, those who had experienced repression under the Soviet occupation or had lost a high social position, transferred their hatred of the Soviet regime to their Russian colleagues. It is interesting to note that neither archival sources nor interviews touch upon Lithuanian – Polish conflicts in industrial factories. Apparently, as residents of the Vilnius region, Poles enjoyed the status of ‘local residents”; they were not outsiders. The fact that they had the same religious faith as Lithuanians seems to have also been a significant factor. Large numbers of local Poles in industrial factories began to merge with the labour force arriving in Vilnius from West Belarus. Archival materials examined contain no references to conflicts in factories that involved accusations of nationalism or Russian chauvinism levelled against Russian speakers. One can see here an interesting paradox in the way ‘Leninist ethnic policy’ was interpreted. If at the macro level ‘Leninist ethnic policy’ was one of the cards played by Lithuanian nomenclatura in its dealings with Soviet all-union ministries, at the factory level Lithuanian “technostructure” was held “hostage” in order to allow the republic’s government to maintain the appearance of national harmony for the sake of Moscow. Ethnic conflicts had to be absorbed inside the enterprise and not go beyond factory gates.

‘Into Production!’

Maria Gough: The Artist as Producer: Russian Constructivism in Revolution (University of California Press: Berkeley, CA, 2005), 99 illns, 9 in colour, 258 pp., hardback ISBN 0-520-22618-6, $49.95, £32.50. In discussions of what critics once called the ‘avant-garde’, the question of how and with what degree of success ‘art’ shifted itself towards ‘life’ and perhaps finally dissolved there played a major and perhaps defining role. The Russian Constructivists were always the heroes and heroines of the story, and they continue to be, especially in American academia, where a certain resistance to bourgeois power is at the moment deemed an important credential. In Europe, by contrast, interest in keeping alive the prospects of an artistic avant-garde seems to be flagging. Let us then applaud the forensic scholarship that has gone into the making of Maria Gough's book, The Artist as Producer: Russian Constructivism in Revolution, which comes again at an old question but does so through the archives of the so-called laboratory phase of Moscow Constructivism, the phase of the early debates inside INKhUK (the Institute of Artistic Culture), and then continues into the post-laboratory question of whether artists could go into production – into a final eradication of the categorial distinction between art and Soviet industry. With the help of unexplored archives in Penza and Riga, as well as in Moscow and St Petersburg, Gough has provided us with perhaps the most careful analysis of these epochal debates so far published in the West.

Resolving the Long-Term Trends of Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons in the Canadian Arctic Atmosphere

Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH) air concentrations measured over the period 1992-2000 at the Canadian High Arctic station of Alert were subject to time-series analysis using dynamic harmonic regression (DHR). For most of the PAHs, the DHR model fit to the observed data was good, with DHR capable of interpolating over missing data points during periods when air concentrations were below detection limits. As expected, DHR identified seasonal increases in PAH air concentrations. However, it has also identified additional, subtler "seasonal" patterns as a series of harmonics with varying periodicity. For example, a regular summer high in air concentrations was apparent for many PAHs, particularly the lower molecular weight (two- to three-ringed) compounds, which may be attributed to summertime regional combustion events such as forestfires and/or revolatilization from surfaces (e.g., soil and oceans, as well as arctic surfaces). Comparison of wintertime PAH concentrations (where sigmaPAH ranged from 260 to 516 pg m(-3)) with an earlier arctic study did not reveal a reduction in PAH levels. However, removal of the seasonal components by DHR revealed a declining trend in PAH concentrations over the 1992-2000 period. For many lighter PAHs, this was typified by a linear decrease over the whole time series, although, for the higher molecular weight PAHs, a marked reduction was apparent in the first few years of sampling followed by a leveling off in concentrations by the mid/late-1990s. This behavior is similar to reported trends of other air pollutants in the Arctic, may be attributed to the decline in Soviet industry during the early 1990s, and has implications regarding the major PAH sources affecting the Arctic.

Addressing the Challenges of Russia's "Failing State": The Legacy of Gorbachev and the Promise of Putin

is a pressing necessity that has arisen out of the profound processes taking place in the course of the development of our socialist society. That society is ripe for change-one might say it has suffered enough. Any delay in pursuing Perestroika could lead in the very near future to a deterioration in the situation in Russia.1For Russians a strong state is not an anomaly that should be gotten rid of. Quite the contrary, they see it as a source and guarantor of order, and the initiator and main driving force of any change. ... I am not calling for totalitarianism. ... A strong state power in is a democratic, law-based, workable federative state.Vladimir Putin, Russia on the Threshold of the Millennium, December 1999.2When Mikhail Gorbachev succeeded Konstantin Chernenko in March 1985, informed Soviet observers were positive about the prospects for reform, with even their Western counterparts guardedly optimistic. The former protege of Yuri Andropov did not disappoint them, launching what was arguably the most important set of system and policy changes since Stalin's building of the command economy. However haphazard and disconnected in their creation and implementation, perestroika, glasnost, and demokratizatsiya were ultimately intended to breathe new life into an ossified Soviet polity and economy, although theirgreatest consequence was to generate the implosion of the Soviet state. Despite the overwhelmingly positive post-facto assessments of Western observers regarding these reforms' original intent, they have subsequently been dismissed by many in the wake of the failure both to increase economic efficiency and to salvage the crippled institutions of the Soviet state.In contrast, the agenda and reforms put forward by Vladimir Putin have been received with almost universal skepticism in the West, being widely perceived as measures against democratic consolidation and an overall setback from the democratic market transformation of the Yeltsin regime.3 The massive reinforcing of the presidency vis-a-vis the parliament and local government, assaults on the media and political opponents, and bolstering of the security apparatus have all been considered indicators of a dangerous antidemocratic tendency and even as stepping stones to a new authoritarianism. We wonder, however, whether Putin's initiatives are so different in their ultimate intent from those designed by Gorbachev and his associates in the latter 1980s.4 Indeed, as we reflect on the evolution of the late Soviet and post-Soviet Russian polity over the period from 1985 to 2005, we are struck by the similarities between the two regimes in their thinking and broad institutional-policy prescriptions intended to address the challenges of Russia's failing state.Both Gorbachev and Putin were confronted by a similar domestic political reality: a weak economy and highly bureaucratized state, increasingly unable to efficiently implement policy and ensure economic productivity. On the one hand, Gorbachev had to cope with serious problems of corruption and with the resistance of both central and local political institutions and elites to needed political and economic change. His set of reforms was designed to overcome these obstacles through guided political decentralization and openness, with an expectation that central political executive policymaking prerogatives would be reinforced. One seasoned Russian observer, Alexander Zinoviev, described perestroika as centered on four objectives: (1 ) creating a new superpower structure that would stand above the communist party apparatus, (2) establishing order in the country by harnessing the masses and compelling them to cooperate with the leadership, (3) overcoming economic difficulties, and (4) modernizing Soviet industry, especially its military component.5 The overriding end was to restore political and economic order, with such order designed to infuse dynamism to the economy and society. …

"Malenkie liudi" i "bolshaia istoriia": Inostrantsy moskovskogo Elektrozavoda v sovetskom obshchestve 1920-kh-1930-kh gg. (review)

Reviewed by: "Malenkie liudi" i "bol´shaia istoriia": Inostrantsy moskovskogo Elektrozavoda v sovetskom obshchestve 1920-kh-1930-kh gg. Michael David-Fox Sergei Zhuravlev , "Malenkie liudi" i "bol´shaia istoriia": Inostrantsy moskovskogo Elektrozavoda v sovetskom obshchestve 1920-kh-1930-kh gg. ["Little People" and "Big Events": Foreigners of Moscow's Electrical Factory in Soviet Society, 1920-30s]. Moscow: Rosspen, 2000. 351 pp. ISBN 5824301506. At the height of the Soviet industrialization drive in the early 1930s as many as 35,000 foreign workers, engineers, and specialists and their family members had migrated from the countries of the industrialized West to live and work in the Soviet Union, many for long periods of time (29-31). Elektrozavod (after 1932, Elektrokombinat), the Moscow electro-industrial giant welded together from many factories in late 1927 and existing as a single entity until 1938, was an enterprise with one of the most substantial foreign contingents. This center of "socialist construction," like other industrial sites where foreigners were concentrated, held great strategic and symbolic value simultaneously. The electrical industry was central in the earliest Soviet plans for industrial development (47). The "Il´ich lightbulb" and electrification were for many years touted as virtual synonyms for the October Revolution, and during and after the First Five-Year Plan Elektrozavod was a high-priority enterprise that for many became a literal "symbol of socialism" (143). In the Soviet Union as a whole, by far the greatest number of Western economic and political émigrés working in Soviet industry were German, while the second largest group was Americans (29-30). This held true at Elektrozavod, where foreigners meant first and foremost Germans (about 80 percent, many of them Communists and skilled workers from Berlin), followed by Americans (a diverse group including highly paid specialists and returning émigrés from the Russian empire) and a smattering of many other nationalities. While Elektrozavod's foreign colony was a drop in the bucket in terms of the factory as a whole—at its height in 1932, foreigners totaled about 180 employees, not including family members, while the number for the entire factory the next year reached 24,000 (144, 157)—it holds a significance well beyond its numerical size. The lives and experiences of these foreigners are important not only as a window into the broader import of Western expertise into Soviet industry, but because these were the outsiders whose contact with the emerging Soviet system can be counted as among the most sustained, intimate, and often, as it turned out, tragic. [End Page 611] In this thoroughly researched volume packed with revealing new material, Sergei Zhuravlev has written the history of foreigners at Elektrozavod. His task, as he defines it, is to describe the foreign colony as a social entity (sotsium, or, more rarely, mikro-sotsium,sotsial´naia obshchnost´, or obshchestvennyi organizm) within Soviet society. Another of his major goals is to place the experiences of "little people" at the center of the historical process, and to do this especially through the extensive reconstruction of individual biographies within their broader context. While this agenda leaves open certain angles of investigation into the topic that I discuss below, it also informs his work's achievements, which rest on two closely related features of the monograph, its source base and its architectural design. Of the approximately 50 Russian archival collections (fondy) listed in Zhuravlev's bibliography, the most important for the study were the factory archives in the Moscow municipal archive (TsMAM) and the factory party organizations in the former Moscow party archive (TsAODM). Zhuravlev uses the 144 extant personal collections (lichnye fondy) of foreigners in the Elektrozavod collection exhaustively, developing the practice of inserting a biographical sketch in italics directly into his text each time an important personage appears. In 1993, when the author began research for this study, he also gained access to about 40 transcripts of purge-era NKVD interrogations of Elektrozavod foreigners executed or sent to labor in the Gulag, including those of several German proletarian Communists whose life stories are at the heart of the book. These materials from the former KGB archives (FSB RF)—now, as a rule, no longer accessible—not only are prominent in...

Soviet industrial location: a re‐examination

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes This study was financially supported by a Grant‐in‐aid from the Ministry of Education, Science, Culture, Sports and Technology of Japan (Grant #14730043, 2002–04) and the Japan Securities Scholarship Foundation (2003–04) which are gratefully acknowledged. I also acknowledge a debt of gratitude to Dr. Yoshiaki Nishimura and Dr. Ichiro Iwasaki, both of Hitotsubashi Institute of Economic Research (HIER), for their generous agreement to allow use of the RGAE data, which they collected at the HIER Library. For details see Turina (1999 Turina EA ‘Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Ekonomiki i ego informatsionnye vozmozhnosti v oblasti izucheniya ekonomicheskoi istorii SSSR i Rossii’ Discussion Paper No.D99–2, Institute of Economic Research, Hitotsubashi University, Japan, 1999 [Google Scholar]) and Nishimura & Iwasaki (1999 Nishimura Y Iwasaki I ‘Soren Chuh‐oh Toukei‐kyoku Naibu Shiryou ga Shimesu Chuh‐oh Ajia Kougyou Hattatsu‐shi’ Discussion Paper No.D99–35, Institute of Economic Research, Hitotsubashi University, Japan, 1999 [Google Scholar]). Thus Nishimura & Iwasaki reproduced the RGAE data at Hitotsubashi University Library; they have been available since 1999. In the 1970s the statistics were made available in Narodnoe Khozyaistvo Litovskoi SSR. Nishimura & Iwasaki (1999 Nishimura Y Iwasaki I ‘Soren Chuh‐oh Toukei‐kyoku Naibu Shiryou ga Shimesu Chuh‐oh Ajia Kougyou Hattatsu‐shi’ Discussion Paper No.D99–35, Institute of Economic Research, Hitotsubashi University, Japan, 1999 [Google Scholar]), p. 3. This article does not examine policies affected by military considerations. It is certain that evacuation of firms from Europe to the Ural or Siberia regions or other militarily related changes in industrial location deeply affected regional economic conditions during the 1940s. After the 1960s, however, many studies point out that the effects of these unusual policies ceased to affect general industrial location patterns even in the USSR (Hooson, 1972 Hooson, D. 1972. ‘The Outlook for Regional Development in the Soviet Union’. Slavic Review, 31(3): pp. 535–554[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]; Rodgers, 1974 Rodgers, A. 1974. ‘The Locational Dynamics of Soviet Industry’. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 64(2): pp. 226–240[Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]; Dienes, 1972 Dienes, L. 1972. ‘Investment Priorities in Soviet Regions’. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 62: pp. 437–454[Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]). The most extreme examples are the data on industrial output in Ukraine and Belarus. As can be seen in Table 2, RGAE lacks data on these territories during this period because these republics were occupied by the German army. At that time Azerbaidzhan produced the world's largest volume of oil from one field. After the 1950s crude oil production began full‐scale in Siberia and other peripheral areas. The population in each region can be obtained from Narkhoz (various years). RGAE data are expressed in 1926/1927 prices, and our estimates (Kumo, 2003 Kumo K Migration and Regional Development in the Soviet Union and Russia: A Geographical Approach (Moscow, Beck Publisher Russia, 2003) [Google Scholar]) are in 1985 constant prices. Nishimura & Iwasaki (1999 Nishimura Y Iwasaki I ‘Soren Chuh‐oh Toukei‐kyoku Naibu Shiryou ga Shimesu Chuh‐oh Ajia Kougyou Hattatsu‐shi’ Discussion Paper No.D99–35, Institute of Economic Research, Hitotsubashi University, Japan, 1999 [Google Scholar], p. 11). Since then the authors have collected more RGAE data, but capital and wage data were still not available in April 2004.

Soviet industry and the Red Army under stalin: a military-industrial complex?

RésuméL’industrie soviétique et l’Armée rouge sous Stalin : un complexe militaro-industriel ?L’article étudie certaines vues courantes de l’historiographie sur le rapport entre l’industrie soviétique et l’Armée rouge sous Stalin et démêle certains problèmes liés à l’interprétation du terme voenno-promyšlennyj kompleks. Il présente plusieurs aspects du poids du secteur de la défense dans le système économique. Les connaissances acquises grâce à des recherches récentes dans les archives servent de point de départ à l’analyse du rapport entre l’armée et l’industrie sous Stalin, analyse qui présente ce rapport comme le « dilemme du prisonnier » : malgré les gains potentiels d’une coopération, les deux parties sont fortement encouragées à se tromper mutuellement. L’auteur conclut que la notion de complexe militaro-industriel n’est pas tout à fait applicable à l’ère stalinienne, mais serait peut-être plus pertinente en ce qui concerne l’ère post-stalinienne.

Soviet industry and the Red Army under Stalin

Soviet industry and the Red Army under Stalin

The Myth of the Strong Soviet State

Studies of state‐society relations continue to assume that the Soviet Union was the quintessential “strong” state, able to dominate a weak society at every stage of the policy process. Evidence gleaned from the former Soviet defense industry, however, reveals that the Soviet state, at least since the Brezhnev era, had difficulty implementing some of its highest priority objectives. While the Soviet state may have possessed considerable despotic power, its infrastructural power was lacking in many areas. Soviet authorities never managed to construct policy levers that could consistently influence defense industrial managers to behave in the ways they desired.