In February 1931, Joseph Stalin made a speech to the Central Committee of the Soviet Union. In it he warned, Russia must overtake the advanced capitalist countries in just ten years, or, I swear to you, those capitalist countries will destroy us. Ten years later, in 1941, Nazi Germany invaded Russia. In a lightning strike, the German army swept east with a speed that made Soviet collapse seem certain. But then, with German tanks just ten miles from Moscow, the Red Army began slowly to push back.
Soviet propaganda hailed this advance as painful but heroic. But also they stressed how this advance was a failure. would not have been possible were it not for another advance.
Just as painful, just as heroic, the creation over ten years of Soviet industrial strength. In just ten years, a backward peasant society had been transformed under Stalin's orders, modernized, industrialized, to face the capitalist threat. As an American observer recalled, what had been won seemed nothing less than a battle of iron and steel.
For ten years, the Soviet Union's been at war. The Soviet people sweating, shedding blood and tears. People were wounded and killed. Women and children froze to death.
Thousands were court-martialed and shot. I'd wager the battle of iron and steel alone caused more casualties than any battle in this present war so far. This is one man's story of the industrialization of the Soviet Union.
A story both tragic and triumphant. This rather dull photograph taken in 1925 shows an expanse of barren land 70 miles east of the Ural Mountains. It's a tough, unforgiving landscape. Winters here can last nine months.
For hundreds of years the only people who worked this land were roving shepherds, the Bashkirs and Kirghiziy. But under their feet were iron deposits so rich they swung compass needles off centre. They gave the place its name, Magnitogorsk. The same year that photograph was taken, industrial output in the Soviet Union was at rock bottom.
less than a sixth of what it had been even under the Tsar. But that was to change. For the Bolsheviks, a workers'party. Industry was the way forward.
Industry managed by the workers'state, built by the workers, for the workers. For Stalin, industrialization was part of the international class struggle. Let us advance full steam ahead to become a country of metal.
And when we've put the USSR on a motor car and the peasant on a tractor, then let these much admired capitalists try to overtake us. We'll see then which countries may be called backwards and which advanced. In 1928, Stalin announced the first five-year plan.
Production targets, way in advance of anything produced at that time, were announced for every industry, with a concentration on iron, steel, coal and oil. At Magnitogorsk, work began on an iron and steel complex to rival any in the capitalist world. Barren land would give way to vast blast furnaces and smelting plants.
It was to be a symbol of what socialist planning could achieve. John Scott, an American, lived and worked in Magnitogorsk from 1932 to 1937. I went to Russia because it seemed to me here was a society at least one step ahead of my own. When I left college, America was in depression. There were no jobs to be had, few opportunities for young energy and enthusiasm.
I was a young man, a man of courage, a man of enthusiasm. Whereas from what I'd heard, Soviet Russia was something new, a society under construction. No unemployment, rather they were crying out for workers. So I went, turned up in Moscow, told them I'd trained as a well-trained soldier.
welder. They put me on a four-day train trip east to this new miracle city. I remember feeling very happy.
What Scott found in Magnitogorsk was a world very different to the one he'd imagined. The city was no more than a disorganized building site without roads or sewage pipes. types. Housing was just makeshift barracks.
Food was scarce. And without enough wood or coal to go round the cold was terrible. Scott's book describes the daily routine.
The two-mile walk to the blast furnace at minus 35 degrees. Equipment frozen. The first thing you do is Wooden scaffolding covered in an inch of ice. It was hard, dangerous work. There were accidents every day men crushed by girders scaffolding collapsing The workers came from all over Russians Ukrainians Jews tartars Mongols mostly just peasants their whole lives stuck on some beetroot patch, and now, here they were punching rivets into sheets of freezing metal.
Not surprisingly, they underestimated the danger. Fire! What is it? Fire! There's a body up on top in our own night.
Who is it? I don't know. He looks like a rigger.
Must have slipped. I'll need three men to bring him down. They're just plough boys.
They don't think. Stupid peasants. Pick it up, then. Sometimes you'd get angry, you'd spit out, why couldn't we have more light or more lumber to make the scaffolding safe? They'd look at you like you were some soft westerner.
Anyway, what could anyone do? There was no light because someone had jacked up the voltage so high the bulbs kept blowing. Lumber they just chopped up for firewood. You could be shot, of course, for stealing government property, but it kept our hands warm. When Scott first arrived in the Soviet Union, he thought it wonderful how people seemed not to mind about material comforts.
How they ate only black bread, wore clothes till they fell to pieces, used old newspapers for writing letters or rolling up. It didn't take him long to realize the obvious. They ate black bread because that was all there was. In the one surviving photograph of Scott and his work gang, Scott is the only man smiling. And yet, if Scott's to be believed, the picture of hardship in these faces tells only half the story.
Because behind that hardship, Scott found a purpose and magneto ghost that left him amazed. I couldn't say how many suffered that hardship willingly. Some had come because they had no choice, they needed work, but others came, I mean this, with a burning enthusiasm, wanting to take part.
My roommate was a young Russian called... Collier, we had the best room in the barrack because he was the foreman on my shift. His enthusiasm right from the first day I arrived, it was infectious.
I mean, where you come from, they build big. Yes? Yes.
American iron and steel, biggest in the world, yes? Yes. Yes, well here we'll build bigger.
Except the difference is, in America, who takes the profit? The bosses. Capitalist parasites, hm? What I build, I build for myself.
Myself. Every rivet in this plant. We all have a share. If some damn fool Riga freezes to death for some capitalist's profit, that makes me angry.
If some damn fool Riga freezes to death for me and for you, for every Soviet man and woman and child, then that, my American friend, makes me very proud. On the shift, you'd see people staring up at what we'd built. There was one man, his name was Kaibulan.
He was a shepherd from Kazakhstan. One year earlier, he'd never seen a staircase. He'd never seen a train. He'd never seen a light bulb.
And now here he was, building the biggest blast furnace in the world. And it was his. As much as anyone's, it was his.
There was a room in every barrack called the Red Corner. Newspapers on the wall, banners, pictures of Lenin and Stalin, a library. Ours had over 200 books.
Six o'clock every night the whole barrack, men and women met there with guitars and balalaikas and they'd sing workers revolutionary songs, folk tunes, love songs. And then we'd talk. First maybe grumbles, why is the bread ration cut, why is there so little sugar?
But then someone would explain the party line, how one day the Soviet Union wouldn't have to export its sugar anymore, how one day there'll be enough for all. And people would listen and accept. Because for all the hardship, there was a wonderful optimism that tomorrow would be better.
And that somehow made it all worthwhile. You know the difference between you and me. You are a reject from a system that's finished. Whereas I have this potato. Now it may not be much, but if we complete the plan on time, then our blast furnace will make metal.
And with this metal, we will make tractors. And we will plough up so much of this land, that I will end up with two potatoes. And maybe a motorcar to sit in, as I eat my potatoes.
You see how it goes. Drink! And so at least for some the hard work of Magnitogorsk was balanced with a real sense of purpose.
Still it was chaotic. The five-year plan set ludicrous, unrealistic targets. But under that pressure, despite the temptation to fudge the figures, real advances were made. In 1935 the blast furnaces were ready. Magnetogorsk moved from construction to production.
By 1936, every day the furnaces and mills produced 15,000 tons of iron ore, 4,000 tons of pig iron, Meanwhile, the dirty building site of the early 30s became a healthy and reasonably comfortable city. There were still barrack blocks, but plastered now and whitewashed. were cinemas and theatres, a streetcar, and stores with goods in reasonable quantities at reasonable prices.
As Scott put it, it was no longer necessary to steal in order to live. I got married about that time. A Russian woman, Masha. She was born a peasant.
She could remember the famine of the Civil War years. No. Now she felt the world was at her feet.
You can't do that, you've already murdered it. I can, I can, I haven't put mine down. She'd trained as a teacher, she'd learned the piano, how to play chess.
I remember reading a speech of Stalin's one time, how he said, life has become better and more joyful. For us, yes, I believe it was true. Sometimes Scott's picture of Magnitogorsk sounds like so much propaganda.
Like the hype reports and the newsreels made to exaggerate Soviet success. But Scott mentions too the failures. Machinery pushed beyond safe limits, repairs left undone. The Work quotas that put a dreadful strain on the workforce, causing resentment and fear amongst those unable to keep up.
For some, Magnitogorsk was a true labor of love, hard work justified by results. For others, it was just hard work, coupled with a very real fear of the system. From the mid-1930s onwards, that fear grew stronger.
In Moscow, Stalin was holding show trials to kill off his old rivals. The prosecutor in the trials, Vyshinsky, urged the court to shoot like dogs the spies and traitors who betray our motherland. Propaganda encouraged people to denounce anyone slowing down the great Soviet advance. Those that set record targets were rewarded, but those that made mistakes stood accused as saboteurs, wreckers, enemies of the people.
What do you mean, clumsy? Clumsy is when you fall and break your stupid nose! When you break Soviet property, it's not clumsy!
God! Were the people prepared to wreck the works? Some, certainly. Some had good cause. In Magnitogorsk, as elsewhere, there were prisoners, slave laborers forced to work against their will.
Most were kulaks, peasants condemned for no greater crime than owning a plot of land or a cow or two. There were 35,000 kulaks in Magnitogorsk. One, a man called Shabkov, worked in Scott's own team.
Ah! Koolag smoke. They brought us in closed box cars.
Twelve days, sucking air through a chink in the wood. Standing in our own excrement like cattle. When we arrived, the army had fixed bayonets. They gave us tents to live in. That first winter, I don't know how many thousand died.
All the children, I think. I lost my little girl. And then my son.
And then my wife. How long is your sentence? Five years. And then? Where can I go?
They won't let me do any other kind of work. I'll stay. Join the glorious march of Soviet labour. Scott describes two cases of Kulak's guilty of wrecking.
One used a wrench to jam the works. Another filled the bearings of a gas turbine with ground glass. But the propaganda against wrecking was out of all proportion. proportion with the problem, real sabotage was rare.
Instead, for simple errors, or for no fault at all, managers and workers alike found themselves accused. At least at first, there seemed to be reasons why people were arrested. Production targets not met, machinery broken.
People thought, no smoke without fire. But in 36, 37, it got out of hand. It became stupid.
For no reason. Arrests at midnight, workers, managers taken off, held for months, then a secret trial, perhaps, then exile or execution. No one was guilty.
And so everyone was afraid. People would say, if only Stalin knew. Eventually, John Scott himself was forced to leave Magnitogorsk. It was Kolya that broke the news.
It's nothing against you, you understand. But we can't have foreigners here anymore. He'd survived black bread, rotten salt fish, the cold and hard work, but he'd not survived the purge.
He left with Masha in 1939, disillusioned, but still amazed at the scale of what they'd achieved. His years in Magnitogorsk he described as the most productive of his life. Two years later the German invasion plunged the Soviet Union into war and the war seemed to justify what had gone before. The scramble to industrialize so fast paid laid back with iron and steel for guns and tanks. And all that talk of enemies of the state made real by this attack on the motherland.
Stalin was now cast in a new light. as war leader, father of his country, America's friend. For Scott, writing of Stalin in 1942, it seemed as if, to some extent, the ends had justified the means.
He knew how expensive, how brutal it would be. But he saw the threat. He knew one day enemy capitalist powers would try to destroy the first socialist state. So, ruthless, determined, he dragged the Soviet Union into the modern age. Along the way, millions of men and women died.
Shot, frozen. starved, brutalized by labor. But the rest learn to work, to obey orders, to mind their own business, to take it on the chin without complaining.
Things they'll need to survive a modern war. And if they do survive, and I believe they will, our debt to them will be enormous.