***** Stephen Kotkin Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization
Publication Date: February 1997 Subjects: History; Russian & Eastern European Studies; European History Rights: World 728 pages Paperback: $34.95 0-520-20823-4 £24.95 Available Now
"A kind of archaeological analysis of Soviet life during the momentous years of Stalinist industrialization."--Lewis Siegelbaum, Michigan State University
DESCRIPTION This study is the first of its kind: 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 life: 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.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Stephen Kotkin is Assistant Professor of History at Princeton University and author of Steeltown, USSR (California, 1991).
<http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/5448.html> *****
***** Stephen Kotkin Steeltown, USSR: Soviet Society in the Gorbachev Era (A Centennial Book)
Publication Date: March 1991 Subjects: Politics; European History; Sociology; Russian & Eastern European Studies Rights: Not available in British Commonwealth except Canada Paperback: $25.00 0-520-07354-1 £17.95 Available Now
"[Kotkin] reports with controlled passion and vividness the social and economic tribulations of a proletarian population."--Peter Reddaway, New York Review of Books
"An excellent portrait of what central planning means to the population of a Soviet city."--David Satter, Wall Street Journal
"[Kotkin's] ground-level view tells more about the era of perestroika than the many recent profiles of Gorbachev. Kotkin spells out succinctly how Gorbachev's economic changes were either ill-conceived or frustrated by Moscow ministries."--Peter Galuszka, Business Week
"The most in-depth, vivid and multilayered view yet of a society wrestling with its greatest internal transition since the revolution. . . . Kotkin presents a remarkable view of current Soviet reality in microcosm."--Les K. Adler, San Francisco Chronicle Book Review
"An excellent model for approaching the monstrous complexity of today's USSR."--Richard Lourie, New York Newsday
DESCRIPTION No one, not even Mikhail Gorbachev, anticipated what was in store when the Soviet Union embarked in the 1980s on a radical course of long-overdue structural reform. The consequences of that momentous decision, which set in motion a transformation eventually affecting the entire postwar world order, are here chronicled from inside a previously forbidden Soviet city, Magnitogorsk. Built under Stalin and championed by him as a showcase of socialism, the city remained closed to Western scrutiny until four years ago, when Stephen Kotkin became the first American to live there in nearly half a century.
An uncommonly perceptive observer, a gifted writer, and a first-rate social scientist, Kotkin offers the reader an unsurpassed portrait of daily life in the Gorbachev era. From the formation of "informal" political groups to the start-up of fledgling businesses in the new cooperative sector, from the no-holds-barred investigative reporting of a former Communist party mouthpiece to a freewheeling multicandidate election campaign, the author conveys the texture of contemporary Soviet society in the throes of an upheaval not seen since the 1930s.
Magnitogorsk, a planned "garden city" in the Ural Mountains, serves as Kotkin's laboratory for observing the revolutionary changes occurring in the Soviet Union today. Dominated by a self-perpetuating Communist party machine, choked by industrial pollution, and haunted by a suppressed past, this once-proud city now faces an uncertain future, as do the more than one thousand other industrial cities throughout the Soviet Union.
Kotkin made his remarkable first visit in 1987 and returned in 1989. On both occasions, steelworkers and schoolteachers, bus drivers and housewives, intellectuals and former victims of oppression--all willingly stepped forward to voice long-suppressed grievances and aspirations. Their words animate this moving narrative, the first to examine the impact and contradictions of perestroika in a single community. Like no other Soviet city, Magnitogorsk provides a window onto the desperate struggle to overcome the heavy burden of Stalin's legacy.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Stephen Kotkin is Assistant Professor of History at Princeton University.
<http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/5722.html> *****
Stephen M. Kotkin: <http://www.princeton.edu/~history/PROFILES/kotkinprofile.htm> -- Yoshie
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