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Stalin's Railroad: Turksib and the Building of Socialism PDF

400 Pages·2001·7.516 MB·English
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Stalin's Railroad Stalin's Railroad Turksib and the Building of Socialism Matthew J. Payne University of Pittsburgh Press To my wife\ Jackie, who put up with my shock work Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pa., 15261 Copyright © 2001, University of Pittsburgh Press All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Printed on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Payne, Matthew J. Stalin’s railroad: Turksib and the building of socialism / Matthew J. Payne. p. cm. — (Pitt series in Russian and East European studies) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-8229-4166-x (cloth: alk. paper) 1. Turkestano-Sibirskaia magistral’. 2. Railroads—Soviet Union—History. 3. Railroads and state—Soviet Union. 4. Soviet Union—Economic policy—1928-1932. 5. Soviet Union—Ethnic relations. 6. Stalin, Joseph, 1879-1953. 7. Communism—Soviet Union. 1. Tide: Turksib and the building of socialism. 11. Tide. in. Series in Russian and East European studies. HE3140.T87 P39 2001 385'-0957—^dc2i 2001003342 Contents List of Illustrations and Tables vi Preface vii Acknowledgments ix Introduction l 1. The Politics of Planning n 2. Managerial Hegemony: Spetsy and Reds 39 3. Turksib’s “Modey” Workforce 67 4. The Fall of the Bourgeois Specialists 99 5. Forge of a Native Proletariat? 126 6. The Struggle to Control KontroV 156 7. A New Commanding Staff 183 8. Reforging the Working Class 209 9. The New Industrial Order and Edinonachalie 246 10. Controlling the Unruly Working Class 267 Conclusion: Legacies 286 Notes 301 Glossary of Russian Terms 357 Bibliography 363 Index 377 Illustrations and Tables Map The Turkestano-Siberian Railroad and Southern Variants 32 Figures 3.1. Labor on the Turksib 70 8.1. Percentage versus Numbers of Kazakhs Employed 234 Tables 1.1. Numbers of Construction Workers in the Kazakh ASSR 28 2.1. Composition of the Southern Construction’s Administration 58 3.1. Workers by Quarter, 1927-30 73 5.1. Unemployment in Kazakhstan 132 5.2. Union Membership, Southern Construction 145 8.1. Nativization of Turksib Railroad Operations 240 9.1. Plan versus Construction Workers Employed 249 9.2. Members of Southern Construction’s TPO 253 VI Preface A WORD about the citation SYSTEM and the scholarly apparatus of the work. First, the archival citations follow standard conven­ tions and refer to the latest names of the referenced archives. As these have undergone a constant whir of reorganization and renaming, keeping the nomenclature current has not always been easy. In one case, the archives of the former Communist party of Kazakhstan (pre­ viously held by the filial branch of the Institute of Marxist Leninism, now in Kazakhstan’s Presidential Archive), I have not been able to check if the former numbering of institution file holdings (fondy) has been maintained. Therefore, I have maintained its former nomencla­ ture. Full citations for the various archives as well as their subunits and abbreviations can be found in the bibliography. I use standard Russian abbreviations for these citations, which, following the archive name, are as follows: f (orfond, archival subdivision), op. (or opis\ inventory division), d. (<delo, or file folder), and 1. (list) or ll. (listy, or pages). Sec­ ond, these citations, as well as those of the local periodical press, have been reduced to the bare minimum of information to avoid cluttering the text with arcane references to Soviet sources. But, of course, such arcane information is precisely what scholars most desire in citations. To slake this thirst, the full text of all notes, including title and date of the document, can be found at <http://www.emory.edu/HISTORY/ PAYNE> (follow the links). I apologize for any inconvenience such a web-based scholarly apparatus might cause, but, in the competition between text and notes, I thought most readers would prefer the former. vu Acknowledgments T HE TURKESTANO-SIBERIAN railroad (Turksib) took a little more than three years to build, whereas I have labored on its history for the better part of a decade. At times, I have felt that I, too, labored to cross desolate deserts and raging rivers in this, my own little shock project. But unlike the original builders, I cannot claim to have accom­ plished my feat alone. I owe many debts of gratitude. This book, such as it is, could not have been written without the as­ sistance and encouragement of many people. The bulk of the research for it was done during four trips to the archives in Almaty, Moscow, and Semipalatinsk over the last decade. I am grateful for the University of Chicago’s History Department for a fellowship to the Moscow State Historical Institute (1990-91), the International Research and Ex­ changes Board for a Long Term Grant (1991-92) and a Short Term Grant (1996), and to Emory University’s Halle Seminar on Global Learning for its fellowship (1998). In a period when archival access seemed to open new possibilities for scholarship from month to month, the generosity of these grants allowed me to present a far more nuanced view of the building of Turksib than I ever thought possible. I owe special thanks of gratitude to the archivists of the Central State Archive of the Republic of Kazakhstan. At a time when the entire world had turned upside down and these consummate professionals did not know if they would be able to continue to serve as stewards of their nation’s past, they were more than kind to a lone foreign scholar who stayed far past closing on many nights. I am also grateful to the archivists at the now defunct party archive in Almaty, who allowed me continued access to their holdings until the furniture was literally carted away from under me! In a decade of hard times, I have always been honored to work with them. I am also grateful to Oxford Univer­ sity Press for allowing me to rework part of chapter 8, which was pub­ lished as the essay, “The Forge of the Kazakh Proletariat?” in Ronald IX x Acknowledgments Suny and Terry Martin, eds., A State of Nations: The Soviet State and Its Peo­ ples in the Age of Lenin and Stalin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). I cannot possibly thank personally all the people who have been kind enough to read my articles and various draft chapters and taken the trouble to engage the arguments in them. But some attempt must be made to single out several. First off, Sheila Fitzpatrick shepherded this project through its original stages, and anyone reading this book will note the intellectual and scholarly debt I owe to her. Richard Hellie also gave selflessly of his time and intellect at a very early stage of this work. Without his encouragement, I can honestly say that I would not even be a historian. As for other persons in on the early stages of this work, Ken Gill first encouraged me to explore the meaning of class and ethnicity outside the Russian heartland, which led me to Turksib in the first place and my long engagement with it. Thanks, Ken. The extraordinary and vi­ brant atmosphere of the University of Chicago’s Russian and Soviet History Workshop constantly enlightened and challenged me. Though we disagreed constantly, you are the finest comrades I have ever known. Thank you. At its later stages this work ballooned into a massive manuscript, and only the wise advice of colleagues and well-wishers allowed me to pare it down to a manageable level. To Rob Stone and Kate Gilbert, who offered keen editorial eyes, and my colleagues Margot Finn and Kathy Amdur, who gave me very good advice on the final manuscript, I owe a real debt of gratitude. And one final word of thanks, to my wife Jackie. Even though I know you were disappointed I did not entitle this book Train in Vain, I could not have written it without your humor, strength, and love.

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