Peasant Metropolis: Social Identities in Moscow 1929-1941 Review

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Peasant Metropolis: Social Identities in Moscow 1929-1941 ReviewThis book recreates the "immigrant" experience of peasant workers in Moscow during the first two Five Year Plans, the era of the "Great Break." Here was laid the foundations of the Soviet system as we came to know and love it for the next sixty years.
As alluded, the story of peasant migrants come to the big city reminds me strongly of immigrants who came to New York, Chicago, and other big industrial US cities a generation before. The same dislocation, the same clannishness, the same rivalries between the established and the greenhorn. What also emerges is the rise of Stalin as political boss and Stalinism as a Russian variant of big-city bossism. The social base - immigrants and their upwardly-mobile offspring - was strikingly identical and goes far to explain Stalinism as a social phenomena, beyond the "cult of personality" or ideological wrangles with right or left party opponents.
At one crucial statement I do disagree with Professor Hoffmann, when he states on page 106 that "The Soviet industrial system, with its undisciplined worforce, weakened management, and Party and police interference, never achieved rationalized and routinized production." These same handicaps plagued American industry some 30 years before, but were overcome by expanding industry and the education and adaption of the workforce. As Stephen Kotkin shows in "Magnetic Mountain," tracing this same Stalinist pattern in the creation of the Magnitogortsk Complex, Stalinism hammered out a very credible industrial civilization; while Michael Burawoy's work experience in socialist Hungary showed a "rationalized and routinized production" regime equal to that of American factories where he'd earlier worked.
But altogether a useful contribution to the school of "Stalinist studies."Peasant Metropolis: Social Identities in Moscow 1929-1941 OverviewDuring the 1930's, 23 million peasants left their villages and moved to Soviet cities, where they comprised almost half the urban population and more than half the nation's industrial workers.Drawing on previously inaccessible archival materials, David L. Hoffmann shows how this massive migration to the cities--an influx unprecedented in world history--had major consequences for the nature of the Soviet system and the character of Russian society even today.Hoffmann focuses on events in Moscow between the launching of the industrialization drive in 1929 and the outbreak of war in 1941.He reconstructs the attempts of Party leaders to reshape the social identity and behavior of the millions of newly urbanized workers, who appeared to offer a broad base of support for the socialist regime.The former peasants, however, had brought with them their own forms of cultural expression, social organization, work habits, and attitudes toward authority.Hoffmann demonstrates that Moscow's new inhabitants established social identities and understandings of the world very different from those prescribed by Soviet authorities.Their refusal to conform to the authorities' model of a loyal proletariat thwarted Party efforts to construct a social and political order consistent with Bolshevik ideology.The conservative and coercive policies that Party leaders adopted in response, he argues, contributed to the Soviet Union's emergence as an authoritarian welfare state.

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