Did population policy under Stalin differ, in any fundamental respect, from those of inter-war France or other Western countries? In a radical rethinking of the Soviet experience, Stephen Kotkin said no. Magnetic Mountain moved the field of Soviet history past an increasingly sterile cold war standoff between the so-called new social history and the totalitarian school. With the social history generation, Kotkin insisted on seeing the Soviet project from the perspective of ordinary people, subject to the same kind of forces that applied throughout Europe. He had no truck with ideas like oriental despotism or Russian exceptionalism, but, with the totalitarian school, he took ideology seriously, presenting everyday life and high politics within a single analytical frame. To do so, he drew eclectically on a range of theoretical perspectives, above all on the work of the late Michel Foucault. Foucault often implied that Auschwitz and the Gulag were the logical outcome of the Enlightenment project, but his primary goal was to illuminate the corrosive, coercive nature of liberal reform efforts in Western Europe, to puncture their claims to universality. The vast bulk of his corpus avoided the twentieth century. Kotkin, by contrast, used Foucault's perspective directly on the Soviet system itself.Footnote 1
For my own work on immigration control in inter-war France, Kotkin's work was richly suggestive.Footnote 2 His adaptation of Foucault's notion of power as creative rather than purely restrictive drew attention away from formal institutions and legal codes and focused it on the way abstract categories like nationality and citizenship are transformed in their application, on the ground, in concrete historical settings. Doing so expanded the realm of the political in fruitful ways. It made it possible to rethink the relationship between state and society, and to shed new light on forms of alienation and inequality that have become increasingly prevalent around the world in the past century. It provided a model study of what Foucault called ‘governmentality’, the efforts of modern states everywhere to manage entire populations, and, in the process, profoundly influence their opportunities and life chances.Footnote 3 In two critical respects, however, Kotkin departed from Foucault.
For all that he followed Foucault's interest in discourse and catholic vision of the political, Kotkin ultimately relied on a more conventional notion of power. He held onto the idea that overwhelming force radiated out from the centre, in Moscow, without meaningful checks, feedback loops or rival sources. Where Foucault sought to show that significant forms of power escape even the most powerful sovereign's control, Kotkin was primarily interested in the sovereign itself, in its most powerful, violent incarnation. In other words, he accepted the broad contours of the totalitarian school argument. He advanced it by showing how the state intervened in people's everyday lives at the local level, exploring coercion in much greater depth than consent and leaving little room for people to develop their own subjectivities.
Kotkin then distanced himself from the cold warriors’ politics by blurring distinctions between liberal and authoritarian rule, inverting their moral claims. He went beyond the idea that Stalinism represents one possible trajectory that emerged from the Enlightenment tradition and instead placed it at the heart of that tradition. ‘The Russian revolutionaries’, he insisted, were ‘following the central vision of the Enlightenment’ (p. 7). Where the totalitarian school celebrated the emancipatory virtues of the Enlightenment, Kotkin presented the USSR as its essentially pure, rigorously coherent form, its logical terminus, flaws and all. In doing so, he embraced a more monolithic, teleological view of modernity than Foucault ever did.Footnote 4
Kotkin's view of modernity overlooked profound divisions and alternate trajectories within the Enlightenment. It also confused the relationship between means and ends, tools and techniques with their use in practice. Welfare states are inherently hierarchical, but are they essentially authoritarian and sinister? What about using the political police to carry out door-to-door searches to establish and update a vast register of legal immigrants? Does it matter who gave the orders, why, and how the information was ultimately used? I found it impossible to make sense of immigration controls in inter-war Paris without paying special attention to those questions, not to celebrate the French Republican tradition but to move beyond a binary logic of good and evil, and to establish the specificity of a system of power rooted in a particular time and place.
If Kotkin went too far in articulating a monolithic notion of modernity that remained implicit in the master's oeuvre, the journey was nevertheless more than worth it. Magnetic Mountain brought social, cultural and political history together in path-breaking ways. It captured the chaotic, contradictory, often incompetent and yet ideologically driven, purposive and powerful nature of the Soviet Union under Stalin. Kotkin presented the nature and reach of Soviet power in more satisfactory terms than any historian had before. Ultimately the evidence he marshalled drove home the exceptional nature of the Stalin phenomenon. For its richly textured portrait of Soviet life and conceptualisation of how power worked in a concrete setting, Kotkin's work remains indispensable.
I
Following Foucault, Kotkin called attention to domains that received little attention from historians before the 1990s. Sociologists and social historians inspired by the Annales school of French social historians had long used parish records and post-Napoleonic population registers to reconstruct the lived experience of ordinary people: their basic demographic profiles and their mobility, both social and geographic. Most of that work, however, understood the ‘social’ as independent of, if not resolutely opposed to, ‘the political’ in general and the state in particular. For quantitative social historians, policemen, census agents, surveyors or spies may have created the sources they used, but they did not constitute legitimate subjects of study in their own right. Evolving group classifications and other changes in data collection caused headaches. They biased statistical series and had to be airbrushed out of datasets to get at the underlying social reality. The data collectors themselves and their conflicts or concerns were of little interest.Footnote 5 The new social historians of the Vietnam era tended to take a dim view of the state and minimised its influence. In the Soviet context, they pointed to contradictory policies in order to dismiss the ideological nature and effectiveness of the regime while stressing the agency of ordinary people; in Western Europe and the United States, the literatures on migration, diasporas and other transnational networks often underestimated the reach of government regulation and the power of host cultures to form subjectivities, to shape people's view of themselves. Whether taking aim at the likes of Hannah Arendt or Oscar Handlin, Vietnam-era critics of the cold war establishment relied on a stark distinction between the state and civil society, especially for its poorest members.Footnote 6
Kotkin used the traditional sources of social history. He did so, first, in familiar terms, to recount the building of a city and a massive steel plant from nothing. Far from any urban centre that might have served as a logistical support base, isolated on the steppe, the new socialist city had to be created from scratch. Everything – supplies, machines and, above all, people – had to be brought in vast quantities by long distance rail. He recounted the ‘push’ factors familiar to immigration specialists, here often in the form of Communist Party directives, above all the Central Committee's decision formally calling for the ‘liquidation of the kulaks as a class in 1930’ (quoted on p. 81). The regime's assault on the countryside combined with existing seasonal migration systems to produce a massive wave of arrivals. Trainloads full of ‘dekulakised’ peasants arrived in 1931 and 1932, tens of thousands a month, and even more rural dwellers (otkhodniki) came from the Urals and beyond in search of work. Magnitostroi, like all large construction concerns, sent teams of recruiters to reach out to the labour pool emptying the countryside; it also launched a national press and letter-writing campaign vaunting the opportunities of an exciting new world, to ‘pull’ them from cities farther afield. They struggled especially to recruit skilled workers and managers. From an initial group of perhaps twenty-five, in March 1929, the population rose to a quarter million within the space of just three and a half years, making Magnitostroi the country's largest shock construction site.
The chaotic nature of migration patterns appears at first glance to support social historians’ frequent references to the regime's ineptitude. Despite the massive numbers of people streaming into the new steel town, an equally impressive number streamed out. As in most centres of immigration in the so-called age of great migrations, many people came and went several times over very short periods of time. Circular migration patterns were quite common. To take only one example, many young Italian men, the so-called golondrinas, or birds of passage, worked the harvest in Italy until late autumn and then sailed to Argentina in late spring for the planting season. Similar patterns can be found around the world, and Magnitogorsk was no exception: people came and went by the tens of thousands.Footnote 7 According to one official source, the average length of stay for a worker was eighty-two calendar days in 1931. Nor was it only the unskilled population that turned over in such numbers. That same year, almost half of the white-collar employees left the site (p. 96). If some departures were to be expected – a few hundred young men, for example, were called up for service in the Red Army – many more people simply fled. Living conditions were wretched. Most workers lived in overcrowded barracks or mud huts. There was a shortage of warm work clothes, not enough food (even before the famine), and little to do in the early years besides work. The railways that brought workers to the construction site also carried them away and enabled them to tour the country. Others left on foot. The constant mobility, wretched conditions and high mortality rates were hardly unique. There was nothing distinctively Soviet about them.
II
Unlike social historians of the prior generation, however, Kotkin took government efforts to control migration seriously. He looked closely at the various kinds of registration systems the Soviets pressed into service, fully aware of their limitations in achieving many of their immediate goals but also showing their power to create new forms of inclusion and exclusion. If the use of physical force was limited (to a degree) outside the Gulag, the regime nevertheless mobilised other, gentler kinds of influence with its control of jobs; living space; health, education and welfare benefits; and the consideration of one's peers. As Igal Halfin and Jochen Hellbeck have argued, Kotkin's emphasis on the overwhelming power of the party-state prevented him from exploring the subjectivity of ordinary people.Footnote 8 But his attention to the application of Party directives at the local level enabled Kotkin to show the nature and limits of Soviet power. It allowed him to show the interaction between ordinary people, the Communist Party and the state, and ultimately to explore the nature of Soviet authority in richly satisfying detail.
The first measures to control the constant flux of people had little effect. Authorities initially offered a series of incentives to convince people to stay: advances for workers to bring their families or preferential supply allotments, a little extra bread, sometimes additional sugar, though the supply depot often found itself unable to comply. In perhaps their most popular move, authorities allowed workers to cultivate small garden plots. At the same time, they declared registration mandatory for anyone leaving the site. Given conditions at the site, those initial rules turned out to be powerless. As Kotkin put it, ordinary people seemed to be holding all the cards. In some cases, authorities begged them to stay (pp. 98–9).
They did not beg for long. Worried both about a volatile workforce and famine conditions further emptying the countryside, the USSR Council of People's Commissars (Sovnarkom) reinstated the tsarist internal passport system in 1932. In Magnitogorsk the passport campaign began early the following year. Everyone in charge of construction objectives had to turn in lists of workers including names, year and place of birth, current residence and job title. From that point on, all hiring required the presentation of a valid passport. The first passports were given out to much fanfare at a meeting in an elite rolling mill with speeches on the building of socialism and on cleansing Magnitogorsk of ‘parasitic’ elements. A brigade came from Moscow to make sure the campaign was taken seriously by local bosses and that no documents ‘fell into the hands of the class enemy’ (p. 99). Getting caught without up-to-date papers could lead to harrowing police investigations and deportation.
Not shy to exercise their authority, local officials were simply overwhelmed by the task set by their superiors. On a normal day at a small neighbourhood militia station, as the regular police were called, hundreds of people came to request signatures, to complain or to comply with various requests for further information. The staff struggled to keep up. People fell through the cracks. It did not help that police funding came from local authorities and could not begin to keep up even in the boom years.Footnote 9 The Soviet population registration, or propiska, system never enabled authorities to control population movements completely.Footnote 10 Although Kotkin did not explore in any detail the means authorities developed to manipulate the vast stores of data they collected, those means do not appear unusually sophisticated or powerful by European standards.Footnote 11 People survived for decades with fake papers. Some braved the risks and managed to get by without any papers at all, given the voracious demands for labour at the local industrial concerns. Even when government authorities identified people with the documents at their disposal, finding them often proved difficult. Well into the 1930s, the streets of Magnitogorsk had no names; the houses had no numbers. The single most effective housing programme, the one that apparently best satisfied people's needs and desires, was entirely private, the mud huts that sprang up against the government's desires. This was hardly an all-knowing administrative behemoth with an agent behind every lamp post, terrifying an atomised subject population.
Neither the use of the local police to keep identity records nor the workload was unusual. If the use of internal passports generally came to an end in the second half of the nineteenth century in most European countries, police forces and gendarmes across the continent struggled to keep population registers and identification systems current. Northern and central European countries kept particularly elaborate records.Footnote 12 At the turn of the twentieth century, the Berlin document registry housed records on some twelve million current and former residents. Names that began with the letter H filled ten rooms; the letter S filled fifteen.Footnote 13 In inter-war Paris, Republican authorities sent the political police door to door to check up on people and make sure their declarations were accurate – in principle, a much more authoritarian move than the Soviets initially made, though in practice much less so – and the volume of annual renewals so overwhelmed the administrative branch that it could never adequately keep up with the workload. Police forces around the world created special units to monitor groups they considered threatening to the established order. In some cases, like the special North African services in Paris, police and social hygiene programmes actively sought to create loyal, docile subjects out of colonial migrants with a mix of political surveillance and assistance.Footnote 14 The Soviet Union under Stalin was hardly the only country to adapt police measures initially created for vagabonds and other marginal groups to broader populations.Footnote 15
As in every society that has required identity documents, the new Soviet passport policy created a new market for them. Even, perhaps especially, in the Soviet Union under Stalin, passports became valuable commodities, among the first objects burglars stole from apartments. Escapees from the labour colony robbed the first people they encountered for their papers. According to the local newspaper, passports were ‘lost’ all the time. Reporting the loss allowed people to obtain legitimate new copies. In the mid 1930s it was not rare to see lists of twenty or more lost documents in the press. The need for legitimate papers influenced living arrangements, shaped people's most intimate relationships. People got married, or stayed married, to gain access to housing or other benefits, and they moulded themselves in accord with government priorities. Kotkin unearthed the revealing case of a man named Popik, who decided to change his social position from middle to poor peasant by making his own official seal.Footnote 16 It worked so well that he decided to go into the business of forging documents for others. He stole blank trade union booklets and membership cards and stole official stamps, and he produced a range of papers as needed. The local newspaper reported on a ‘factory for bogus documents’ (p. 100). Everyone knew where they could get papers, if only from reading the popular press.
The Soviet case was extreme, but it had analogues elsewhere. Forgers like Kotkin's Popik have plied their trade on a wide scale at least since the eighteenth century.Footnote 17 Immigrants routinely marry (or stay married) for residency permits, whether American green cards, UK visas or French cartes de séjour. There is likewise no shortage of cases of border crossers internalising the values of the receiving country to gain entry, most of the time, however, very differently from Popik, who became a ‘poor peasant’ to increase his odds of preferential treatment. Rather than convincing authorities they were authentic workers or the poorest of peasants, most migrants have had to allay fears they would become dangerous agitators or public charges, from the Chinese immigrants who sought to convince American border guards in the early twentieth century that they fitted the category ‘other than workers’, to avoid §6 of the Exclusion Law of 1882, to the Vietnamese in the late 1970s who desperately sought to convince border guards in receiving countries that they were in fact ‘boat people’ and not workers in search of jobs.Footnote 18 Since the late 1990s the ‘best’ position for poor people without papers has been to be gravely ill, to avoid zero immigration policies by making claims on the basis of specific forms of suffering recognised by host societies. Western democracies have (again) closed their doors to workers but left them open, in very rare cases, to victims of rape, torture, and HIV-AIDS.Footnote 19 For those caught up in these systems, efforts to mark boundaries of various kinds have powerfully shaped subjectivities and life chances.
What makes the Soviet case unusual is the reach of these documentary controls. They touched nearly everyone – more than 27 million in the Russian Federation alone by 1934 – and not only relatively small groups of immigrants and asylum seekers.Footnote 20 Identity cards and population registers were tied to a rationing system for housing and other goods in the Soviet Union that was abandoned elsewhere after the First World War. In this sense, the Soviet Union took measures used widely in the so-called national security states of First World War Europe and kept them after the war, revolution, and civil war.Footnote 21 If population registers abounded across the continent, state-owned housing and controlled economies did not. This gave the Soviet state a power over ordinary people vastly greater than most other governments enjoyed. The propiska system did more than merely record residence. Unlike its counterparts elsewhere, that system authorised people to occupy a housing unit with a big red stamp, conspicuously recorded in the internal passports people had to keep with them at all times. Without official permission, that is, people could not legally occupy any kind of residence. The local police could, and did, refuse to register people who fell afoul of their employers or the state. People informed on one another to settle scores, but also to empty a coveted housing unit or compromise a workplace rival.
By comparative standards, this level of popular participation was quite extraordinary. The Soviet system embraced a much wider swath of the population, and it embraced them more completely, than any of its counterparts. Where the Paris police cultivated concierges and café waiters, their Soviet counterparts relied on everyone. The Soviet system could not function without the input of ordinary people. There was not an NKVD agent behind every mud hut, on every factory floor, in every communal apartment. For all its ambition and size, the Soviet state was simply not big enough for that kind of control: only the camps and the Gulag had such asymmetrical relations of power that they could compel people to act with physical force. Everywhere else, government controls required at least the tacit consent and constant participation of ordinary people. Kotkin's treatment of the relationship between coercion and consent resembles work by Robert Gellately and others on the Nazi terror system, which stressed the relatively small numbers of Gestapo agents and the major role played by popular participation, especially denunciations, played. But Kotkin refused to accept the social historians’ (and Gellately’s) insistence on the primacy of civil society.Footnote 22
Magnetic Mountain amply documented the Soviet state's ability to reach people in their everyday, intimate lives. Some of the most suggestive passages of the book detail the ways in which ordinary people engaged with the regime and its values. Social identities, the ones recorded on the endless torrent of forms, were not simply decreed in Moscow and imposed by force. They were ultimately validated and legitimised by everyday exchanges in which ordinary people took part. Reporting one's work history became a common practice, a way to define one's self and make claims on the community. Those histories were constantly reported in public, and people took their identities as workers seriously. The government encouraged, ‘evenings of remembrances’; it commissioned interviews and collected memoirs with the never realised goal of producing a history of the new steel town. People recounted their social origins, their political pasts, their work histories, often to confess. The local newspaper published their accounts. In one of them an electrician named Gabaiduli wrote:
I am a Tatar. Before October, in old tsarist Russia, we weren't even considered people. We couldn't even dream about education, or getting a job in a state enterprise. And now I’m a citizen of the USSR . . .
Two years ago I worked as the chairman of a village soviet in the Tatar republic . . .
In 1931 I came to Magnitogorsk. From a common labourer I have turned into a skilled worker. I was elected a member of the city soviet. As a deputy, every day I receive workers who have questions or need help. I listen to each one like to my own brother, and try to do what is necessary to make each one satisfied.
I live in a country where one feels like living and learning. And if the enemy should attack this country, I will sacrifice my life in order to destroy the enemy and save my country (p. 221)
Here we see the importance of nationality and its relationship to the regime as well as the ubiquitous references to working-class status. Gabaiduli appears to have internalised the regime's values and ideological categories. But Kotkin hedged on the electrician's ability to fashion himself in his own terms. Did Gabaiduli actually write the letter that appeared in the newspaper? Did he mean what he said? Why did he say what he did, or allow his name to be used in the first place? Does it matter? Kotkin insisted, ultimately, that it does not. What mattered, for him, was that people acted as though they believed in public.
People learned to speak and act according to a complex set of rules, but their ability to manipulate those rules remained unclear in Kotkin's account. In perhaps the single most striking piece of evidence he presents, culled from the Magnitogorsk history project archives, a lengthy unpublished letter from a woman who declares her husband the best locomotive driver in the internal factory transport, the author berates another woman whose husband, the former insists, is the worst, a complete and utter failure both as a worker and as a man. The author wrote that her husband was a model worker, took others under his wing, kept his locomotive clean, constantly hit his targets and economised on fuel; he was known as a ‘shock worker’ and enjoyed special housing and numerous awards. The other woman's husband, the author pointed out, suffered repeated breakdowns; his locomotive was dirty. Given his multiple failures, he did not deserve respect or assistance. ‘Therefore, I ask you, Marfa, to talk to your husband heart to heart, read him my letter. You, Marfa, explain to Iakov Stepanovich that he just can't go on working the way he has’ (p. 219). People spied. They denounced one another, sometimes surely out of fear or self-interest – notice the accuser lived in special housing and received benefits as the wife of a ‘shock worker’ – sometimes out of conviction. For Kotkin, what mattered was that they did so while ‘speaking Bolshevik’, whether or not they had any input into its vocabulary and syntactical structure. Ordinary people used the regime's ideological goals against it, to carve out space for themselves, to hold onto whatever property they could and control their own, apparently quite bourgeois, domestic arrangements. It remains unclear why they behaved as they did. Were they trying to hold onto a job, get a better apartment, a place in school for their children, or did they mean what they said? What sources and traditions did believers draw upon? What kind of choice did they have? Without exploring ordinary people's choices and motivations more fully, without finding ideological resources beyond state authority, Kotkin stopped short of understanding the development of Soviet power and subjectivity in fully Foucauldian terms.
Recent research has followed Foucault more closely, blurring the distinction between state and society and studied the nature of individual subjectivity in authoritarian regimes. Halfin and Hellbeck, for example, have more fully explored ordinary people's ability to fashion themselves in the USSR. They showed that the language of self did not originate in a preformed ideological liturgy, imposed from above, but borrowed from pre-revolutionary traditions that people manipulated in their own terms. They took more seriously Foucault's interest in broad discursive formations beyond the control of the sovereign. Mary Fulbrook's notion of the ‘honeycomb state’ in East Germany provided a much more diffuse, Foucauldian view of power relations than Kotkin employed in Magnetic Mountain. Perhaps because she examined the so-called ‘participatory dictatorship’ over its entire existence and not only its most intensely coercive period, she presented a wider array of power structures than Kotkin did, in a wider range of sites, which operated according to different rules. Fulbrook distinguished between the relatively small power elite and the massive numbers of people who served in a diverse series of official and unofficial capacities to understand ordinary people's complex, contradictory motivations, which included ideological sympathy with the regime that went beyond pragmatic self-interest; their ideals often overlapped with authorities’ but came from sources outside the regime's control.Footnote 23
For all his attention to everyday life and his recognition that Soviet power mixed brutality and benefits, Kotkin ultimately relied on a state-society distinction that recalls the totalitarian school. If they were not the passive, atomised, isolated masses portrayed by Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), ordinary people nevertheless followed rules set in advance by central authorities. Throughout the book, Kotkin stressed the over-riding power of politics and an ideology handed down from Moscow, backed with the threat of violence, ‘without discussion beforehand and with little opportunity to give direct voice to reservations afterward’ (p. 356). This perspective limited his ability to analyse the subjectivity of ordinary people, but it provided the most sophisticated account I have seen of the descent into terror in the 1930s in a concrete, local setting. In his final chapter, really a book unto itself, Kotkin identified the origins of the terror in the interaction of ideology with the particular nature of the party-state in the midst of an international crisis. He is especially convincing about conflicts like those between local Party bosses, in principle the most powerful local officials with control of the press, and factory directors, who controlled all economic resources from housing to food supply and were generally men of much higher standing in the Party union-wide. Local authorities were kept on their guard by Moscow's chaotic but ultimately successful efforts to achieve tighter control of provincial Party machines.
Soviet authorities were overwhelmingly powerful. Under Stalin, both the civil and the political police used the passport system to purge selected cities and other sensitive areas of groups they deemed undesirable, whether merely ‘antisocial’ or ‘counter-revolutionary’, ‘kulak’, or the catch-all, ‘anti-Soviet elements’. Even before the terror, many hundreds of thousands of people were caught up in police sweeps of cities, industrial areas like Magnitogorsk, border zones, and other strategic locations; Soviet police monitored everyone, not only political opponents, immigrants or criminals.Footnote 24
During the great purges, overlapping jurisdictions and bureaucratic infighting drove a process of cumulative radicalisation. Unlike Paris in the Third Republic, where the use of the elite political branch (Renseignements généraux) to enforce residency restrictions curbed police abuse – it took years to make the grade, and officers risked careers by overstepping their orders – their Soviet counterparts, the NKVD, played a central role in the terror and used the passport system to do so. With orders from Moscow, the secular arm of the government took over and extended an inquisition launched by the Party, and deadly violence became much more common: nearly 400,000 killed in one and a half years and hundreds of thousands more were imprisoned.Footnote 25 People got away, to be sure. Arrests were often arbitrary and resulted from personal grudges, and yet they required the sanction of a state procurator. Charges were brought under specific sections of the Criminal Code. The chaos followed a certain perverse logic.
III
Soviet authorities drew on the radical traditions of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe. They had faith in the power of science and technology to harness nature and in the power of government to improve people's lives. Rational planning, they thought, would replace the waste and irrational allocation of resources under capitalism, with its devastating economic downturns. Indeed they had faith in the power of government to transform the human species.
Kotkin sees these aspirations, and the Soviet plans to create a planned socialist steel town which they informed, as the logical culmination of the Enlightenment tradition. In the framing sections of the introduction and conclusion, he presents Stalinism as the most extreme and internally coherent version of a movement that spread across the continent after the First World War – state-centred efforts to impose order on a messy, chaotic social order, what James Scott has called ‘high modernism’.Footnote 26 In contrast to the cold warriors who saw it as the product of Russian backwardness or oriental despotism, the Soviet Union, for Kotkin, was a model welfare state, essentially similar to its counterparts across the continent, an ideal type and not some sort of laggard or deviant. He inverted those cold war claims:
Rather than being viewed as a pathological case . . . the USSR in a narrative of the welfare state might appear as the standard whose uncanny success challenged the rest of the world to respond. More than in any other country, Stalinism seemed to bring together the elements of what was then the prevalent conception and experience of ‘progressive modernity’ . . . the main reason that the USSR needs to be reincorporated into European history is that Stalinism constituted a quintessential Enlightenment utopia . . . (pp. 20, 364).
And again, in the book's concluding lines:
In the lands of the former USSR, the welfare state centered on large factories has outlasted the institutionally redundant Communist party, but it is in deep crisis. Rather than as a cause for comfort or self-congratulation, this crisis might better be seen as also our own (p. 366).
To present the planned city of Magnitogorsk as a quintessential Enlightenment utopia is to draw on one strand of Enlightenment thought at the expense of others that were at least equally important and without which the movement as a whole would be unrecognisable. Kant, in particular, would be turning over in his grave. This one-sided account of the Enlightenment marked the next generation of historians, many of whom have adopted its perspective, presenting the Soviet Union as violent, to be sure, but within the Western mainstream, almost ‘normal’.Footnote 27 Since the 1990s, a dark, postmodern reading of the Enlightenment has stressed the all-controlling, repressive, panoptic, if not downright genocidal nature of all modern states. Ideologically driven mass violence perpetrated by a very small number of powerful states, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union above all, has been turned into a paradigm for understanding modern life altogether. We have done away with the self-congratulatory triumphalism of cold war liberals but held onto an untenable, teleological vision of Western civilization.Footnote 28
There is certainly ample cause for alarm. Welfare states are in crisis everywhere, in more serious peril now than they were when Kotkin wrote. But the relationship between ‘our own’ problems, whoever ‘we’ are, and the Stalin dictatorship remains obscure. It seems odd, moreover, given Kotkin's attention to context and ideology, to the unique civilization he saw emerge in Stalin's Soviet Union, to conclude Magnetic Mountain by dismissing that uniqueness. His concept of modernity made too much of the similarities in the tools modern states use and not enough out of how those tools are used, the power and discipline of the state that wielded them, or the ideologies that inspired their use. It confused an extreme, historically rare case with a norm.Footnote 29
Foucault himself rejected this sort of monolithic view of modernity. When confronted by the Italian journalist Duccio Trombadori about minimising distinctions between democratic and totalitarian societies, Foucault denied ever having done so:
Of course techniques of power can be transposed . . . But I have never suggested that a mechanism of power can suffice to characterize a society.
The concentration camps? They are said to be an English invention; but that does not mean that England was a totalitarian country. If there is a country in European history that was not totalitarian, it is certainly England . . . [I] have never said or considered that the existence of concentration camps, in both democratic and totalitarian countries alike, means that there are no differences between the two.Footnote 30
The Gulag, Foucault insisted elsewhere, should not be decontextualised and used as a model for modernity at large:
I am indeed concerned by a certain use that is made of the Gulag . . . A certain use that consists in saying: ‘we all have our own Gulag; the Gulag is here at our door, in our cities, our hospitals, our prisons; it's here in our heads.’ . . . The Gulag is not a question to be posed for any and every country. It has to be posed for every socialist country, insofar as none of these since 1917 has managed to function without a more-or-less developed Gulag system.Footnote 31
Foucault grew up in conservative, provincial Poitiers in the 1940s, where local notables passed easily from supporting the collaborationist Vichy regime to the Fourth Republic, and a great deal of his most important work sought indirectly to deflate their claims to have made a complete break with the past. Foucault spoke of an ‘ambient Vichyism’ pervading post-war France that served as a point of departure for his desire to theorise.Footnote 32 He saw important connections, resemblances and continuities of practice between democracies and dictatorships, and he often courted confusion.Footnote 33 But he recognised the problem of blurring the boundary between the two. When challenged, he fell back on a Kantian emphasis on the rational standards of critique and the historical method, insisting that in his empirical work he always restricted himself to precise and locally delimited phenomena in discrete historical contexts.
Past a certain point, differences of degree become differences of kind. If population control systems always set up unequal relations between those being watched and those doing the watching, and we can think of different states on a continuum in terms of their capacity to embrace ordinary people in their documentary webs, surely the Soviet system was among the most powerful, an outlier by any meaningful definition, an extreme case. The extraordinary breadth of Soviet ambition meant that the documentary controls it established had a greater power than those in force elsewhere, and the content of that ambition further distinguished the Soviet case. No other state set out to remake an entire society in anything like the same terms. Kotkin at least implicitly recognised as much in his departure from Foucault's philosophy of power.
The great merit of Magnetic Mountain was to examine everyday life in richly satisfying detail, to look beyond formal institutions and draw attention to a range of political activity that scholars had overlooked. It showed how population control measures like passports and ration cards, mundane administrative practices that all modern states employ, shaped patterns of inclusion and exclusion, and ultimately how they figured in the terror. Kotkin identified gentle means of punishment every bit as central to Soviet rule as physical force and invited us to think seriously about the relationship between liberal and authoritarian rule. Above all, he evoked Stalinism in all its strangeness. If others have travelled further down some of the paths it opened up, Magnetic Mountain provided a wonderfully compelling account of the Soviet state's ability to influence people's everyday lives and showed how those people struggled to evade, adopt new identities, and adapt. It showed how, together, if in profoundly unequal terms, they dealt with a wide range of common problems and created something fundamentally new.
