Industrial Deserts

 "Would Trotsky Wear a Bluetooth?” by Paul Josephson, 2010

Review, Part 2

In the latter part of the book Josephson addresses nuclear programs imported from the USSR into East Central Europe as large examples of what he calls ‘gigantomania.' The Soviet nuclear program began near Arkhangelsk in the north and instead of the Bikini Atoll, used the huge Novaia Zemlia islands as the test sites. They are located far northwest of St. Petersburg between the Barents and Kara arctic seas. This program he terms 'nuclear hubris' for its wide-ranging confidence in nuclear power as some kind of cure-all.  He investigates North Korea’s adoption of Soviet methods, then their ‘refinement’ in the autarkic ‘juche’ ideology - Korean for “self-reliance”. North Korea had to be rebuilt after the Korean War, as its infrastructure and cities were literally leveled by U.S. bombers. Then projects expanded to extraordinary and flawed levels. To give an idea of the autarkic slant, in 1992 the Korean Workers Party removed ‘Marxism-Leninism’ from their Constitution and replaced it with Juche.

Josephson looks into the massive ecological damage of various building, energy and agricultural projects in the USSR, a familiar issue. This especially occurred in the southern Urals, creating what he terms ‘industrial deserts.’ He has an extraordinary section on worker safety – and its absence - and one on the gains and losses of feminism in the USSR due to the failures of consumer commodity production and the reality of the second shift.

Josepheson’s main focus – repetition actually – is the post-capitalist preference for massive industrial projects, the bigger the better. The repetition I think is because each chapter is supposed to stand on its own, or was originally published that way. He repeatedly notes the early use of forced and convict labor or terrible working conditions, as much work was done using massed labor with hand tools. Hundreds of thousands died building the Belomor Baltic-White Sea Canal for instance, while gulag and ex-peasant labor built Siberian roads, mines, factories and towns. Skilled workers and good equipment were in short supply everywhere.  Khrushchev, Brezhnev and Co. mitigated some of the brutal methods after Stalin, yet large industrial projects with human, environmental and social damage continued. The first real inklings of environmental policy related to development were issued under Khrushchev. But rules are made to be broken and were ignored or not prosecuted. He contends the issues finally became more public under Gorbachev. He blames what a Marxist would call a ‘lack of workers’ democracy’ and holistic science for the heedless top-down state-led methods of development.

Those methods put priority on making unrealistic production goals - not labor safety, environmental concerns or public benefits. In one key chapter he points out that a lack of light-industry 'commodities' hit women – whose domain was the home – especially hard. While the USSR was on paper and in some ways light years ahead of capital on women's issues, simple things like contraceptives, menstrual pads or a lack of labor saving devices like home vacuums, decent washers or refrigerators made women's 2^nd shift life especially difficult. Polluted city water, a key to domestic life, didn't help. He focuses on Alexandra Kollontai in this regard, but the early feminist plans of the Bolsheviks were partly reversed in 1936 under Stalin's “Great Break” when, among other things, abortion was recriminalized, 'bastardy' revived and divorce made more difficult. The Bolshevik women's organization was disbanded in the 1932, as the 'women's question' had been solved according to the Nomeklatura. No one asked the women workers of course.

Hard Hats

Josephson has an extraordinary detailed chapter on health and safety at work, especially in the northern tundra regions – fishing, forestry, mining, road and rail building, factories, foundries, canals, dams, water diversions. Safety gear was almost absent – no eye or ear protection, no hard hats, no masks, no prohibition of alcohol, not even decent gloves, boots or clothing. Workers, sailors and lumberjacks were to make do. Food, housing and medical care were an afterthought.  He contends alcohol was one of the main drivers of absenteeism, accidents, fines and high turnover, as workers would drown their sorrows in vodka. The reason for drink was obvious. He describes a plague of accidents in the nuclear, shipping, rail and auto/truck industries due to lack of education, poor workmanship, shoddy building materials (watered-down concrete and poorly-made steel), drunkenness and absurd top-down production requirements that forced groups to take damaging and deadly risks. Productivity and production were divorced in the bureaucratic planner's thinking, except in the concept of speed-up. Even driving became hazardous, as car accidents and dead pedestrians were common. Any laws that existed were not enforced in the name of production and a macho culture of 'unsafety.'

The indigenous reindeer, hunting and fishing peoples – the Nenets, Chukchi, Komi, Guldi and Saami - were removed or forced to become laborers in these areas.

Sverdlovsk after 1979 Anthrax leak

Deserts?

According to him, in the Ural mountains, “a vast, toxic rust belt of chemical, metallurgical and nuclear factories and extractive industries spewed smoke, acid and poison into the air, water and land over decades.” 100K hectares of vegetation became denuded. The worst was Cheliabinsk province, where according to him 500K hectares had become an 'industrial desert' by the mid-1980s. This was 'the forge' of the Soviet Union and it is one of the reasons why the Soviets defeated the Nazi armies in the '40s. In these industrial zones the Soviets did not provide adequate housing, education, medical care, entertainment or food. This even though the USSR set up the first forest preserve in the world in 1920. In the 1980s attempts were made to reclaim these brownlands in the Urals around Sverdlovsk, trying to mitigate the damage to water, soil and forests. In the collective farms they used 3-5 times the pesticides and herbicides that a farm in the U.S. would do, due to soil problems. Putin disbanded the Russian environmental protection agency in 2000, so the situation retains a certain similarity.

On the tundra and Siberian zones, toxic nuclear waste was buried under lakes and soil. One, Lake Karachai, held 24 times the radioactive material released at Chernobyl.

As to solutions, Josephson finally says a ‘publicly-controlled nuclear program’ is his aim. He thinks whistle blowers, environmental groups, health & safety laws, lawsuits and an open muck-raking press are the solution – all partly found in the advanced capitalist countries. He does not go beyond that, so his solutions are pretty vanilla considering the dire production, environmental and health issues we face even with those patches to capitalist production. He does not mention independent unions as antidotes to workplace health problems. They were banned in the USSR and other transitional, post-capitalist bureaucratic workers' states.  He does not note that Trotsky's Left Opposition supported independent unions in workers' states. Union's enforce workplace safety standards in capitalist countries … or should. It is clear he's kind of a left-liberal supporter of the New Deal.

All together a good purgative for those 100% cheerleaders of the Soviet Union or its knock-offs, as the book reveals the contradictory character of the USSR, North Korea and the East Central former states. It is also a counter-active to the somewhat rosy Soviet environmentalism of Monthly Review . Josephson even waded through many previously unread volumes of information on Soviet industry in the USSR as part of the research for this book.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 16 year archive, using these terms: "Red Gas," “Kollontai," "environmentalism," "technology" or “New Dark Age – Technology and the End of the Future,” “Scorched Earth – Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World,” “Fully-Automated Luxury Communism,” “Shrinking the Technosphere” (Orlov); “Bit Tyrants – the Political Economy of Silicon Valley,” “The New, New Thing – A Silicon Valley Story” (M. Lewis); “The Circle and the Snake: Nostalgia and Utopia in the Age of Technology,” “Democracy, Planning, Big Data," "Art of the Soviets."

And I bought it at the excellent cut-out section at May Day Books!

Red Frog

October 23, 2023