Vladimir Tikhonov
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These photos are from Kuznetsk of the early 1930s. The Party was building a huge metal works there. The design was done by Americans: Freyn Engineering Company was working there until 1933. Both Americans and Soviet engineers and cadres were living in decent redbrick houses. The workers, however, inhabited the barracks and dugouts, like the ones you can see below. The thing was that there was NO budget at all assigned for workers' housing in the beginning. In a word, the workers were asked to arrange their housing themselves in the best way they could. The result resembled....yes, exactly, the slums one could find in the developing countries of East Asia and which still are in abundance in, say, Latin America. The workers, for the most part, were former peasants who fled collectivization.
The more one studies early Soviet history the more one is struck by obvious similarity one finds there with the developmental regimes otherwise known as "normal" capitalist, especially on the (semi-)periphery.
There collectivised/runaway peasants were Stalin's internal quasi-colony, of sorts - they were to be squeezed hardest in the process of Soviet-style primitive accumulation.
And then you find slums, (forced/unpaid) overwork, sky-high industrial accident rate, horrible child mortality and extremely tangible inequality between the different categories of employees (uneducated/unskilled vs educated/skilled) literary inhabiting different worlds - just like in South Korea in the 1960-70s. Just forget for a moment the "socialist" label and you will see just a very, very typical early industrial capitalism - with all its horrors.
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