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• W4377694174 abstract "technology and culture Book Reviews 541 only what they wanted to see” and “be deceived because they wanted to be deceived” (p. 317)? Resolution of such differences is the stuff of fruitful scholarly exchange. This is a fine book. Patrick Dale Dr. Dale, assistant professor of political science at St. Olaf College, is currently preparing a monograph on industrial workers and the Communist party during the First Five-Year Plan. He has published articles on this subject and on Gorbachev’s Perestroika in Soviet Studies and Soviet Union!Union Soviétique. The Generation of Power: The History of Dneprostroi. By Anne D. Rassweiler . New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Pp. viii + 247; illustrations, tables, notes, bibliography, index. $32.50. In The Generation of Power, Anne Rassweiler presents a fascinating account of the planning and construction of the massive Dneprostroi hydroelectric project, a showcase of Stalinist industrialization. She poses the question: “How congruent was the goal of industrialization with that of building socialism?” (p. 7). Her answer—that it was not, and that it had more to do with state building—is neither new nor surprising. What is distinctive about this book is the way in which it uses a case study to further our comprehension of the social forces, including those related to technology, associated with Stalinist indus­ trialization. Although the book is not always free of the problems characteristic of its genre, it nonetheless refines and, at times, revises the way we think about this important period. The first part of the book examines the historical background of the construction project, Soviet-era decision-making and planning pro­ cesses, and the project’s operational implementation. The discussion reinforces Kendall Bailes’s view that, although technical specialists and party leaders (starting with Lenin) shared a common interest in industrialization, the imposition of Stalinist tempos meant the aban­ donment of the principle of technological rationality in industrial planning and production. These developments help explain much of Stalin’s hostility toward bourgeois specialists during the First Five-Year Plan, but, as Rass­ weiler shows in her treatment of A. V. Vintner, the nonparty bour­ geois specialist who was appointed in early 1927 to manage Dnepro­ stroi, a countermodel of regime-specialist accommodation existed. In short, enthusiasm for industrialization, coupled with a technocratic faith in his capacity to overcome any difficulties, prompted Vintner to advocate “optimum” construction plans that “corresponded with those of Stalin and his faction.” These views, which Rassweiler says (on the basis of rather thin documentation) also characterized the thinking of many of Vintner’s contemporaries in the engineering TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE 542 Book Reviews profession, “provided strong impetus for expansion of the industrial plan” (pp. 73-74). At the very least, Vintner’s career, and especially his long tenure as director despite some costly failures that might easily have spelled his ruin, is a remarkable story that underscores the need to examine more closely Stalin’s cadre policies. The social processes associated with the construction of Dneprostroi are examined in the last half of the book. Here, Rassweiler is chiefly interested in the immense, and largely unintended, conse­ quences of Stalinist tempos on the composition of the labor force and on changes in labor markets, work processes, managerial authority, and party-worker relations. She stresses the manner in which social factors, including a largely unskilled work force and a chaotic labor market, frustrated all efforts to assert rationality at both the planning (in terms of resource and labor force allocations) and the operational (in terms of the adoption of advanced technology and designs) levels. One-man management, as well as authoritarian and mobilizational labor policies such as Stakhanovism, shock work, and workbooks, were largely ineffective, ad hoc responses aimed at improving labor discipline and industrial productivity. Rassweiler shows that, because managers were under the gun to meet unrealistic construction targets, deficits in the supply of skilled labor and spare parts encour­ aged them to take the expedient step of substituting masses of unskilled laborers for machines, even when the latter were available. The result, of course, was the development of an extremely inefficient and wasteful labor-extensive form of work organization that is characteristic of Soviet industry to this..." @default.
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• W4377694174 title "The Generation of Power: The History of Dneprostroi by Anne D. Rassweiler" @default.
• W4377694174 doi "https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.1990.0034" @default.
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