Neal Stephenson: evaluation

Transcript context

…Do you, like me, also want to go there, or is this somewhere you want to stay away from? Assuming you could go safely, forget about the current war and the like. Yes, if I could go safely, it would be interesting to see, for sure. But obviously, I’m not setting foot in Russia anytime soon. The story, for those who don’t know it, is that Stalin said, “I want the world’s biggest steel mill,” and at the time, it was Gary, Indiana. So they just got the numbers on Gary, Indiana, and increased them by, I don’t know, 10 percent, and started working on this huge steel mill in this place called Magnitogorsk, which means magnetic mountain, which is in the Urals out in the middle of nowhere and called magnetic mountain because it’s an incredibly rich load of iron ore. In a pretty short time, they built this giant steel-mill complex, which still exists, and the city has grown up around it. I imagine that a lot of what made it interesting in 1933 is probably gone now. But I did go to Volgograd once, which got a few things in common with Magnitogorsk, I guess, the former Stalingrad. I don’t know Russia well, but some part of me feels that the Soviet Union and America had more in common in the 1930s than they ever had before or have had since. Does that make sense to you at all? What is that something?…

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