Stephen Kotkin: evaluation

Transcript context

…Now, in the 1980s, you went to live in Magnitogorsk in the Ural Mountains. Other than your work and your curiosity as a historian of Soviet Union, what was the best thing about living there, just as a citizen of Magnitogorsk? Was there anything you liked? For sure. It was a harsh environment. Pollution wouldn’t begin to describe the orange air in the town. It was a one-company town, one-industry town. They had a gigantic integrated steel plant, and they had next to no pollution controls because they had installed pollution controls, but they didn’t use them because it lowered their output, and they were paid and got their bonuses based on quantitative output. The place was harsh as harsh could be, but at the same time, the people were astonishing. There is something that, for foreigners, is really captivating about all Slavic cultures, the Russian one included, which is the degree of hospitality and the warmth inside people’s homes. Outside there’s mismanagement, corruption, unbreathable air, undrinkable water, no places to shop because the goods have all been stolen. But inside people’s homes, there’s everything and anything, in a modest way because the size is not comparable to the kind of middle-class life we would imagine here or in Europe or in Japan. Inside, despite the constrained circumstances in terms of the amount of space, the warmest and best people you could imagine, and the conversation, which was about novels and plays and poetry and science and the meaning of life and philosophical terms. That was even before you started drinking. Now, the early plans of Magnitogorsk — they incorporated various ideas of utopian urban design. Did any of those come to fruition? Did you see any of that when you were actually living there, like a rationally constructed and built city along some kind of different principles?…

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