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The results were visible, tangible. Impressive new buildings were rising, new cities in process of creation, new infrastructure under construction. In Moscow, new brick-and-concrete blocks of worker housing replaced ramshackle wooden building in the suburbs, overshadowing neglected monasteries and churches. A handsome underground-railway system was excavated beneath the city, equipped with deep, fast escalators and stations like palaces with their marble halls and striking statuary — palaces for the people. Across the continent new cities rose up with vast industrial plants. New canals were being cut, dams constructed, rivers diverted, and ‘palaces of culture’ erected in towns and even villages for the entertainment and instruction of the people. On dozens of different sites across the vast terrain, virgin lands were turned into swarming ants’-nests of activity as the regime mobilized the population to meet the overambitious targets that would at last realize the country’s immense potential. On one site just east of the Urals the whole amazing process could be observed in little —

a strange combination of soaring ambition, driving energy, faltering and sometimes highly defective execution, large-scale building, hard and primitive living conditions, idealism and ruthlessness.

Magnitogorsk at first conveys a confused series of impressions: heaps of bricks, timber, sand, earth and other building material, thrown about in characteristically Russian disorderly fashion; long lines of low wooden barracks for the construction labourers; towering new industrial structures, with belching smokestacks … The town is a product of ultramodern industrialization, yet … one’s first impression is that of an Asiatic city. ²⁷

Never before had so many resources and so much human energy been concentrated to realize impossibly ambitious plans in so short a time. The achievement was great; so was the human cost. The labour for big projects in the wilderness was found from the twin offspring of revolution: the enthusiastic believers and the sullen hordes of the oppressed. The cheerleaders of the enthusiasts were the Young Communists, who, in the words of an American observer at Magnitogorsk, were

always ready to fling themselves into the breach if some part of the building were lagging, willing to work under the hardest material conditions without reckoning hours … [But] at the other end of the scale were the unfortunate kulaks … who, after being stripped of their possessions, were sent here, sometimes with their families, to work for the success of a system that is based on their ruin.

The working day was long, wages low, rations minimal, the barrack-type housing primitive and sometimes miles away from the site. It was ‘the same story at the Chehabinsk tractor plant, at the Berezniki chemical works, at the Dnieprostroi hydroelectric power plant’ and, for that matter at the heavy-machine-building plant at Sverdlovsk, the iron and coal complex at Kuznetsk in central Siberia, the agricultural-machine factory at Rostov-on-Don, the motor-vehicle plant at Nizhnii-Novgorod. ²⁸

At the same time an 8o-mile canal was being cut to link Moscow directly to the Volga; others were cut across the Kola Peninsula to Murmansk in the far north, and to connect Lake Onega (and hence Moscow) with the White Sea. This last project, where conditions were among the harshest, was built by political prisoners, enemies of the regime. The Gulag system, which had its origins in the penal colonies of tsarist Russia, was much expanded; the camps were more rigorously run than their forerunners, and the death rate in the worst of them was very high. The largest lay north and east of Yakutsk, near the Kolyma goldfields. ²⁹

The first Five Year Plan, introduced in 1929, did not quite meet its ambitious targets, but its purpose was ultimately achieved. Modern industries were built. Moreover, the new factories and steel plants could be used to make tanks and various other types of military hardware — and much of this capability was well out of reach of potential enemies to the east as well as the west. Even though consultants had occasionally been hired from the West, and some contracts were even let to Western companies, the operation was inefficient by Western standards — sometimes highly inefficient — but the regime could use media manipulation to assign blame for these failings and encourage improvement.