Rapid industrialization of the USSR

Rapid industrialization of the USSR was not merely an effort to increase production: in the book’s account, the drive beginning in 1928 sought to remake the composition of Soviet society. It stands at the center of a difficult argument about the October Revolution: the transformation’s radical and emancipatory impetus cannot be separated from the violence of its Stalinist outcome, yet neither can that outcome be reduced to a mere deviation from the revolutionary project.

An Alternative Modernity

The book places Soviet industrialization alongside fascism as a major twentieth-century attempt to construct an alternative modernity. Both projects claimed to offer a route distinct from standard Anglo-American liberal capitalism. This comparison does not make their political purposes equivalent; it identifies how the language of multiple modernities can obscure the antagonism built into modernity itself, especially its entanglement with capitalism. Soviet industrialization, in this reading, was not simply a different national version of an otherwise neutral process. It was an effort to transform society through a competing political and economic project.

From Emergency to Social Remaking

The chronology matters. Between 1917 and 1921, the whole of society was in a state of emergency, but the social texture remained largely intact. The Soviet New Economic Policy period then consolidated state power while leaving much of that texture in place. The decisive thrust came in 1928. Collectivization aimed to liquidate peasants as a class of individual owners, while the industrial drive displaced the old intelligentsia—teachers, doctors, scientists, engineers, and technicians—and made way for a new one.

Sheila Fitzpatrick’s comparison of Moscow gives this transformation a concrete scale. Someone who left the city in 1914 and returned in 1924 could still recognize its shops, offices, theaters, and, in most cases, the people in charge. Returning in 1934, that same observer would no longer recognize the texture of social life. The point is not simply that the city had acquired new institutions: the people, arrangements, and everyday structure of society had been profoundly altered. The book describes the push as terrible in its consequences, while also stressing that it carried a ruthless, sincere, and enthusiastic will to create a new state, intelligentsia, and legal system.

Revolution Turned Inward

The book treats this transformation as part of the internal dynamic of the October Revolution, rather than as an accidental departure from it. Its account therefore resists two explanations: that Stalinism was only a contingent betrayal, and that the Communist project was totalitarian at its core. The task, as framed here, is to hold together the revolution’s emancipatory potential and the historical necessity of its Stalinist outcome.

Isaac Deutscher’s account supplies a causal link between revolutionary isolation and domestic coercion. When the revolution failed to expand beyond the Soviet Union, its dynamic force, compressed within the country, turned inward and violently reshaped Soviet society. Forced industrialization and collectivization became substitutes for revolution’s spread abroad; the liquidation of the Russian kulaks became an Ersatz for overthrowing bourgeois rule elsewhere. On this interpretation, a project conceived as the first step in a pan-European revolution redirected its transformative energy toward the society it governed.

Production, Value, and Political Antagonism

The book’s theoretical discussion of Karl Marx helps clarify why industrialization cannot be understood through production alone. In its reading of Marx, value is grasped through a parallax between production and circulation, rather than by treating exchange as illusion and production as the sole site of truth. The planned economy’s failure to supply goods consumers needed, or its production of things nobody wanted, shows the cost of privileging production at the expense of consumption.

This account also distinguishes the material usefulness of an object from the social form it takes as a commodity. A wooden table remains wood as a useful thing, but, once it enters commodity relations, it acquires a value and position that cannot be explained by its physical properties alone. The book’s wider point is that form is not a superficial disguise to be stripped away in search of an underlying essence: the form itself is essential. Applied to Soviet industrialization, that caution keeps the transformation’s economic drive connected to its political struggle over the shape and control of society.