John Scott, A Day in Magnitogorsk. 1942
I was more or less warmed up by this time, so I pulled my scarf up around my face and went out after the two foremen. They had ascended a rickety wooden ladder and were walking along the blast-furnace foundation, looking at the tons and tons of structural steel in process of erection on all sides. Over their heads was a ten-foot diameter gas pipe, one section of which was not yet in place. To their left was the enormous conical box of the fourth blast furnace. They walked past this, and down through the cast house toward No. 3. A few dim bulbs cast a gray dawn around the job. Several scurrying figures could be seen – bricklayers, laborers, mechanics, electricians – getting things lined up for the day’s work. I caught up with them and the three of us climbed up to the top of No. 3. We found a little group of riveters standing silently around a shapeless form lying on the wooden scaffold. We discovered that it was the frozen riveter, and having ascertained that a stretcher had already been sent for to take the body down, we went on to the very top to look over the coming day’s work.
‘How’s school going?’ asked Ivanov. ‘You’ll be a technician pretty soon, won’t you, Kolya?’
‘It’s pretty tough studying when it’s as cold as this,’ said Kolya. ‘We have to take our gloves to the classroom with us. Not enough coal.’
‘Yeah, I know,’ said Ivanov sympathetically. ‘It’s tough studying; but then, what the hell! If you want to learn, you’ve got to work.’
By the time the seven o’clock whistle blew, the shanty was jammed full of riggers, welders, cutters, and their helpers. It was a varied gang, Russians, Ukrainians, Tartars, Mongols, Jews, mostly young and almost all peasants of yesterday, though a few, like Ivanov, had long industrial experience. There was Popov, for instance. He had been a welder for ten years and had worked in half a dozen cities. On the other hand, Khaibulin, the Tartar, had never seen a staircase, a locomotive, or an electric light until he had come to Magnitogorsk a year before. His ancestors for centuries had raised stock on the flat plains of Kazakhstan. They had been dimly conscious of the Czarist government; they had had to pay taxes. Reports of the Kirghiz insurrection in 1916 had reached them. They had heard stories of the October Revolution; they even saw the Red Army come and drive out a few rich landlords. They had attended meetings of the Soviet, without understanding very clearly what it was all about, but through all this their lives had gone on more or less as before. Now Shaimat Khaibulin was building a blast furnace bigger than any in Europe. He had learned to read and was attending an evening school, learning the trade of electrician. He had learned to speak Russian, he read newspapers. His life had changed more in a year than that of his antecedents since the time of Tamerlane.
Ivanov, Kolya, and I entered the shanty just as the whistle started to blow. The cutters’ brigadier was already in the center of the room assigning his men to their various places for the day. Welders were getting electrodes and buttoning up their coats. The burners were working over their hoses, swearing graphically as they found frozen spots or as disputes arose about torches, generators, or wrenches. By the time the whistle had finished blowing, most of the men had left the room, whistling cheerfully, kidding each other and swearing at the cold.
The foremen gathered around the table. The telephone rang incessantly – a welder was wanted at the blowing station, two of the riggers in the gang working on the open-hearth gas line had not come to work. The gang could not hoist the next section of pipe short-handed. Ivanov swore at the absentees, their mothers, and grandmothers. Then he went out to borrow two men from another gang. Kolya wrote out a list of the welders and what they were doing. He wrote it on newspaper. The ink was a semi-frozen slush. This list formed the basis on which the workers would get paid for the day’s work. He thrust it into his pocket and went to the clean gas line to see how things were going. I took my mask and electrodes and started out for No. 3. On the way I met Shabkov, the ex-kulak; a great husky youth with a red face, a jovial voice, and two fingers missing from his left hand.
‘Well, Jack, how goes it? he said, slapping me on the back.
My Russian was still pretty bad, but I could carry on a simple conversation and understood almost everything that was said.
‘Badly,’ I said. ‘All our equipment freezes. The boys spend half their time warming their hands.’
‘Nichevo, that doesn’t matter,’ said the disfranchised rigger’s brigadier. ‘If you lived where I do, in a tent, you wouldn’t think it so cold here.’
‘I know you guys have it tough,’ said Popov, who had joined us. ‘That’s what you get for being kulaks.’
Shabkov smiled broadly. ‘Listen, I don’t want to go into a political discussion, but a lot of the people living down in the “special” section of town are no more kulaks than you.’
Popov laughed. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised. Tell me, though How did they decide who was to be dekulakized?’
‘Ah,’ said Shabkov, ‘that’s a hell of a question to ask a guy that’s trying to expiate his crimes in honest labor. Just between the three of us, though, the poor peasants of the village get together in a meeting and decide: ‘So-and-so has six horses; we couldn’t very well get along without those in the collective farm; besides he hired a man last year to help on the harvest.’ They notify the GPU, and there you are. So-and-so gets five years. They confiscate his property and give it to the new collective farm. Sometimes they ship the whole family out. When they came to ship us out, my brother got a rifle and fired several shots at the GPU officers. They fired back. My brother was killed. All of which, naturally, didn’t make it any better for us. We all got five years, and in different places. I heard my father died in December, but I’m not sure.’
Shabkov got out his canvas tobacco pouch and a roll of newspaper, and thrust both toward Popov. ‘Kulak smoke?’ He smiled grimly.
Popov availed himself of the opportunity and rolled a cigarette.
‘Yes. A lot of things happen that we don’t hear much about. But then, after all, look at what we’re doing. In a few years now we’ll be ahead of everybody industrially. We’ll all have automobiles and there won’t be any differentiation between kulaks and anybody else.’ Popov swept his arm dramatically in the direction of the towering blast furnace. Then he turned to Shabkov. ‘Are you literate?’
‘Yes,’ said Shabkov, ‘I studied three years. I even learned a little algebra. But now, what the hell! Even if I were really well-educated, they wouldn’t let me do any other work but this. What’s the use of me studying? Anyhow, they won’t even let me in to any but an elementary school. When I get home from work I want to raise my elbow and have a good time.’ Shabkov touched his throat with his index finger, to any Russian a symbol of getting drunk. We arrived at No. 3. Shabkov swung onto a ladder and disappeared up into the steel. Popov looked after him with wrinkled forehead. Shabkov was one of the best brigadiers in the whole outfit. He spared neither himself nor those under him, and he used his head. And yet he was a kulak, serving a sentence, living in a section of town under the surveillance of the GPU, a class enemy. Funny business, that. Popov didn’t thoroughly understand it.
Popov and I set about welding up a section of the bleeder pipe on the blast furnace. He gave me a break and took the outside for the first hour. Then we changed around. From the high scaffolding, nearly a hundred feet above the ground, I could see Kolya making the rounds of his thirty-odd welders, helping them when they were in trouble, swearing at them when they spent too much time warming their hands. People swore at Kolya a good deal too, because the scaffolds were unsafe or the wages bad.
It was just about nine-fifteen when I finished one side of the pipe and went around to start the other. The scaffold was coated with about an inch of ice, like everything else around the furnaces. The vapor rising from the large hot-water cooling basin condensed on everything and formed a layer of ice. But besides being slippery, it was very insecure, swung down on wires, without any guys to steady it. It swayed and shook as I walked on it. I always made a point of hanging on to something when I could. I was just going to start welding when I heard someone sing out, and something swished down past me. It was a rigger who had been working up on the very top.
He bounced off the bleeder pipe, which probably saved his life’ Instead of falling all the way to the ground, he landed on the main platform about fifteen feet below me. By the time I got down to him, blood was coming out of his mouth in gushes. He tried to yell, but could not. There were no foremen around, and the half-dozen riggers that had run up did not know what to do. By virtue of being a foreigner I had a certain amount of authority, so I stepped in and said he might bleed to death if we waited for a stretcher, and three of us took him and carried him down to the first-aid station. About halfway there the bleeding let up and he began to yell every step we took.
I was badly shaken when we got there, but the two young riggers were trembling like leaves. We took him into the little wooden building, and a nurse with a heavy shawl over her white gown showed us where to put him. ‘I expect the doctor any minute,’ she said; ‘good thing, too, I wouldn’t know what the hell to do with him.’
The rigger was gurgling and groaning. His eyes were wide open and he seemed conscious, but he did not say anything. ‘We should undress him, but it is so cold in here that I am afraid to,’ said the nurse. Just then the doctor came in. I knew him. He had dressed my foot once when a piece of pig iron fell on it. He took his immense sheepskin off and washed his hands. ‘Fall?’ he asked, nodding at the rigger.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘How long ago?
‘About ten minutes!
‘What’s that?’ asked the doctor, looking at the nurse and indicating the corner of the room with his foot. I looked and for the first time noticed a pair of ragged valenkis sticking out from under a very dirty blanket on the floor.
‘Girder fell on his head,’ said the nurse.
‘Well,’ said the doctor, rolling up his sleeves, ‘let’s see what we can do for this fellow.’ He moved over toward the rigger. who was lying quietly now and looking at the old bearded doctor with watery blue eyes. I turned to go, but the doctor stopped me.
‘On your way out, please telephone the factory board of health and tell them I simply must have more heat in this place,’ he said.
I did the best I could over the telephone in my bad Russian, but all I could get was, ‘Comrade, we are sorry, but there is no coal.’
I was making my way unsteadily back to the bleeder pipe on No. 3 when Kolya hailed me. ‘Don’t bother to go up for a while, the brushes burnt out on the machine you were working on. They won’t be fixed for half an hour or so.’ I went toward the office with Kolya and told him about the rigger. I was incensed and talked about some thorough checkup on scaffoldings. Kolya could not get interested. He pointed out there was not enough planking for good scaffolds, that the riggers
were mostly plowboys who had no idea of being careful, and that at thirty-five below without any breakfast in you, you did not pay as much attention as you should.
‘Sure, people will fall. But we’re building blast furnaces all the same, aren’t we?’ and he waved his hand toward No. 2 from which the red glow of flowing pig iron was emanating. He saw I was not satisfied. ‘This somewhat sissified foreigner will have to be eased along a little,’ he probably said to himself. He slapped me on the back. ‘Come on in the office. We are going to have a technical conference. You’ll be interested.’
Source: John Scott, Behind the Urals (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1942), pp. 15-21.