Zhuravliov, Sergey. Small people and big history: foreign workers of the Moscow Electric Factory in Soviet society of the 1920s-30s

Журавлев С.В.  "Маленькие люди" и "большая история": иностранцы московского Электрозавода в советском обществе 1920-1930-х годах. М.: РОССПЭН, 2000.

Methodologically, the author draw inspiration from contemporary Western social history (in particular, Steven Kotkin’s research of Magnitogorsk) and aims to study the history of the Soviet society from perspectives of social history, taking as a case a group of foreign employers in one of Moscow’s factories and arguing that a research focus on this group might highlight social, political and cultural evolution of the interwar USSR in a kind of litmus test.

The book starts with a study of the organization of industrial espionage in Germany in electrical industry, with the technological process of production of tungsten lamps as the main aim of Soviet efforts. Zhuravlev looks at rank-and-file executors of this operation, particularly at their life trajectories, as an entrance point to this period of Soviet history. He then switches his attention to immigrant specialists, focusing, in particular, on biographies of several of German engineers and technicians to examine how they organized work process and their everyday activities, how they communicated with German community in Moscow and with Soviet society. He draws quite extensively on their investigative files from NKVD (all of them were arrested in 1937-8).

Narrative strategy of the book alternates a story line of the production process with biographies of immigrants and Soviet specialists – as a result, there are multiple chronological breaks and different story lines not always create context for each other. A disadvantage rather than an advantage of the author’s style. Another problem – Zhuravlev uses categories coined by Soviet organs (including NKVD): inokoloniia, for example, which offers a specific perspective on the subject which he not always overcomes in his analysis.

Second part of the book starts with the turn of 1930s when a huge influx of new foreign specialists forced Soviet government to take measures to accommodate foreigners to Soviet realities. Selection of candidates and their re-inculcation in Soviet norms and values were regarded as clues to success (146ff). A sociological overview of immigrants, their workplace conflicts with administration and coworkers, their adaptation to ways of life in the USSR. Mid-1930s: a changed attitude to foreign specialists, from “what we should learn from foreign workers?” to “what foreigners should learn in the USSR” (273). Purgest and trials as a spectacle (276–7). Return of German workers to Nazi Germany as a choice (often tragic) between their failed belief in Communism and their inability to adapt to Soviet conditions.