The financial crisis has prompted considerable speculation on editorial pages about the “death of global capitalism” and homilies from pulpits about the dangers of “idolizing” free markets. We should not underestimate the seriousness of the current situation—responsibility for which lies as much with the politicians who ignored warnings about the excesses of the two government-owned financial institutions known as Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae while accepting campaign contributions from those entities’ executives as it does with “greedy” Wall Street bankers—but we must also take care not to discard the lessons the 20th century taught us about economics. Two books that may seem remote from our pressing concerns with “collateralized debt obligations” and bank liquidity—one a history of the Soviet auto industry, the other a memoir of Detroit’s precipitous decline—together offer valuable perspectives that we would do well to keep in mind as we search for the lessons from recent events.
Lewis Siegelbaum, a historian at Michigan State University, opens Cars for Comrades by repeating what a Russian told him after learning that he was writing a history of the Soviet auto industry: “That will be a very short book.” On the contrary: What Siegelbaum has produced is a superb account of Soviet life as viewed through the lens of the failed Soviet struggle to match the capitalist West, and the United States in particular, auto for auto and highway for highway, while denying its citizens the mobility that would undermine the Soviet state. Accommodating the automobile proved to be a dialectical struggle whose contradictions communism could not resolve, and Siegelbaum repeatedly highlights problems that mass production and ownership of automobiles posed for the Soviet Union. To do so he has mastered countless details of Soviet life and economic history, including deciphering Soviet motor vehicle production statistics; unearthing car-related proverbs from throughout the Soviet bloc (my favorite is the East German saying, “beware of aggressive women and cars built by Russians”); surveying Russian literature for examples of the impact of roadlessness on Soviet life; and finding cartoons and photographs (including some he took) that provide a visual counterpart to his clear prose.
The story is a fascinating one, ranging from cross-USSR road rallies to the tribulations of the Russian émigrés with experience in American auto factories who returned to the Soviet Union full of hope and the desire to help build a new society with their skills. Moreover, drawing on a seemingly encyclopedic knowledge of the Soviet Union, Siegelbaum deftly sets his rich and wonderfully improbable narrative of the embattled auto industry within the broader sweep of Soviet history.
You should read Cars for Comrades for yourself and not simply rely on this review. To begin with, the book is simply a pleasure to read. Siegelbaum is one of those rare academic writers who can convey substance with style: “Alas, like the Stalinist state itself, the ZIS-101 [a car model] looked more impressive the less one knew about its inner workings.” In describing the Moskvich 408, one of three main Soviet passenger car models in the 1960s and the planners’ vehicle of choice to expand Soviet consumers’ access to cars, Siegelbaum notes, “[t]he only problem with the Moskvich was that it was a terrible car.” My personal favorite is his comment, after observing how reality had deviated from the central plan in one of the cities built for the auto industry, that “if everything in the Soviet Union went according to plan, at the very least there would still be a Soviet Union.” If all scholarly works were this lively, higher education would be a great deal more enjoyable.
With the pleasure of Siegelbaum’s prose comes the opportunity to learn. We all know now that the record of Soviet rule is grim. But understanding the Soviet experience—and appreciating the contrast with our own way of life—requires more than accounts of planned famines, show trials, brutal labor camps, summary executions, and pervasive surveillance. Cars for Comrades brings an important part of the history of the Soviet Union to light by illustrating the day-to-day workings of the Soviet economic system.
To take but one example, Siegelbaum describes in a few pages how the planned economy ate away at individuals’ lives through the story of an apartment in the Avtograd (“Auto City”) district of the city of Togliatti, one of many cities where Soviet planners concentrated particular industries. The city was built when a hydroelectric dam flooded the site of the city of Stavropol’-on-Volga in the early 1950s; the existing city was relocated 18 km upriver and renamed in honor of Palmiro Togliatti, a founder of the Italian communist party, “a secular canonization that had turned into a statist rite” used to build ties to communists abroad. Togliatti himself had no connection to the city that took his name, other than having spent time in exile from Italy in a “not-so-far-away” city in the region in the 1920s and 1930s. But the Italian connection may have helped Togliatti be the location of choice in 1966 when the Soviet Union contracted with Fiat in the largest of all the USSR’s commercial agreements to build a massive new automobile complex intended to help boost automobile production beyond the 617,000 vehicles built in 1965. The planned output for the new factory was to be 660,000 per year, thus more than doubling the entire Soviet Union’s annual output, a level it reached in 1974.
To house the workers for the new Fiat-built plant, VAZ (Volga Automobile Factory), a satellite city of apartments and shops was constructed that became known as Avtograd. Built according to Soviet urban planning theory, Avtograd was to house more than 40,000 people, enable them to get to work within thirty minutes, and provide all the various services necessary for this workforce. (Notably absent from the plans were houses of worship; the first was built only in August 2002, when the post-Soviet successor to VAZ erected a cathedral.) Avtograd’s planners designed apartments of one to three rooms for families of two to five. When construction delays slowed progress on housing and limited the factory’s ability to attract skilled workers, a preference for married couples was instituted.
In 1972, VAZ employee Gennadi Efremovich Ukhov applied for an apartment for himself and his mother. He was turned down because the only apartments available were reserved for married people. Desperate to gain an apartment, Ukhov married Zoia Vasil’evna Kuznetsova, a tutor in one of the dormitory complexes who had a daughter from a previous marriage. As Siegelbaum notes, Kuznetsova was “either incredibly naïve or pretty desperate herself” to agree to the marriage, but agree she did, and the new couple was rewarded with a two-room, 29-square-meter apartment. Ukhov’s 86-year-old mother and 62-year-old sister moved in shortly thereafter, and Ukhov threw Kuznetsova out, telling her that the apartment was for his family alone. He then had his mother file a complaint in the “residential comrade’s court” against his wife, alleging that she mistreated and made threats against the mother. That body ruled in his favor—perhaps because Kuznetsova never attended any of its sessions and may not have even been given notice of the times and dates of the sessions. Fining her ten rubles for “unacceptable behavior” and requiring her to have her behavior discussed at her workplace, the court nonetheless recommended that the apartment be physically divided between husband and wife: “Ukhov, however, rejected this Solomon-like solution, presumably because the prospect of living with his mother and sister in one room was intolerable.”
In the meantime, Kuznetsova had gone to her labor union, which launched its own investigation. The union discovered that Ukhov had previously married another woman in an earlier attempt to secure an apartment, a marriage that had never been legally ended. They also encountered a “torrent of bad language” when they attempted to interview Ukhov’s mother but managed to learn that she was not homeless, as Ukhov claimed, but had a house in the countryside. When Kuznetsova appealed to the executive committee of the district soviet, the union’s findings were added to the record. (One of Kuznetsova’s witnesses observed to the soviet that “it is not possible to gain satisfaction from Ukhov because there is no law that can bring to order a person who has lost his conscience.”) The soviet sent the matter back to the comrade’s court for rehearing.
Siegelbaum extracts a number of important insights from this conflict. First, “the catalyst driving events” was the shortage of apartments—a shortage that was partly planned (all desirable goods were deliberately kept in short supply) and partly due to the preference for married workers with families in allocating living space. To gain one of these valuable apartments, and to escape “the deprivations of the countryside,” Soviet citizens “were willing to go to extraordinary lengths to obtain permission to reside in Avtograd, breaking the law, breaking hearts, and probably a few other things too.” Only through “Gennadi’s scam” could his mother and sister escape the countryside and obtain the “status and comforts unknown in the village.” The planned society thus created the source of this conflict.
The story also illustrates how work served as a nexus for much of life in Soviet society. This was not the result of workaholics letting their careers erode their marriages, as might be true in an American version of the conflict. Rather, it reveals the transformation of all relationships into ones organized through the workplace. The Soviet state managed to weaken all of the institutions of civil society, leaving individuals with only their economic relationships as a basis for addressing conflicts. Kuznetsova turned to her union for help with a domestic problem, and it was to her workmates—not her neighbors—that the comrades’ court turned in its efforts to correct her behavior.
“Always hard to define in the Soviet context,” Siegelbaum writes, “the line between public and private seems particularly fuzzy in this instance. Perhaps this was because vaz, the provider of jobs, housing, recreational facilities, and much else, served to intensify the intrusiveness of the paternalistic state.” A society in which voluntary institutions, from churches to fraternal orders, have been displaced by the omnipresent state and relationships in the workplace is one that lacks the vital connective tissue that allows real affection between individuals to flourish. That the sacrament of marriage could be seen as the solution to a housing problem, not in an aberrant case but in a routine one, is a sign of a deeply dysfunctional society. The willingness of both parties in this incident to accept a spouse to gain access to 29 square meters to be shared among three people (although each spouse had a different three in mind) is in itself striking. But that a fraudulent marriage would be seen as a reasonable solution by one of the partners is a sign of a society in a state of moral collapse.
The war over the apartment also provides a means of examining what Siegelbaum calls the “exhaustion of Soviet rhetorical categories” in the post-Stalin era. What he means is that people’s statements during the various case proceedings lacked political content, an absence of politics that was a new development in Soviet life in the Brezhnev era. Thus Ukhov was not charged with “anti-soviet behavior” when his scam was uncovered, and even Kuznetsova’s virtues are described by her advocates in their testimony in strikingly apolitical language. The record of this minor domestic dispute thus illustrates the collapse of the Soviet attempt at constructing a secular morality as well as its failure in the specific case of Comrade Ukhov.
Americans live in a society marked by great material plenty. Even when gasoline was $4.00 a gallon or higher, we were enjoying extraordinarily inexpensive mobility compared to virtually any society in history thanks to the widespread private ownership of cars, a network of highways exceeding even Germany’s autobahns, and the ready availability of spare parts, fuel, and skilled personnel to repair our cars on the relatively few occasions when they break down. Soviet citizens had none of these things. Even those privileged enough to own a private vehicle found themselves regularly scavenging for parts and fuel, and repairs were often a do-it-yourself affair. The reason that Americans have cheap mobility while the Soviets did not is simple: We live in a market economy, and they did not.
Market economies do not produce only successes. A functioning market has—must have, if it is to produce successes—failures as well. If to everything there is a season, today it appears that the season of the Rust Belt cities has passed. As an economist, I know that economic change is the only constant in societies that are alive. New industries appear, old industries wither, and regions’ fortunes rise and fall as technologies and tastes change. Early in the 20th century, the invention of the automobile fueled booms in places like Detroit and Cleveland as people flocked to jobs in the new auto plants. Today those cities are struggling. American automakers are appealing for a government bailout in an effort to survive, while new auto plants spring up in places like Kentucky, Tennessee, and Mexico.
The shift from Rustbelt to Sunbelt has made Americans better off in the aggregate, but the costs for individual people in declining regions have been large. And the Rustbelt’s decline has a long list of causes: high taxes, bad management of firms like U.S. Steel and General Motors, greedy and shortsighted union leadership. These multiple causes leave no easy answers as to who is responsible for the decline or how to reverse it.
Joseph Schumpeter termed capitalism “creative destruction.” Markets and economic change promise great beauty (Manhattan’s skyline), great benefit for the poor and downtrodden (even our poorest have access to medicine, food, and technology unimaginable to the richest even a century ago), and great hope for the hopeless. But the price of that creativity is the destruction that makes it possible. There is no alternative to economic change; we cannot stop it. Protectionism, whose advocates are always at hand, whether claiming to protect Michigan jobs from competitors in Tennessee or American jobs from competitors in India, ultimately impoverish everyone. As an economist I can draw the graphs and recite the figures that show that free trade is a benefit despite its costs. But as a human being and a Christian, I witness the suffering that such dislocations cause. A firm moving from Detroit to Phoenix or India disrupts the lives of those who once worked at it. The reality is that economic change can be costly, even when it brings substantial benefits. Made in Detroit: A South of 8 Mile Memoir, is an elegant reflection on the decline of Detroit through the lens of one family’s experiences there, a reflection that provides much food for thought concerning the costs of change.
Paul Clemens was born in Detroit in 1973, and his parents moved out of the city in 1993. During that period, Detroit collapsed in on itself, losing almost a third of its population (from over 1.5 million in 1970 to just under 1.028 million in 1990) and almost a quarter of its 1970 housing stock (from over 530,000 units in 1970 to just over 410,000 in 1990). Although the city fell faster and farther than most, Detroit’s experience was far from unique in the upper Midwest. Akron, Cleveland, Canton, Dayton, Gary, Pittsburgh, Toledo, and others also went through wrenching decline—and some cities are still in free-fall. In Made in Detroit Clemens reflects on his hometown’s fate, mingling a keen sense of place with a thoughtful analysis of the politics and economics of Detroit’s decline. As he tells the reader early on, he set out to write a novel but ultimately found he’d written a memoir instead. I’m sure he’ll write many fine novels, but I’m glad he wrote this book first. For as he says at the end, “it’s going, all of it, and the only way to preserve it is to put it down on paper and to hope I managed, at long last, to get some things right.”
At the center of Clemens’ life in Detroit were two institutions: the family and the Catholic Church. The families Clemens knew in the 1970s were largely nuclear ones—”a mother and a father, with children over whom they exert some control”—and he thinks of his neighborhood by first visualizing “its homes, to the front doors of which I mentally tack a family tree, in much the way that genealogies are sometimes slipped into the opening pages of magical realist novels.” These families exerted a strong gravitational pull on their members, keeping people in the neighborhood and serving as the center of daily life.
Clemens writes of families, his and others, with great affection but does not romanticize them. The strong families, alas, served to demarcate boundaries between neighbors in ways that limited Detroit’s ability to adapt to change. For example, when Clemens asked his father why two African American children on the street lived with their grandmother rather than with their parents, his father’s response—”That’s their business. It’s none of ours”—was what Clemens terms “the perfect answer,” avoiding both “the usual conservative condemnation” and “the usual liberal apologetics”:
It’s their business. Lurking in there, too, is the sense that taking care of one’s own is enough to ask of any man, and that there is little need for him to look outside this small sphere. My father kept up the mortgage payments, put food on the table, and kept his kids in clothes and Catholic school. The rest of the world was on its own, and insofar as its desires did not conflict with his own needs or those of his young family, he wished it well.
One of the reasons for the decline of the Rust Belt is that whites and blacks lived such separate lives even when they lived in the same neighborhoods. Such separation fueled white flight to the suburbs and fostered the racial politics of predatory politicians like longtime Mayor Coleman Young, who dominated the Detroit of Clemens’ childhood.
The second center of gravity in Clemens’ neighborhood was the Catholic Church—in transition between the traditional Catholicism of European immigrants and the radically different post-Vatican II world. On the one hand, religion served as “a hedge not just against eternal damnation but against social decay” because “[i]f you followed the rules, as laid out in two testaments and ten commandments and further codified by two millennia of encyclicals and edicts, chances were not only that you wouldn’t go to hell, but that your neighborhood wouldn’t, either.” On the other hand, the church was changing along with the larger society, and those changes filtered into the Catholic schools Clemens attended. You may wince in recognition when Clemens describes his eighth grade teacher’s daily reading from God is For Real, Man!, a volume “which sought to make the teachings of Christ accessible by translating them, disastrously, into teenage argot.” The book was “replete with cool cats, crazy kittens, soulful sisters, and bell-bottomed hipsters muttering absolute, irreligious drivel, you dig?”
Enough that was distinctively Catholic remained, however, despite the cool cats and crazy kittens, for the line between Catholic and Protestant to remain sharply drawn. Clemens’ all-male high school, “run by the Marist Fathers, a missionary teaching order headquartered in Boston that modeled itself more or less after the Jesuits, minus the pursuit of world domination,” sat next to a Lutheran school as well as a girls’ Catholic high school. The two did not mix:
Lutheranism didn’t have the cachet in our corner of Detroit that Catholicism did. It was viewed as having been born about a millennium and a half too late. What was Wittenburg compared to Rome? Where was their Sistine Chapel? Lutherans, damningly, didn’t believe in the transubstantiation, and accused Catholics of a cult of Mary. I remember one anti-Lutheran diatribe, delivered by a priest during religion class, that approached something like brilliance. Five hundred years after the fact, the wound inflicted by the split in the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church remained fresh, and he tried to impress upon us the intellectual shoddiness of Protestantism.
But even the most impassioned anti-Lutheran diatribe could not stop the demographic shift of the neighborhoods around Clemens’ home. Schools once named St. Peter or St. Brendan began to have “incense-free names like Heart Academy and the Detroit School for the Industrial Arts.” One major virtue of this book is its sensitive but unsentimental analysis of this change.
The Catholic-Protestant divide was large, but not as large as Detroit’s racial divide. Clemens was born in the same year that Coleman Young became the city’s first African-American mayor, and the city became a majority black city. It’s tricky to avoid either causing offense or resorting to bland nostrums when writing about race, but Clemens pulls it off by presenting the facts of white flight and Young’s disastrous mismanagement of the city together with his own reflections on the experience of being part of a rapidly declining white minority. What he finds is that “[w]hite Detroiters of a generation or two before mine acted as if the city from which they came had become, against their will, a universe lost, and thus the yardstick against which everything else—sterile suburbs, slum cities—would forever be slightingly judged.”
By itself, Made in Detroit tells only half the story of the massive demographic realignment in the United States during the last half of the 20th century. People and jobs did not just leave Detroit and the Rust Belt, they moved south and west, generating booms in places like Phoenix. While Detroit was losing a third of its population between 1970 and 1990, Phoenix almost doubled its population. While Detroit’s housing stock was shrinking by almost a quarter, Phoenix’s more than doubled. A nation dominated by cities like Phoenix is a different nation from one dominated by cities like Detroit. We need parallel memoirs of the rise of the Southwest to fully understand what we have gained as well as what we lost. This beautifully written memoir is a wonderful first step in developing that fuller picture. Let’s hope that we don’t have to wait too long for Phoenix’s or Houston’s Paul Clemens to emerge to tell those stories. In the meantime, Made in Detroit offers an opportunity for thoughtful reflection on what once was. Yes, Clemens got “some things right.”
Andrew P. Morriss, H. Ross & Helen Workman Professor of Law and Business and professor, Institute for Government and Public Affairs at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, experienced the decline of the Rust Belt personally by living for 14 years in the Cleveland area. He drives a Chevrolet 2500 diesel pickup.
Copyright © 2009 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine. Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.
