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  • Would Trotsky Wear a Blue Tooth? Technological Utopianism under Socialism, 1917–1989
  • Andrew Jenks (bio)
Would Trotsky Wear a Blue Tooth? Technological Utopianism under Socialism, 1917–1989. By Paul R. Josephson. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010. Pp. 342. $65.

Paul Josephson’s latest book argues that practitioners of socialist construction were technological utopians. Lenin, Trotsky, et al. had supreme confidence in the ability of technology to overcome centuries of backwardness and create the promised land of communist plenty. Their faith in technology, however, fatally overlooked the human factor: the actual needs of the workers as well as the environmental impact of large-scale technomania. As a result, the Soviets “discovered that technology was not the panacea they anticipated” (p. 60). In the end, technology glorified the power of the state and weakened the power of the workers in whose name the revolution had supposedly been conducted. Instead of utopia, the Soviets created an environmental wasteland and some of the most dangerous workplaces in the world.

The author’s argument is not original. This book is largely a rehash of ideas presented elsewhere by the author as well as by other scholars, including Loren Graham’s more succinct Ghost of the Executed Engineer (1993). While the book provides an overview of existing secondary literature on the topic, there are some gaps. For example, the author does not provide references to many of the articles in Technology and Culture on Soviet and Russian technology in the last decade—other than his own. He analyzes tensions between Soviet and Russian craft traditions and the Soviet industrialization project without engaging the recent literature devoted to this topic. He talks about Soviet consumerism without reviewing some of the more recent scholarship on the issue, just as his discussion of the construction of the Moscow metro overlooks recent research.

As a comprehensive review of technology in socialist society, the book also falls short. There is almost nothing on Soviet triumphs in space and on [End Page 410] Soviet communication technologies such as radio and television. The author makes only passing mention of military technology and says little about aviation. His claim that technology in the hands of the Soviets was a tool of “Russification” (p. 111) is intriguing but not fully developed. Some parts of the book, however, are excellent, especially those dealing with nuclear power (particularly its spread from the Soviet Union to the rest of Eastern Europe) and worker conditions in factories.

The biggest problem with the book is the author’s discussion of Leon Trotsky. While Josephson claims that Trotsky’s “views on technology were instrumental in the formation of many Soviet policies or in triggering debates about those policies” (p. 37), his influence is not clearly explained or proved by the end of the book. By the mid-1920s Trotsky had lost the power struggle with Stalin, as the author notes. By the time Soviet industrialization policies intensified in the first five-year plans, Trotsky already had been exiled from the Soviet Union and his writings and ideas excised from libraries and public discussion. The more relevant figure would seem to be Stalin, whose influence on later Soviet policies, as the book itself clearly illustrates, was far deeper than Trotsky’s. A more detailed and systematic analysis of the technological views of those who actually wielded power after Trotsky’s rapid demise in the mid-1920s—including later figures such as Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov, and Gorbachev—would have made the book more compelling as a general investigation of the relationship between technology, politics, and everyday life in a socialist society.

One innovative feature of the book is the attempt to broaden the subject of study from the Soviet Union to the rest of Eastern Europe. The conclusion that the Soviets imposed their questionable model of technological development on Soviet bloc states is not entirely surprising. Incidentally, the author rightly attributes this imposition to Stalin, begging the question again of why the book focuses so much on Trotsky. A chapter on North Korea, while interesting, seems out of place in a book that is focused otherwise on European socialist states. Why North Korea and not China and Vietnam? Finally, the...

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