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Reviews 221could not be left to some self-proclaimed cultural vanguard, a state subsidizedorganization claiming autonomy from the "vanguard of the proletariat?" The demiseof Proletkult was rooted in the very essence of Leninism.Vladimir BrovkinHarvard UniversityTHE GENERATION OF TOWER: THE HISTORY OF DNEPRO-STROI. By Anne D. Rassweiler. Oxford and New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1988. viii, 247 pp., index, bibliography. $32.50.Dneprostroi was the paradigm of the ambitious construction projects that were thehallmark of Stalin's First Five-Year Plan. In her history of its implementation, AnneRassweiler gives a minutely detailed description of the transfiguration that accompaniedthe project and turned it into something of a caricature of its intended character.The construction of a giant hydroelectric station across the Dneiper was conceivedas the lever of modernity that, grasped by conscious and enthused proletarians,would turn peasant Russia into an urban and industrial power. Instead, itbecame the model for mass mobilization of manual laborers, refugees from themurder and famine of the collectivization of agriculture, poorly fed, poorly housed,and endlessly chivvied to set new records that would be the next day's norms.Rather than showing the way for scientific organization to compensate for technicalbackwardness, Dneprostroi became a demonstration of how politics could dominateand silence technical critiques. Graduates of the period, having learned to maneuverand manipulate in an environment of chronic shortage, disequilibrium, and wastefulcampaigning, became the Khrashchevs and Brezhnevs, the "generation of power" ofsenescent Stalinism who eventually led the USSR into exhausted decline. In detailingthe processes of labor recruitment and training, of management's battle withimpossible plans and scarce resources, and the Communist party's inadequacy as adirecting force, Professor Rassweiler has made her point strongly.Despite its detail, the book comes to life only in a few places. In great measurethis is the fault of the writing and editing. There are endless unnecessary repetitions.One section of the introduction is repeated verbatim in the epilogue (cf. pp. 10-11and 188). On the other hand, we are promised a discussion of the Stakhanovitemovement (p. 125) that never materializes. In the midst of a political analysis of theattack on "bourgeois specialists" as part of the internal party struggle against tradeunion independence and Bukharin's right-wing group, we find the simplistic sentence:"Engineers and specialists became the special objects of antagonism, whippedup by Stalin, who did not trust them." Statistics are shoveled in like concrete pouredby Zhenia Roman'ko's brigade—but too often without reference points that wouldhelp the reader judge their significance (housing space, p. 150; absenteeism, p. 164;nutritional intake, p. 152—though here, additional figures with a proper base of