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Paul R. Josephson, Red Atom: ’s Program from Stalin to Today. New York: W. H. Freeman and Company, 1999. 352 pp. $26.95.

Reviewed by David R. Marples, University of Alberta

This is the ªrst major English-language study to provide an in-depth, comprehensive analysis of the Russian nuclear industry. Paul Josephson, a fellow at the Davis Center for Russian Studies at Harvard University, has drawn on Soviet and Russian archival materials, interviews, and personal travel to many of the sites to uncover a fascinat- ing, complex, and fundamentally ºawed industry that dates back to the era of Josif Stalin. Josephson begins his account with a discussion of the experimental reactor at Obninsk in the 1950s and ends it with , arguably the world’s worst civilian industrial accident. In between he examines the various stages of the program from its inception during World War II to the development of breeder reactors (at the Shevchenko complex on the Caspian Sea) and the efforts to set up grandiose centers for reactor construction and design. The centers included the South Ural Construc- tion Trust in the Chelyabinsk region, where the early workers were common prisoners and Germans captured during the war, and Volgodonsk and the ill-fated Atommash complex, the giant factory for nuclear-related machinery constructed too close to the shores of a lake. The overall picture is one of frantic construction, early optimism, and willful sacriªce of the health and livelihoods of the industry’s workers as a result of de- plorable living conditions and high accident rates. At times the book is a little too technical. Josephson has a good understanding of the operation of nuclear reactors, and though his style is communicative—almost journalistic in tone—the average reader may ªnd some passages hard to follow. In general, however, his enthusiasm for the subject is infectious. The middle chapters of the book illustrate the profound Soviet faith in the atom inspired in part by a belief, dating back to Vladimir Lenin, in the virtues of technol- ogy. Soviet scientists developed nuclear engines, a food irradiation program, and fu- sion power facilities. Josephson notes that many ofªcials regarded as an ideal solution to Soviet energy problems, especially through the reactors. The machinery and equipment for this program came from the Efremov Scientiªc Research Institute of Electrophysical Apparatus located near Leningrad, but there were also signiªcant developments throughout the , particularly in Ukraine where an Institute of Nuclear Research was founded in Kyiv in 1970. No Soviet community was immune from the spreading wave of nuclear power. Even the Chukhotsk peninsula on the remotest northeastern tip of the Soviet Union was provided with a small nuclear power station at Bilibino for heating. Some of Josephson’s most detailed research concerns the pioneers of the industry, and he pro- vides a biographical account of each major ªgure. Some names—, , and Evgenii Velikhov—are familiar in the West. Others are Soviet heroes whom many Western readers will discover for the ªrst time, including Vladi-

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mir Malykh, Anatolii Aleksandrov, Lev Artsimovich, Lev Landau, and Kirill Sinelnikov. The nuclear power program was clearly an integral facet of the Cold War. Under Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet Union appeared momentarily to have the edge. Secret cities were built in the Urals, and workers in these cities were restricted in their travels and lived reclusive lives. Josephson also looks at the construction of the icebreaker Le- nin in 1959, a moment of great national pride. It plowed through 47,000 kilometers of northern ice in its ªrst three years of operation. Every accomplishment, however, was accompanied by a plethora of accidents and disasters. Some were deliberate, such as the use of nuclear explosions to alter the landscape and facilitate mining extraction and oil and gas development. The ocean, especially in the arctic region, has been a dumping ground for Soviet . Various parts of Russia and other former Soviet republics remain highly radio- active today as a result of this tampering with nature. Chernobyl was the turning point, a symbol of all that was wrong with the Soviet nuclear industry. Josephson depicts the shoddy construction, the giant plants dotted with reactors (ten were planned for Chernobyl), ill-trained workers, and a leadership that was utterly unprepared for a major catastrophe. In virtually every sphere, he notes, the Soviet government failed to respond adequately. As a result, there is now a huge territory of contaminated land in which radiation is spreading by ªre and wind, and the population, especially the “liquidators” (those who were pressed into service to clean up some of the contamination), continues to suffer from the health effects. Perhaps most tragically, few if any lessons have been learned from this disaster. In an epilogue entitled “Atomic-Powered Communism Reconsidered,” which is sure to generate scholarly discussion, Josephson provides a searing indictment of the Russian nuclear industry. He discusses earlier catastrophes, such as Kyshtym (1957) and Tomsk-7 (1993). The former dispersed over 2 million curies of radioactivity over an area of 20,000 square kilometers. In the summer of 1967 Lake Karachai evaporated in dry, warm weather, and the radioactive waste on the surface was dispersed more than 80 kilometers by winds, affecting 41,000 people. Josephson warns that despite the collapse of the Soviet Union, all the damage inºicted on the former Soviet land- scape, and the immense human sacriªce involved, a faith in the power of the atom persists. But the dangers are self-evident. No solution has ever been found for radioactive waste. Former antinuclear republics like Ukraine (one of the key centers of the Soviet nuclear industry) and Lithuania continue to operate Soviet-designed RBMK reactors despite endemic problems such as obsolete technology, irregular wages, and the lack of safety inspections. Nuclear power is a stopgap for countries with an energy shortfall. Josephson points out that although the nuclear establishment was originally a product of the Cold War, employing over 1 million people, the residue of “atomic-powered Communism” continues to inºuence the Russian scientiªc community today. Nu- clear specialists, he declares, “wear historical blinders” (p. 307). This outstanding

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study is thus ultimately a warning that the nuclear problems generated by the Cold War remain with us.

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John Barber and Mark Harrison, eds., The Soviet Defence-Industry Complex from Stalin to Khrushchev. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000. 283 pp. $79.95.

Reviewed by Joseph S. Berliner, Brandeis University

In the early 1990s a group of British and Russian scholars launched a collaborative ef- fort to search for materials in the Russian archives that would shed light on previously inaccessible topics. This informative collection of essays on the defense industry is one of the products of that collaboration. In the introductory essay the authors argue that the notion of a military-indus- trial complex does not adequately describe the conditions of Soviet society, because the relations among defense enterprises, the military, and the government were funda- mentally different from the corresponding relations in capitalist countries. Civilian enterprises often took pains to avoid having to accept military production and the problems it often entailed. Hence, although the military and security organs play an important role in this study, the authors’ focus is on the defense-industry com- plex—the enterprises and design bureaus that produced military goods. Parts II and III of the book are historical; they discuss the prewar, wartime, and postwar periods. The next two parts are topical: Part IV examines the impact of defense production on Leningrad and the closed city of Krasnoyarsk-26, and the concluding Part V deals with the oversight of the defense industry and the role of the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD), as the security organs were then known. Archival evidence is of particular importance in studying the Soviet defense in- dustry, because the concern with secrecy was exceptionally pervasive there. Even the State Planning Commission (Gosplan) was not trusted to receive a full account of de- fense production plans. The researchers found little archival information on some topics—for example, the essay on Krasnoyarsk-26 was written primarily on the basis of personal accounts. The essays on rocketry and nuclear weapons are also based largely on memoirs and other nonarchival sources. In other essays, however, archival materials are used very effectively. Robert Davies and Harrison were able to construct an annual time series of de- fense expenditures, which made it possible to identify several phases of mobilization: very slow before 1930, a sharp increase after that, and a very sharp increase in the late 1930s. Harrison compiled detailed annual data on wartime weapons production in the USSR and Germany to show that the Soviet Union’s performance was remarkably good. Despite the loss of the borderlands and other initial disadvantages, Soviet rates of weapons production exceeded those of Germany, at least under Hermann Goering’s disastrous mismanagement. However, the successful Soviet performance was pur- chased at a high production cost. Defense output siphoned the best inputs from the

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