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                                                                                COVER STORIES, Page 50

THE NEW RUSSIA: VIEWS

Death of The Dream


Not much is different for the young boy building a blast furnace
in the Russia of 60 years ago and the youthful coke oven tender
who labors in the same factory today


    In the early 1930s, when communism still shone with the
promise of a bright future, Margaret Bourke-White went to the
Soviet Union to capture the seismic changes of a society bent on
forging itself anew. The country was a mystery then, and her
photographs and journal entries, excerpted here, laid bare the
dedication and raw muscle fueling a blast furnace of a nation
as it struggled out of feudalism. Sixty years later, TIME
invited Anthony Suau to retrace Bourke-White's journey. If her
pictures were the positive, his are the negative. The Russia
that emerges from Suau's frames is a land of shabbiness and
despair -- images of dilapidation that results when sacrifice
and suffering are attended only by shattered dreams.


    1932

    THE NEW PROMETHIANS

    "Less than two years ago, there had been nothing in the
whole countryside but a few primitive villages. Then geologists
discovered the richest iron ore in the world. Now the blast
furnaces tower, prickly with wooden scaffolding. In a wasteland
these furnaces are rising, the highest man-built structures the
workers have ever seen."


    1992

    INHERITORS TO A TARNISHED VISION

    The Soviet Union hurled itself feverishly into crash
industrialization. The factory at Magnitogorsk grew bigger but
never better. Today Russians must cope with the legacy of that
era: pollution that blots out the light and deteriorating,
inefficient furnaces making steel no one wants. "It's quite
common," says a worker, "to commit suicide by throwing oneself
into the liquid ore."


    1932

    AGRICULTURE'S ARMY

    "In the old days, all the men and women cut their grain
with rhythmically moving sickles, and out of the measured swing
of their movements grew the peasants reaping songs. Now, with
the coming of collectivization, the sickle is giving way to
modern reaping machinery, and the peasant songs are yielding to
the new revolutionary songs."


    1992

    THE MORE THINGS CHANGE . . .

    Although modern farming in Russia is now almost completely
mechanized, broken tractors and combines can languish for weeks
or months awaiting spare parts. When the cacophony of the
engines is silenced, peasants tune their work to the cadences
of the land and return to the ageless methods of their
forbearers.


    1932

    APOSTLES OF AN INDUSTRIAL MESSIAH

    "Soviet workers are stirred by an almost religious
enthusiasm; in spite of shortages, difficulties, hardships. The
Stalingrad tractor factory was finished six months ahead of
schedule."


    1992

    BURNED OUT AND BONE-WEARY

    Factories that once resounded to the harsh tympany of
steam hammers and hydroturbines now emit only a somnolent
midmorning snore. As the gears of a spent nation grind to a
halt, the determination and grit once blazing from the face of
industrial workers have given way to the tired stare of apathy
and depression.


    1932

    A FIRMAMENT OF POSSIBILITIES

    "Only the victory of socialism can deliver the working
class from unemployment and poverty. The capitalist world is
crumbling -- the Five-Year Plan is driving in the coffin nails
of world capitalism."


    1992

    GEOGRAPHY OF A SUNDERED WORLD

    A concrete landscape in a bleak terrain. Behind
communism's illusions there always lurked a chilling
soullessness. From an unlimited expanse of possibility, the
horizon of Russia's future has shrunk to a prefabricated
emptiness devoid of assurance that things may one day change for
the better.