Paul R. Josephson

The Ocean's Hot Dog: The Development of the Fish Stick

The fish stick—the bane of schoolchildren who generally consider it an overcooked, bread-encrusted, cardboard-tasting, fish-less effort of lunchrooms and mothers to deceive them into consuming protein—is a postwar invention that came into existence as the confluence of several forces of modernity. These forces included a boom in housing construction that contained kitchens with such new appliances as freezers; the seeming appeal of space-age, ready-to-eat foods; the rise of consumer culture; and an increasingly affluent society. Yet the fish stick arose during the 1950s not because consumers cried out for it, and certainly not because schoolchildren demanded it, but because of the need to process and sell tons of fish that were harvested from the ocean, filleted, and frozen in huge, solid blocks. Consumers were not attracted by the form of these frozen fillets, however, and demand for fish products remained low. Manufacturers believed that the fish stick—a breaded, precooked food—would solve the problem. Still, several simultaneous technological advances had to take place before the product could appear.2

Farm to Factory: A Reinterpretation of the Soviet Industrial Revolution (review)

Economists, historians, and political scientists have long debated the relative successes of the Soviet industrial revolution. Did Soviet officials succeed in raising industrial production more rapidly by means of central planning mechanisms than the nations of Western Europe and the United States? Most scholars argue that the Soviet growth rate was not very high compared with capitalist nations, that output in such sectors as steel, machine building, and military equipment—for which leaders proclaimed stunning increases—were much lower than claimed, and that the quality of life of Soviet citizens remained rather poor. Further, they argue that collectivization of agriculture to finance industrialization was cruel at best, leading to the starvation of millions of peasants in Ukraine. In Farm to Factory Robert Allen considers these and other contentions about the costs and achievements of industrialization and the collectivization of agriculture in the USSR. He does so in a new vein, in part by reevaluating data, in part through more precise analytical economic tools. Dozens of graphs and tables help in this reevaluation of various measures of output, labor supply, economic and population growth, and urban and rural differences, as well as the place of the tsarist empire and the USSR in world markets. Comparisons with the North American Great Plains are instructive in evaluating the problems facing agronomists and planners in the USSR. Allen indicates that the weakness of Russian agriculture was not labor; rather, it was insufficient capitalization and mechanization and poor organization that kept productivity down. Rural unemployment was high during the 1920s, and forced collectivization—the rapid conversion of peasants into workers—may have been an effective tool for dealing with this problem. Collectivization maximized internal migration and accelerated industrialization by driving people into cities. But there were numerous and persistent problems in agriculture—for example, lower productivity of livestock because of poor breeding practices and inadequate feed. Further, collectivization was more than an economic tool. It was political, ensuring that the Bolsheviks established control over the countryside and ensuring the supply of food to the cities. The USSR grew rapidly from 1927 until 1970 by accumulating capital and creating industrial jobs for people otherwise inefficiently employed in agriculture. Allen notes that the industrialization drive under Stalin was marked by the substitution of output targets for profits and that this marked the end of cost controls. Though targets were rarely met, they served as a motivaB O O K R E V I E W S

Critical Masses: Citizens, Nuclear Weapons Production, and Environmental Destruction in the United States and Russia (review)

The end of the cold war has permitted intriguing comparative studies of military technologies in Russia and the United States. In Critical Masses, a collection of authors from Russia and the United States examines citizens’ responses to the environmental challenges presented by the world’s two major plutonium manufacturing sites: Hanford, Washington, and Chelyabinsk, Russia. Because plutonium production involved new technology and messy operations, and because of the shield of secrecy, these enterprises produced vast quantities of liquid and solid, high-level and low-level, radioactive wastes, which the authorities then disposed of poorly. In the name of national security the extent of production and the nature of the haphazard waste-disposal practices—and their devastating impact on public health and the environment—was kept from citizens’ scrutiny. That such a book as this could be produced is remarkable in itself. Over a six-year period the authors surveyed citizens’ attitudes toward radioactive waste, its impact on their lives, and how they organized to protect their health and safety. The authors asked important questions about national security, citizen mobilization, and the development of citizen expertise. In twelve chapters and appendixes that include descriptions of the survey methodology, the book covers the historical background of Hanford and T E C H N O L O G Y A N D C U L T U R E

Stalinism and Soviet Rail Transport, 1928-1941

Acknowledgements - Introduction - The Years of Forced Development 1928-30 - The Transport Crisis 1931 - Rail Transport under Strain 1932-33 - Steady Recovery and Future Prospects 1934 - The Year of Advance 1935 - The Watershed Year 1936 - The Year of the Purge 1937 - Rail Transport and War Preparations 1938-41 - Glossary of Russian Terms and Abbreviations - Appendices - Bibliography - Index