Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970-2000 Read Online Free PDF Page A

drop for the first time in the post-war period. Beyond the immediate downturn, the entire fossil-fuel industrial economy—which had arisen in the late nineteenth century and which in the first half of the twentieth century had adopted mass production—seemed to be heading towards extinction.
    In 1970s England, Sheffield and its surrounding industrial zone lost more than 150,000 jobs in steel; many more jobs vanished in engineering industries, and the city council became Sheffield’s largest employer. 2 During the same decade, Germany’s powerhouse Ruhr Valley and its multitude of steelworks shed 100,000 jobs. In Pennsylvania—which had once been championed as the ‘Ruhr Valley of America’—‘Black Friday’ (30 September 1977) delivered a body blow to Bethlehem, whose steel had gone into the George Washington Bridge connecting Manhat-tan and New Jersey, the Golden Gate Bridge across San Francisco Bay, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and many of the silos for Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles. The US’s entire industrial heartland of the eight Great Lake states—Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, Minnesota, New York, as well as Pennsylvania— was devastated.
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    history’s cruel tricks
    More than 1,000 factories closed in the US over the 1970s. 3 In a howl of desperation, two authors wrote that ‘we are currently witnessing the decline of industrial America, the bankruptcy or deterioration of some once-mighty manufacturing enterprises’. 4 Other commentators more accurately noted the end not of industry per se , but a wrenching changeover to what was called flexible manufacturing. 5 Yet, although manufacturing in the American Midwest began to grow again in the mid-1980s, manufacturing employment failed to recover at the same rate.
    In a few instances, even Big Steel pulled itself out of a hole, but the communities stayed down. ‘The Gary Works represents one of the most impressive turnarounds in the history of US industry,’ a steel industry analyst told a reporter in 1988. But, after a reinvestment of $2.9 billion over seven years, the restructured factory complex, which had once employed 21,000 people, had just 7,500 employees, with further reductions anticipated. ‘It’s a great success story for the company,’ Gary’s mayor told a reporter, ‘but it has been a painful experience for us’. 6
    This wrenching of industries and communities left an indelible mark on the culture and popular psyche. A cheeky British film entitled The Full Monty (1997) retro-spectively spotlighted a group of down-and-out steel-workers who hit upon a survival scheme: organize their own potbellied male striptease, recruiting performers from an unemployment queue. The film was set in Sheffield, and opened with footage from a bygone civic-booster film about a ‘city on the move, the jewel in 13
    history’s cruel tricks
    Yorkshire’s crown’. Now, its idle men were compelled to show their jewels to get by. The film’s soundtrack appropriately featured disco, as in the industrial classic, Saturday Night Fever (1979), about a blue-collar dancing king, which had helped set off the late 1970s disco craze with the anthem of irrepressible dreams, ‘Staying Alive’.
    Desperate times brought desperate approaches. In Johnstown, Pennsylvania, ‘tour buses idle outside the moldering steel mills’, wrote a New York Times Magazine reporter in 1996. He described how Johnstown was ‘heading into a future in which the economy will be fed by an ambitious, seemingly quixotic experiment called heritage tourism’, which ‘retails the often unhappy narratives of unlucky places, and is clearly a growth industry’. 7
    Monuments to misfortune soon pockmarked the entire industrial landscape of the West. The increases in oil prices in the 1970s had crystallized larger trends. Henry Kissinger, who served as President Richard Nixon’s Secretary of State during what Washington took to calling the Arab oil embargo,