Remember the wielder of the weapon, yes. But forget not the one who placed it in his hand.
This towering monument, rising 50 feet high, can be found in the Russian city of Magnitogorsk. Built of bronze, it stands in tribute to the women and men who worked the city’s giant steelworks during World War II, a vital and heroic effort, as “every second tank and every third shell [built in the USSR] during the conflict was built with Magnitogorsk steel.”* For this reason, the city, straddling the border between Europe and Asia, is known as the ‘steel heart of the Motherland’.
The American analogue to Magnitogorsk is the constellation of once-industrialized cities that FDR referred to as the ‘Arsenal of Democracy’, great metropolises that powered the Allied war effort. And yet, I have lived in Pittsburgh and visited Detroit, walking their streets, squares, and waterfronts. While granting I may have missed something, to my eyes, no such monuments to American industrial workers — to the women and men who riveted, welded, and forged — are to be found.
For several days now, certain sectors of the internet and the press have been abuzz with talk of the centennial of the October Revolution, which eventually birthed the Soviet Union. I have seen vicious diatribes against Lenin alongside glowing eulogies for the society he brought into being (before it was twisted into a totalitarian police state by Stalin). It has been a fascinating conversation to follow.
There is, of course, much to discuss and debate, but for all their crimes and failings, the Soviets did this much right: they built statues like these, statues that symbolize reverence for manual labor and civic sacrifice. It is a reverence shamefully absent from the landscape — physical and cultural — of 21st-century America.
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