Hero Projects: The Russian Empire and Big Technology from Lenin to Putin by Paul R.Josephson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024. 344 pp. $45.95. ISBN 978‐0‐19‐769839‐6

This book offers an impressive panorama of the large-scale engineering projects undertaken on the Kremlin’s behalf over the past hundred years. The term “heroic” in the book’s title refers to their scale, massive mobilization of human and material resources, and symbolic significance as outstanding achievements of the Soviet people or tangible proof of the country’s ability to compete with other scientific and technological superpowers in the present. Drawing on a rather eclectic collection of sources, including archival documents, secondary literature, personal observations and communications during travels to the Soviet Union and Russia, websites and media publications, and some “anecdotal evidence,” Paul Josephson explores the complex and often ill-fated histories of specific projects: railroads, mines, water constructions, nuclear-powered engines, and bridges. The originality of this book is to trace the strong continuities in the realization of these projects through more than a hundred years, despite the radical changes in political regimes. As the reader may find out, some of them originated, at least as ideas, in the Russian Empire, were carried out mainly during the Soviet regime, but were renewed or completed in the twenty-first century. Thus, the Baikal-Amur Mainline—conceived by Tsarist-era engineers in the late nineteenth century, built from the 1930s to the 1980s, and completed in 2003—represents an archetype of such construction projects of the century. Similarly, the idea of building a Crimean bridge across the Kerch Strait dates back to Tsarist times: the first attempt to build it was made by Stalin in the 1930s, then by Hitler during the occupation, only to be revived and realized in the twenty-first century under Putin. Other ideas for grandiose projects, such as diverting the Siberian rivers to Central Asia and China, reappear recurrently in the political and engineering imagination over this period. In particular, the book examines various forms of historical continuity of “heroic projects” in contemporary Russia with the Soviet legacy: for example, major Russian state corporations in charge of these projects are often inheritors of the Soviet ministries and administrations, as well as the key R&D institutions in nuclear, space, or hydroelectric engineering, all of which have their roots in the Soviet period. But what is even more important, according to Josephson, is that today’s large-scale technological projects perform roughly the same functions as they did during the Soviet era. Thus, hydroelectric plants and railroads in Siberia and the Far North, nuclear icebreakers and floating stations, the Crimean Bridge, and other heroic projects may have some social value, but they essentially serve not the people but the military, political, and economic interests of the central power in Moscow. The last chapter of the book, as well as its epilogue, suggests that the significance of these projects as attributes of strong power and imperial domination is reflected in the nostalgic attitudes of politicians, engineers, and laypeople in contemporary Russia, who long for the lost “greatness.” This attention to the political and cultural dimensions of big technology is the book’s undeniable strength. At the same time, one might ask whether such an overemphasis on the symbolic dimension of “hero projects,” reflecting in particular the personal thirst for power of political leaders like Stalin or Putin, does not downplay the importance of structural factors that determined the extensive nature of the Soviet and Russian economies, which relied heavily on large-scale mobilization of labor and extraction of resources. Moreover, this fascination with large-scale infrastructure projects, often with devastating effects on nature and human communities, was hardly a unique feature of Russian or Soviet development in the past century. As the author notes on multiples occasions, the technological solutionism was common to engineering and political imagination in both the West and the East since the Industrial Revolution. He also provides interesting parallels and examples of other countries’ experiences with similar projects. However, the book underscores the inefficiency and excessive costs of these large-scale infrastructures in the Soviet and Russian context. Reflecting the “typical flaws of the Soviet system,” most of them were very expensive to build, always behind schedule, of poor quality, and in need of repair, resulting in frequent breakdowns and even disasters (p. 49). Josephson is particularly attentive to the often neglected dark, or dystopian, side of “heroic projects,” devoting many pages to reminding us that many of them originated under the Stalinist dictatorship and were based on the mobilization of slave labor (gulags), in which many innocent people worked under inhumane conditions and perished, as well as the mistreatment or disregard for the needs of indigenous peoples. In addition, many of these “great constructions” have caused severe and often irreversible damage to the natural environment. Overall, these engineering efforts are repeatedly described as “failures” in all respects, pushing unanswered questions: Under what circumstances could they be called “successful”? Are authoritarian states and their “achievements” somehow predestined to “fail”? Despite a few factual errors and questionable methodological choices (for example, the use of public opinion polls as a source of information about the attitudes of Russians under Putin’s rule, especially after the annexation of Crimea), this book is a rich and thought-provoking read about the past and present structures of power in Russia through its specific modes of mastering nature and territory through technology.