Death of the Dream

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.