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Behind the Urals An American Worker in Russia City of Steel John Scott Books

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Behind the Urals An American Worker in Russia City of Steel John Scott Books

This book provides perhaps the best on the spot testimony by an American worker actively involved in Stalin's industrial enterprise in the early and middle 1930s. In many ways, John Scott revealed himself as hopelessly naïve and ideology-driven, in his overall acceptance of the grim realities of Stalinism, but, leaving America still roiling in the Great Depression, he was quickly caught up in the enthusiasm shared by his fellow industrial workers at Magnitogorsk in the meaning and glory of what they daily had to do. This book is a very worthwhile read for anyone, scholar, student, ort general reader, who wishes to understand the daily mechanism of what made Russia under Stalin tick.


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Behind the Urals An American Worker in Russia City of Steel John Scott Books Reviews

My first copy of this book came to me as a gift from my mentor in college, a Russian historian who travelled through the Soviet Union in the 1970s. It has been one of my favorite books for years because of the writer, John Scott, who went to live in one of Stalin's industrialized towns. He learned first hand how the glorious Soviet system worked and tells his readers all the ups and downs of the process. I found it to a fascinating, first-hand account of the area of history I've dedicated my life to. If you are in any way interested in Soviet history, socialism, or Russia, you should check out this book!
An unusual approach toward USSR / Marxist paradise history, as related from the viewpoint of an American worker who emigrated to the Soviet Union in the 1930s and worked on industrial projects in the new cities west of the Urals. He then returned to the U.S. with a Russian wife after World War II. The book is remarkably free of Soviet propaganda and is also free of American right-wing vilification of the USSR of the times. It describes the efforts made to industrialize the Soviet Union and also the largely high level of enthusiasm that many Russians had for the country at the time.
In 1931, with America in the midst of the Great Depression, John Scott, a sophomore at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, decided to leave school and go to the Soviet Union as a volunteer industrial worker. He first worked for a few months at the General Electric plant in Schenectady, NY to acquire skills as a welder, and the next year was in Magnitogorsk, a new industrial complex being built on the southeastern edge of the Ural Mountains, beyond the range of Hitler's bombers.
With raw courage and physical stamina, Scott worked alongside and shared hardships with Russian workers, welding blast furnaces and watching an immense industrial complex take shape. In his spare time he wrote daily notes of his observations, recording freezing cold, rickety ice-covered wooden scaffolding eighty feet above the ground, many accidents, and inadequate food and shelter.
He also noted the elan that gripped the workers, who compared their current state with the misery of the peasant villages in which they had grown up. Most were enrolled in night school courses and attending local cultural events, convinced that their lives were daily getting better and better.
Stalinist purges from time to time removed local Communist Party members, and Scott himself lost his job in 1938. He was nevertheless able to remain in Russia until 1941, when he was accused of being an American spy. On June 22, he left Vladivostok with his Russian wife and two daughters--on the very day that Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa and invaded the Ukraine.
Back in America, using nine years of field notes, Scott wrote Behind the Urals An American Worker in Russia's City of Steel, which was published in 1942. An anthropologist would call his book a superb ethnography--a description of the day-to-day life and culture of a community of people. Scott, whose subsequent career was with Time magazine, became a journalist. In any case, his descriptions of the horrible working and living conditions, the grim political climate and purges, and the tremendous enthusiasm and hope of the workers amidst the chaos of forced-march industrialization are clear-eyed and objective. His book remains the best description of daily life in the USSR under Stalin.
This book provides perhaps the best on the spot testimony by an American worker actively involved in Stalin's industrial enterprise in the early and middle 1930s. In many ways, John Scott revealed himself as hopelessly naïve and ideology-driven, in his overall acceptance of the grim realities of Stalinism, but, leaving America still roiling in the Great Depression, he was quickly caught up in the enthusiasm shared by his fellow industrial workers at Magnitogorsk in the meaning and glory of what they daily had to do. This book is a very worthwhile read for anyone, scholar, student, ort general reader, who wishes to understand the daily mechanism of what made Russia under Stalin tick.