John Scott left the University of Wisconsin for the Soviet Union in 1931. Appalled by the depression and attracted by what he had heard concerning the effort to create a "new society" in the Soviet Union, he obtained training as a welder and went abroad to join the great crusade. Assigned to construction of the new "Soviet Pittsburgh," Magnitogorsk, on the eastern slopes of the Ural Mountains, the twenty-year-old was first an electric welder and then a foreman and chemist in a coke and chemicals by-products plant. He lived in a barracks, suffered cold and privation, studied evenings, married a Russian girl--in short, lived for five years as a Russian among Russians.No other description of life in a new steel city provides such a graphic description of the life of workers under the First Five Year Plan. Scott had a clear eye for detail and produced a chronicle that includes the ugliness and squalor as well as the endurance and dedication. Behind the Urals stands as a unique and revealing description of an iron age in an iron country.-Print ed."Students reading Scott have come away with a real appreciation of the hardships under which these workers built Magnitogorsk and of the nearly incredible enthusiasm with which many of them worked."--Ronald Grigor Suny"A genuine grassroots account of Soviet life- a type of book of which there have been far too few."--William Henry Chamberlin, New York Times, 1943 "...a rich portrait of daily life under Stalin."--New York Times Book Review |