Overview

"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"

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9781773238593

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