American Engineers In The Soviet Union

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An American Engineer in Stalin's Russia

Author : Zara Witkin
Publisher : Univ of California Press
ISBN 13 : 0520351088
Total Pages : 444 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (23 download)

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Book Synopsis An American Engineer in Stalin's Russia by : Zara Witkin

Download or read book An American Engineer in Stalin's Russia written by Zara Witkin and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-11-10 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1932 Zara Witkin, a prominent American engineer, set off for the Soviet Union with two goals: to help build a society more just and rational than the bankrupt capitalist system at home, and to seek out the beautiful film star Emma Tsesarskaia. His memoirs offer a detailed view of Stalin's bureaucracy—entrenched planners who snubbed new methods; construction bosses whose cover-ups led to terrible disasters; engineers who plagiarized Witkin's work; workers whose pride was defeated. Punctuating this document is the tale of Witkin's passion for Tsesarskaia and the record of his friendships with journalist Eugene Lyons, planner Ernst May, and others. Witkin felt beaten in the end by the lethargy and corruption choking the greatest social experiment in history, and by a pervasive evil—the suppression of human rights and dignity by a relentless dictatorship. Finally breaking his spirit was the dissolution of his romance with Emma, his "Dark Goddess." In his lively introduction, Michael Gelb provides the historical context of Witkin's experience, details of his personal life, and insights offered by Emma Tsesarskaia in an interview in 1989.

Engineering Communism

Author : Steven T. Usdin
Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 0300127952
Total Pages : 346 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (1 download)

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Book Synopsis Engineering Communism by : Steven T. Usdin

Download or read book Engineering Communism written by Steven T. Usdin and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2008-10-01 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Engineering Communism is the fascinating story of Joel Barr and Alfred Sarant, dedicated Communists and members of the Rosenberg spy ring, who stole information from the United States during World War II that proved crucial to building the first advanced weapons systems in the USSR. On the brink of arrest, they escaped with KGB’s help and eluded American intelligence for decades. Drawing on extensive interviews with Barr and new archival evidence, Steve Usdin explains why Barr and Sarant became spies, how they obtained military secrets, and how FBI blunders led to their escape. He chronicles their pioneering role in the Soviet computer industry, including their success in convincing Nikita Khrushchev to build a secret Silicon Valley. The book is rich with details of Barr’s and Sarant’s intriguing andexciting personal lives, their families, as well as their integration into Russian society. Engineering Communism follows the two spies through Sarant’s death and Barr’s unbelievable return to the United States.

How Not to Network a Nation

Author : Benjamin Peters
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 0262034182
Total Pages : 313 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (62 download)

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Book Synopsis How Not to Network a Nation by : Benjamin Peters

Download or read book How Not to Network a Nation written by Benjamin Peters and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2016-03-25 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How, despite thirty years of effort, Soviet attempts to build a national computer network were undone by socialists who seemed to behave like capitalists. Between 1959 and 1989, Soviet scientists and officials made numerous attempts to network their nation—to construct a nationwide computer network. None of these attempts succeeded, and the enterprise had been abandoned by the time the Soviet Union fell apart. Meanwhile, ARPANET, the American precursor to the Internet, went online in 1969. Why did the Soviet network, with top-level scientists and patriotic incentives, fail while the American network succeeded? In How Not to Network a Nation, Benjamin Peters reverses the usual cold war dualities and argues that the American ARPANET took shape thanks to well-managed state subsidies and collaborative research environments and the Soviet network projects stumbled because of unregulated competition among self-interested institutions, bureaucrats, and others. The capitalists behaved like socialists while the socialists behaved like capitalists. After examining the midcentury rise of cybernetics, the science of self-governing systems, and the emergence in the Soviet Union of economic cybernetics, Peters complicates this uneasy role reversal while chronicling the various Soviet attempts to build a “unified information network.” Drawing on previously unknown archival and historical materials, he focuses on the final, and most ambitious of these projects, the All-State Automated System of Management (OGAS), and its principal promoter, Viktor M. Glushkov. Peters describes the rise and fall of OGAS—its theoretical and practical reach, its vision of a national economy managed by network, the bureaucratic obstacles it encountered, and the institutional stalemate that killed it. Finally, he considers the implications of the Soviet experience for today's networked world.

The Forsaken

Author : Tim Tzouliadis
Publisher : Hachette UK
ISBN 13 : 0748130314
Total Pages : 582 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (481 download)

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Book Synopsis The Forsaken by : Tim Tzouliadis

Download or read book The Forsaken written by Tim Tzouliadis and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2011-06-02 with total page 582 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Of all the great movements of population to and from the United States, the least heralded is the migration, in the depths of the Depression of the nineteen-thirties, of thousands of men, women and children to Stalin's Russia. Where capitalism had failed them, Communism promised dignity for the working man, racial equality, and honest labour. What in fact awaited them, however, was the most monstrous betrayal. In a remarkable piece of historical investigation that spans seven decades of political change, Tim Tzouliadis follows these thousands from Pittsburgh and Detroit and Los Angeles, as their numbers dwindle on their epic and terrible journey. Through official records, memoirs, newspaper reports and interviews he searches the most closely guarded archive in modern history to reconstruct their story - one of honesty, vitality and idealism brought up against the brutal machinery of repression. His account exposes the self-serving American diplomats who refused their countrymen sanctuary, it analyses international relations and economic causes but also finds space to retrieve individual acts of kindness and self-sacrifice.

Black on Red

Author : Robert Robinson
Publisher : Acropolis Books (NY)
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 448 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (91 download)

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Book Synopsis Black on Red by : Robert Robinson

Download or read book Black on Red written by Robert Robinson and published by Acropolis Books (NY). This book was released on 1988 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Robert Robinson (1907?-1994) was a Jamaican-born toolmaker who worked in the auto industry in the United States. At the age of 23, he was recruited to work in the Soviet Union, where he spent 44 years after the government refused to give him an exit visa for return. Starting with a one-year contract by Russians to work in the Soviet Union, he twice renewed his contract. He became trapped by the German invasion of the Soviet Union during World War II and the government's refusal to give him an exit visa. He earned a degree in mechanical engineering during the war. He finally left the Soviet Union in 1974 on an approved trip to Uganda, where he asked for and was given asylum. He married an African-American professor working there. He finally gained re-entry to the United States in 1976, and gained attention for his accounts of his 44 years in the Soviet Union."--Wikipedia.

The Ghost of the Executed Engineer

Author : Loren Graham
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674254171
Total Pages : 168 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (742 download)

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Book Synopsis The Ghost of the Executed Engineer by : Loren Graham

Download or read book The Ghost of the Executed Engineer written by Loren Graham and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1996-02-01 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stalin ordered his execution, but here Peter Palchinsky has the last word. As if rising from an uneasy grave, Palchinsky’s ghost leads us through the miasma of Soviet technology and industry, pointing out the mistakes he condemned in his time, the corruption and collapse he predicted, the ultimate price paid for silencing those who were not afraid to speak out. The story of this visionary engineer’s life and work, as Loren Graham relates it, is also the story of the Soviet Union’s industrial promise and failure. We meet Palchinsky in pre-Revolutionary Russia, immersed in protests against the miserable lot of laborers in the tsarist state, protests destined to echo ironically during the Soviet worker’s paradise. Exiled from the country, pardoned and welcomed back at the outbreak of World War I, the engineer joined the ranks of the Revolutionary government, only to find it no more open to criticism than the previous regime. His turbulent career offers us a window on debates over industrialization. Graham highlights the harsh irrationalities built into the Soviet system—the world’s most inefficient steel mill in Magnitogorsk, the gigantic and ill-conceived hydroelectric plant on the Dnieper River, the infamously cruel and mislocated construction of the White Sea Canal. Time and again, we see the effects of policies that ignore not only the workers’ and consumers’ needs but also sound management and engineering precepts. And we see Palchinsky’s criticism and advice, persistently given, consistently ignored, continue to haunt the Soviet Union right up to its dissolution in 1991. The story of a man whose gifts and character set him in the path of history, The Ghost of the Executed Engineer is also a cautionary tale about the fate of an engineering that disregards social and human issues.

American Girls in Red Russia

Author : Julia L. Mickenberg
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 022625612X
Total Pages : 436 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (262 download)

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Book Synopsis American Girls in Red Russia by : Julia L. Mickenberg

Download or read book American Girls in Red Russia written by Julia L. Mickenberg and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-04-25 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If you were an independent, adventurous, liberated American woman in the 1920s or 1930s where might you have sought escape from the constraints and compromises of bourgeois living? Paris and the Left Bank quickly come to mind. But would you have ever thought of Russia and the wilds of Siberia? This choice was not as unusual as it seems now. As Julia L. Mickenberg uncovers in American Girls in Red Russia, there is a forgotten counterpoint to the story of the Lost Generation: beginning in the late nineteenth century, Russian revolutionary ideology attracted many women, including suffragists, reformers, educators, journalists, and artists, as well as curious travelers. Some were famous, like Isadora Duncan or Lillian Hellman; some were committed radicals, though more were just intrigued by the “Soviet experiment.” But all came to Russia in search of social arrangements that would be more equitable, just, and satisfying. And most in the end were disillusioned, some by the mundane realities, others by horrifying truths. Mickenberg reveals the complex motives that drew American women to Russia as they sought models for a revolutionary new era in which women would be not merely independent of men, but also equal builders of a new society. Soviet women, after all, earned the right to vote in 1917, and they also had abortion rights, property rights, the right to divorce, maternity benefits, and state-supported childcare. Even women from Soviet national minorities—many recently unveiled—became public figures, as African American and Jewish women noted. Yet as Mickenberg’s collective biography shows, Russia turned out to be as much a grim commune as a utopia of freedom, replete with economic, social, and sexual inequities. American Girls in Red Russia recounts the experiences of women who saved starving children from the Russian famine, worked on rural communes in Siberia, wrote for Moscow or New York newspapers, or performed on Soviet stages. Mickenberg finally tells these forgotten stories, full of hope and grave disappointments.

The Forsaken

Author : Tim Tzouliadis
Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 9781594201684
Total Pages : 456 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (16 download)

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Book Synopsis The Forsaken by : Tim Tzouliadis

Download or read book The Forsaken written by Tim Tzouliadis and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2008 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tzouliadis presents this remarkable piece of forgotten history--the story of how thousands of Americans were lured to Soviet Russia by the promise of jobs and better lives only to meet a tragic and, until now, forgotten end.

An American Engineer Looks at Russia

Author : George Arthur Burrell
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 376 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (91 download)

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Book Synopsis An American Engineer Looks at Russia by : George Arthur Burrell

Download or read book An American Engineer Looks at Russia written by George Arthur Burrell and published by . This book was released on 1932 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Scientists, Engineers, and Track-Two Diplomacy

Author : National Research Council
Publisher : National Academies Press
ISBN 13 : 0309090938
Total Pages : 167 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (9 download)

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Book Synopsis Scientists, Engineers, and Track-Two Diplomacy by : National Research Council

Download or read book Scientists, Engineers, and Track-Two Diplomacy written by National Research Council and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2004-03-02 with total page 167 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This report is intended to provide a brief historical perspective of the evolution of the interacademy program during the past half-century, recognizing that many legacies of the Soviet era continue to influence government approaches in Moscow and Washington and to shape the attitudes of researchers toward bilateral cooperation in both countries (of special interest is the changing character of the program during the age of perestroika (restructuring) in the late 1980s in the Soviet Union); to describe in some detail the significant interacademy activities from late 1991, when the Soviet Union fragmented, to mid-2003; and to set forth lessons learned about the benefits and limitations of interacademy cooperation and to highlight approaches that have been successful in overcoming difficulties of implementation.

Stalin and the Bomb

Author : David Holloway
Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 0300164459
Total Pages : 507 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (1 download)

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Book Synopsis Stalin and the Bomb by : David Holloway

Download or read book Stalin and the Bomb written by David Holloway and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2008-10-01 with total page 507 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The classic and “utterly engrossing” study of Stalin’s pursuit of a nuclear bomb during the Cold War by the renowned political scientist and historian (Foreign Affairs). For forty years the U.S.-Russian nuclear arms race dominated world politics, yet the Soviet nuclear establishment was shrouded in secrecy. Then, shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, David Holloway pulled back the Iron Curtain with his “marvelous, groundbreaking study” Stalin and the Bomb (The New Yorker). How did the Soviet Union build its atomic and hydrogen bombs? What role did espionage play? How did the American atomic monopoly affect Stalin's foreign policy? What was the relationship between Soviet nuclear scientists and the country's political leaders? David Holloway answers these questions by tracing the dramatic story of Soviet nuclear policy from developments in physics in the 1920s to the testing of the hydrogen bomb and the emergence of nuclear deterrence in the mid-1950s. This magisterial history throws light on Soviet policy at the height of the Cold War, illuminates a central element of the Stalinist system, and puts into perspective the tragic legacy of this program―environmental damage, a vast network of institutes and factories, and a huge stockpile of unwanted weapons.

Behind the Urals

Author : John Scott
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780253351258
Total Pages : 360 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (512 download)

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Book Synopsis Behind the Urals by : John Scott

Download or read book Behind the Urals written by John Scott and published by . This book was released on 1989 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Scott's classic account of his five years as a worker in the new industrial city of Magnitogorsk in the 1930s, first published in 1942, is enhanced in this edition by Stephen Kotkin's introduction, which places the book in context for today's readers; by the texts of three debriefings of Scott conducted at the U.S. embassy in Moscow in 1938 and published here for the first time; and by a selection of photographs showing life in Magnitogorsk in the 1930s. No other book provides such a graphic description of the life of workers under the First Five-Year Plan.

Rossiya

Author : Alex Shishin
Publisher : iUniverse
ISBN 13 : 059538529X
Total Pages : 224 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (953 download)

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Book Synopsis Rossiya by : Alex Shishin

Download or read book Rossiya written by Alex Shishin and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2006 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rossiya: Voices from the Brezhnev Era is a poignant sketch of the Soviet Union prior to its disastrous invasion of Afghanistan. It is also a bittersweet tale of an American coming to terms with his Russian roots. One summer in the late 1970s, author Alex Shishin travels through the USSR on the Rossiya, the Trans-Siberian train that runs between Vladivostok and Moscow and that twice carries him across the vastness of Siberia. Fluent in Russian, the young Russian American converses with countless citizens from every strata of Soviet society. An extended side trip to Poland brings him in contact with a simmering revolution. Everywhere he goes, Shishin meets ordinary people imbued with a generosity that transcends all political systems and times. "Alex's readiness to accept people without judging them enables his fellow travelers to open up to him and talk about things that affect their lives: politics, economics, their harsh memories of war, and their deep desires for peace. His vivid portraits of the people he meets make you feel as if you are sitting together with him, hearing the voices, enjoying the food and drinks, and feeling the motion of the train traveling over the tracks.. This is a moving account of the writer's pilgrimage to know himself through human encounters." -Peter Sano, author of 1,000 Days in Siberia: The Odyssey of a Japanese-American POW

Cultural Exchange and the Cold War

Author : Yale Richmond
Publisher : Penn State Press
ISBN 13 : 0271031573
Total Pages : 266 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (71 download)

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Book Synopsis Cultural Exchange and the Cold War by : Yale Richmond

Download or read book Cultural Exchange and the Cold War written by Yale Richmond and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2003-04-21 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Some fifty thousand Soviets visited the United States under various exchange programs between 1958 and 1988. They came as scholars and students, scientists and engineers, writers and journalists, government and party officials, musicians, dancers, and athletes—and among them were more than a few KGB officers. They came, they saw, they were conquered, and the Soviet Union would never again be the same. Cultural Exchange and the Cold War describes how these exchange programs (which brought an even larger number of Americans to the Soviet Union) raised the Iron Curtain and fostered changes that prepared the way for Gorbachev's glasnost, perestroika, and the end of the Cold War. This study is based upon interviews with Russian and American participants as well as the personal experiences of the author and others who were involved in or administered such exchanges. Cultural Exchange and the Cold War demonstrates that the best policy to pursue with countries we disagree with is not isolation but engagement.

Foreign Relations of the United States

Author : United States. Department of State
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 1062 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (319 download)

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Book Synopsis Foreign Relations of the United States by : United States. Department of State

Download or read book Foreign Relations of the United States written by United States. Department of State and published by . This book was released on 1941 with total page 1062 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Cars for Comrades

Author : Lewis H. Siegelbaum
Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 0801461480
Total Pages : 329 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (14 download)

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Book Synopsis Cars for Comrades by : Lewis H. Siegelbaum

Download or read book Cars for Comrades written by Lewis H. Siegelbaum and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2011-08-15 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The automobile and Soviet communism made an odd couple. The quintessential symbol of American economic might and consumerism never achieved iconic status as an engine of Communist progress, in part because it posed an awkward challenge to some basic assumptions of Soviet ideology and practice. In this rich and often witty book, Lewis H. Siegelbaum recounts the life of the Soviet automobile and in the process gives us a fresh perspective on the history and fate of the USSR itself. Based on sources ranging from official state archives to cartoons, car-enthusiast magazines, and popular films, Cars for Comrades takes us from the construction of the huge "Soviet Detroits," emblems of the utopian phase of Soviet planning, to present-day Togliatti, where the fate of Russia's last auto plant hangs in the balance. The large role played by American businessmen and engineers in the checkered history of Soviet automobile manufacture is one of the book's surprises, and the author points up the ironic parallels between the Soviet story and the decline of the American Detroit. In the interwar years, automobile clubs, car magazines, and the popularity of rally races were signs of a nascent Soviet car culture, its growth slowed by the policies of the Stalinist state and by Russia's intractable "roadlessness." In the postwar years cars appeared with greater frequency in songs, movies, novels, and in propaganda that promised to do better than car-crazy America. Ultimately, Siegelbaum shows, the automobile epitomized and exacerbated the contradictions between what Soviet communism encouraged and what it provided. To need a car was a mark of support for industrial goals; to want a car for its own sake was something else entirely. Because Soviet cars were both hard to get and chronically unreliable, and such items as gasoline and spare parts so scarce, owning and maintaining them enmeshed citizens in networks of private, semi-illegal, and ideologically heterodox practices that the state was helpless to combat. Deeply researched and engagingly told, this masterful and entertaining biography of the Soviet automobile provides a new perspective on one of the twentieth century's most iconic—and important—technologies and a novel approach to understanding the history of the Soviet Union itself.

Assignment in Utopia

Author : Eugene Lyons
Publisher : Transaction Publishers
ISBN 13 : 9781412817608
Total Pages : 696 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (176 download)

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Book Synopsis Assignment in Utopia by : Eugene Lyons

Download or read book Assignment in Utopia written by Eugene Lyons and published by Transaction Publishers. This book was released on with total page 696 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a story of belief, disillusionment and atonement. Long identified with leftist causes, the journalist Eugene Lyons was by background and sentiment predisposed to early support of the Russian Revolution. A "friendly correspondent," he was one of a coterie of foreign journalists permitted into the Soviet Union during the Stalinist era because their desire to serve the revolution was thought to outweigh their desire to serve the truth. Lyons first went to the Soviet Union in 1927, and spent six years there. He was there as Stalin consolidated his power, through collectivization and its consequences, as the cultural and technical intelligentsia succumbed to the secret police, and as the mechanisms of terror were honed. As Ellen Frankel Paul notes in her major new introduction to this edition, "It was this murderous reality that Stalin's censors worked so assiduously to camouflage, corralling foreign correspondents as their often willing allies." Lyons was one of those allies. Assignment in "Utopia "describes why he refused to see the obvious, the forces that kept him from writing the truth, and the tortuous path he traveled in liberating himself. His story helps us understand how so many who were in a position to know were so silent for so long. In addition, it is a document, by an on-the-scene journalist, of major events in the critical period of the first Five-Year Plan. As Ellen Frankel Paul notes in her major new introduction to this new edition, Assignment in "Utopia "is particularly timely. The system it dissects in such devastating detail is in the process of being rejected throughout Eastern Europe and is under challenge in the Soviet Union itself. The book lends insight into the "political pilgrim" phenomenon described by Paul Hollander, in which visitors celebrate terrorist regimes, seemingly oblivious to their destructive force. The book is valuable for those interested in the Stalinist era in the Soviet Union, those interested in radical regimes and political change, as well as those interested in better understanding current events in Europe. It will also be useful for the tough questions it poses about journalistic ethics.