John Scott (writer)

After leaving the University of Wisconsin in 1931[1]^: 3 and getting some welding apprentice training at the General Electric plant in Schenectady, New York, Scott migrated to the Soviet Union in September 1932 at the age of 20.[1]^: 5 He worked for 5 years in the new industrial city Magnitogorsk at an iron and steel plant.[1]^: 253 Most of his book is a memoir of his life and work experiences from 1932 to 1937.

Returning from a vacation in late 1937, he found that the purge had "made astonishing headway" in only a few months[1]^: 230 and that, as a foreigner, he was no longer allowed into the plant. He talked with a fellow foreman and longtime friend, Kolya, who concluded: "Better leave. This is no place for foreigners now."[1]^: 230 He and his wife, Maria (Masha) Ivanovna Dikareva Scott, decided that night to leave. The next day Masha applied for permission to go to the United States to live, which would turn out to take four years to come through. After three months of waiting[1]^{: 230, 244} while unemployed, Scott left Magnitogorsk for Moscow, planning to seek work as a translator or a secretary to a foreign journalist. In 1942, the family moved to America, an outcome that took help from the U.S. embassy to come about.[1]^: 244 Scott came close to being a purge victim; he stated that if he had switched citizenship during his good Soviet years, as some other foreign-born socialists had, he would have been sent, like them, into Siberian labor camps. This theme (differing fates for foreign-born residents depending on citizenship status by the time of the purge) is also confirmed in Robert Robinson's memoir.[5]

Scott wrote Behind the Urals: An American Worker in Russia's City of Steel about his experiences in Magnitogorsk, presenting the Stalinist enterprise of building a huge steel producing plant and city as an awe-inspiring triumph of collectivism. Scott contributed to the construction of Magnitogorsk as a welder working in treacherous conditions. His writing reflects the painful human price of industrial accidents, overwork, and the inefficiency of the hyperindustrialization program, the wretched condition of peasants driven from the land in the collectivization program and forced into becoming industrial laborers, and the harshness of Article 58 in the ideological purges.

In Behind the Urals Scott recalls many examples of the danger workers faced in Magnitogorsk:

I was just going to start welding when I heard someone sing out, and something swished down past me. It was a rigger who had been working on the very top. He bounced off the bleeder pipe, which probably saved his life. Instead of falling all the way to the ground, he landed on the main platform about fifteen foot below me. By the time I got down to him, blood was coming out of his mouth in gushes. He tried to yell, but could not.[1]^: 19–20

According to Scott, Stalin chose to industrialize Magnitogorsk for several reasons, and integrated the construction of Magnitogorsk into a five-year economic plan. First, Stalin began to emphasize industrial modernization in favor of agriculture by the mid-1930s. Second, Magnitogorsk was rich in iron ore and other minerals. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, Magnitogorsk lies far from any borders and was less vulnerable to enemy attack.

The Russian people shed blood, sweat, and tears to create something else, a modern industrial base outside the reach of an invader—Stalin's Ural Stronghold—and modern mechanized army...the population was taught by a painful and expensive process to work efficiently, to obey orders, to mind their own business, and to take it on the chin when necessary with a minimum of complaint. These are the things that it takes to fight a modern war.[1]^: 266

These experiences, however, had not yet disillusioned Scott with the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), which he believed was "the source of initiative and energy which drove work forward."[1]^: 83 Scott expressed a deep sense of pride for his contributions as a welder in Magnitogorsk[1]^: 249 and was sympathetic to many Soviet ideals. Reflecting back on the poor working conditions, loss of life, and ideological purges, Scott explained that many average Soviet citizens saw moral value nonetheless in the Soviet alternative to the exploitative imperial default that would otherwise exist. To them "it was worthwhile to shed blood, sweat, and tears" to lay "the foundations for a new society farther along the road of human progress than anything in the West; a society which would guarantee its people not only personal freedom but absolute economic security."[1]^: 248 However, after leaving Magnitogorsk in 1938, Scott spent the next 3 years in Moscow as an "observer",[1]^{: 248–249} waiting for the visa allowing him to bring his wife and children out of the USSR, and although his book as published in 1942 showed that he had abiding sympathy with the ideals of the Soviet experiment, by February 1938 in his then-classified debriefing by the U.S. embassy, he had already reached a private dread that "the future of the Soviet Union does not look bright to me."[1]^: 301 It is clear that he still sympathized with socialist ideals but had found Stalinism and the purge to be a wrong turn away from them. He said, "Unless the Party is restored to at least some of its former position as a leading force in the country and permitted to propagate certain basic socialist principles, there will be no cement to prevent demoralization and breakdown, no ideology to act as a religion or faith for youth."[1]^: 301 This was an accurate prediction, although the loss of zeal would take another half century to fully develop, long after chekism had displaced progressive idealism as the real driving force of the party. Even on the same page from 1942 on which he credited the CPSU with getting things done economically,[1]^: 83 he described Stalin's leadership as full of "ruthlessness and cold, colorless dogmatism."[1]^: 83 However, he saw most of the populace as focused solely on rising standard of living, which he saw had in fact occurred in the 1930s, and he said even in his private 1938 debriefing that "I believe that the economic battle is gradually being won."[1]^{: 305–306} He said, "I believe that the popular feeling in the Urals is that the present regime has given them [the common people], and is giving them, more goods and comforts than they have had before. It is possible that as long as the Soviet regime is able to keep the people at work and give them enough purchasing power to buy the things essential to their low standards it will endure."[1]^{: 305–306} The "low standards" part of his statement is significant in fully understanding it. As Manya Gordon showed in 1941, the overall arc of Russian standard of living from the 1910s through the 1930s was not at all what it should have been if a brutal civil war and forced collectivization had not happened at all, but given that those things did in fact happen, it was possible, among those people who had not been imprisoned, starved to death, or shot, to see improvement in 1938—relative to the deranged baseline of how horrible things had gotten by 1923 in the civil war's aftermath. The latter nadir was the reference point by which the "low standards" were calibrated, and it was quite different from "what should have been" if Bolshevism had never destroyed the better angels of earlier Russian progressivism, which is how Scott's examples of improved living standards and Gordon's examples of degraded living standards were both accurate despite their apparent contradiction.

It would be some years before Scott later became openly anti-Bolshevik. Reading his book of 1942 and the embassy dispatches in its addendum, which were from 1938 but were not published until decades later, it is traceable that in between the time when he was very enthusiastic about the Soviet future (i.e., in the early 1930s) and the time when he became anti-Bolshevik (years later) was a transition that started in 1937 at the height of the purge.

From 1938 to 1941, owing to the Soviet crackdown on foreign nationals during and after the Great Purge, Scott was no longer allowed to work in the plant at Magnitogorsk. He would have left Russia, but he could not bring his wife and children out of the country because his wife's request for an exit visa was being held up.[1]^{: 230–249} Waiting for his wife's visa, he spent about 2.5 years in Moscow as a translator, journalist, observer of daily life, and sometime novelist. During this time, the U.S. embassy debriefed him about his time living and working in the USSR.[1]^{: 280–306} Diplomatic dispatches conveyed this debriefed information to the United States. Their content is published in the addendum to Scott's book.[1]^{: 280–306} As his book's editor, Stephen Kotkin, said, "Embassy officials regularly debriefed American citizens living and working in the USSR."[1]^: 280 Most such people were American engineers doing consulting work in Soviet enterprises. Some were workers like Scott who had come to the USSR during the Great Depression with excitement about participating in what was then projected to be the successful construction of a great Soviet socialist future. Such debriefings were one of the only ways for the United States to get nonofficial information about Soviet life and industry, as most real economic data was a state secret in the USSR by the late 1930s, and the U.S. had little successful human intelligence in the country.

It was ascertained in the United States, through the National Security Agency's Venona Project, that the Soviet government was aware of Scott's debriefing and its transmission to the United States, and that, in the paranoia of Stalinism, it characterized them as espionage, although Scott was never privy to any substantial Soviet secrets and was in fact only reporting facts that were fairly obvious to many Soviet workers and administrators, albeit undiscoverable outside the country. For example, these included hearsay about what sort of industrial plant was under construction in this or that city, how huge it was, and what kind of wages and apartments workers were finding available there. They also included objective information on dekulakization, the public and administrative mood during the height of the purge, and objective information on wrecking (both real and doubtfully alleged, both physical and administrative).[1]^{: 280–306} The three dispatches date from January, February, and March 1938 and cover an array of topics, including the forced labor colony in Magnitogorsk;[1]^: 280 activities of Soviet secret police,[1]^: 303 wrecking, both as industrial sabotage and (as the Soviet view included) incompetent but unintentional malpractice;[1]^: 290 food stores;[1]^: 302 and the production capabilities of the metallurgical plant in Magnitogorsk.[1]^: 305 In 1942 Scott moved back to the United States with his wife and two children.[1]^{: 248–249}

Amongst nearly 1,300 messages sent between New York and Moscow in 1942, just twenty-three were successfully decrypted and translated by the Venona Project.[6] A cable sent from New York to Moscow on May 22, 1942, addressed to code name "Viktor", who was the director of Soviet Intelligence during World War II Lieutenant General Pavel Fitin,[7] credited "Ivanov" with delivering "a mass of materials on the Soviet war industry" to the United States.[8] Nearly three years later cable number 207 sent from Moscow to a Soviet Intelligence office in New York on March 8, 1945, revealed that the cover name "Ivanov" referred to John Scott.[9]

Scott Nearing, Scott's father, eventually broke with him because of his criticism of Bolshevik and Bolshevik-inspired systems. Nearing too had his own critiques of the Soviet system and advocated pacifism, but he remained sympathetic to socialism in countries with violently repressive regimes whereas his son did not. Nearing was a sympathetic socialist guest of the Albanian state of the Stalinist-inspired Hoxha regime as late as the 1970s.

Whittaker Chambers claimed that Scott tried to influence Time Magazine publisher Henry Luce to remove Chambers as foreign news editor because of Chambers' anti-communist and anti-Soviet views.[10]^: 498 Scott's own evolution in his views over the decades is relevant here as at the time of which Chambers spoke Scott still had hope for socialism in its non-Stalinist forms whereas by the 1970s his disillusionment was more extensive.