The Ghost of the Executed Engineer: Technology and the Fall of the Soviet Union

by Loren R. Graham

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 Magnito-gorsk, the gigantic and ill-conceived hydro-electric plant on the Dnieper River, the infamously cruel and mislocated construction of the White Sea Canal. Time and again, we see the effect of policies that ignore not only 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 engineering that disregards social and human issues.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Russia, Economics, History Of Science, School, Science

154 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1993

About the author

Loren R. Graham was an American historian of science, particularly science in Russia.

Reviews

[Helen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a really interesting and easy to read book about an exceptional Russian mining engineer, who, although educated in pre-Revolutionary Russia, embraced the Revolution, yet, because of his stubborn insistence on considering the human, social side of engineering projects, eventually suffered a tragic fate in the earliest purge under Stalin. It's both a book about Engineer Palchinsky's life, and about the reasons why Russia, both under the Tsar and under the communists, was unable to succeed in developing industry in a rational, humanistic manner. The reason why this happened under the Tsar was because the Tsar didn't want the populace to become particularly well-educated, since he feared any competition or demands from the masses. And so he deliberately didn't promote education. Under communism, even though there was much more education and illiteracy was wiped out, in the field of engineering, education was minutely focused on ridiculously specific specialties, so that each graduate didn't get an overall education, and so never could get an overall view of the effects of projects, just knew about his one specific area of specialization. These engineering students didn't learn about the humanities, society, ethics as part of their education. The narrowness of the approach led to an inability to understand what the long-term effects of decisions might be. These armies of specialized engineers eventually formed the backbone of Soviet leadership - unfortunately, the result was the focus on heavy industry, mega-projects, without much thought given to the welfare of the workers at the projects, or their environmental costs. Perhaps the extreme specialization was also a way of "hobbling" or preventing any possibility of a challenge from the engineers, by the Soviet leadership. After the Industrial trial, the first purge, during which Palchinsky was executed in secret, the engineers never again tried to be an independent voice. They became compliant, merely a mechanism to be used by the leadership to reach their grandiose goals.

I thought this book was quite interesting - in that it provided some insight as to why Russia was unable to capitalize on its plentiful natural resources, combined with armies of engineers. It turns out that both the Tsar and Stalin really did not want to foster any possible challenge from an independent class, in this case, the engineers. One-man, one-party rule minimized or eliminated the opposition - but that could, and was often, disastrous when it came to development and engineering decisions - if leadership didn't take into account pertinent factors, or wouldn't listen to warnings, or pushed production without the slightest regard for worker safety etc, the result could be catastrophic, as at Chernobyl, a nuclear power plant that used outdated technology and where an idea to see if corners could be cut led to a major melt-down.

In some ways, this was one of the most insightful books about Russian problems I have ever read. Albeit it simply focuses on the story of Palchinsky, it is poignant and tragic at the same time as it recounts the life of Palchinsky, his efforts to organize engineers into professional organizations so as to exchange ideas on new developments in the field and so forth. Palchinsky was truly a brilliant engineer and only hoped for the best for his native land. However, he came to be seen as organizing an alternative "power center" to the regular Kremlin leadership. It also didn't help that he had been educated in pre-Revolutionary times, had received an engineering education that included humanities classes; this alone made him suspect. In the end, despite the pronouncements of the leadership that the "workers paradise" was just around the corner, the populace became increasingly skeptical and finally cynical about the prospects for Russia under communism. When the end came, hardly anyone tried to save the old system, which collapsed with hardly any violence.

Here are the quotes:

"This book attempts to ...explain why the Soviet Union failed to become a modern industrialized country."

"Almost every textbook of Soviet history mentions the Industrial Party Trial in 1930, a prosecution of many leading Russian engineers. Few of those texts offer any information about the alleged head of the Industrial Party, Peter Palchinsky."

"[Palchinsky's] ...ghost has guided me to an understanding of the failures of Soviet technology and the great cost that industrialization exacted from the Soviet people."

"Why had the USSR been unable to benefit fully from its impressive start in technological modernization?"

"...when the Soviet Union installed factory equipment for the first time, it was the latest model, putting the USSR in a superior position to those countries that had expanded earlier and were saddled with obsolescent technology."

"...the Soviet centrally planned economy worked well enough to build up an industrial establishment that was in its heyday, the second largest in the world; it enabled the Soviet Union to resist and throw back Hitler's armies, and to continue to expand for many decades, both before and after World War II."

"[Palchinsky's] ... mother recognized that Peter was unusually self-contained, and she urged him to be more expressive with others."

"...one of the credos of all his later activity was formed: Good industrial policy cannot be formulated in the absence of full and reliable statistics."

"[Palchinsky] ... often spoke of the advantages of common ownership of the land and of cooperation among all the members of society."

"[The anarchist Peter] Kropotkin [1842-1921] believed that the industrial revolution... was a cruel aberration in history, a temporary phase when financial capital and steam technology worked together to form an oppressive society based on centralized factories with division of labor and resulting class conflict."

"...before and after the 1905 Revolution Palchinsky rejected violence as a political means."

"The obstacles to Russia's industrial advancement were not technological, [Palchinsky] ... believed, but political, social, legal, and educational."

"[Palchinsky's wife Nina]... not only helped her pupils achieve literacy but taught them political doctrines of reform and change."

"[Nina, in 1909 letter to Peter:] How far [the] ... life [of their Viennese friends the Shenks] is from that path upon which we are traveling, and, especially the one on which you are now going, leading toward anarchism."

"[Palchinsky] ... established in 1916 an institute devoted to the "study of the rational use of the natural resources" of Russia.. [which] ... took as a slogan a thousand-year old phrase from the primary chronicle of ancient Kiev: "Our land is great and rich, but there is no order in it.""

"Like many people, as Palchinsky grew older.. he became more conservative politically, economically, and personally."

"According to Bolshevik mythology, the takeover on the night of October 25, 1917, of the Winter Palace, where top officials of the Provisional Government had sought refuge, was a heroic military event. In actual fact, the Winter Palace fell by infiltration rather than by frontal assault, and only a few people were killed."

"As soon as the group [of Provisional Government prisoners] emerged onto the dark street it was surrounded by a fist-shaking mob of Bolshevik adherents who demanded that the government officials be beheaded and thrown into the river."

"The Bolsheviks were committed to creating a planned economy, to industrialization, and to science and technology."

"[Palchinsky] ... was particularly excited by the plan to electrify all of Russia in a few years..."

"[By the early 1920s, Palchinsky] ... made a sharp distinction between the interests of Russia as a country, which he strongly supported, and the interests of the Communist Party, which he opposed."

"He wrote in 1927 that the Soviet oil industry has "too many administrative rules and too few safety rules.""

"[Palchinsky] ...emphasized that the Revolution had overcome many of the obstacles to industrialization that engineers had earlier encountered. He believed that the new Soviet regime presented possibilities for the planning of industry about which engineers of the tsarist period could not have dreamed; indeed, he thought that Soviet engineers, freed from capitalist employers, could have a greater influence on their nation than engineers anywhere else. He hoped that Soviet engineers might come to occupy the roles that financiers and entrepreneurs had under capitalism."

"The Soviet Union, [Palchinsky] ... warned, must have a goal beyond the construction of heavy industry."

"Human beings must be considered not hired hands but creative individuals with cultural and spiritual needs."

"Palchinsky observed in 1926 that... Some of the most productive industries were less well equipped than the less productive ones. The difference came down to the workers-- how well educated were they, how well treated were they, how interested were they in the work."

"While Palchinsky admired American workers...he thought industrial managers in the United States were too narrowly interested in profits and that American society in general was too self-centered. In place of the Monroe Doctrine that "America is for Americans," Palchinsky proposed a new principle: "The world is for its human inhabitants.""

"Lenin...asserted in 1918, "We must introduce the Taylor system and the scientific American system of increasing the productivity of labor throughout all of Russia.""

"The more Palchinsky examined Taylorism the more critical of it he became, and he proposed "humanitarian engineering" as a substitute."

"Knowledgeable workers, Palchinsky believed, would be masters of their work, not slaves of it."

"Earlier...higher authorities asked [the engineer] ... to find solutions to technical problems. Now, ...the engineer must emerge as an active economic and industrial planner, suggesting where economic development should occur and what form it should take."

"The tensions between Palchinsky's vision and that of the Party became extreme once Stalin gained absolute control at the end of the twenties. The primary issue was political authority. The Communists had never allowed professional groups to have the kind of autonomy or to express the broad concerns that Palchinsky wanted engineers to do."

"Stalin was ... willing to force poorly educated peasants ... to perform tasks in new industries for which they were not qualified. The results were high accident rates and shoddy production...."

"Stalin had served on a commission investigating the strikes of the university faculties and engineers immediately after the Revolution, and he considered the technical intelligentsia potential saboteurs."

"[In]...a draft letter...dated 5 December 1926...apparently intended for Aleksei Invanovich Rykov, at that time the prime minister of the Soviet Union... Palchinsky asserts that science and technology are more important factors in shaping society than communism itself."

"...from November 25 to December 7, 1930...the beginning of a reign of terror among Soviet engineers, several thousand of whom were arrested. There were only about ten thousand engineers in the entire Soviet Union at the time. In the end, about 30 percent of Palchinsky's colleagues were arrested--most of them thrown into labor camps with little chance of survival. The lucky ones were placed in special research and development prisons and assigned tasks by the government."

¨A major charge against Palchinsky and his organizations was that they insisted on publishing ¨detailed statistics¨ on the mining and petroleum industries, which could be used by anti-Soviet organizations. Thus, the Soviet authorities were taking the same attitude toward industrial and labor statistics that the tsarist government had when Palchinsky had investigated the ¨labor question¨ in the Don Basin at the turn of the century.¨

¨...[Palchinsky´s] fate and that of like-minded engineers of the late 1920s had a negative effect on industry in the Soviet Union for many years--just as the similar elimination of enterprising farmers, the so-called kulaks, damaged agriculture."

¨...Soviet industrialization projects were badly flawed from an engineering standpoint, flagrantly wasteful of the faith of those Soviet workers who supported them, and dreadfully costly of the lives of those who worked on them voluntarily and involuntarily."

¨Dneprostroi [the Dnieper dam project] established patterns of the abuse of labor and local populations, which became more evident and flagrant in later projects and contributed to the decades-long disillusionment of Soviet workers. It was just the first among many experiences that gradually reduced support for the Soviet government among workers and peasants."

¨Stalin and the top leaders of the Communist Party wanted the largest power plant ever built in order to impress the world and the Soviet population with their success and that of the coming Communist social order."

¨Palchinsky admonished the government not to plan enormous hydroelectric plants, such as Dneprostroi, without regard to the distance between where the energy would be used to where it would be generated. The likely consequences, he predicted, would be huge transmission costs and declines in efficiency."

¨In 1929 construction began on a gigantic complex of blast furnaces, open hearth furnaces, and finishing mills that would eventually produce each year almost as much steel as all of Great Britain [known as Magnitogorsk]."

¨One of the characteristics of industrialization under Stalin was the coexistence of volunteer and forced labor, of heroic self-sacrifice and violent coercion. It was a temporary and unstable dichotomy that could occur only in a society that was simultaneously undergoing a social revolution with substantial support from below while being enslaved from above.¨

¨The workers of Magnitogorsk eventually lapsed into the apathy characteristic of most of the Soviet labor force."

¨The building of the White Sea Canal, another of the large projects of the First Five-Year Plan, was a nightmare.¨

¨The accounts of the [White Sea] canal´s construction published in the Soviet Union totally ignored the human costs of the project.¨

¨The engineers who led the [White Sea Canal] project...were not permitted to question the wisdom of the project itself. That the canal would be frozen half the year and that a modernization of the existing railroad, usable year-round, might be more sensible, were not included in the [engineering team´s] analysis. As prisoners, the engineers were allowed to submit suggestions to their police supervisors only for the path of the canal and the method of construction.¨

[Sophie Kessler]

I don’t know how to rate this cause I learned a lot from this book, but it was also assigned for me to read and I would never just pick it up for funsies

[Phoenix · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Rediscovery of Peter Palchinski

The Problem was not in the Engineer’s Plans – It was in his Execution.

Partly a biography and largely a critique of the Soviet propensity for centrally planned mega-projects, the author takes us through Palchinsky’s early life, his family relationships and elements of his career. An idealist, a progressive socialist who favoured the writings of anarchist Peter Kropotkin who believed in the utopian possibilities of technology, Palchinsky spent his life as an engineer advocating for the human side production in the belief that that improvements in production were not just technological but deeply intertwined with the conditions given to the workers.

Exiled to Siberia in 1906 for anarchist sympathies he found work as an engineer and became an expert on mining. He escaped 1908 and found success in Germany as an industrial consultant writing a 4 volume study of productivity in European sea ports. He main recommendations were in improvements to infrastructure such as housing, schools, medical care, pay and social insurance. Pardoned in 1913 he returned to Russia and aligned himself with the right wing of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, supported the War against Germany (WW I) and held a number of positions with the Provisional Government including deputy minister of Trade and Industry. Indeed he was one of the 3 men put in charge of defending the Winter Palace and authorized the surrender of its council chambers. The Bolsheviks put him in jail but released him in March 1917. Paradoxically he found government work as an engineer for which he became well known, but he stayed with friends rather than with his wife Nina for fear of being arrested.

Palchinsky’s political mistake was to be critical of the regime, writing that Soviet industry had “too many administrative rules and too few safety rules”. He castigated the lack of planning of the Great Dnieper Hydroelectric Dam (Dneprostroi) pointing out the large distance between the points of production and use would lead to large energy losses and voiced concern that approval for construction had gone ahead w/o prior topological maps nor studies of the flow patterns of underground water. No one actually knew how large a region the 35 meter high dam would flood. Soviets, such as Lenin and Aleksei Gastev were impressed by American productivity, in particular the “scientific” methods of production recommended by Taylorism and Ford’s assembly line. Stalin also distrusted the engineering profession. Two of his favourite books on the subject were pre-Revolution science fiction novels about a socialist society on Mars which was continually sabotaged by the brilliant but villainous Engineer Menni. Stalin believed that 5 year plans and political exhortations exalting Soviet ideology would inspire the workers to overcome such trivial concerns. The reality however consisted of desperate working and living conditions, environmental damage, high mortality and slave labour. In 1928 Palchinsky was arrested, charged with leading a conspiracy to overthrow the government and executed in secret.

Graham continues with an analysis and criticism of 3 other large scale projects that ultimately proved to be just as ill planned and impractical as Dneprostroi – The Magnitogorsk mine, the White Sea Canal and the BAM transcontinental railroad. The last, which took place during the Brezhnev era, did not use slave/prisoner labour but did make large use of army recruits to make up for the failure of citizen labour to meet political goals, which amounted to the same thing as they were paid far less and subject to military discipline. Graham is also critical of how narrow Soviet engineering education became – the liberal studies component was nothing more than exposure to the rhetoric of dialectic materialism and the students graduated with highly specific degrees such as “ball bearing engineer for paper mills” as opposed to a general designation of mechanical engineer.

An interesting set of insights into the mind set of the Former Soviet Union and an excellent remedy to the notion of management by decree. Recommended!

[Matthew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Graham describes the life of Peter Palchinsky (1875-1929), a civil/mining engineer (and self-styled technocrat/internationalist) who participated in (or at least attempted to) the modernization of Russia and the Soviet Union. Palchinsky strove to integrate political and social factors into industrial planning – promoting a more complex view of planning than those of his peers who simply thought in terms of technological and economic concerns. Palchinsky’s holistic approach to planning (which also took into account working conditions, local infrastructure, and the local environment) earned him exile under the Tsar in 1906, and got him executed by the Soviet regime in 1929.
Graham uses the story of Palchinsky’s life and career as a means to examine the trajectory of technology (or the technological intelligentsia) in the history of tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union. This works well, as Palchinsky seems to have embodied many of the concerns of his peers, as well as to have represented a possible new way of approaching technological planning. For example, like many of his peers, Palchinsky was very critical of the Russian autocracy. He saw the policies of the Tsar as devaluing human life. His opposition to the autocracy earned Palchinsky exile after the failed revolution of 1905.
Palchinsky was later repatriated. After the 1917 revolution, he played a role in the Provisional Government. While Palchinsky opposed the Bolsheviks, he was able to come to terms with the new government and even welcomed its promise of rational development, modernization, and industrialization. As a consultant, he promoted "humanitarian engineering" - his holistic form of planning along with the concept that the country would be best served by engineers educated broadly in the social aspects of engineering - sincerely believing that "Russia had the opportunity to develop a far more humane industry than anywhere else" (p. 36). However, like his peers, he was to find that Soviet planning subordinated independent thought to centralized management for rapid industrialization. Social costs were not considered, at least not on the local level Palchisky promoted. These ideas became dangerous under the Stalinist regime. Palchinsky’s execution seems to predict the Industrial Party Trial of 1930, when thousands of engineers became the regime's victims.
Soviet technical education suffered a similar fate. According to Graham, the focus of education became so incredibly narrow (even more so than its tsarist counterpart) that it became “intellectually impoverished, politically tendentious, socially unaware, and ethically lame” (p. 73). This produced a cohort of what might be better described as technicians than engineers. This politically loyal but socially disconnected technical elite (many of whom had no liberal arts education at all), Graham insists, was responsible for some of the most famous technological disasters of the 20th century – Chernobyl the most infamous. But these large-scale disasters are only emblematic of the even larger network of problems, indications that central planning took little account of the lives and needs of workers, that eventually signaled the failure of the Soviet push for rapid, state-controlled industrialization.
This book is very impressive. Graham uses Palchinsky's story to illustrate a larger social story about the fate of the Soviet technological intelligentsia. This book makes an excellent biographical companion to Kendall Bailes' social history of the Soviet technical intelligentsia, Technology and Society under Lenin and Stalin: Origins of the Soviet Technical Intelligentsia, 1917-1941.

[Heather · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the lovely little story of a pesky bourgeoisie engineer who actually gave a crap about the proletariat. First he was kneed in the groin by the tsarist regime for finding out that the reason their coal production was sucking was because the living conditions for the miners were terrible. Then he was (briefly) involved in the provisional government, and then he was kneed in the groin repeatedly by the Soviets because he actually had the testicular fortitude to tell Stalin that maybe, just maybe, they should do some actual research before deciding to build things, and that maybe they should provide housing, medical care, sanitation, and proper wages for the workers. Stalin told him that sounded like defeatist capitalist propaganda. And then he killed him. And Russia continued to get suckier, and hardly any of the big monuments to Stalin's insecurities about his wang size worked properly, and Chernobyl blew up, and Communism fell. Because they DIDN'T LISTEN TO THE ENGINEER. It's like the House of Atreus, only with more death.

Okay, I'm waaaaaaay oversimplifying. But this is a very good read and very interesting if you are at all interested in 20th century Russian history or engineering.

But seriously, Russia. Stop handing over the reins of your country to total dicks, and then killing all the people who have good ideas.

[Frank Stein · Rating 4 out of 5]

A short and not-so-sweet portrayal of Peter Palchinsky, the mining engineer who tried to maintain a scintilla of independence during the early years of Soviet communism, and ended up as the face of the "Industrial Party Trial" in December 1930, where some of the Soviet Union's top engineers were accused of "wrecking" the economy and trying to overthrow the government. Unlike his putative colleagues, however, Palchinsky refused to spout lies, and was executed in secrecy before the trial already began.

Palchinsky's life is interesting in its own right. He was the son of a impecunious nobleman, who managed to work his way up to the Mining Institute of St. Petersburg and become a major international engineer. His radical politics, and his support for the Socialist Revolutionaries, meant he was numerous jail sentences and was exiled to Siberia. Still, he managed to escape, spent time serving the Tsarist government in World War I, and eventually became the chief defender of the "White Palace" when the Provisional Government fell to the Bolsheviks. He was arrested for the first of three times by the Bolsheviks, but always kept his wits about him and managed to also work with them in forming engineering societies. But his refusal to kowtow to every party dictate, his continued belief in moderate decnetralization (due to his love of the old anarchist Peter Kropotkin) and his belief that engineers should make independent contributions outside of Stalinist orthodoxy, meant he was ultimately doomed. Stalin's love of the science-fiction novels of Aleksandr Bogdanov, like Red Star and Engineer Menni helped seal Palchinsky's fate. The novels describe a socialist society on Mars, which relied on an engineer named Menni, who unfortunately had anti-socialist tendencies, and ended up wrecking the economy by proposing a bad path for a canal, until he is arrested and tried. For Stalin, Palchinsky was Menni.

Palchinsky's life, however, is really more of a framing device for explaining why the Soviet Union, so blessed with resources and with unparalleled engineering talent, produced so little of value. The author shows that the Soviet focus on "functional" plans, by industry, instead of regional plans, by area, like Palchinsky advocated, meant they rarely paid attention to local needs. The capture of technical education by the individual industrial ministries meant that while the Soviet Union had major universities, none of them taught broad, technical education, while the 500 plus technical universities taught only the narrowest subjects. The author relates a story where she asked one Soviet engineer what her focus was, to which the engineer responded "I'm an engineer for ball bearings for paper plants," to which the author said, you must mean mechanical engineer. No, the engineer, just ball bearings for paper plants. The precent of Politburo members that were engineers went from 59% to 89% in the 30 years after 1956, but they had barely any broad knowledge. Leonid Brezhnev received his degree from the MI Arsenichvev Metallurgical Institute in production methods of rolled steel. It is no surprise such people could not run an economy.

[Muhannad Sheikh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loren Graham explores the turbulent life of mining engineer Peter Palchinski and contrasts his engineering philosophy with the dire and ineffective strategies spearheaded by the soviets from the early 1920s to the 1990s. Throughout the book, Palchinski encourages to make detailed geographic, economic, and social analyses of places before starting projects, particularly those of enormous magnitude involving Tsarist Russia. Above all, he stressed that the human factor should be the top priority in any engineering project. Pleased and focused engineers in the Soviet would be able to complete tasks with more quality and effectiveness, something that Palchenski was puzzled why the Soviets kept ignoring. The author struck gold in the last chapter, as Graham eloquently summed up the humane and ethics-focused engineering philosophy of Peter Palchinski while showing ways in which his several pieces of advice and warnings would have helped the soviet economy and landscape enormously if they were listened to.

Engineering seniors and beginners alike should all read this thought-provoking book on how it is not enough for engineers to be technically sound but to be socially aware and ethically robust as well.

[Manuel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Muy buen libro sobre la relación entre tecnología y sociedad. Relata la vida y trabajo de Peter Palchinsky, ingeniero ruso educado en la época zarista que adopto la revolución socialista mas sin embargo fue ejecutado por su insistencia en considerar el lado humano y económico de los proyectos de ingeniería estalinistas. Utilizando la historia de Palchinsky el autor examina el curso de la tecnología en la Unión Soviética y las fallas de sus proyectos de ingeniería. El resultado es un ensayo de los peligros de la ingeniería cuando ignora su contexto social.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

A concise, fascinating look at engineering, technology, and bureaucratic failure in the Soviet Union through the lens of the life of Peter Palchinsky. It definitely doesn't go into deep detail on the history of how the Soviet Union ultimately failed its engineering workforce and specifically engineers like Palchinsky, but it provides some pretty important examples that showcase those issues enough to whet the reader's appetite.

[Jithu Krishna · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a quick brief about industrialization of the Soviet Russian and how it must have been ideally. Technology without consideration of its economic or social aspect will not survive the long run-this was the message delivered by the visionary engineer Peter Palchinsky.

[David Jonah · Rating 5 out of 5]

True tales of a brave engineer courageous enough to tell both the Czar and Stalin that their industrial plans and projects were either harmful or not worth the effort.

I gave copies to two young engineers at Ford. Looking forward to rereading Loren’s

[Ari · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pyotr Palchinsky was a prominent (and progressive) Russian engineer. In 1928, he was shot for "wrecking" -- supposedly, he had given bad engineering advice to destroy the revolution, to receive foreign bribes. Indeed, Soviet propaganda makes him out to have been one of the leaders of the "industrial party" devoted to bringing down the government that way.

This book tries to weave together a biography of Palchinsky with a history of soviet engineering. Both are good topics, but they don't completely mesh. I'd have liked to hear more about "wrecking" -- why was this myth invented, what were the disasters in the 20s that required it to be created, and what happened to it later.

[Matthew Talbert · Rating 4 out of 5]

Communism didn't fall only because it lost economically to capitalism, but because it stifled free speech. That's essentially the message of this book. There were good engineers, good scientists, experts in all areas in the Soviet Union, and if they had been allowed a voice, many things would have turned out differently. Sadly those who spoke out were executed, as the subject of this book was. Very informative book.

[Matthias · Rating 2 out of 5]

Polemical (NTTAWWT,) and badly enough misrepresents at least one quote that I'm left rather skeptical of any given claims, but a quick enough read and contains enough interesting ideas that it could be worth a lazy afternoon if you're interested in the subject.

[Manuel Barrios · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesante ensayo sobre la industrialización soviética

[Jacob · Rating 5 out of 5]

a quick read with incredible insight from an important perspective.

[Cath Holden · Rating 5 out of 5]

An interesting read and unique perspective of communism