"Behind the Urals"

Paper Summary:

The paper explains that author John Scott was 20-years old when he went to Russia to work in 1932 and returned to America five years later. His book "Behind the Urals: An American Worker in Russia's City of Steel" is still considered a classic because it is such an intimate look inside Russia as it was building up its strength for World War II and the Cold War. The author points out that the Communist Party really ruled over everything that happened in the Soviet Union. Their rules determined who could attend school, who was an enemy of the state and they controlled the food, the work and everything. The paper relates that construction and production processes were called battles because the workers literally "fought" with the mill to produce steel; keeping the mill running was a battle because of problems with scheduling, materials, delivery and just about everything they had to do.

From the Paper:

"There were numerous challenges for the workers and in building these blast furnaces and the complex around them. The location was isolated, freezing, and difficult to work in because there was never enough heat. The materials were often substandard, such as the slippery scaffolding and burned out machinery. There were also difficulties with workers not showing up and understanding their jobs, and the organization was bad, too. It took only 20 minutes for the workers to eat, but an hour and half to get the food and get back to work....so they lost valuable working time because of poor organization. The Russians did have some American and foreign consultants to help but the biggest problem was lack of materials to complete the work and a total lack of understanding of the conditions by the Communist regime, who simply wanted work completed early no matter the difficulties."

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