John Scott (writer)
John Scott (1912–1976) was an American writer. He spent about a decade in the Soviet Union from 1932 to 1941. His best-known book, Behind the Urals: An American Worker in Russia's City of Steel,[1] is a memoir of that experience. The bulk of his career was as a journalist, book author, and editor with Time Life.
For other people named John Scott, see John Scott (disambiguation).
John Scott
John Scott Nearing
March 26, 1912[1]: x
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States[1]: x
Fairlawn Cemetery, Ridgefield, Fairfield County, Connecticut, United States[2]
Writer, tradesman, journalist, editor, lecturer
Behind the Urals: An American Worker in Russia's City of Steel.[1]
Elka (1935); Elena (1939)[1]: photo insert
Scott Nearing (father); Helen Nearing (stepmother)
Scott began his adult life as an idealistic democratic socialist, and traveled to the Soviet Union in 1932 to be part of the early Soviet zeitgeist of enthusiastically building socialism. He worked as a welder, chemist, and foreman at the new city of Magnitogorsk and married and had children there.[1] He was disillusioned in 1937 and 1938 by the Great Purge, which removed him from normal Soviet life as a suddenly distrusted foreigner and which disappeared many of his Russian colleagues.[1] In the late 1930s and early 1940s, he remained sympathetic to socialist ideals but had soured on Stalinism as the path for socialist development, although he believed that the Soviet economy was succeeding in raising the standard of living of the populace and that the Soviet regime would endure as long as that remained true.[1]: 305–306 He moved back to the United States with his family and published his book about his Soviet experience.[1] He worked in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during World War II. After the war, he was a journalist with Time magazine for several decades.[2] He published various other books.[2] In later years he publicly advocated against Bolshevism. After his retirement in 1973, he served as vice president of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty[2] for several years.
Soviet experience[edit]
Magnitogorsk years[edit]
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:
Criticism[edit]
By Scott Nearing[edit]
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.
By Whittaker Chambers[edit]
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.