In this episode, we uncover the extraordinary story of John Scott, a twenty-year-old American idealist who abandoned the University of Wisconsin during the Great Depression, taught himself to weld, and boarded a train for the Soviet Union. He would spend nearly a decade in Magnitogorsk, Stalin’s new “City of Steel” in the Urals, building blast furnaces, marrying a Russian woman, and slowly, painfully watching his idealism curdle under the pressure of Stalinist terror. His memoir, Behind the Urals: An American Worker in Russia’s City of Steel, is one of the most remarkable eyewitness accounts of Soviet industrialization ever written— and it tells us as much about the seductive power of Cold War ideology as it does about steel.
Transcript for: American Idealist in Stalin’s City of Steel: A Pre-History of the Cold War
MARISSA: I want to start this episode with a question I’ve been sitting with since I finished the book we’re talking about today. What would you do if you looked around at your own country and decided it had fundamentally failed? Not just that times were hard, or the wrong people were in charge— but that the whole organizing logic of the society had broken down, and that a genuinely better alternative existed somewhere else in the world? Would you go? Because John Scott, in 1931, at nineteen years old, answered that question with an unequivocal yes. He dropped out of the University of Wisconsin, taught himself to weld at a General Electric plant in Schenectady so he’d have a practical skill when he got there, and boarded a train for Moscow. After a four-day train ride beyond Moscow, he arrived at a place called Magnitogorsk.
He wrote a memoir about what he found there, Behind the Urals: An American Worker in Russia’s City of Steel, and I have not been able to stop thinking about it (probably because I’m teaching modern Russia right now and using it in my class). Still, it’s one of the most vivid, honest, and genuinely complicated pieces of eyewitness history I’ve read since, well, since I read it as an undergrad. And as we’ll get into today, it’s also a document that ended up at the center of the ideological contest that defined the Cold War in ways Scott couldn’t have anticipated when he wrote it in 1942. This is the first episose of our Cold War series and, as usual, I chose to do a “pre-history” of the Cold War… you know me! Always trying to push the timeline back!
I’m Marissa.
AVERILL: And I’m Averill.
MARISSA: And we are your historians for this episode of Dig.
AVERILL: We are so thankful for all of our Patreon supporters – especially our Auger and Excavator level patrons: Alissa, Maria, Colin, Denise, Edward, Jessy, Judy, Karen, Lauren, Lisa, Megan, Susan, Ben, and Joseph! We can’t thank you enough. Listener, if you enjoy what we do here but aren’t yet a patron of this show, it’s easy: just go to patreon.com/digpodcast to learn more.
MARISSA: A quick word on our sources before we begin. The backbone of this episode is Scott’s memoir, originally written in 1942 and available today in a 1989 Indiana University Press edition edited by the historian Stephen Kotkin. I’ve also been working with a 2016 academic article by historian Oksana Klymenko, published in the Kyiv-Mohyla Humanities Journal, which reads Scott’s memoir alongside that of a Soviet Ukrainian worker named Borys Weide and analyzes how Soviet ideology shaped the way workers wrote about themselves during the 1920s and 1930s. It’s a genuinely illuminating analytical frame for understanding what Scott is doing on the page, consciously and otherwise, and we’ll be coming back to it throughout. Alright. Let’s set the scene.
AVERILL: John Scott was born in 1912 in Philadelphia as John Scott Nearing. His father was Scott Nearing, a well-known American radical and socialist intellectual. Growing up in that household meant growing up already steeped in a critique of American capitalism and already fluent in the language of labor rights and progressive politics. The intellectual framework that would eventually take him to Magnitogorsk was the scaffolding of his childhood (Like our steelwork metaphors?!?). So when the Depression arrived and everything his father had been predicting seemed to be confirmed all at once, John didn’t respond with despair or cynicism. He responded with action. At around seventeen or eighteen, he changed his name, dropping “Nearing” and going simply by “Scott.” His future editor, the historian Stephen Kotkin, said this was “to secure his own identity and independence” and not a rejection of his father’s politics. Scott was insisting on claiming those politics as his own rather than inheriting them passively.
MARISSA: After leaving Wisconsin in 1931, Scott spent several months as a welder’s apprentice at the General Electric plant in Schenectady, deliberately getting a trade, because he wanted to arrive in the Soviet Union as a worker rather than an intellectual tourist. He wanted a practical skill that would make him genuinely useful, someone who could contribute something concrete rather than just observe. He got a welder’s certificate, collected union credentials and letters of introduction, and in September 1932 boarded a train for Moscow, age twenty. He writes in the memoir’s opening pages that he had concluded the Bolsheviks had “found answers to at least some of the questions Americans were asking each other,” and that he was going to Russia “to work, to study, and to lend a hand in the construction of a society which seemed to be at least one step ahead of the American.” He meant every word of it.
The phenomenon Scott represents is worth pausing on, because he was far from alone. There was a real and significant wave of Western workers, engineers, and intellectuals who went to the Soviet Union in the early 1930s. They were drawn by a combination of genuine ideological conviction and the very practical reality that the Depression had created mass unemployment in the West at precisely the moment the Soviet industrialization drive was generating enormous demand for skilled labor and technical expertise. The Soviets were actively recruiting Americans in particular to help build projects exactly like Magnitogorsk. There’s something almost surreal about it in retrospect. The largest capitalist economy in the world was effectively exporting its unemployed workforce to help construct the largest communist one.
AVERILL: The broader ideological context matters enormously here. The 1930s were a decade of genuine crisis in liberal democracy’s self-confidence. Fascism was rising on the right, communism on the left, and both movements were making versions of the same argument: the liberal capitalist order has catastrophically failed, and here is a coherent, rational replacement. For a politically conscious young person in 1931, with Scott’s specific family background and intellectual framework already in place, the Soviet Union wasn’t an abstraction or a romantic fantasy. It was a live experiment that appeared to be producing results at the very moment the American system appeared to be in terminal collapse. The decision to go wasn’t naive. It was a historically specific form of rationality.
To understand what Scott walked into, you need to understand what Magnitogorsk actually was. Stalin’s first Five-Year Plan, launched in the late 1920s, was a crash program of industrialization designed to transform the Soviet Union from a largely agricultural society into a modern industrial power within a single generation. The state collectivized agriculture— violently, catastrophically, at the cost of millions of lives— and used the resulting resources to fund massive industrial projects. Magnitogorsk was the flagship: a brand-new city built from nothing in the southern Urals on a site rich in iron ore, deliberately positioned far from any border so an invader couldn’t reach it. The plan was to build one of the largest steel complexes in the world. And here is an irony Scott himself would have registered: the design was modeled on a U.S. Steel plant in Gary, Indiana. American blueprints, American engineering consultants, at the heart of the socialist project.
MARISSA: Now I want to spend some time giving you an idea of the texture and content of the memoir. The workforce Scott joined was an extraordinary and terrible mixture; Soviet workers, foreign specialists like Scott, peasants forcibly displaced from their land during collectivization who had never worked in industry in their lives, and Gulag prisoners. When he arrived in September 1932, it was barely a city. Barracks, mud, construction sites, temperatures hitting thirty-five below zero in winter, tens of thousands of people in conditions that would fail every conceivable health and safety standard. And his memoir opens with scenes of overwhelming sensory vividness: walking two miles through pitch-dark arctic cold at six in the morning to the blast furnaces; workers crammed into a wooden shanty, rolling newspaper cigarettes as thick as cigars, warming frostbitten hands at an iron stove. It reads, in places, almost like Hemingway. And crucially, he isn’t performing socialist solidarity. He’s watching and recording with genuine, absorbed attention.
AVERILL: But at the same time, Scott immediately felt an intense feeling of belonging. He writes: “I plunged into the life of the town with the energy of youth. I literally wore out my Russian grammar, and in three months I was making myself understood. I gave away many of the clothes I had brought with me, and dressed more or less like the other workers on the job. I worked as hard and as well as my comparatively limited experience and training permitted. I was liberally rewarded. My fellow workers accepted me as one of themselves.”[1]
MARISSA: His belonging is most apparent at the morning circle around the stove (a sort of Stalinist version of a water-cooler gathering at the workplace): “They approached the electric stove, produced rolls of dirty newspaper and a sack of ‘Makhorka,’ a very cheap grade of tobacco, and rolled themselves newspaper cigarettes as big as Havana cigars. I rolled one too and we lit them from the stove.” He’s one of them.
Later in the same scene, Ivanov arrives and the foremen fall into easy shop talk at the top of the blast furnace, standing over a dead riveter who froze to death the night before: “‘How’s school going?’ asked Ivanov. ‘You’ll be a technician pretty soon, won’t you, Kolya?’ ‘It’s pretty tough studying when it’s as cold as this,’ said Kolya. ‘We have to take our gloves to the classroom with us. Not enough coal.’ ‘Yeah, I know,’ said Ivanov sympathetically. ‘It’s tough studying; but then, what the hell! If you want to learn, you’ve got to work.’” Three men, a frozen corpse at their feet, discussing night school. It’s a perfect window onto Magnitogorsk’s particular combination of the brutal and the ordinary.
AVERILL: Scott’s most meaningful relationship at the steel plant was with his foreman and roommate, Kolya. He describes Kolya masterfully (you’ll see where the Hemingway comparisons come in): “Kolya, the welders’ foreman, was twenty-two, big-boned, and broad. There was not much meat on him, and his face had a cadaverous look which was rather common in Magnitogorsk in 1933. His unkempt, sawdust-colored hair was very long, and showed under his fur hat. The sheepskin coat which he wore was ragged from crawling through narrow pipes and worming his way into various odd corners. At every tear the wool came through on the outside and looked like a Polish customs officer’s mustache. His hands were calloused and dirty; the soles of the valinkis on his feet were none too good. His face and his demeanor were extremely energetic.”[2]
MARISSA: Scott and this enthusiastic, lean behemoth became fast friends. The book includes depictions of their most intimate moments together: “I climbed out of bed and turned on the light. I could see my breath across the room as I woke my roommate, Kolya. Kolya never heard the whistle. Every morning I had to pound his shoulder for several seconds to arouse him.”[3] Immediately, a brotherly affection (the loving but annoying kind) blooms between them.
When Scott witnesses the maiming of a brutally injured rigger, Kolya knows right away that he is not okay. And Scott is able to imagine Kolya’s internal dialog. Scott writes: “He saw I was not satisfied. ‘This somewhat sissified foreigner will have to be eased along a little,’ he probably said to himself.” But in reality, Kolya did this: “He slapped me on the back. ‘Come on in the office. We are going to have a technical conference. You’ll be interested.’”[4] Kolya knows he needs time and companionship to process what he just saw. But he is careful not to embarrass him in front of the other workers. It’s really, quite sweet.
AVERILL: One of the most remarkable relationships in the book is between Scott and Shabkov, a kulak (technically a class enemy, serving a sentence, living under GPU surveillance) who is also one of the best workers on the site. The exchange between them captures how friendship at Magnitogorsk cut straight across ideological categories.
Scott writes: “On the way I met Shabkov, the ex-kulak; a great husky youth with a red face, a jovial voice, and two fingers missing from his left hand. ‘Well, Jack, how goes it?’ he said, slapping me on the back.”[5]Shabkov calls him Jack— a nickname, an Americanization, a mark of easy familiarity.
MARISSA: Then, in a moment of extraordinary candor with Scott and Popov, Shabkov explains what happened to his family during dekulakization:
“Just between the three of us, though, the poor peasants of the village get together in a meeting and decide: ‘So-and-so has six horses; we couldn’t very well get along without those in the collective farm; besides he hired a man last year to help on the harvest.’ They notify the GPU, and there you are. So-and-so gets five years… When they came to ship us out, my brother got a rifle and fired several shots at the GPU officers. They fired back. My brother was killed. All of which, naturally, didn’t make it any better for us. We all got five years, and in different places. I heard my father died in December, but I’m not sure.’”[6]
Then, immediately after telling this devastating story, Shabkov produces his tobacco pouch and offers it to Popov: “‘Kulak smoke?’ He smiled grimly.”[7] Scott records this without comment. He doesn’t need to editorialize. The scene does the work (Hemingway indeed!).
One other thing that stands out to me in the memoir is how well Scott’s crew represents the vast ethnic and religious diversity of the USSR. He writes: “It was a varied gang. Russians, Ukrainians, Tartars, Mongols, Jews, mostly young and almost all peasants of yesterday, though a few, like Ivanov, had long industrial experience… Khaibulin, the Tartar, had never seen a staircase, a locomotive, or an electric light until he had come to Magnitogorsk a year before… Now Shaimat Khaibulin was building a blast furnace bigger than any in Europe. He had learned to read and was attending an evening school, learning the trade of electrician. He had learned to speak Russian, he read newspapers. His life had changed more in a year than that of his antecedents since the time of Tamerlane.”[8]
AVERILL: This diversity (and the Soviet promotion of it) is central to understanding Stalinism. Some historians argue that Stalin’s totalitarianism was, in a way, made necessary (but also stronger) by the vast diversity of the population under the USSR’s control. This has always been true of imperialist Russia, especially since ethno-nationalism hit the scene in the 19th century. Authoritarian rule has acted as a brutal glue to hold this hodge-podge of peoples together under central control.[9]
What Scott describes about Magnitogorsk maps precisely onto what the historian Stephen Kotkin documents in Magnetic Mountain. Kotkin argues that Magnitogorsk wasn’t just a steel plant but a civilization, and an attempt to construct a new Soviet subjectivity alongside the physical infrastructure. The people building the city were being simultaneously remade by it, ideologically and psychologically. And the question of whether that remaking was coerced or genuine, whether the enthusiasm Scott observed and participated in was authentic or performed is one of the most contested problems in the historiography of Stalinism. The most honest answer from the best scholarship we have is that it was both, simultaneously. Real enthusiasm and real terror coexisted in the same spaces, often in the same people. That’s not a paradox to be resolved. It’s a feature of how ideology operates in lived experience.[10]
MARISSA: It’s also worth being precise about the human cost that made Magnitogorsk possible, because when Scott describes peasants “driven from the land,” that phrase is doing a great deal of work. The collectivization campaigns that funded Soviet industrialization were one of the worst state-engineered humanitarian disasters of the twentieth century. Millions were displaced from their farms. The Ukrainian famine (the Holodomor) killed somewhere between three and five million people. Kulaks, the better-off peasants who survived the famines, were declared enemies of the state and executed or sent to labor camps in enormous numbers. The steel plant in Magnitogorsk and the catastrophe in the countryside were not separate events. They were the same event, with the same author. The coerced labor and extracted resources that built the industrial base Scott arrived to join came directly from the bodies and lives of rural people who had no say in any of it.
AVERILL: This is where the Klymenko article does its most interesting analytical work. Her argument is that Soviet ideology shaped not just what workers did, but how they wrote about themselves— and therefore how they understood themselves. The Bolsheviks, from essentially the beginning of the regime, grasped that controlling the story of the revolution was as important as winning it. They created state institutions specifically to commission and collect workers’ memoirs: a Commission on the History of the Communist Party, a Commission on the History of Factories and Plants. Maxim Gorky published articles in Pravda and Izvestia in 1931 explicitly arguing that because workers had built the factories, workers had to write the history of building them. Workers were organized into writing campaigns and taught a formalized “Bolshevik” language— specific vocabulary, specific narrative framings, specific ways of turning personal experience into evidence of building socialism and becoming the “new Soviet man.” Klymenko calls these organized memoir-writing drives “memory projects,” and she argues that they served a specific ideological function: workers were not just recording history, they were being shaped by the act of recording it.
MARISSA: Her most striking observation about Scott specifically is that he absorbed this ideological language before he ever set foot in the Soviet Union— through his father’s politics, through his reading, through the intellectual currents of the American left in the early 1930s. The framework was installed before it could be tested against reality. And so when he sat down to write his memoir, he reached for those categories naturally, as the tools most available to him. He describes the Communist Party as “the source of initiative and energy which drove work forward.” He frames suffering and sacrifice as the price of something transcendent. These mental gymnastics made it possible to look at enormous human cost and still perceive progress. The ideology preceded the experience and then filtered it for years.
AVERILL: What Klymenko describes connects to a much broader debate in the historiography of totalitarianism about the relationship between sincere belief and performed compliance under repressive regimes. Jochen Hellbeck’s work on Soviet diaries makes a related argument which was that many Soviet citizens genuinely internalized the ideological frameworks the state provided, not because they were passively brainwashed but because those frameworks offered something real: meaning, coherence, a sense of participation in something larger than oneself. The question of whether you can call it authentic belief when the alternative to belief was persecution is genuinely difficult, and the scholarship doesn’t fully resolve it. Scott is a particularly useful test case precisely because he came from outside the system. He was never subject to the Soviet educational apparatus or the full coercive machinery. His adoption of Bolshevik interpretive categories was largely voluntary which makes it both more and less like the experience of Soviet workers around him.
It’s worth underscoring that the phenomenon Klymenko identifies (frameworks shaping perception before experience can test them) is not unique to Stalinism or to the political left. It’s how ideology always operates, on every side of every conflict. The frameworks we use to interpret experience foreground certain realities and background others. They provide categories for some things and have no categories for others at all. What makes Scott’s memoir valuable as a historical document is precisely that you can watch, across its pages, the moment when the framework loses its grip on experience— when reality produces things that the ideology has no category for. That is when the memoir becomes most honest, and most compelling.
MARISSA: Scott doesn’t flinch from the human cost even in the years when his ideological framework was intact. The memoir opens with a framing passage comparing the Soviet industrialization drive directly to a war— he writes that he would wager “Russia’s battle of ferrous metallurgy alone involved more casualties than the battle of the Marne.” The Marne was one of the bloodiest engagements of World War One, and he is not being rhetorical. Workers died building Magnitogorsk. They fell from scaffolding. They were killed in industrial accidents in freezing conditions with inadequate safety equipment. He describes watching a rigger fall from the top of a structure, bounce off a bleeder pipe (which probably saved his life) and land on a platform fifteen feet below him, blood coming from his mouth in gushes, trying to yell and unable to. He describes the peasants newly conscripted into industrial labor: people farming by medieval methods six months earlier, now expected to operate blast furnaces in thirty-five-below zero temperatures. The food shortages, the housing shortages, the vast differentials in wages: comfortable quarters for party officials and foreign specialists, while Bashkir shepherds froze to death in tents.
And yet in the early to mid-1930s, Scott holds all of it within the ideological framework. The suffering is real, but so is what’s being built. He writes that ordinary Soviet citizens believed 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.” He’s not inventing those feelings. He witnessed them, and shared them. But something else is also happening, something Klymenko’s framework helps us see: Scott has learned to contain the suffering within a narrative of progress. The deaths and the shortages and the inefficiency don’t contradict the project. They’re the price of the project. The price is terrible, but the goal is transcendent. Even on the same page where he credits the Communist Party for driving things forward, he describes Stalin’s leadership as full of “ruthlessness and cold, colorless dogmatism.” He’s holding two incompatible truths simultaneously. What keeps them from destroying each other is the framework itself.
AVERILL: The logic Scott absorbed, that rational, scientific reorganization of society could achieve in decades what would otherwise take centuries, and that the human cost of that transformation was acceptable because the destination was genuinely superior, is what historians sometimes call Stalinist high modernism. It wasn’t unique to the Soviet Union. Versions of it drove colonial development projects, forced resettlements, and authoritarian modernization schemes across the twentieth century. What made the Stalinist version particularly lethal was the combination of that ideology with unchecked state power and Stalin’s specific pathological paranoia. But the underlying ideological logic was older and broader than Stalin, and it had genuine appeal to thoughtful people who looked at the failures of liberal capitalism and asked what workable alternative actually existed.
What’s important for understanding Scott is that this logic was accessible to him in 1933 in a way that’s difficult to reconstruct now, with full retrospective knowledge of the Gulag, the Holodomor, the show trials, and everything that followed. Scott in 1933 had none of that. He had the Depression-era left’s critique of capitalism, a revolution that seemed to be producing real industrial results, and his own eyes telling him that something enormous was being built by people who believed in it. That combination isn’t stupidity. It’s a historically specific form of partial vision— partial in the way all historical vision is partial, shaped by the frameworks that were available at the time.
MARISSA: You genuinely can’t tell this story without talking about Masha. Maria Ivanovna Dikareva— who became Maria Ivanovna Dikareva Scott— is one of the most vivid presences in the entire memoir. Scott met and married her in Magnitogorsk in 1933 and devotes a whole section of the book to her story. What her presence in the memoir illuminates is the specific experience of Soviet women in the 1930s: the expectation that she work, participate politically, embody the ideal of the “new Soviet woman” who is educated, productive, and ideologically engaged. And she does all of this, to a real degree. One reviewer summarized the effect well— through Masha’s character, the hard living conditions come into focus not as exceptional circumstances but as simply what Russian life was, and those conditions pushed people like her toward education and profession even out of scarcity and lack of food and shelter. Scott’s portrait of her is loving and specific. He’s not using her as a symbol. He’s writing about a person.
Perhaps Masha’s mother was a symbol though. About her, Scott writes: “Masha’s mother was the most remarkable member of the family. She had given birth to nine children, and had never needed the services of a doctor or a midwife. They were all born at night, Masha told me, and the mother never woke anyone up. The next morning she would get up as usual and make the fire before daybreak, then she would go to work in the fields as though nothing unusual had occurred. She was in her sixties, had never seen a dentist, and had all her teeth. She had a sharp tongue in an argument, but shed copious tears whenever one of her children came home or went away. Her hut was spotlessly clean, and she still worked in the fields and took care of a flock of collective-farm sheep.”
Here you can see many old Russian peasant ideals: communal living in the “mir” (peasant commune), emotionally available to her children, extreme physical endurance, self-reliance and no interference from modern or scientific institutions. If you know anything about classic Russian literature, you’ll recognize this archetype right away. But what’s interesting here is that the Soviets have obviously reimagined this old trope. They’ve portrayed her as a “heroic worker” whose productivity and endurance are unmatched; she’s working on the Kholkozy (the new collectivized farm system). She portrays stoicism as a political virtue (key during the Five-Year Plans). She also perfectly illustrates the “double burden” taken on by all Soviet women: they had to be a good worker and just as good a mother.
But Masha’s story becomes genuinely harrowing in what comes next, because when Scott needs to leave the Soviet Union in late 1937, it is Masha who will be held there. Not by any specific charge against her, but by the simple fact that Soviet citizens (including women married to foreigners) did not have the right to simply leave the country. Exit visas had to be obtained from the state, and the state was not in a hurry to grant them, especially not during the height of the purge’s paranoia about foreign connections. Scott could not leave without her. So, they would both wait. For four years.
AVERILL: The situation of foreign nationals and their Soviet spouses during the purge years is one of the more quietly devastating subplots of the period, and it’s underrepresented in popular accounts of the era. There were many people caught in exactly this bind— one partner who could technically leave, one who could not, families suspended in impossible limbo while the security apparatus worked through everything around them. The exit visa system was not a bureaucratic inconvenience. It was a deliberate instrument of state control over citizens’ bodies and movements, and in the purge years it was particularly weaponized against anyone with foreign connections. The contrast between Scott’s American passport, which ultimately got the family out, and Masha’s Soviet citizenship, which kept her trapped, is a stark illustration of how Soviet citizenship in the 1930s functioned not as protection but as exposure.
The gender dimension is also worth taking seriously. Soviet ideology made specific and often contradictory demands on women, full participation in the labor force alongside traditional domestic expectations, and the purge years added a specific layer of peril for women whose husbands had foreign associations. To be a Soviet woman married to a foreign national during the Great Terror was to be doubly exposed: suspect because of your husband’s foreignness, and under implicit pressure to demonstrate Soviet loyalty by distancing yourself from potentially counterrevolutionary ties. That Masha survived the four-year wait without denouncing Scott or being denounced herself was not a foregone conclusion.
MARISSA: In late 1937, Scott returned from a vacation to find that the Great Purge had “made astonishing headway” (his words) in just a few months. And this is where everything breaks. He watches as his colleagues (people he’d worked beside for years, people he called friends) simply disappear. One day they’re at the plant. The next they’re gone. Nobody explains where. Everyone knows. And then it becomes personal: as a foreigner, Scott is suddenly barred from the plant overnight. His access is revoked. He goes from being an insider (welcomed, trusted, admitted to the Communist University) to being a suspect, a potentially dangerous alien. His old foreman and close friend Kolya finds him and says plainly: “Better leave. This is no place for foreigners now.” That night, Scott and Masha decide they’d go. And then they discover they can’t, because of the exit visa problem. Scott moves to Moscow, finds work as a translator and journalist, and during this enforced limbo is debriefed by the U.S. embassy in three sessions in early 1938.
Those debriefings, covering the forced labor colony at Magnitogorsk, the activities of the secret police, the state of industrial production, food supplies, the texture of life during the purge, were essentially the only source of non-official information the U.S. had about Soviet interior life at that point, since real economic data had become a state secret and reliable human intelligence on the Soviet interior was nearly impossible to develop. In those sessions we see the private Scott (the one who has stepped outside the ideological frame) for the first time. He tells embassy officials that “the future of the Soviet Union does not look bright to me.” He says that unless the Communist Party is restored to some of its former role, there will be “no cement to prevent demoralization and breakdown, no ideology to act as a religion or faith for youth.” And yet, in the same breath, he says “I believe that the economic battle is gradually being won.” He hasn’t fully crossed over. He’s in the painful middle— privately dreading, still unable to entirely shed a framework that had organized five years of his life.
AVERILL: That complicated position is important to sit with, rather than retrospectively tidying it up. It would be easy (and historically lazy) to say “Scott was wrong” and move on. But the Soviet economy in the 1930s was, by certain measures, genuinely growing. Living standards for many workers were genuinely improving relative to the catastrophic baseline of the post-civil-war years. Scott wasn’t inventing that. The horror and the achievement were simultaneously real, which is part of what makes Stalinist industrialization such a morally and analytically difficult thing to assess even now, with all the evidence available to us. The gap between the purge’s terror and the plant’s real output wasn’t a contradiction Scott was too naive to see. It was a genuine feature of the thing itself.
The Great Purge, for those less familiar with it, was a campaign of mass political repression orchestrated by Stalin beginning in 1936 that escalated dramatically through 1937 and 1938. Hundreds of thousands were executed. Millions were sent to the Gulag. The victims weren’t only obvious dissidents— they were military officers, senior party members, factory managers, engineers, and ordinary workers. The logic was the logic of institutional paranoia: anyone could be an enemy, a wrecker, a spy, a saboteur. Confessions were extracted under torture. Denunciations spread through social networks like wildfire, implicating anyone connected to anyone already accused. The purge was, among other things, a mechanism of social atomization— it destroyed horizontal solidarity between people and replaced it with vertical dependence on the state. Which is, of course, why it was so effective, and why Scott’s experience of watching his friend network simply vanish was so specifically disorienting.
MARISSA: There’s one more chapter of Scott’s Soviet story that’s worth telling before we move to the Cold War context, because it has a quality that seems almost too cinematic to be real. After Scott returned to the United States in 1942. With Masha and their two daughters, Elka and Elena, finally extracted with direct help from the U.S. embassy; he went on to serve in the Office of Strategic Services, the OSS, the wartime intelligence agency that preceded the CIA. Meanwhile, the NSA’s postwar Venona Project, a secret program that decrypted intercepted Soviet intelligence cables, revealed something remarkable: the Soviet government had known about Scott’s embassy debriefings all the way back in 1938 and had, in their characteristic way, categorized them as espionage.
A cable from New York to Moscow in May 1942, addressed to the director of Soviet intelligence, credited someone codenamed “Ivanov” with delivering “a mass of materials on the Soviet war industry” to the United States. Three years later, a separate cable identified Ivanov as John Scott. To be clear: he was never actually a spy. What he had told the embassy was largely observable fact available to any attentive worker; the scale of the construction, wages, industrial output, the mood during the purge. Things that were common knowledge inside the Soviet Union but invisible from outside. But in Stalinist logic, any information flowing to a foreign government was espionage by definition. Scott later said that if he had switched to Soviet citizenship during his optimistic early years, as some other foreign-born socialists did, he would have ended up in a Siberian labor camp. He had watched it happen to others.
AVERILL: The Venona cables are a remarkable historical resource and they’re worth flagging for listeners who haven’t encountered them. The NSA ‘s Venona Project ran from 1943 to 1980 and managed to decrypt a portion of Soviet intelligence communications from the 1940s. Out of nearly 1,300 messages between New York and Moscow in 1942 alone, only around twenty-three were successfully cracked. The project revealed, among much else, the extent of Soviet espionage in the United States during and after World War Two, and it confirmed the guilt of figures like Julius Rosenberg and Alger Hiss that had been disputed for decades. Scott appearing in those cables (under the codename Ivanov) places him squarely within the world of Cold War intelligence, even though his involvement was entirely involuntary.
The broader context for Scott’s embassy debriefings also tells us something important about the informational landscape of the period. The United States in the late 1930s had extraordinarily limited visibility into Soviet interior life. The embassy relied heavily on Americans who had lived and worked in the USSR— engineers, workers, journalists— as its primary non-official intelligence channel, precisely because human penetration of the Soviet system was so difficult and because the Soviets had classified most real economic data. Scott’s value wasn’t access to secrets. It was five years of granular, embodied knowledge of how the Soviet industrial system functioned at ground level— knowledge that no amount of external analysis could replicate. He had been inside it. That kind of authority was going to matter enormously in the ideological contest that was coming.
MARISSA: Let’s step back from Scott’s individual story now, because what happens after 1945 is where everything he lived through in Magnitogorsk becomes not just personally significant but world-historically significant. The ideological contest he experienced in miniature— capitalism versus communism, two competing visions of what a modern industrial society should look like and what kind of human life it should produce— didn’t end with the war. It metastasized into the Cold War, the defining global conflict of the second half of the twentieth century. And I think it’s important to say clearly: for a long time, it was genuinely not obvious which side was going to win that argument. The Soviet Union’s claim going into 1945 was impressive and real. In 1917, Russia had been a largely agricultural empire in collapse. By 1945 it had built an industrial economy sufficient to absorb the full force of the Nazi war machine from the gates of Moscow and push it back to Berlin. That is one of the most extraordinary industrial mobilizations in human history. And Magnitogorsk was at its literal center.
Scott writes about this directly. The Soviet workers had built what he calls Stalin’s “Ural Stronghold,” an industrial base beyond the reach of any invader. The steel from Magnitogorsk became Soviet tanks. The city Scott had helped weld into existence contributed materially to defeating Hitler. That is not propaganda. It is real. And the memoir he published in 1942 was, among other things, a document attesting to that reality from the inside: someone sincere and intelligent had looked at what was being built in Magnitogorsk and found it genuinely impressive. That attestation mattered enormously in the ideological contest that was coming, precisely because it couldn’t be dismissed as Soviet boosterism. It came from a twenty-year-old American with welding calluses and, as we now know, a Soviet intelligence codename.
AVERILL: The Cold War’s ideological dimension is something that looks deceptively simple in retrospect (democracy versus communism, outcome inevitable) but it was contested and dangerous. The Soviet model had real appeal in places that are important to understand. In the developing world especially, in the newly decolonized nations of Africa and Asia trying to build modern economies without private capital or established industrial infrastructure, rapid state-directed industrialization was a serious alternative to the American model. “Look what we did in thirty years” was a compelling pitch to a newly independent nation in 1955. The Soviets tested an atomic bomb in 1949, launched Sputnik in 1957, put Yuri Gagarin in orbit in 1961. None of these were tricks. They were products of exactly the kind of crash state-directed mobilization that Magnitogorsk represented.
What eventually tilted the contest toward the American side was a structural limitation in the Soviet model that took decades to fully reveal itself. The command economy was extraordinarily effective at the first phase of industrialization— blast furnaces, steel, heavy industry, weapons— things where the state could set a target, compel the resources, and measure the output. What it was structurally incapable of was the second phase: consumer goods, innovation, a responsive economy that figures out what people actually want and makes it. You cannot compel innovation. You cannot command an economy to respond to consumer preferences when the entire premise of your system is that consumer preferences are irrelevant. The command economy could build Magnitogorsk. It could not build a soap factory to save their lives. And this connects directly back to something Scott wrote in his private 1938 embassy debriefings— more than a decade before the Cold War properly began. He told American officials that ordinary Soviet workers were focused above all on rising standards of living, and that as long as the regime could deliver on that promise, it would endure. He was right, and he was also predicting the terms of its eventual failure.
MARISSA: John Scott’s postwar career has to be understood in this ideological context, because he didn’t just quietly retreat from his Soviet experience. After the OSS was dissolved at the end of the war, he joinedTime-Life, working for Henry Luce— the legendarily anti-communist publisher whose magazines were genuine instruments of American soft power during the Cold War. Time, Life, and Fortune shaped how millions of readers understood the Soviet Union and the stakes of the ideological contest. Scott was Luce’s Soviet authority. His credentials were unimpeachable in a way no think-tank analyst’s ever could be: he had lived there, built steel there, married a Russian woman, raised his daughters in the Soviet Union, watched the purge devour the people he worked beside, and had a Soviet intelligence codename. You cannot manufacture that kind of authority.
But his transition was not instantaneous, and this matters. Whittaker Chambers, the former Soviet spy turned ardent anti-communist, most famous for his role in the Alger Hiss case, claimed in his memoir that Scott had actually tried to get Luce to remove him as foreign news editor, because Chambers’ anti-Soviet views were too extreme for Scott’s taste. Which tells you something important about how the conversion actually worked. Even well into the early Cold War, Scott retained enough sympathy for socialist ideals (as distinct from Stalinism specifically) that he found Chambers’ absolutism off-putting. He had spent five years living and working alongside Soviet people he genuinely cared about. The ideology had been his identity. You don’t fully shed that overnight, and we should be suspicious of accounts that suggest you can.
AVERILL: The eventual destination of Scott’s trajectory is the most juicy part of his postwar biography. After his retirement from Time-Life in 1973, he was appointed vice president of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty— the American-funded broadcasting organizations that transmitted Western news and programming behind the Iron Curtain throughout the Cold War. RFE targeted the Soviet satellite states of Eastern Europe; Radio Liberty targeted the Soviet Union itself. Funded covertly through the CIA in the early years and then openly through Congress, their explicit purpose was ideological warfare: to undermine Soviet propaganda by telling people living under communism what was actually happening in the world, and to keep alive the idea that a different way of organizing society was possible. They were, in the most direct sense, instruments for accelerating the failure of the ideological cement Scott had identified back in 1938.
The personal cost of that arc was real and shouldn’t be glossed over. Scott’s father, Scott Nearing, remained a committed socialist to the end of his life. He was still accepting the hospitality of Stalinist-inspired regimes well into the 1970s, still defending socialist ideals long past the point where most of his contemporaries had abandoned them. Because of John’s work at Time-Life, his associations with Luce and later Nixon, and his public anti-Bolshevik advocacy— his father essentially disowned him. He wrote in a letter: “I want nothing to do with him.” When John died in Chicago in 1976, Scott Nearing refused to attend the funeral. The ideological rupture had become a family rupture that was never repaired. The man who went to the Soviet Union in 1932 to help build a better world spent the last decades of his life broadcasting, to the people living in that world, the reasons it had failed— at the cost of his relationship with the father whose worldview had sent him there in the first place.
MARISSA: Here’s the question at the heart of the Cold War that Scott’s story illuminates more clearly than almost any other source: what, exactly, were the two sides arguing about? On the surface, the answer seems obvious: democracy versus dictatorship, open societies versus closed ones. And that’s not wrong. But the deeper argument, the one that determined where the developing world would align, that drove the space race and the arms race and the proxy conflicts from Korea to Vietnam to Angola— was about something more fundamental than political systems. It was about modernity itself. About which model for transforming a poor agricultural society into a modern industrial one actually worked. And in 1932, when John Scott arrived in Magnitogorsk, that question was genuinely open. The United States had industrialized through private capital and the brutal logic of the market. The result was the richest country in the world and, in 1932, a country with twenty-five percent unemployment and breadlines stretching around city blocks. The Soviet Union was industrializing through state planning and forced collectivization. The result was Magnitogorsk.
What became clear over the course of the Cold War was that the Soviet model had a fundamental structural limitation— one that Magnitogorsk itself eventually came to embody. It could do the first phase of industrialization with a kind of terrifying efficiency, precisely because it could compel people to do things and build what it decided to build, regardless of the human cost. What it couldn’t do (what it was structurally incapable of doing) was the next phase. The consumer goods. The innovation. The responsive, adaptive economy that figures out what people actually want and produces it. Steel is one thing. Refrigerators, computers, and cars that people actually choose to buy are something else. And once your citizens can see— through Radio Free Europe, through smuggled Western goods, through the accounts of people who’d traveled abroad— that people on the other side are living materially better, the ideology has to work harder and harder to explain the gap. And eventually it can’t. The zeal drains away. And without the zeal, there is only coercion. And pure coercion, without any genuine consent, is ultimately unstable.
AVERILL: Scott had privately identified this vulnerability as early as 1938, which is remarkable given how early in the Cold War’s prehistory that is. He told U.S. embassy officials: “Unless the Party is restored to at least some of its former position, there will be no cement to prevent demoralization and breakdown, no ideology to act as a religion or faith for youth.” That word, cement, is exactly right as a metaphor for what ideological coherence does: it binds disparate elements together into something that can bear structural load. When the cement fails, the structure doesn’t gradually weaken. It collapses. Scott saw that failure coming in 1938. The Soviet Union’s collapse came in 1991. The prediction was right— it just took fifty-three years to be confirmed.
Radio Free Europe (the organization Scott helped lead in his final years) was explicitly in the business of accelerating that failure. By broadcasting Western news, Western culture, and Western economic realities behind the Iron Curtain, it was constantly undermining the Soviet claim that communism was delivering a better life. It was the ideological weapon forged, in a very direct sense, out of experiences like Scott’s— out of the testimony of people who had been inside the thing, seen it clearly, and decided it needed to be opposed. Scott’s whole biography, when you look at it from this angle, is a map of the Cold War’s ideological geography compressed into one life: start on one side of the argument, experience the reality firsthand, cross over, spend the rest of your life on the other side. Nobody had more direct personal authority to speak about what the Soviet system actually was. Nobody had paid a higher personal price to earn it.
MARISSA: I want to close by thinking about why we should care about John Scott and his memoir today and specifically why this story belongs in a series about the Cold War. The first reason is about how ideology operates on individuals. Klymenko’s analysis of Scott’s memoir as a product of Soviet “memory projects” is a reminder that the frameworks we use to interpret experience are never purely our own and never neutral. Scott absorbed a Bolshevik interpretive structure before he set foot in the Soviet Union— through his reading, through his father’s politics, through the intellectual currents of the American left in the early 1930s. That structure shaped what he noticed, how he described it, and what meaning he assigned to it. The ideology preceded the experience and filtered it for years. That’s not a story about one young man’s personal failures of judgment. That’s a story about how ideology always works, on every side of every conflict, including the ones we’re currently living inside.
The second reason is about the Cold War specifically. Scott’s trajectory— from welder in Magnitogorsk to vice president of Radio Free Europe— is the arc of American Cold War strategy compressed into one biography. Understand the enemy from the inside. Build authority through genuine experience rather than ideological performance. Use that authority to fight back on the terrain of ideas. His credentials as a Cold War voice were unimpeachable because they were earned in a freezing factory in the Urals, watching friends disappear, waiting four years to get his wife out of a country that had become a prison. The Cold War was not only fought with missiles and proxy armies. It was fought with memoirs and radio broadcasts and the patient accumulation of credible human testimony about what life under communism actually was. Scott was one of the most important contributors to that effort, and he started accumulating his evidence in 1932.
AVERILL: The third reason is the most enduring, which is that Behind the Urals is simply a great piece of writing about people in extremity— and those people deserve to be remembered in their full complexity rather than as abstractions in an ideological contest. The Cold War at its most abstract was a geopolitical chess game between superpowers with incompatible theories about how to organize industrial society. At its most human, it was the story of what happens to ordinary people when they are made to serve an idea that is larger than they are. Kolya, with his ragged sheepskin coat and his ferocious energy and his quiet warning to leave. Masha, navigating Soviet womanhood with a pragmatic resilience that Scott admires without ever quite fully understanding. The Bashkir shepherds, effectively medieval in their farming practices, thrown into an industrial city in the frozen Urals and expected to operate blast furnaces. The workers in the shanty at six-thirty in the morning, rolling newspaper cigarettes in freezing temperatures, warming their hands at an iron stove and getting on with it.
Scott’s disillusionment, it’s worth emphasizing, was not the clean, instantaneous conversion that anti-communist literature tends to prefer. His 1942 memoir still contains real admiration for what the Soviet workers achieved. He still believed that living standards had genuinely improved, by a certain measure, over the catastrophic post-civil-war baseline. He still saw the steel plant at Magnitogorsk as a real achievement, even as he understood the cost at which it was purchased. That ambivalence is honest— and it’s more analytically useful than a clean break, because it captures something true about how disillusionment actually works in real lives: slowly, in pieces, with the old commitments and the new knowledge sitting uneasily together for years before they finally resolve. Scott’s memoir is one of the best accounts we have of that experience, and of what the twentieth century looked like from the inside of one of its most extraordinary experiments.
MARISSA: Thank you for joining us today. As always, we invite you to follow us on BlueSky and Instagram at dig_history. If you have a comment or question or want to share some kind words with us, you can always email us at hello@digpodcast.org – we love listener mail! If you’re an educator, we’ve got a compendium of episodes you can use in the classroom – and free teaching resources, including full lesson plans! – on our website, digpodcast.org. You’ll also find full bibliographies, the scripts for all of our episodes, resources, and a link to our swag store at digpodcast.org.
Show Notes and Bibliography
Scott, John. Behind the Urals: An American Worker in Russia’s City of Steel (1942). Indiana University Press, 1989 edition edited by Stephen Kotkin.
Klymenko, Oksana. “Soviet Ideology in Workers’ Memoirs of the 1920s–1930s (A Case Study of John Scott’s and Borys Weide’s Memoirs).” Kyiv-Mohyla Humanities Journal 3 (2016): 37–55.
Kotkin, Stephen. Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.
Hellbeck, Jochen. “Working, Struggling, Becoming: Stalin-Era Autobiographical Texts.” Russian Review60.3 (2001): 340–59.
Haynes, John Earl and Harvey Klehr. Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999.
Chambers, Whittaker. Witness. Random House, 1952.
Holt, Robert T. Radio Free Europe. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1958.
Gaddis, John Lewis. The Cold War: A New History. New York: Penguin Press, 2005.
Getty, J. Arch. Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933–1938. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
Harris, James R. The Great Urals: Regionalism and the Evolution of the Soviet System. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999.
Harris, James R. The Great Fear: Stalin’s Terror of the 1930s. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.
Hosking, Geoffrey A. Russia and the Russians: A History. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011.
Martin, Terry. The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001.
Slezkine, Yuri. “The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism.” Slavic Review 53.2 (1994): 414–52.
Suny, Ronald Grigor. The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993.
[1] https://www.redstarpublishers.org/ScottBehindUrals.pdf, p. 5
[2] https://www.redstarpublishers.org/ScottBehindUrals.pdf, p. 6
[3] https://www.redstarpublishers.org/ScottBehindUrals.pdf, p. 6
[4] https://www.redstarpublishers.org/ScottBehindUrals.pdf, pp. 10-11
[5] https://www.redstarpublishers.org/ScottBehindUrals.pdf, p. 9
[6] https://www.redstarpublishers.org/ScottBehindUrals.pdf, p. 10
[7] https://www.redstarpublishers.org/ScottBehindUrals.pdf, p. 10
[8] https://www.redstarpublishers.org/ScottBehindUrals.pdf, p. 9
[9] See Martin, Terry. 2017. The Affirmative Action Empire : Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. https://www.degruyter.com/doi/book/10.7591/9781501713323; Slezkine, Yuri. 1994. “The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism.” Slavic Review 53 (2): 414–52. https://doi.org/10.2307/2501300: Suny, Ronald Grigor. 1993. The Revenge of the Past : Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press; Harris, James R. 1999. The Great Urals: Regionalism and the Evolution of the Soviet System. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press; Harris, James R. 2017. The Great Fear : Stalin’s Terror of the 1930s. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press; Getty, J. Arch. 1985. Origins of the Great Purges : The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933-1938. 1st pbk. ed. Cambridge [Cambridgeshire]: Cambridge University Press; Hosking, Geoffrey A. 2011. Russia and the Russians : A History. Second edition. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
[10] Kotkin Magnetic Mountain
Discover more from DIG
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
0 Comments