The authors show that Soviet planning was erratic and "Bacchanalian," with a systemic tendency to under- or overshoot targets on a massive scale. The core of the book is the presentation of a linear programming model tracing alternative growth paths from 1929 to 1944. Heroic assumptions have to be made in order to simplify the model (for example, there are only two types of technology, "old" and "new"). The authors are able to show, even using the assumptions and data of the Soviet central planners themselves, that a slower, less "taut" capital accumulation path would have produced faster long term growth. There is not - much novelty in such a finding for a political scientist or a political economist, but economic historians will appreciate the authors' rigor. The narrative includes some background on the major shifts in state policy but does not get into a detailed discussion of the political feasibility of the alter- native policies suggested by the model. Some of their asides are nevertheless interesting. For example, they make the point that for neoclassical economists there was no agricultural "surplus" in the late 1920s: on the contrary, low prices meant that there was under-supply. (p. 121) However, orthodox Marxists treated any consumption in excess of subsistence as "surplus" - hence the assault on the peasantry.

Peter Rutland Wesleyan University

John Scott. Behind the Urals: An American Worker in Russia's City of Steel. Edited by Stephen Kotkin. Bloomington � Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989. xxv, 306 pp. $27.50 cloth; $9.95 paper.

An American Engineer in Stalin's Russia: The Memoirs of Zara Witkin, 1932-1934. Edited by Michael Gelb. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991. 363 pp. $29.95.

Between the October Revolution and the beginning of World War II, approxi- mately 80,000 workers emigrated to the . More than 10,000 of these were Americans, many of them of Russian origin, who decided in the early 1920s to return and thereby join in the construction of a new social order. In the: 1930s, as pushed this grand effort toward its tragic denouement, thousands more answered what the Soviet Government advertised as a "cordial" recruitment call to bring the task to as rapid a conclusion as possible. Among such persons was a young university student-turned welder, John Scott, and an established construction engineer, Zara Witkin. In their memoirs, these two very different men excavate some of the grand problems of Stalin's grand effort - problems which continue to trouble the nations that once comprised the Soviet Union and which for decades have vexed the historians and political scientists who study them. Scott's book, arguably the most valuable in the vast canon of firsthand ac- counts written by visitors to Stalin's Russia, was first published in 1942. In this edition, editor Stephen Kotkin has added, in addition to his own helpful introduction, the texts of three previously unpublished interviews of Scott conducted by U.S. officials in Moscow in 1938. In the interviews, Scott explores two of the principal themes addressed in the book itself: the emergence of "a new class of men" that was fueled by Stalinist purges, and the moral and political guest ions that accompanied them. Insofar as it identifies the "new people" who rose to power in the 1930s, depicts a disjointed governmental apparatus, and illustrates the large disjunctures between official state pronouncements and the reality of life and work in the new city of Magnitogorsk, Scott's account lends credence to several of the central tenets of the "revisionist" interpretation of forged by J. Arch Getty and Sheila Fitzpatrick, among others. Indeed, Scott's own empirical estimate that "several million" Soviets suffered "devastating effects" as a result of the great purges largely conforms to Getty's most recently published research on the heretofore inflated tally of victims claimed by the Soviet penal system prior to World War II. More significant, possibly, are two additional questions embedded in Behind the Urals. The first, closely related to the rise of the new men, stems from Scott's observations on the underlying demoralization of the Stalin years. "Unless the Party is restored to at least some of its former position as a leading force in the country and permitted to propagate certain basic socialist principles...," Scott notes, "the future of the Soviet Union does not look bright to me." Despite his reservations, Scott told the staff at the U.S. Embassy, "It is possible that as long as the Soviet regime is able to keep the people at work and give them enough purchasing power to buy the things essential to their low standards, it will endure." While Scott's book has stood quite justly for decades as a testament to the men and women who built Magnitogorsk, Soviet scholars as well as. nonspecialists may therefore now find in it important, if impressionistic, evidence of social breakdown that bears upon the chaotic conditions of the post-Gorbachev era. throughout the text, Scott counters his fears and premonitions with painful explanations for the utter necessity of Stalin's chosen path to industrialization. Stalin "was conyinced," Scott writes, "that it was just a matter of time until the Soviet Union would ... be invaded by hostile capitalist powers seeking to dismember and destroy the first Socialist State. Stalin considered it his sacred obligation to see to it that when the time came, the attackers would not be able to accomplish this. The fulfillment 6f this task justified all means (emphasis added)." The ultimate justification for this line of thought, in Scott's view, was provided by the armies of the Third Reich: "During the five years from 1937 till 1942, Magnitogorsk furnished roughly ten million tons of steel.... It was expensive steel, both in terms of roubles and human lives, but ten million tons of steel will make a great many tanks whose military effectiveness bears no relation to the price paid for the steel." "Modernizing" the Soviet Union, building Magnitogorsk, thus meant necessarily that "men froze, hungered, and suffered...." While Kotkin concludes that Scott ultimately applauds the accomplishments of Stalin, the text of Behind the Urals seems to suggest that the author was keenly,