An American Engineer in Stalin's Russia

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 435 An American Engineer in Stalin’s Russia: The Memoirs of Zara Witkin, 1932—1934. By Zara Witkin. Edited by Michael Gelb. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. Pp. ix + 363; illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $29.95. Given the collapse of Communism and the appearance of a nascent market system in what used to be the Soviet Union, what can we learn from the memoirs of an American engineer who spent two years in the Soviet Union in the early 1930s? The answer is a great deal. The memoirs of Zara Witkin provide an insightful eyewitness analysis of the Soviet economy in general and of the Soviet construction industry in particular during the First and Second Five-Year Plans. Although a socialist and a sympathizer with what he believed to be the great human experiment taking place in the Soviet Union, Witkin was a practical engineer and keen observer of society who quickly recog­ nized the flaws of a centralized economy that crushes individual creativity and initiative. As early as 1932-34 Witkin had come to understand the fatal weaknesses that with time would bring about the complete ruin of the Soviet economy. Born in 1900, Zara Witkin graduated with honors from the College of Civil Engineering at the University of California. In the 1920s he became well-known for his work on such projects as the Hollywood Bowl, but the inequities he observed in American life upset him. The stock market crash and the onset of the Great Depression deepened his dissatisfaction, and so he turned his sights to the Soviet Union and its First Five-Year Plan. Witkin saw in this plan the potential for creating a rational economy that would benefit the entire population—not just a well-off few—and he decided he must help create this new society. Witkin arrived in the Soviet Union in 1932 and soon began working as a consultant in the All-Union Construction Trust (Soiuzstroi). In this position he inspected a variety of construction projects, factories, and even industrial disaster sites. After observing the extreme back­ wardness of Soviet construction technology, Witkin undertook a program to adapt Western methods to primitive Soviet conditions. If his proposals had been accepted and implemented, they could have saved millions of rubles and produced a dramatic improvement in the efficiency and quality of Soviet construction. From the first, however, Witkin had to do battle with the en­ trenched Soviet bureaucracy. The administration at Soiuzstroi did not want to listen to Witkin’s proposals and did its best to consign them to oblivion using bureaucratic delaying tactics. This failure to act on plans that had great potential for improving Soviet construction angered Witkin immensely. Finally, when his design for interlocking blocks was disposed of in this way, Witkin decided to fight back. A Sovietjournalist publicized Witkin’s battles in Izvestiia and delivered a letter from Witkin to Stalin. This had an immediate effect. The 436 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE OGPU (the secret police) began investigations while frightened bu­ reaucrats at Soiuzstroi called meetings and promised to act on Witkin’s ideas. With the passage of weeks, however, this apparent action lapsed and Witkin’s ideas were again shelved. Witkin’s battles brought him into contact with officials from a large number of organizations, including the Commissariat of Heavy Industry, the Council of Labor and Defense, the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate (RKI), and several industrial trusts. Witkin may well be the only Westerner ever to have been engaged by the RKI and the OGPU as an industrial expert. In his spare time Witkin took it upon himself to calculate the total construction completed during the First Five-Year Plan. He con­ cluded that in no year did construction exceed that of prerevolution­ ary Russia in 1913/14, and he found that total construction for the entire Five-Year Plan was less than that in America for an average single year between 1923 and 1932. Witkin’s analysis of Soviet construction was the first of its kind, and it established the truth behind the propaganda of official inflated figures. In the end Witkin was defeated by the bureaucracy he fought so

Communism · Economic history · Memoir · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Soviet union · American Environmental and Regional History · History · Law