American Idealist in Stalin's City of Steel: A Pre-History of the Cold War

Cold War Series. Episode #1 of 4. 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.

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