The Ghost of the Executed Engineer

The Ghost of the Executed Engineer: Technology and the Fall of the Soviet Union is a documentary book written by Loren Graham, an MIT professor specializing in Russian technology history that criticizes the direction of Soviet industrialization. The beginning of the book focuses on the life of Peter Palchinsky (Russian: Пётр Иоакимович Пальчинский), born in 1875 in a city on the Volga, Kazan. He was a mining engineer who wished to take a more humanitarian approach to engineering than the communist government desired. The Ghost of the Executed Engineer was published by the Harvard University Press in 1993. While the book does cover the life of Peter Palchinky, a major part of the book personifies the struggles and misfortunes of the Soviet industrialization.

Peter Palchinsky

Peter Akimovich Palchinsky (Russian: Пётр Иоакимович Пальчинский) was the oldest son of five children. He grew up with his mother in the Volga river city of Kazan. As a youth he was encouraged by his mother to read in the family's large inherited library. It was at an early age that Peter became interested in science. In the fall of 1893 he entered the Mining Institute in St. Petersburg, one of the elite engineering institutions of the tsarist Russia. During his time at the institute he became interested and attracted to radical political doctrines.

In 1901 Palchinsky was recruited by the Russian government to investigate the living conditions of workers in the coal mines of the Don Basin; however, his criticism of the workers' living conditions was not well received. Shortly after the Revolution of 1905 Palchinsky became interested in the Socialist Revolutionary Party, which at the time was the largest party in Russia. He sympathized with the moderate wing of the party and was sharply critical of the radicals. He was implicated in the 1905 effort of the revolutionaries to declare a separate democratic. It is not clear if he was an active participant in the movement or just a sympathizer. Because there was no hard evidence to convince the Russian government that Palchinsky had an active role in the movement, he was not brought to trial, but instead exiled under the emergency powers granted to the police during revolutionary turmoil.

After his 8 year Siberian exile, Palchinsky and his wife returned to their native land where he held several positions in the provisional government. While probably not a formal member, he associated himself with the right wing of the Socialist Revolutionary Party and supported the war effort against Germany. In 1917, Bolsheviks arranged for a takeover of the provincial government and imprisoned ministers and other officials of the Provisional Government including Palchinksy.

Palchinsky resisted the Bolsheviks rule; however, gradually, he and many of his associates found certain aspects of the new Soviet political system beckoning. Their commitment to creating a planned economy, to industrialization, and to science and technology were promising to Palchinsky.

Palchinsky believed that the obstacles to the Russia’s industrial advancement were not technological, but political, social, and educational. He argued that Russian engineers were not equipped to deal with the competitive world because Russian engineers did not approach problems in a "academic-dilettantish" way. Instead, they took on every problem as a purely technical one and assumed that if a solution incorporated the latest science, then it was the best solution.

Palchinsky worked with the Soviet Authorities and the Communist party in planning industry and increasing the strength of Russia, but he was strongly against any takeover by the Party of any organization of which he was a member. He opposed the interests of the Communist Party. During this time, policies started by the Bolsheviks and Stalin emphasized huge projects controlled by Moscow. These projects did not include consideration for local conditions and safety was sacrificed to output. This did not set well with Palchinsky as he had seen firsthand the death and destruction caused when consideration of local conditions and safety measures were not taken. He continued to criticize these projects and was arrested in April 1928, and executed for his political position in 1929.

Palchinsky was vilified by Soviet propaganda, and then mostly forgotten, but he is given a much more favourable hearing in Alexander Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago (1974), pt.1 and November 1916 (1984) which present him as a clear-eyed, hard-working spokesman of the engineer community.

Technology in the Soviet Union

Stalin's vision for the Soviet Union and industrialization was very different from Palchinsky's. Joseph Stalin had an ideological outlook for economic advancement in the Soviet Union that set unrealistic goals that required massive human effort. Stalin emphasized that all industrial establishments should be of great size (preferable the largest in the world). This came to be known as "gigantomania" by the Western observers. The results of taking on these astronomical industrial establishments were high accident rates and shoddy production. The high death rate and exposure to disease was an acceptable cost for Stalin. Stalin's motto was that "technology decides everything" no matter at what cost. After Peter's death, in 1929 the Soviet Union launched the First Five-Year Plan, a list of economic goals that was designed to strengthen the economy.

Three of the monumental projects in the early Five-Year Plans were the building of the world's largest hydroelectric plant on the Dnieper River, the construction of the world's largest steel plant (Magnitogorski) and the digging of the White Sea Canal. These Soviet industrialization projects were greatly flawed and wasteful, costing many people who worked both voluntarily and involuntarily their lives.

USSR Engineering Disasters from The Ghost of the Executed Engineer[1]

Dnieper Dam Power Plant

Many engineers, including Peter Palchinsky warned the USSR not to rush and go ahead with the building of the dam. They argued that the water flow was ultimately going to be too slow and no good studies had been made of the flow patterns of surface and underground water in the area. Ultimately, 10,000 farmers were forced out of their farmland with little or no compensation, and those who did not volunteer to work on the project were forced to do so. As the project proceeded, it fell behind on schedule and grossly exceeded the estimated costs. Worker needs were neglected and they lived and worked under unbearable conditions. Destroyed and rebuilt twice after World War II, it has been expanded several times and is still in operation today as one of six hydroelectric dams on the Dnieper River.

Magnitogorsk ("Steel City")

Construction began in 1929 at the site of one of the country's richest iron deposits, known as Magnetic Mountain. Peter Palchinsky published articles in 1926 and 1927 complaining that the Soviet government was going ahead with plans for the construction of the mining plant without adequate studies of geological resources, availability of labor, economics of transportation and supplying proper housing for the work force. Workers were promised a "garden city" away from industry and instead got barracks with open sewers directly in the path of blast furnace fumes.

In 1987 Stephen Kotkin was the first American to live in Magnitogorsk and found a dirty and dispirited city surrounding hopelessly obsolescent steel mills, far from the "garden city" anyone expected.

White Sea Canal

The building of the White Sea Canal was described as a complete nightmare. It ignored the engineering principles of Palchinsky and was also an obscene violation of human rights. Almost all workers were prisoners and more than 20,000 died during construction. The Canal would freeze half the year, and water was too low in the dry summers. The Canal failed to live up to its specifications from the beginning. After World War II, the entire canal was rebuilt, running parallel to the first one.

See also

References

  1. ↑ "Three USSR Engineering Disasters (from "The Ghost of the Executed Engineer" by Loren Graham)". Rpi.edu. Retrieved 2013-06-15.