clew's reviews: a book log

The Ghost of the Executed Engineer, Loren R. Graham

Loren is a historian of Soviet science & technology at MIT, and winds up this (short) book not only with specifics on how incredibly stupid and destructive the huge projects of the USSR could be, but how much hope for change was burned up in them, leading directly - though slowly - to the collapse of the regime. Palchinsky was a mining engineer; he was moved to socialism by the suffering of the coal miners in the Don Basin; 88 years later the coal miners in the Don Basin stood up in the first big strike in Soviet Russia. They weren't much better off than they had been under the tsars, and both revolutionary and patriotic fervor had finally been frozen out.

Any history of the Soviet Union's engineering projects would necessarily be depressing. Even if some of its works turned out to have been sensible, they would be clogged by the failure of the enterprise as a whole. Most of them - including the most famous, enormous, pre-WWII ones, which impressed the West - turn out to have been far too expensive in human and ecological destruction, and not even to have produced as much as they could have had they been better-planned.

What raises this to the level of classical tragedy* is the ghost of the engineer. Peter Palchinsky, or Petr Pal'chinskii, as you choose to transliterate - not only had a deeper understanding of the pure engineering issues (e.g., don't build a canal that will run too shallow for the draft of your barges) but was a courageous socialist, who had been so horrified by conditions in tsarist Russia that he had argued at some risk against that regime. He was exiled to Siberia in 1906 and 1907; escaped; spent four years as a successful industrial consultant in Western Europe; had a shaky but loving marriage of comrades to a feminist.

Nor was Palchinsky's socialism at odds with his engineering. He didn't think of production as an end in itself; with human happiness, rather, as the end, he could recommend smaller locally-adapted industry over the enormous, centralized, monuments to ego that advertise themselves as triumphs of engineering. Most constantly, he assumed that the productivity of a system would be damaged by maltreating the workers in it: once because the misery of the workers counts as a cost, many times over because miserable workers probably can't, and eventually won't, work efficiently or hard.

Stalin preferred monuments to his ego and had Palchinsky convicted without trial and shot in 1928. Stalin was worried by organizations of engineers proposing technocracy- this was happening around the industrialized world at the time, although Hoover's election in 1928 isn't much evidence of conspiracy. (See also Layton's The Revolt of the Engineers.)

If Palchinsky has a legacy, it's probably a sidewise one in Western Europe, where Fukuyama's Trust describes an ideal, sometimes achieved, of continuity of interest and skill between workers and management. Lenin promoted the Taylorizing ideas of US production, in which workers are deskilled into replaceable and frequently replaced cogs; Palchinsky, as a socialist and an engineer, argued that justice and efficiency would be the same when educated workers profited by their own efficiency.

*except for the unity of time and place, etc., etc. So wrote clew in History (20th c.).