John Scott

Soviet experience

Magnitogorsk years After leaving the University of Wisconsin in 1931

Scott wrote Behind the Urals: An American Worker in Russia's City of Steel about his experiences in Magnitogorsk, presenting the Stalinist enterprise of building a huge steel producing plant and city as an awe-inspiring triumph of collectivism. Scott contributed to the construction of Magnitogorsk as a welder working in treacherous conditions. His writing reflects the painful human price of industrial accidents, overwork, and the inefficiency of the hyperindustrialization program, the wretched condition of peasants driven from the land in the collectivization program and forced into becoming industrial laborers, and the harshness of Article 58 in the ideological purges.

In Behind the Urals Scott recalls many examples of the danger workers faced in Magnitogorsk: I was just going to start welding when I heard someone sing out, and something swished down past me. It was a rigger who had been working on the very top. He bounced off the bleeder pipe, which probably saved his life. Instead of falling all the way to the ground, he landed on the main platform about fifteen foot below me. By the time I got down to him, blood was coming out of his mouth in gushes. He tried to yell, but could not. A cable sent from New York to Moscow on May 22, 1942, addressed to code name "Viktor", who was the director of Soviet Intelligence during World War II Lieutenant General Pavel Fitin, credited "Ivanov" with delivering "a mass of materials on the Soviet war industry" to the United States. Nearly three years later cable number 207 sent from Moscow to a Soviet Intelligence office in New York on March 8, 1945, revealed that the cover name "Ivanov" referred to John Scott.

Criticism By Scott Nearing Scott Nearing, John Scott's father, eventually broke with him because of his criticism of Bolshevik and Bolshevik-inspired systems. Nearing, a pacifist, remained sympathetic to socialism in countries with violently repressive regimes whereas his son did not. Nearing was a sympathetic socialist guest of the Albanian state of the Stalinist-inspired Hoxha regime as late as the 1970s. John's association with Henry Luce and, later, Richard Nixon also contributed to the estrangement between father and son. Scott Nearing said in a letter, "I want nothing to do with him." Nearing refused to go to his son's funeral.

By Whittaker Chambers Whittaker Chambers claimed that Scott tried to influence Time Magazine publisher Henry Luce to remove Chambers as foreign news editor because of Chambers' anti-communist and anti-Soviet views. Scott's own evolution in his views over the decades is relevant here as at the time of which Chambers spoke Scott still had hope for socialism in its non-Stalinist forms whereas by the 1970s his disillusionment was more extensive.