John Scott (writer)

John Scott (March 26, 1912 – December 1, 1976) was an American writer and author of Behind the Urals: An American Worker in Russia's City of Steel who worked in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during World War II. The OSS was the predecessor organization to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

Scott was born in 1912 and was the son of Scott Nearing and Nellie Marguerite Seeds Nearing.

After leaving the University of Wisconsin in 1931 Scott migrated to the Soviet Union September 1932 at the age of 20. He worked for 5 years in the new industrial city Magnitogorsk at an iron and steel plant. In 1938, with regret, he left the mills to escape arrest by the NKVD only after lengthy council with a confidant who concluded: "Better leave. This is no place for foreigners now." The next day his wife Mariya Ivanovna Dikareva applied for permission to go to the United States to live, which took four years to come through, and in 1942 the two moved to America.

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 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.

...
Wikipedia