VAULT
Russia’s Engineers: Sources of Soviet Power, Threats to Soviet Power
An anthropologist specializing in the study of the Soviet Union examines the vital but precarious role of engineers in the communist system when this article was first published in August 1955.
Written by Demitri B. Shimkin, Social Science Analyst, U.S. Department of Commerce, Washington, D.C.
SOVIET TECHNICAL EDUCATION IS BASICALLY designed to mass-produce supervision of manufacturing routine. This specialization is possible so long as necessary innovations can be borrowed systematically from the West. Before World War II, and especially before 1935, the Soviets had many of their new industrial plants designed and erected by Western firms, and selected Soviet engineers and workers were sent abroad for training, while Soviet scientists participated in international meetings and other exchanges.
During World War II, Lend Lease provided a massive transfusion of Western experience. Several thousand Soviet engineers were sent to the United States during this period to gain a comprehensive understanding of American industrial layout and practice. Advanced equipment was either imported or available from blueprints. The occupation of Germany provided further opportunities. All of this new information was rapidly assembled and organized. The direct fruit of this carefully used aid was a Soviet technological breakthrough in atomic energy and other weapons’ development.
In all, one can scarcely overstate the dependence of the Soviet Union on Western, especially American, technology. The structure of Soviet industry—plant sizes, locations, and layouts—corresponds remarkably to the American.
Ford Motor Company worked with the Soviet government in 1929 to open two automobile plants in Nizhny Novgorod and Moscow. Ford's engineers, foremen, and detailed drawings made construction possible. Pictured is the Molotov Avtozavod or “Gorky” automobile plant. Photo: The Henry Ford Archive
Peter Palchinsky, a Russian engineer during the early 20th century who resisted the idea that huge projects should be built no matter the cost. After speaking out against massive projects that held no regard for worker safety or local conditions, Palchinsky was arrested and eventually executed in 1929. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
Domestic Research Program
Dependence upon the West is a cheap and fairly sure way to achieve technological progress, but it incurs the disadvantages of a built-in time lag and of solutions inappropriate to peculiarly Soviet conditions. A domestic research program is essential to overcome these disadvantages. Russian science has a strong tradition, with many outstanding figures, such as Lobachevsky in mathematics, Mendeleeff in chemistry, Fersman in geochemistry, and the Vavilov brothers in plant genetics. Government support, centralized organization, and planning have characterized Russian research for the past two centuries. Although Western coverage of Soviet published research is very poor, it is clear that at the present time only the United States surpasses the USSR in research volume. However, the successful applications of original Soviet research appear to be notably few.
Why? In part because of qualitative weaknesses in Soviet science itself, weaknesses in experiment design, instrumentation, and control which have led to unsure results. These weaknesses are vanishing. Other causes are the conservatism, compartmentation, and structural rigidity of Soviet industry, traits reinforced by Soviet technological selection and training systems. Even more important is Party dictation, which forces Soviet industry to produce at all costs, to improvise rather than to reach basic solutions.
The Dnieper Hydroelectric Station under construction in the 1930s. It was destroyed during World War II, but rebuilt in the years following the war. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
Heavy Hand of Suspicion
Above all else the Soviet scientist and engineer is deeply suspected by the Party. His vital technical skills give him a power potentially challenging the Party’s absolutism. To do his job, he must maintain contact with both the prerevolutionary past and with the West. And the logic of his work drives him into repeated conflict, open or hidden, with Party dogma and favoritism.
Therefore the Party must take strong measures to maintain its control. It recruits its scientists from the most privileged group in the Soviet Union, the Russian urban elite. It presses them to join the Party, rather successfully for scientists and engineers as a whole, much less so for their teachers. Of the former, 38 percent are Party members; of the latter, 17 percent. The Party organizes elaborate networks of inspection and informers. And, periodically, it imposes terror, forcing scientists to grovel to abase themselves before Party pronouncements, and at times, to die, in token of their subjugation to Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist infallibility.
Thus, in fighting potential subversion, the Party generates apathy and despair, if not actual subversion. In consequence, there is a constant flight from responsibility, from operations to administration or teaching. Despite the large number of engineers trained, the compulsions, and the great material incentives, shortages of skilled manpower in high-priority areas are chronic.
A blast furnace at Magnitogorsk in the Urals, Russia. Part of Stalin’s first “Five Year Plan,” it was built by a combination of volunteer “shock workers” and forced labor. Photo: Hulton Archive/Getty Images
How Effective is the System?
The selection, training, and use of physical scientists and engineers in the Soviet Union reveals paradoxical strengths and weaknesses. The application of science on a vast scale is essential to the realization of Soviet ambitions, yet the Communist Party dare not trust the scientist and the engineer. The Soviet Union fears the West, yet depends upon its technology. Given these circumstances, these conclusions may be advanced:
1) At present, the actual effectiveness of the Soviet Union in scientific innovation and application is far lower than might be indicated by the large numbers of its physical scientists and engineers, and by the immense Soviet effort in training and research.
2) In part, this gap lies in the failure to develop and apply increasingly good basic research. Thus Soviet science warrants far closer study by the West than Soviet technology indicates.
3) Beyond this, the Soviets are creating a potential which, given appropriate social changes, might generate a technological revolution.
4) At present, the Soviet utilization of Western technology is limited by Western controls on information flow and exports. Moves toward the modification of these controls should be guided by careful assessment of Soviet technological strengths and weaknesses.
5) Finally, scientific and technical publications, including trade journals, constitute a channel of communication behind the Iron Curtain which the Soviet Union simply must keep open. This fact needs wider exploitation both as a means of insuring a reverse flow of data from the Soviet Union, and as a medium for the diffusion of a new hope for a world of peace.
Demitri B. Shimkin was a social science analyst for the U.S. Department of Commerce in Washington, D.C. An anthropologist who was born in Siberia, Shimkin served in the U.S. Army Military Intelligence Division before settling in as a long-serving professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
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