Selected Memoirs of Foreign Specialists and Workers

Beal, Fred. Proletarian Journey: New England, Gastonia, Moscow . New York, 1937. (The highly interesting account of an American labor organizer who worked at the Kharkov Tractor Factory in the early 1930s.)

Bornet, Francisque. Je reviens de Russie . Paris, 1947. (A short account by a French engineer who worked for much of the 1930s in the USSR, including in Magnitogorsk.)

Burrell, George A. An American Engineer Looks at Russia . Boston, 1932. (Burrell was a petroleum engineer who worked in the Caucasus oil town of Groznyi from 1931 to 1932.)

Ciocca, Gaetano. Giudizio sul bolscevismo . Milan, 1933. (The account of an Italian engineer's experience in the USSR during the First Five-Year Plan.)

Cotte, Jules. Un ingénieur français en URSS . Paris, 1946. (Cotte, a French chemical engineer, lived in Russia for much of the period from before World War I to 1946; his account is distorted by pro-Soviet bias.)

Francis, Peter. I Worked in a Soviet Factory . London, 1939. (The author worked ten months in a plastics factory northeast of Moscow, 1936–37.)

Grady, Eve Garrette. Seeing Red: Behind the Scenes in Russia Today . New York, 1931. (Grady was the wife of an American engineer who worked in Kharkov in 1930.)

Ilyashov, Anatoli. "Victor Reuther on the Soviet Experience: An Interview." International Review of Social History 31 (1986): 298–303. (See also Reuther, The Brothers Reuther and the Story of the UAW , cited below.)

Kleist, Peter. G.P.U. Justice . Edited by Maurice Edelman. London, 1938. (The notes of a German engineer working in the Soviet Union from 1933 to 1937; he was imprisoned 1937–38. Not one of the better personal accounts.)

Koerber, Lili. Life in a Soviet Factory . London, 1933. (Koerber was an Austrian who worked in Leningrad's Putilov Works [later Kirov Works] for one month in 1931.)

Krupinski, Kurt, ed. Rückkehrer Berichten über die Sowjetunion . Berlin, 1942. (German specialists tell about their experiences in the USSR; published in Nazi Germany at the height of World War II.)

Legay, Kleber. Un mineur chez les Russes . Paris, 1937. (The insightful observations of a French miner who spent most of 1936 in the USSR with a trade union delegation.)

Littlepage, John D., and Bess Demaree. In Search of Soviet Gold . New York, 1937. (Littlepage worked in Soviet mines from 1927 to 1937; highly interesting, though politically unsophisticated.)

Miller, Jack. "Soviet Planners in 1936–1937." In Soviet Planning: Essays in Honor of Naum Jasny , ed. Jane Degras and Alec Nove, pp. 123–25. Oxford, 1964. (The author studied economic planning in the USSR; he recounts the observations of the planning students with whom he lived.)

Monkhouse, Allan. Moscow, 1911–1933 . Boston, 1934. (Monkhouse was a specialist in electrical generating equipment with two decades of experience in Russia and the USSR; he was a defendant in the Metro-Vickers trial of 1933.)

Nobile, Umberto. My Five Years with Soviet Airships . Translated by Frances Fleetwood. Akron, 1987. (Nobile, an Italian dirigible designer and polar explorer, worked in the USSR from 1929 to 1936.)

Reuther, Victor. The Brothers Reuther and the Story of the UAW: A Memoir . Boston, 1976. (Reuther and his brother Walter, later president of the United Automobile Workers, worked in a Soviet automobile factory for eighteen months between 1932 and 1934. See also Ilyashov, "Victor Reuther on the Soviet Experience," cited above.)

Robinson, Robert, with Jonathan Slevin. Black on Red: My Forty-Four Years inside the Soviet Union . Washington, D.C., 1988. (Robinson, a Jamaican-American toolmaker sent by Ford to work at the Stalingrad Tractor Factory, took Soviet citizenship, was elected to the Moscow city soviet, and became an honored Soviet engineer; he left the USSR in 1974 after nearly thirty years of difficulties.)

Rukeyser, Walter Arnold. Working for the Soviets: An American Engineer in

Russia . New York, 1932. (Rukeyser worked in the Urals asbestos industry from 1928 to 1930.)

Scott, John. Behind the Urals: An American Worker in Russia's City of Steel . Boston, 1942; Bloomington, 1989. (A classic account by an American who worked for most of the 1930s in Magnitogorsk. The 1989 edition includes previously unpublished material.)

Seymour, June. In the Moscow Manner . London, 1935. (Seymour was the wife of a Canadian engineer working in the USSR from 1931 to 1934.)

Smith, Andrew, and Maria Smith. I Was a Soviet Worker . London, 1937. (Andrew Smith was a left-wing American worker in a Moscow electrical factory. Includes perceptive observations of Soviet economic and political life and the story of the authors' disenchantment with Soviet communism.)

Strom, Arne. Uncle Give Us Bread . London, 1936. (A rare glimpse of Soviet animal husbandry by a Danish-American poultry specialist.)

Westgarth, John R. Russian Engineer . London, 1934. (Westgarth was a British consultant to Gosplan on the metalurgical complex at Novokuznetsk, 1929–31.)

Wood, William, with Myrian Sieve. Our Ally: The People of Russia . New York, 1950. (Wood, an American engineer, and his wife lived in the USSR from 1931 to 1934, in 1937, and in 1941. This account describes their relations with the bureaucracy, everyday life, and the treatment of foreign specialists compared to that of Soviet engineers.)