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
ideological purges
Great Purge
John Scott (writer)