The Beginnings of the Soviet Union

The Beginnings of the Soviet Union

The United States that we live in makes it very hard for us to fathom what a struggling nation is like to live in. In the United States, we are socialized to believe that America is the most superior of all the countries and our prosperity will continue to grow. We are very fortunate to be born into a relatively high standard of living as a society, thus we cannot comprehend what it is like for countries trying to build societies from the bottom up. John Scott portrays this brilliantly in his book "Behind the Urals" as he examines individual people and their struggles as they worked in Magnitogorsk. These citizens worked in the most inhumane conditions, all with the intention to help their country develop under the new system of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union had just gone through an entire turn around in their political, social, and economic spheres as they went from one extreme to another. The old Czarist government was always out to serve the rich landowners, while treating the peasantry as second-class humans rather than equals. However, when the Russian Revolution came to a head, and the Red Communists or Bolsheviks defeated the White Czarists, Russia was left with an entirely new system of thought in its government. This ideology viewed the working class and peasantry as the main citizens in their society, while the rich landowners were not nearly as powerful as they once were. Thus the workers of Magnitogorsk held a very important position as they had the responsibility to help the Soviet Union take flight as a country that could compete with other powerful countries of the world, all while working under the most inhumane conditions.

John Scott moved to the Soviet Union leaving the United States and in his eyes, its unsatisfactory capitalistic way of governing. Scott may have been aided in making his decision as he saw the United States slip into the Great Depression, a time when the conditions in America reached an all time low. He left his roots in the United States to begin a new life in a foreign country simply because he was disgruntled with American governing and was appealed to by the Soviet philosophy of governing. It tool Scott a tremendous amount of will and fortitude to leave behind everything he knew so well, to start a new life on the other side of the world. He showed his courage as he began...

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...derwent, he served his sentence with dignity and was respected as one of the best workers there.

In the beginnings of the Soviet Union, and more specifically Magnitogorsk, a diversified group of people from various ethnic, religions, and national backgrounds all put forth their individual efforts to develop the new Russia. The grueling environment that these people lived in developed them into strong and proud workers. In looking to our home front, I cannot find one example that even borders similarities to life in the Soviet Union under Stalin's Five Year Plans. We can study the times, even look to experts in the field for information on the topic, but we can never fully grasp the extreme environment that the peoples of Magnitogorsk lived in. They jeopardized and sometimes even sacrificed their own lives to build up a country. Lives were not lost in the battlefields, but instead on the job as workers froze from the climate while working the blast furnaces. The Soviet Union's success is usually given to the Communist ideology or even Stalin, but instead it was the hard workers who came from all over the eastern hemisphere to take on and complete the task of developing Russia.