The ghost of the executed engineer
by Loren R. Graham · first published 1993
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Stalin ordered his execution, but here Peter Palchinsky has the last word. As if rising from an uneasy grave, Palchinsky's ghost leads us through the miasma of Soviet technology and industry, pointing out the mistakes he condemned in his time, the corruption and collapse he predicted, the ultimate price paid for silencing those who were not afraid to speak out. The story of this visionary engineer's life and work, as Loren Graham relates it, is also the story of the Soviet Union's industrial promise and failure. We meet Palchinsky in pre-Revolutionary Russia, immersed in protests against the
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…on some ideology rather than familiarity with Soviet culture. I can't think of one single book that gives a good overview of Soviet engineering, but some good ones to start with might be Graham's The Ghost of the Executed Engineer, Gerovitch's From Newspeak to Cyberspeak, and Idov's Made in Russia: Unsung Icons of Soviet Design. I think most of the really interesting examples are in military technology, but unfortunately I don't…
on “The AK-47” ↗…Century" by Wolfgang Schivelbusch It’s about how if you think about distance as spacetime, that trains moved cities closer together by making the distance between them shorter. They shrink the world. The Ghost of the Executed Engineer" by Loren Graham About how Soviet era projects thought they could throw pure labor at massive scale engineering problems to overcome any problem, to their detriment.
on “1910: The year the modern world lost its mind” ↗