[1] He was disillusioned in 1937 and 1938 by the Great Purge, which removed him from normal Soviet life as a suddenly distrusted foreigner and which disappeared many of his Russian colleagues.
[1]: x A 1989 New York Times book review said: In 1931, John Scott dropped out of the University of Wisconsin, itchy with wanderlust and disenchanted by the misery of the American Depression... he took a welding course and embarked for Russia to help Joseph Stalin build a steel mill in Magnitogorsk... As a foreigner and a gung-ho Communist, Scott [was well treated and had] freedom to travel widely in a region little visited by outsiders.
Until his death in 1976, he traveled the world as a Time-Life editor and business consultant, preaching that a dangerously inhumane system lurked behind the seeming allures of Communism.
[4]After leaving the University of Wisconsin in 1931[1]: 3 and getting some welding apprentice training at the General Electric plant in Schenectady, New York, Scott migrated to the Soviet Union in September 1932 at the age of 20.
After three months of waiting[1]: 230, 244 while unemployed, Scott left Magnitogorsk for Moscow, planning to seek work as a translator or a secretary to a foreign journalist.
[1]: 244 Scott came close to being a purge victim; he stated that if he had switched citizenship during his good Soviet years, as some other foreign-born socialists had, he would have been sent, like them, into Siberian labor camps.
This theme (differing fates for foreign-born residents depending on citizenship status by the time of the purge) is also confirmed in Robert Robinson's memoir.
In Behind the Urals Scott recalls many examples of the danger workers faced in Magnitogorsk: I was just going to start welding when I heard someone sing out, and something swished down past me.
[1]: 266 These experiences, however, had not yet disillusioned Scott with the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), which he believed was "the source of initiative and energy which drove work forward.
"[1]: 248 However, after leaving Magnitogorsk in 1938, Scott spent the next 3 years in Moscow as an "observer",[1]: 248–249 waiting for the visa allowing him to bring his wife and children out of the USSR, and although his book as published in 1942 showed that he had abiding sympathy with the ideals of the Soviet experiment, by February 1938 in his then-classified debriefing by the U.S. embassy, he had already reached a private dread that "the future of the Soviet Union does not look bright to me.
He said, "Unless the Party is restored to at least some of its former position as a leading force in the country and permitted to propagate certain basic socialist principles, there will be no cement to prevent demoralization and breakdown, no ideology to act as a religion or faith for youth.
"[1]: 301 This was an accurate prediction, although the loss of zeal would take another half century to fully develop, long after chekism had displaced progressive idealism as the real driving force of the party.
"[1]: 83 However, he saw most of the populace as focused solely on rising standard of living, which he saw had in fact occurred in the 1930s, and he said even in his private 1938 debriefing that "I believe that the economic battle is gradually being won.
It is possible that as long as the Soviet regime is able to keep the people at work and give them enough purchasing power to buy the things essential to their low standards it will endure.
From 1938 to 1941, owing to the Soviet crackdown on foreign nationals during and after the Great Purge, Scott was no longer allowed to work in the plant at Magnitogorsk.
For example, these included hearsay about what sort of industrial plant was under construction in this or that city, how huge it was, and what kind of wages and apartments workers were finding available there.
[1]: 280–306 The three dispatches date from January, February, and March 1938 and cover an array of topics, including the forced labor colony in Magnitogorsk;[1]: 280 activities of Soviet secret police,[1]: 303 wrecking, both as industrial sabotage and (as the Soviet view included) incompetent but unintentional malpractice;[1]: 290 food stores;[1]: 302 and the production capabilities of the metallurgical plant in Magnitogorsk.
[8] Nearly three years later cable number 207 sent from Moscow to a Soviet Intelligence office in New York on March 8, 1945, revealed that the cover name "Ivanov" referred to John Scott.