The Ghost Of The Executed Engineer: Technology And The Fall Of The Soviet Union
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Edition: repr.,
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: No dust jacket
Pages: Good
Condition remarks: Condition as shown in image
In the shadow of Stalin's purges, a brilliant engineer named Peter Palchinsky was executed in 1929 for daring to tell the truth — that Soviet industrial gigantism was economically irrational, environmentally destructive, and ultimately doomed to fail. The Ghost of the Executed Engineer resurrects Palchinsky's tragic story as a lens through which to examine one of the twentieth century's most consequential questions: why did the Soviet Union, despite its enormous investment in science and technology, collapse so catastrophically? Loren R. Graham argues with forensic precision that the systemic suppression of independent engineering judgment, critical feedback, and technological pragmatism planted the seeds of Soviet self-destruction decades before the Berlin Wall fell. Graham's analysis transcends biography, presenting a sweeping indictment of how ideology corrupts science and technology when political orthodoxy overrides empirical reality. Written with the authority of a leading historian of Russian science, the narrative draws chilling parallels between Soviet technocratic failure and the broader dangers of politicised expertise in any system of governance. Palchinsky's ghost, it turns out, haunts not only the ruins of the USSR but any society that silences its most inconvenient thinkers — leaving the reader to wonder who today's executed engineers might be.
Author: Loren R. Graham
Format: Paperback
Genre: History
Edition: repr.,
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: No dust jacket
Pages: Good
Condition remarks: Condition as shown in image
In the shadow of Stalin's purges, a brilliant engineer named Peter Palchinsky was executed in 1929 for daring to tell the truth — that Soviet industrial gigantism was economically irrational, environmentally destructive, and ultimately doomed to fail. The Ghost of the Executed Engineer resurrects Palchinsky's tragic story as a lens through which to examine one of the twentieth century's most consequential questions: why did the Soviet Union, despite its enormous investment in science and technology, collapse so catastrophically? Loren R. Graham argues with forensic precision that the systemic suppression of independent engineering judgment, critical feedback, and technological pragmatism planted the seeds of Soviet self-destruction decades before the Berlin Wall fell. Graham's analysis transcends biography, presenting a sweeping indictment of how ideology corrupts science and technology when political orthodoxy overrides empirical reality. Written with the authority of a leading historian of Russian science, the narrative draws chilling parallels between Soviet technocratic failure and the broader dangers of politicised expertise in any system of governance. Palchinsky's ghost, it turns out, haunts not only the ruins of the USSR but any society that silences its most inconvenient thinkers — leaving the reader to wonder who today's executed engineers might be.