Loren Graham (1)

The Ghost is nominally about an engineer named Peter Palchinsky. Apparently Peter Palchinsky was all for revolution, but demanded that manufacturing and construction needed to take the human element of the worker into account, and that things should be designed before being built. (It's interesting that one of the repeated complaints I've read from computer programmers is that their bosses want them to skip the design phase and start coding immediately.) Apparently he was a good enough engineer to survive not only the Tsar but Lenin and the early Bolshevik days (he wasn't a huge fan of the Bolsheviks) but then ran into Stalin with a complete lack of the political sensibilities that would allow him to survive such an encounter. The author ties this into several of the engineering projects, like the White Sea Canal, where Stalin threw man-power and human lives (100,000, by some estimates) to produce as fast as possible a canal that has always been nearly completely useless.

I'm skeptical of some of the connections drawn here, but the heart of the book is in the biography and engineering stories, and they do shine through. Some mind-boggling facts jump out; in 1986, most of the members of the Politburo had engineering educations, but engineers had to take 3 non-technical classes: political economy (i.e. the Marxist stages of history), dialectic materialism, and the history of the Communist Party. I do feel that more explanation would have been useful about why so few people were interested in studying engineering, if it was the road to political power it seemed to be.… (more)