“Whoever is not with us is against us” : (In commemoration of the 90th anniversary of the Case of the Industrial Party)

Abstract

This article reviews how Soviet socio-political reality affected the fates of the scientific and engineering intelligentsia during the period of the country’s industrialisation. Our study is based on the materials from the trial of the Industrial Party (1930) with the emphasis on trial materials concerned with how the regime attributed retarded industry growth to “wrecking” in power industry, the core sector of national economy. During that period, a method of combining facts, truthful but taken out of context, with their interpretation that served the regime’s objectives, was honed and then broadly used to expose the “enemies of the people.” The article looks into the problem of compatibility of morality with political determination of human views and behaviour. The main figure in this article is L.K. Ramzin who was the biggest expert in thermal engineering at the time