Engineer of Revolutionary Russia: Iurii V. Lomonosov (1876-1952) and the Railways (review)

Anthony Heywood has written a model of a biography, admirably showing his decades of study of the well-documented life of Yuri Vladimirovich Lomonosov (1876-1952), one of the premier Russian railroad engineers of the first half of the twentieth century. A professor, advocate of scientific (which also could mean impractical or unrealistic) testing of efficiency, senior manager, occasional revolutionary, and advocate of diesel locomotives, Lomonosov cast a larger-than-life shadow across Russia and the Soviet Union until the late 1920s when he chose external exile over probable imprisonment and left his country.

The railways were one of the economically most important technologies in the late tsarist and early Soviet period, and Heywood skillfully depicts the major technical, financial, organizational, and political challenges railroads faced in fueling and being fueled by Russia's state-guided industrialization. Like every good biography, the reader leaves with a strong sense of context as well as the person. The factors limning Lomonosov's options from childhood through exile—e.g., choice of school, career, university, and firm—are skillfully explicated and analyzed.

By placing Lomonosov in his specific environments, which ranged from tsarist railroad yards to a provisional government delegation abroad to a Soviet ministry to exile in Britain and Canada, Heywood judiciously and convincingly assesses the impact and contributions of Lomonosov at the major stages of his life. Overall, the conclusion is that he was important, but not as significant as previously assumed. One major reason, demonstrating the importance of personality, was that Lomonosov often proved his own worst enemy, managing to constantly antagonize superiors and inferiors, though not, it seems, his mistresses.

Lomonosov's life after the 1917 Bolshevik seizure of power illustrated the dilemma faced by Russian engineers. The Bolsheviks enthusiastically welcomed massive engineering projects to transform Russia, sometimes attaching to them utopian hopes, while the tsarist regime had viewed such projects suspiciously. The Bolsheviks, however, also viewed engineers as politically unreliable "bourgeois specialists," especially after Lenin's death. The right-wing anti-Bolshevik Whites were not an appealing choice for an educated engineer who wanted to rebuild his country. Lomonosov put himself in the unsustainable position of being pro-government but anticommunist. The result made him suspect to everyone and pleased no one. Indeed, his attempt to show his loyalty to the government while in exile led him to refuse the best offer he ever had for lucrative employment in the West, to his financial detriment.

While providing a deep reading of a Russian engineer and his times, this book raises a broader question about audiences. On one hand, Ashgate deserves praise for letting Heywood write this large book. On the other hand, it is 400 pages long and, more important, the $145 price will deter all but the specialist and major library. What if Heywood wrote—or would write—a book a quarter the length and a seventh the price? That would instantly greatly expand the audience to include college students, the audience most in need of a book that would teach them about the nexus between engineering and society, the importance of people and networks in shaping technologies, and the unavoidable challenges non-revolutionary engineers faced in revolutionary times.