Engineering Communism: How Two Americans Spied
for Stalin and Founded the Soviet Silicon Valley
by Steven T. Usdin
(Yale University Press, 329 pages, $40)
Engineering Communism is an engrossing and quintessential
tale of two American immigrants — Joel Barr and Alfred Sarant —
using their entrepreneurial skill and inventiveness to create a
high tech empire. Except that in this case the arrivistes took
their can-do spirit to the Soviet Union after spying against the
United States in hopes of creating the worker’s paradise.
In writing what amounts to a dual biography, Steve Usdin — who
met Barr in Moscow while writing an article on Soviet-American
technology transfer — lets the personality of the two spies shape
both the direction and structure of the book. Barr was part of the
circle of communists whose outlook and commitment to communism was
shaped by conversations, a daily stream of lectures, books and
classes held at City College of New York. It was there that Barr
would meet the more infamous Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Sarant’s
and Barr’s paths would cross while working, at all places, for the
U.S. Army’s Signal Corps.
Risk-taking was clearly part of Barr’s character, as it was with
Sarant. It was that trait that probably allowed them to avoid
arrest by what appears to be a fumbling FBI. (The agency knew that
Barr, Sarant, and Rosenberg were spying but never seemed to connect
the dots or acted on the information it had on all three. Sound
familiar?) Both Barr and Sarant were more than willing to make a
clean break with life in America to build up the Soviet Union’s
defense and high-tech industry. Rosenberg was more cautious and
less inclined to leave home, and that more than anything else led
to his capture.
Incredibly, Barr and Sarant’s story is that of boy makes good.
Their Soviet spy handlers give them new identities and new names,
Philip Staros and Joseph Berg (a not-so-veiled reference to Barr’s
Jewish heritage). The two buck the rigid Soviet bureaucracy and
anti-Semitism to create the Soviet equivalent of a skunk works.
They were less than interested in holding party meetings at their
facility. “Seeking to attract top-level talent, they ignored the
unspoken but universally understood rules regarding the employment
of Jews, ” Usdin writes. They had their own budget, access to
anything they wanted in terms of parts and equipment. The result
was the components essential to tracking radar needed to launch the
Sputnik.
It also launched the creation of Zelenograd, the Silicon Valley,
Soviet-style. The goal was to create, design and produce computers
that could operate the military might of the socialist paradise.
Then-premier Khrushchev was their patron — he built them the city
they dreamt of and gave them control over one of the largest
budgets of any bureau in the Soviet Union, clearly the largest
awarded to anyone who was not a minister or party powerbroker. They
lived a bourgeois existence, complete with maids, mistresses, and
huge apartments, shopping at stores reserved for party members. And
it seemed that their vision of centrally planned computer industry
crushing the capitalist competition was to be realized.
But it was not to be. Their dream would drown in what Usdin
calls “the swamp that doomed Soviet industry to mediocrity.”
Ironically what doomed Berg and Staros was the harsh political edge
that centralized planning always possess and what Berg clearly
saw:
The men…responsible for deciding how state funds
would be invested were selected for their political reliability,
not for their technical knowledge. They reported to men who were
even less qualified to make technical decisions, who ultimately
reported to the Central Committee, which with a few exceptions was
composed of poorly educated political operatives. At the same time,
failure was harshly punished…In this environment, there was very
little incentive to innovate. Managers who weren’t competent to
judge between competing proposals adopted a simple stratagem:
invest only in technologies that had already been proven in the
West, particularly in the United States.
Ultimately, when Khrushchev was purged from power, Berg and Staros
lost their patron, their status, budget and position. Staros died
in 1979 bitter and defeated, half regretting he had allowed Berg to
convince him to become a spy. A proposal to revolutionize the
production of semiconductors — Berg called it the “minifab” — was
frustrated time and again until glasnost came and Barr was given
funding to complete his work and showcase the process for,
ironically, American investors.
With glasnost came the opportunity to return to America and, not
unpredictably, some fame as a recently discovered espionage agent
associated with Rosenberg. Barr was not immune to the celebrity
virus and tried to play it for what it was worth, even hoping to
use an interview on ABC’s Nightline to market his
semiconductor process. How American.
This is Steve Usdin’s first book and he tells this emotionally
and historically complex tale well. Usdin writes crisply and
engagingly. And it is refreshing to read a historical biography
devoid of cattiness and judgment. Rather, he allows Barr’s and
Sarant’s actions to speak for them.
In many respects, Barr is the inverse image of Jay Gatsby the
man who moved East from Minnesota, reinvented himself and built a
dream world to win a girl. Much like Jay Gatsby, Joel Barr “sprang
from his Platonic conception of himself.” And as Usdin notes,
though Barr had to come to grips with his past actions when he
returned to America, “the future had always been more attractive
for Berg than the past. ” So too with Gatsby who “believed in the
green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before
us.” Barr moved East as well and then home again. He was loyal to
communism but ultimately it was his American capacity for invention
and reinventing oneself that allowed him to live out his dreams and
his desires.
