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The story of Peter Palchinsky, a brilliant Russian engineer who was shot in
1928 as a conspirator accused of trying to restore capitalism to the Soviet
Union, is told in Loren Graham’s The Ghost of the Executed Engineer (Harvard
University Press, £7.95/$12.95, ISBN 0 674 35437 0). He was guilty
only of being outspoken. Graham sees in his fate the reasons why the initially
successful Soviet industrialisation process finally collapsed. It is a moving
and lamentable parable.