- Russian Revolution and matured under the iron rule of Joseph Stalin. They tell, too, of his dream of a better world, a dream that became personified in the woman he loved, the screen star Emma Tsesarskaia.

One of the most brilliant foreign engineers in the Soviet Union during the 1930s, Zara Witkin left for Russia in 1932, fired by the belief that a noble attempt to refashion human society was taking place there and intent on finding the woman who had come to symbolize for him the dignified and joyous race that would populate the socialist utopia now being built. In the course of his two-year stay he found, and then lost, Emma; and in his mission to help modernize Soviet construction methods he fought, and ultimately was defeated by, the red tape, cynicism, and venality that were strangling Soviet Russia more surely than the "capitalist encirclement" of which official propaganda warned. More than fifty years later, as the Soviet Union struggles to cast off the pall of Stalinism, publication of Witkin's memoirs is especially timely. His story sheds a penetrating light on the sources of the bureaucratic cancers that spread during decades of political and economic centralization and now threaten the stability of the Soviet state.

Though only thirty-one years old when he went to Russia, Witkin had already proved something of an engineering genius. Born in 1900 to a family of Jewish emigrants from Russia (his last name is an Americanized form of the Russian Utkin ), Witkin attended a polytechnic high school and entered the University of California in 1917