Nursultan Nazarbayev

Throughout its seventy-year history, the Soviet Union struggled to industrialize. Although it made unbelievable strides, it always felt an urgency to grow faster in order to keep up with the West, which had industrialized almost a hundred years earlier. As industry expanded, the need for engineers and trained personnel increased, and the educational system was hard-pressed to keep up with the demand. Consequently, on-the job training became the norm for all branches of industry. Nursultan Nazarbayev was the last prime minister of Kazakh S.S.R. and the first president of Kazakhstan after the fall of the Soviet Union. In this selection from his memoirs, he describes his early education as well as the on-the-job training program via which he learned to operate a steel mill. The selection indicates the obstacles to expansion faced by Soviet industry in...