The American Connection: Ideology
and the Transfer of American
Technology to the Soviet Union,
1917-1941
KENDALL E. BAILES
University of California, Irvine
I N T R O D U C T I O N : T H E PROBLEM OF T E C H N O L O G Y TRANSFER
When one nation looks to another as an example for social and economic
change, as the Soviet Union did to certain aspects of American experience for
a time after 1917, the results are likely to reveal much about the borrower
nation—its dominant values as well as its economy and social structure. The
role which foreign, and particularly American, technology and industrial expertise played in the Soviet economy during the interwar period is still inadequately understood and is a subject of some controversy, with implications
not only for an understanding of Soviet history and society but for the study of
international technology transfers. (The term technology will be used here not
only in the sense of "machinery" and processes, but in the broader sense of
Simon Kuznets's phrase, "stock of knowledge," that is, the knowledge of
techniques of production, including economic organization.1) Such transfers,
particularly those between economically advanced and less-developed countries, have played an important but as yet inadequately studied role in modern
history. Shannon R. Brown has recently written:
Unfortunately, historical studies of technological change which are guided by an
explicit theoretical framework are not yet very common, and among them, those which
concentrate on the international transfer of technology are rarer still. Most of the
studies of international transfer concentrate on transfers between similar countries,
usually Great Britain and the United States.2
Portions of this article were presented to the annual meeting of the American Historical Association in New York, December 1979; the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical
Association in Honolulu, August 1979; and at the Seminar on Russian and East European
Studies, University of California at Los Angeles, November 1976. My thanks to Hans Rogger,
Fred Carstensen, David Joravsky, John Stephan, Bruce B. Parrott, and others for their suggestions
and comments.
1
Simon Kuznets, Toward a Theory of Economic Growth (New York, 1968), 60-62.
2
Shannon R. Brown, "The Ewo Filature: A Study in the Transfer of Technology to China in
the Nineteenth Century," Technology and Culture (July 1979), 550.
0010-4175/81/3477-1391 $2.00© 1981 Society for Comparative Study of Society and History
421
Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 88.99.165.207, on 17 Jun 2017 at 00:06:55, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417500013438
422 KENDALL E. BAILES
Even those studies which do concentrate on transfers between economically
dissimilar countries, such as Brown's insightful work on British technology in
nineteenth-century China, are guided largely by the neoclassical economic
theory of the business firm. A basic assumption of that theory is that a primary
determinant of the decision to import a particular foreign technology is its
expected profitability. Brown has modified neoclassical theory somewhat to
account for different legal, institutional, and cultural factors in the transfer of
technology between economically advanced and less-developed countries, but
the assumption of expected profitability is, as he indicates, still basic to his
study.
This body of theory clearly will not work for a case study of the transfer of
Western technology to the Soviet Union in the interwar period, because the
criterion of profitability in an economic sense was a minor factor in Soviet
development decisions in this period. Such decisions were not made primarily
at the level of the firm, but higher in the bureaucracy of socialized industry
and in the political leadership. We therefore need to develop a new body of
theory to cover transfers between different economic systems, such as those
between market-oriented economies and planned economies, as in the Soviet
bloc. The case study which is explored here is presented as a step in that
direction.3 It is meant to be suggestive rather than definitive. I am concerned
here particularly with the interplay between ideology (with which Hans Rogger's article deals in detail) and the actual transfer of technology, in the broad
sense of that term defined above.
The phenomena wherein residents of one country look to other nations for
ideas and examples for social or economic change, holding these nations or
some aspects of their experience up to fellow citizens as models to study and
emulate, are frequently encountered in modern history. We have only to think
of the role the Soviet Union played for many United States citizens dissatisfied with American life in the 1930s, the significance fascist Italy had for
others in the 1920s and 1930s, or the importance more recently of Maoist
China for elements of the New Left in the West. It is useful to ask when and
why such role modeling takes place, to whom it appeals, why models change
or are rejected, and what lasting influence they may have in, for example, the
area of international transfers of technology.
An understanding of foreign borrowing in the Soviet economic experience
in these decades suggests some possible answers to these questions. The
argument of this article will be developed by focusing on the following questions: (1) What role did American technology play in Russia before 1917? (2)
3
Studies of technology transfer based on neoclassical economic theory are cited in Brown,
"Ewo Filature, particularly pp. 550-51, nn. 2, 4, 6. In addition to those, see Edward E. Furas,
"The Problem of Technology Transfer," in Raymond A. Bauer et al., The Study of Policy
Formation (New York, 1968), and William H. Gruber, Factors in the Transfer of Technology
(Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1969).
Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 88.99.165.207, on 17 Jun 2017 at 00:06:55, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417500013438
IDEOLOGY AND AMERICAN T E C H N O L O G Y
IN T H E U . S . S . R .
423
Why did the Soviets borrow more technology from America than did their
predecessors? (3) What were the channels for borrowing? (4) What did the
Soviets actually borrow and what did they reject in American technological
experience? (5) What were the reasons for the decline in official Soviet
enthusiasm for American technology in the decade from 1931 to 1941? (6)
What significance does this case study have for an understanding of international technology transfers?
In the discussion which follows I will analyze the degree to which Russian
thinking shifted away from a preoccupation with Western European technology and economic models, which had enjoyed dominance before the revolution, toward an increased interest in borrowing from American experience
during the 1920s and early 1930s. I will try to explain, insofar as possible, to
whom and to what extent American technology appealed in the Soviet Union
during this period. Then I will examine the reasons for the rejection of the
American model, as well as other foreign models, in the area of technology
after 1931, and the changes in the methods by which foreign technology was
actually borrowed prior to World War II.
AMERICAN TECHNOLOGY IN RUSSIA BEFORE I 9 I 7:
PREREVOLUTIONARY PATTERNS AND LIMITATIONS TO
TECHNOLOGY TRANSFERS
Although there had been earlier precedents, a strong interest in American
technology and American methods of industrial development began with the
rapid industrialization of Russia in the 1890s and the increase in RussianAmerican trade which this process fostered. Both Count Sergei Witte, the
minister of finance, and Prince Khilkov, who as minister of ways of communications was in charge of Russian railroads, were particularly interested in
increased trade with America and in the direct investment and management of
certain kinds of industrial plants within Russia by American firms. Witte was
concerned that Russia not become too dependent on any single European
power, which might be potentially more hostile than the United States. This
was a concern later to be reflected in Bolshevik practice as well.4
However, there were major barriers to an expansion of American trade and
technological transfer which were never overcome in the period before World
War I. Although the Russians increased their interest in American industry, its
methods, and its products, the Russian market was not of paramount interest
to most American industrialists because they were preoccupied with the
domestic market and with more accessible parts of the globe. Exports to
Russia in this period never exceeded 2 percent of the American total. In fact,
4
Count Witte, in an interview with Ambassador Tower. Tower to Hay, 3 July 1901, State
Department Decimal File, Russia LVIII, Despatch 445, The National Archives, Washington,
DC.
Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 88.99.165.207, on 17 Jun 2017 at 00:06:55, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417500013438
424 KENDALL E. BAILES
direct trade with Russia reached its highest point around 1903 when the
United States supplied 9.9 percent of all Russian imports, a figure which had
declined to 5.7 percent by 1913. This decline coincided with a huge increase
in Germany's direct trade with Russia, which was about 25 percent of total
Russian imports in 1894 and grew to 47.5 percent in 1913. Of America's 1913
exports to Russia, 60 percent still consisted not of industrial technology but of
raw cotton sold to the Russian textile industry; cotton was followed by agricultural equipment, which formed 11.6 percent of American exports to Russia,
and by other machinery and parts, which formed only 8 percent.5
These figures somewhat underemphasize the extent of Russian purchases of
American equipment because Russia imported some American goods indirectly through third parties, particularly Germany. But there can be no doubt
that most of the technology imported to Russia prior to 1914 was of European
design and manufacture. And within Russia itself before World War I, most
new plants were organized according to Western European methods and employed Western European technology, with the notable exception of such
firms as International Harvester and the Singer Company.6 American companies owned only some 5 percent of the direct investment in Russian industry
in 1913, according to one estimate; they were the fifth largest of the foreign
investors but were far behind the French, Belgians, Germans, and English.7
As Frederick Carstensen has pointed out, the American contribution to the
economic development of late Imperial Russia was as important in the area of
commercial organization, such as marketing techniques and the like, as it was
in introducing new technology and industrial organization.8 This was to
change dramatically after the advent of Soviet power in 1917. The Bolsheviks
largely dismissed American commercial methods as capitalistic and inappropriate to Soviet society, but they greatly increased the emphasis on importing
American machinery, processes, and techniques of industrial organization
such as the scientific management principles associated with Frederick W.
Taylor and the methods of Henry Ford.
5
Mikhail V. Condoide, Russian-American Trade (Columbus, Ohio, 1946), 1-5, 96-97,
115-16; Harriet Moore, "American Relations with Russia and the U.S.S.R.," The American
Quarterly on the Soviet Union, 3:2-3 (1940), 327; V. V. Lebedev, Russko-amerikanskie
ekonomicheskie otnosheniia, 1900-1917 (Moscow, 1964).
6
On the role of International Harvester and the Singer Company, see especially Frederick
Carstensen, "American Multinational Corporations in Imperial Russia: Chapters on Foreign
Enterprise and Russian Economic Development" (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1976), 7-356. In
addition, see John P. McKay, Pioneers for Profit: Foreign Entrepreneurship and Russian Industrialization 1885-1913 (Chicago, 1970); V. S. Diakin, Germanskie kapitaly v Rossii: elektroindustriia i elektricheskii transport (Leningrad, 1971); Guenter Sheldon Holzer, "The German
Electrical Industry in Russia, 1890-1918" (Ph.D. diss.. University of Nebraska, 1970).
7
Leonard J. Lewery, Foreign Capital Investments in Russian Industries and Commerce, U.S.
Department of Commerce, Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce, Miscellaneous Series,
no. 124 (Washington, D.C., 1923), 5.
8
Carstensen, "American Multinational Corporations."
Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 88.99.165.207, on 17 Jun 2017 at 00:06:55, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417500013438
IDEOLOGY AND AMERICAN TECHNOLOGY
IN T H E U . S . S . R .
425
At the beginning of World War I, the Russian Empire was cut off suddenly
from Germany, which supplied nearly half of Russia's imports in 1913—
including much technology in areas vital to defense, such as metallurgy,
machine building, and the chemical industry; at the same time, Russia was
also largely isolated from its allies Britain and France by the German blockade. The United States, by routes through Siberia, suddenly became far
more important as a source of imports, particularly machinery, than ever
before. Between 1914 and 1916, American exports to Imperial Russia increased in value by almost 1900 percent.9 By 1917, the Russian trade had
increased from 2 percent to 8.6 percent of total American exports to other
parts of the world; and a number of American companies and banks were
looking to Russia as a vast new market for America's rapidly expanding
industrial capacity. American industrial capacity grew very rapidly during the
war in Europe; American corporate and political leaders worried about how to
employ that capacity once the war had ended. The American ambassador to
Russia during the war, David R. Francis, not particularly known for his
perspicacity in matters outside business and poker playing, wrote to Secretary
of State Robert Lansing in September of 1916: "It is very desirable that
American merchants should get a firm foothold in Russia while the opportunity is presented."10 He further observed that, whereas Russia "has within
her borders boundless forests and immeasurable deposits of iron ore, and coal,
the demands of the people are immediate and will have to be supplied to a
great extent from other countries. We should be prepared to take advantage of
the situation."" The thinking of American business figures went beyond
simply finding foreign markets for American home-based productive capacity, however.
Russia's vast potential attracted a good deal of attention to the country as a
location for industrial production. For example, in 1917 General Electric
signed a contract with the Russian electrical industry, which had been dominated by German technology before the war, to reequip this sector of the
Russian economy with American technology.12 In 1917, the operation of the
Trans-Siberian Railroad was virtually taken over by an American-dominated
commission headed by the engineer John F. Stevens, who described Russian
trains as "strings of match boxes coupled with hairpins and drawn by
samovars. " 13 He proceeded to put the badly disrupted line back into commission using American methods and technology, and he ran it until the close of
9
Condoide, Russian-American Trade, 91.
David R. Francis, Russia from the American Embassy (New York, 1922), 28-29.
" Ibid.
12
"Reminiscences of Gerard Swope," Oral History Collection, Columbia University, manuscript, 1959, p. 94.
13
Jacqueline D. St. John, "John F. Stevens: American Assistance to Russian and Siberian
Railroads, 1917-1922" (Ph.D. diss., University of Oklahoma, 1970), 273.
10
Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 88.99.165.207, on 17 Jun 2017 at 00:06:55, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417500013438
426 KENDALL E. BAILES
the Russian civil war in Siberia, keeping the Japanese at bay and eventually
helping to oust them from Siberia. Standard Oil moved into the Baku area
during the civil war and purchased half of the Russian oil-producing capacity
from the Swedish industrialists, the Nobels.14 Many other American industrialists began to enter the Russian market or to study its potential more seriously
than they had before.
THE APPEAL OF AMERICAN TECHNOLOGY: WHY THE SOVIETS
BORROWED MORE FROM AMERICA THAN THEIR PREDECESSORS DID
It was the experience of World War I and the fall of the Tsarist regime that
took most of the sheen off German technology and enhanced the popularity of
America in Russia, and particularly of its technology and aspects of its industrial organization.
Soviet leaders like Lenin had drawn from the experience of World War I a
bitter lesson which was to have profound consequences for Soviet development, including its relations with industrial nations like the United States and
Germany. For example, in his remarks of March 15, 1918, on the signing of
the treaty with Germany, with its punitive terms for the Bolshevik regime,
Lenin noted ruefully:
The war taught us much, not only that people suffered but especially the fact that those
who have the best technology, organization, discipline and the best machines emerge
on top; it is this the war has taught us. It is essential to learn that without machines,
without discipline, it is impossible to live in modern society. It is necessary to master
the highest technology or be crushed.15
This attitude was a dominant one among the Bolshevik leadership and
helped to shape the over-all course of Soviet industrialization in later years,
but it left open the question of where and how to acquire the ' 'highest technology," in Lenin's phrase. In practice, the Soviets never came to rely exclusively on any single country as a source of technology. Nonetheless, Lenin
and others hoped to develop a "special relationship" with America, as John
Lewis Gaddis has documented in a recent book.16 The relationship of the
Soviets with the capitalist world, including their economic relations, was
shaped by their broader analysis of international capitalism. On the one hand,
the Bolsheviks stressed the monolithic side of capitalism and the universal
hostility they expected toward the new Soviet power from the capitalist world.
But on the other hand, such Bolsheviks as Lenin thought that the Soviets
could take advantage of "contradictions," that is, rivalries and competition
14
Floyd James Fithian, "Soviet-American Economic Relations, 1918-1933: American Business in Russia during the Period of Non-Recognition" (Ph.D. diss., University of Nebraska,
1964), 34-35.
15
V. I. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 5th ed., (Moscow, 1970), XXVI, 116.
16
John Lewis Gaddis, Russia, the Soviet Union, and the United States: An Interpretive
History (New York, 1978), 87-93.
Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 88.99.165.207, on 17 Jun 2017 at 00:06:55, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417500013438
IDEOLOGY AND AMERICAN T E C H N O L O G Y IN THE U . S . S . R .
427
among the leading capitalist nations. In order to prevent concerted action
against the Soviet government, Lenin's policy was to play one capitalist
power against another: for example, Britain against Germany, the United
States against Japan. This could be done in part by holding out the lure of
trade and investment in postwar Russia.
As early as May of 1918, Lenin sent a note to Colonel Raymond Robins of
the Red Cross in which he advocated linking Russian resources to American
industrial methods and capital.17 In this document, Lenin noted that Germany
would be too exhausted after the war to exploit the most favored nation
treatment she had been guaranteed in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. The United
States, therefore, would have the opportunity to take over a large part of the
Russian market if it were willing to extend credits. In return, the United States
would be offered economic concessions in Siberia and opportunities to construct power plants and transport networks in Siberia and Central Russia. The
same day this note was handed to Robins, Lenin explained his strategy to the
Central Executive Committee of the Soviet government: He hoped that by
involving the United States economically, in Siberia especially, he would
exacerbate the rivalry between Japan and America and help preserve Siberia
from Japanese conquest.18
However, his overtures were more than just a short-term expedient to
preserve Soviet territory. For example, in early 1918, Lenin also dropped his
previous hostility to Taylorism—the system of efficiency methods worked out
by the American engineer Taylor.19 In a policy aimed at Russian workers, he
endorsed the selective application of Taylorism to Soviet industry as a means
of raising labor productivity. In October of 1919, Lenin reiterated the special
relationship he hoped to create with the United States: ' 'We are emphatically
in favor of economic arrangements with America, with all countries but
particularly with America,"20 and in February of 1920 he wrote, "We will
need American industrial goods—locomotives, automobiles, etc. more than
those of any other country. " 21 The United States, Lenin argued, could furnish
the Soviets with the means of production necessary to make the transition
to socialism, but the Soviets would have to be prepared to pay American
capitalists well, by offering economic concessions at generous terms.
As Rogger has already documented, the early Soviet attraction to America
sprang from the existence of a broadly based ideological current which the
Soviet leadership did not create, but sought to harness to its own goals. In
1923, for example, the Bolshevik writer Ivan Sosnovsky talked of "seeking
17
Dokumenty vneshnei politiki SSSR (Moscow, 1967), I, 286-94.
Lenin, Polnoe sobranie, XXVII, 366-68.
E. H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917-1923, Penguin Edition, (Baltimore, 1953), III,
96, 281.
20
Gaddis, Russia, 91.
21
Ibid.
18
19
Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 88.99.165.207, on 17 Jun 2017 at 00:06:55, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417500013438
428 KENDALL E. BAILES
and finding new men, men whom we will call 'Russian Americans,' " and in
1924 Stalin, in his famous lectures at Sverdlov University, advocated the
combining of "American efficiency [delovitosf} with Bolshevik ideology." 22 None of these men talked of German efficiency as a model, or of
creating "Russian Germans," as models of the new Soviet man.
As Rene Fullop-Miller wrote in 1926, "industrialized America, for the
Bolsheviks, became the Promised Land."
At an earlier period, the "intelligentsia" still looked for their models in Europe, but
immediately after the Revolution, a wild enthusiasm for America started; the magnificent industrial works of Germany and the highly perfected plant of France and England, all at once appeared paltry to Soviet Russia; they began to dream of Chicago and
to direct their efforts towards making Russia a new and more splendid America.23
The switch was not as complete as Fiillop-Miller implies in this quote, nor
did it begin as suddenly as he asserts. Ideologically it has very important
prerevolutionary roots, as Rogger has argued;24 and American industry was
never taken uncritically as a model by the Bolsheviks. Nonetheless, there was
a switch in emphasis, both in ideology and in the actual transfer of technology. The Bolsheviks purchased much more American technology and expertise than had their Tsarist predecessors and they de-emphasized German
technology and the German model of industrialization which—given certain
similarities in institutions, social structure, and history between the German
and Russian Empires—had enjoyed popularity among many Tsarist officials.
To the surprise of the Soviets, however, their courtship of America fell on
deaf ears in official Washington during the Republican administrations of the
1920s. Not only did the United States government refuse to discuss credits,
the attitude prevailed that diplomatic recognition would convey moral approbation of the Soviet regime. As Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes put
it, recognition could not be extended to a government that not only did not pay
its debts (that is, debts contracted by previous Russian governments), but did
not recognize the sanctity of contracts or guarantee the security of private
property.25 Official Washington had no objections to private American trade
with the Soviet Union during the 1920s, so long as businessmen proceeded at
their own risk. In other words, American businessmen might sup with the
devil, but the United States government would not provide the long spoon.
Official American aloofness, however, did not cool Soviet ardor for
22
Rene Fullop-Miller, The Mind and Face of Bolshevism (New York, 1976), 22; Joseph
Stalin, Sochineniia (Moscow, 1947), VI, 187-88.
23
Fullop-Miller, Mind and Face of Bolshevism, 22.
24
In addition to the article included in this issue, see R o g g e r ' s " A m e r i c a in the Russian
Mind—or Russian Discoveries of America," Pacific Historical Review, no. 1 (February 1978),
27-51.
25
Gaddis, Russia, 97.
Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 88.99.165.207, on 17 Jun 2017 at 00:06:55, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417500013438
IDEOLOGY AND AMERICAN TECHNOLOGY
IN T H E U . S . S . R .
429
American technology during the decade after 1921. There was no single cause
for this phenomenon. Rather, it was a subtle combination of a variety of
appeals America had both for Soviet officials and for other Russians concerned with the development of their country. The attraction of the American
experience went beyond technology, to include such areas as educational
methods—for example, the ideas of John Dewey and the Dalton System were
widely applied in Soviet schools during the 1920s.26 But the focus here must
remain on technology. How does one account for the importance of American
technology in Soviet thinking during this period?
In the view of Soviet leaders, the United States had proved its overall
technological superiority, tipping the balance in World War I with its welldeveloped machine industry and its high degree of material self-sufficiency.
American industry utilized an unprecedented level of standardization,
specialization, assembly line techniques, and economies of scale achieved
through huge plants. The new techniques associated with Taylorism and Fordism were given particular credit by Russian economists and Soviet leaders
for America's achievement of industrial superiority.27 The survival-oriented
Soviet power structure also found the leading role of mining, metallurgy, and
machine building in the United States economy more attractive than the German science-based model which, before the destruction of the war, had emphasized the electrical and chemical industries. The fall of the Tsarist regime,
which had looked to Germany as a model as well as for trade, and the defeat
of Imperial Germany itself, delegitimized the German model in the eyes of
Soviet policy makers.
The priorities of the Five Year Plans before World War II stressed rapid
growth in mining, metallurgy, and machine building—the American option.
During the 1920s, there was a debate over whether the mining, metals, and
machinery sector or the energy and the chemical industries should receive first
priority in development. The so-called metal-eaters can be considered followers of the American model of industrialization, while those who advocated
top priority for the chemical and electrical sectors preferred the more
intensively science-based industries in which Germany had taken the lead
before World War I. The question was resolved in favor of the former groups,
with electrification and the chemical industry following behind, in that order.
Electrical energy production and the chemical industry, although certainly not
ignored, received less emphasis as a result, despite the efforts of a group of
26
See, for example, Sheila Fitzpatrick, Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union,
1921-1934 (Cambridge, 1979), 7, 20, 35, 255, 260.
27
See, for example, V. Motylev, "Istochiniki ekonomicheskogo prevoskhdotsva, S.Sh.A.,"
Bol'shevik, no. 12 (30 June 1928), 35-58; Piatnadtsatyi s"ezd VKP (b) (Moscow, 1961), II,
905, 1166; Izvestiia, 12 April 1929; A. Zaveniagin, "USSR Favors American Engineers and
Equipment," Freyn Design, no. 11 (March 1934), 67.
Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 88.99.165.207, on 17 Jun 2017 at 00:06:55, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417500013438
430 KENDALL E. BAILES
Soviet applied scientists and engineers which attempted to increase the attention given to these latter areas.28
The appeal of American technology and methods of industrial organization
was well articulated in a number of Soviet sources from the 1920s and early
1930s.29 For one thing, the relative self-sufficiency of the American economy, though beginning to wane in the 1920s, greatly appealed to advocates of
"socialism in one country," who aimed at greater economic independence.
Part of America's might and rapid economic growth was attributed to its
relative isolation and economic self-sufficiency. Physically, the size of the
country and its population made it more nearly comparable to the Soviet
Union than were the smaller European countries. Of particular interest were
the high growth rates of American industry and the fact that American productivity, the average hourly output per worker, was generally the highest in
the world.
The organization of American industry in large units of production, the
application of techniques of mass production and standardization—the
methods of Ford and Taylor in particular—were given much credit by Soviet
writers for America's high level of labor productivity and rapid rate of growth
in both industrial and agricultural production. The enthusiasm for Fordism
and other American methods was no doubt reinforced by the fact that Germany too was turning to the American industrial experience, as in the widespread movement for the "rationalization" of German industry in the 1920s,
a fact that Soviet economists, journalists, and industrial officials were quick to
publicize.30 Many German books and articles on Fordism, Taylorism, and
other American methods were translated into Russian during this period.
Despite the lack of United States diplomatic recognition and governmentguaranteed credits during the first Five Year Plan, Soviet sources were pointing after 1928 to the availability of American bank credits and the fact that
American prices were generally lower than European prices.31
In 1930, Anastas I. Mikoyan, then the commissar of trade, reaffirmed this
view of America in an interview with an American journalist. ' 'In the scale of
its economy, in the methods of production (mass production, standardization,
etc.)," he said, "America is most attractive to us and we are more interested
28
Kendall E . Bailes, Technology and Society under Lenin and Stalin: Origins of the Soviet
Technical Intelligentsia (Princeton, 1978), 3 4 2 - 4 4 .
29
In addition to the sources listed in note 2 7 , see N . Osinskii, Amerikanskii avtomobil' Hi
rossiiskaia telega (Moscow, 1927); V . Mezhlauk, "Dognat' i peregnat'," Bol'shevik, nos. 11-12
(August 1930), 8-15; L. Eventov, "Russko-amerikanskie ekonomicheskie vzaimootnosheniia v
proshlom i ikh perspektivy," Planovoe khoziastvo, n o . 7 (1925), 2 1 5 - 2 7 ; N . S. Rozenblit,
Fordizm (Moscow, 1925); I. Rabchinskii, Printsipy Forda (Moscow, 1924); A . V . Zelenko,
Sovremennaia Amerika, Ocherki po organizatsii i upravleniiu predpriiatiiami
severnoi ameriki
(Moscow, 1923).
30
O n this subject, see, for example, the work of Molly Nolan, " T h e Infatuation with Fordism:
Social Democracy and Rationalization in the Weimar R e p u b l i c , " unpublished, 1979.
31
lzvestiia, 12 April 1929.
Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 88.99.165.207, on 17 Jun 2017 at 00:06:55, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417500013438
IDEOLOGY AND AMERICAN T E C H N O L O G Y
IN T H E U . S . S . R .
43I
in establishing the closest economic ties precisely with America and also to
borrow all the advanced achievements of American technology, applying
them to our conditions."32
In the years before 1931, an additional factor abetting the transfer of
American technology was the widespread mistrust by the Bolshevik leaders
and industrial managers of their own technologists. Such mistrust is frequently confirmed by Soviet sources.33 They believed that their own
specialists were often not up to date with the latest, particularly American,
techniques. They disliked the closed-caste mentality of the old prerevolutionary specialists and their younger proteges, whom they accused of
preferring to sit in their offices and talk rather than get their hands dirty. And
as the purges and show trials of prominent prerevolutionary specialists between 1928 and 1933 attest, they clearly distrusted leading elements of the old
intelligentsia as anti-Bolshevik or, at the very least, as politically neutral and
bourgeois in outlook. "It seems clear that at this time the Soviet leaders were
less mistrustful of foreign—and in particular American—engineers than of the
former bourgeois specialists who still dominated the field in the early years of
the Five Year Plan." 34 It might be added that, whereas both German and
British specialists were arrested and appeared as defendants accused of sabotage in show trials of engineers between 1928 and 1933, no American engineers were ever included as defendants in such proceedings. The only
accusation of economic sabotage recorded against an American expert came
much later, after the official enthusiasm for American technology had declined. (During the purges in 1937 an American cotton expert was accused of
attempting to introduce the boll weevil into Soviet cottonfields, but there is no
evidence that he was arrested or that this was more than an isolated instance.)35
One of the major aims of those Soviet officials who supported not only the
transfer of American technology but also the presence prior to 1931 of American engineers in Soviet industry was to break down certain deeply engrained
patterns of behavior among the Soviet technical intelligentsia. This is attested
by a number of sources, including a widely produced Soviet play, Tempo, by
Nikolai Pogodin. This play began its run in November of 1930, the same
month in which the most famous of the show trials of engineers, the Industrial
Party trial, opened in Moscow.36 The hero of Tempo was modeled after the
American construction engineer, John Calder, who had built the River Rouge
32
A. I. Mikoyan, "Vospominaniia," SShA, no. 10 (1971), 70.
See, for example, Bailes, Technology and Society, chs. 2 - 5 .
34
E. H . C a r r a n d R . W . Davies, Foundations of a Planned Economy, (London, 1969), vol. 1,
pt. 2 , p . 6 0 1 .
35
Gaddis, Russia, 131.
36
Nikolai Pogodin, Sobranie sochinenii (Moscow, 1972), I, 5 6 - 1 1 3 ; o n Calder's role as
model for the hero of this play, see Maurice Hindus, ' 'American Engineers in R u s s i a , ' ' American
Magazine (April 1932).
33
Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 88.99.165.207, on 17 Jun 2017 at 00:06:55, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417500013438
432 KENDALL E. BAILES
plant for Ford in Michigan and who after 1929 earned the respect of Soviet
authorities for his work at the Stalingrad Tractor Plant.
CHANNELS FOR THE TRANSFER OF AMERICAN TECHNOLOGY
The main channels for the transfer to Russia of American technology and
methods of industrial organization since the nineteenth century have been (1)
trade, (2) direct ownership, concessions, or enterprises operated by Americans within Russia, (3) technical aid agreements (which involved the employment of American consultants in various industries and the purchase of
American technology and industrial processes through licensing agreements),
(4) copying of American technology, unauthorized and without the aid of
licensing agreements, and (5) importation of American technical books and
journals. Before the revolution, the first two channels, trade and direct ownership, were the major means for transfer, whereas after 1917 the last three
became increasingly predominant. While it is impossible to quantify the relative proportion of total United States technology borrowed through each of
these channels, we can say something quantitative about several of these
channels during the Soviet period, particularly trade, concessions, and technical aid contracts. We know much less quantitatively about the importance of
copying, either through the importation of prototypes or from data obtained
through American publications and through industrial espionage. (Industrial
espionage has played a role in the development of Soviet technology at least
since World War II, but we know little about its importance in the postwar
period, and virtually nothing about its use, or even if it existed, in the preWorld War II era.)37
In the 1920s, imports from the United States occupied a much larger place
in Soviet foreign trade than they ever had in the trade of Imperial Russia
between 1894 and 1914; American-made imports reached a high point in
1930, when approximately 25 percent of Soviet imported goods came from
the United States.38 Furthermore, the nature of this trade shifted away from
imports of raw materials like cotton to favor imports of agricultural and
industrial technology. But the change in Soviet emphasis in trade should be
qualified by the fact that in the years from 1924 to 1938 the percentage of
Soviet imports from Germany was greater than that from the United States in
all but five of these fifteen years; and Germany remained by and large Russia's main trading partner.39 This situation occurred because, unlike the
United States government, the Germans were willing to guarantee long-term
credits.40 Nonetheless, the Soviets generally preferred American technology
37
David Dallin, Soviet Espionage (New Haven, 1955).
U . S . Department of C o m m e r c e , Foreign Commerce Yearbook, 1931 (Washington, D . C . ,
1931), 729; Condoide, Russian-American
Trade, 9 4 .
39
Condoide, Russian-American
Trade, 3 0 , based on the Foreign Commerce Yearbook, for
38
the years 1926-1939, cited in note 38.
40
50 let sovetskoi vneshnei torgovli (Moscow, 1967), 4 1 ; Harvey Dyck, Weimar
and Soviet Russia, 1926-1933 (London, 1966), 108ff.
Germany
Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 88.99.165.207, on 17 Jun 2017 at 00:06:55, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417500013438
IDEOLOGY AND AMERICAN TECHNOLOGY
IN T H E U . S . S . R .
433
and sometimes even bought designs from American firms which were manufactured in German factories and then imported to the Soviet Union in this
roundabout fashion.4'
The technical aid contract, which involved the purchase of licenses and the
hiring of technical consultants, became the primary method for the transfer of
foreign technology and expertise during the first Five Year Plan (1928-33).
Prior to that time, the policy of granting concessions, where industries were
fully operated by foreign concerns, was tried but found wanting as a major
conduit for technical imports. Foreign companies, even German, were wary
of long-term investments in a country which had confiscated such investments
during the revolution. In the 1920s, the Soviets signed some 300 foreign
concession agreements, but by 1929 there were only 59 such concessions still
in operation, 13 German and 6 American. They accounted for less than 1
percent of all Soviet industrial production.42 By 1931, there were 134 signed
technical aid agreements, the vast majority of them with American companies, servicing virtually every branch of the economy.43 Both the Soviet
government and foreign companies preferred such contracts. Foreign companies favored them because they required no long-term outlay of capital and
were paid for in gold or in foreign currency. The Soviet government liked
such contracts because they seemed less compromising to Soviet independence and national pride than concessions.
The data in Antony Sutton's books, the most thorough empirical study of
Soviet technological borrowing between 1917 and 1941, indicate that, of 117
technical aid contracts signed with foreign companies during the 1920-30
decade, 64 (54.7 percent) were with American companies. Thirty-one (26.4
percent) were with German companies. Of 218 contracts signed between 1930
and 1945, American companies accounted for 140 (64 percent). Thirty-three
(15 percent) were with German firms.44 With these contracts came a flood of
foreign engineers. In 1924 there were only 23 foreign engineers working in
the Soviet Union, but their numbers reached a peak of about 9,000 in 1932
and there were in addition 10,000 foreign workers. However, only between
one fifth and one third of the foreign specialists were Americans, and over
half were German.45
Though the Soviets' preference was for American methods in industry, the
German specialists were more readily available than the Americans and less
41
Fithian, "Soviet-American Economic Relations," 280-83; Moscow News, 12 October
1931.
42
Condoide, Russian-American
Trade, 6 0 .
Ibid., 6 1 .
44
Calculated from data in Antony C . Sutton, Western Technology and Soviet
Economic
Development 1917-1930 (Stanford, 1968-73), I, 360-63; II, 363-72.
45
Dana Dalrymple, "American Technology and Soviet Agricultural Development, 1 9 2 4 1 9 3 3 , " Agricultural History (July 1964), 190; V . I. Kas'ianenko, Zavoevanie
ekonomicheskoi
nezavisimosti SSSR (Moscow, 1972), 186; Torgovo-promyshlennaia
gazeta, 13 November 1926
and 24 November 1927.
43
Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 88.99.165.207, on 17 Jun 2017 at 00:06:55, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417500013438
434 KENDALL E. BAILES
costly to hire. The Germans who came to Russia included a number recruited
at Stalin's request by the German Communist Party, enthusiasts who were
more likely to work for rubles instead of foreign currency and more willing to
become Soviet citizens, a practice the Soviet government encouraged.46 These
foreign specialists were recruited under technical aid contracts either with
foreign firms or individuals.
As a practical matter, therefore, the Soviets never came to rely exclusively
on any single country as a source of technology. In fact, one of the patterns
they developed then for borrowing technology is still a common one in Soviet
practice. That is, the Russians understood the competitive nature of international capitalism well and used it to their advantage, playing capitalist nations
and firms against each other in their search for technology and the credits with
which to buy it.47 Even though the Treaty of Rapallo, signed with Germany in
1922, once again brought that country into a close economic relationship with
the Soviet Union, the Soviets were reluctant to become too dependent upon
Germany. When the German-Soviet trade treaty was being renegotiated, by
early 1928, there were clear signs of Soviet dissatisfaction with Germany. The
Germans had become, in 1926, the first nation to grant governmentguaranteed credits to the Soviet Union, but the Soviets felt the interest rates
were too high, and there was dissatisfaction as well over the quality of some
of what they imported.48 In order to extract credits at lower rates from nonGerman companies, including American firms, the Soviets used those companies' fear that the Germans would once again dominate the Soviet import
market. For example, General Electric, in 1928, was the first American
company to grant the Soviets long-term credits. Despite the fact that the
Bolsheviks had confiscated its properties in Russia during the civil war,
General Electric had been eager to reenter the Russian market as early as 1922
to prevent German competitors from preempting it. Their granting of credits
for up to five years, credits which were not guaranteed by the United States
government, caused a sensation in the United States and signaled greater
willingness by capitalist firms to take risks in the Soviet market.49 Owen
Young, then chairman of General Electric, explained his company's motive to
* V . I. Kas'ianenko, Kak by la zavoevana tekkniko-ekonomicheskaia
samostoiatelnost'
SSSR
(Moscow, 1964), 196-208; V . E . Vovk, "Deiatel'nost KPSS p o podgotovke rukovodiashchikh
khoziastvennikov i inzhenerno-tekhnicheskikh kadrov dlia promyshlennosti v gody sozdaniia
fundamenta sotsiasisticheskoi ekonomiki (1926-1932 g g . ) , " (unpublished diss., 1970), Lenin
Library, M o s c o w , pp. 157-58; Partiinoe stroitel'stvo,
nos. 2 3 - 2 4 (1930), 67; N . P . Sharapov,
" O b uchastii inostrannykh rabochikh i spetsialistov v sotsialisticheskom stroitel'stve na Urale
(1930-1934 g g . ) , " Voprosy istorii KPSS, no. 3 (1966), 7 1 - 7 8 .
47
For a very good example of this technique, see George Robert Himmer, Jr., " G e r m a n Soviet Economic Relations, 1 9 1 8 - 1 9 2 2 " (Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1972),
230-509; Piatnadtsatyi s"ezed VKP (b), I, 54.
48
Ibid., I I , 1106, 1146; Dyck, Weimar Germany and Soviet Russia, 123ff.
49
New York Times, 17 October 1928 and 21 October 1928; Ekonomicheskaia
zhizri, 17
October 1928.
Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 88.99.165.207, on 17 Jun 2017 at 00:06:55, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417500013438
IDEOLOGY AND AMERICAN TECHNOLOGY
IN T H E U . S . S . R .
435
the secretary of state in 1930: ' 'If Russia adopted European standards it would
mean an added and perhaps impossible barrier to our future business with
Russia in the electrical field."50
WHAT THE SOVIETS ACTUALLY BORROWED FROM THE UNITED
STATES AND WHAT THEY REJECTED
Stalin was quoted during World War II as saying that American technology
had been used in two thirds of the new plants constructed in the Soviet Union
during previous years. Even earlier, in 1933, he had told a visiting American
who interviewed him, "The Americans have helped us a great deal. This we
must acknowledge. They helped us better and more boldly than others. We
thank them for it." 51 However, his statements were meant for public consumption, particularly in the United States; and we need to know a great deal
more about the actual nature of Soviet-American economic relations in the
years prior to the second war. We should neither exaggerate the American
role—as some authors in the West are prone to do52—nor ignore or underplay
it, as recent Soviet histories almost invariably have.53 The United States
played a role which has left a lasting imprint on the Soviet economy and social
relations, but it must also be remembered that American technology and
expertise was far from being the only or even the primary influence in Soviet
industrialization.
The height of popularity for American methods was in the years from 1917
to 1931. Such American technological imports as Ford tractors were so popular during this period that, according to one source, writing in 1927, "incredible as it may seem, more people in Russia have heard of Henry Ford than of
Stalin.... I visited villages far from railroads, where I talked to illiterate
peasants who did not know who Stalin was or Rykov or Bukharin, but who
had heard of the man who makes the 'iron horses.' " 5 4 Fordson tractors were
imported by the thousands in the 1920s. At first some peasants crossed themselves devoutly when they saw one and "spat out three times as they would on
the appearance of the devil," but before long, when they saw what it could
50
Owen Young to Secretary of State, 7 August 1930, State Department Decimal File, D S
861.6463/47, The National Archives, Washington, D . C .
51
The World War II statement was made during an interview granted by Stalin in 1944 to Eric
Johnston, president of the United States Chamber of Commerce. See Eric Johnston, " A Businessman's View of R u s s i a , " Nation's Business (October 1944), 2 1 - 2 2 .
52
See Sutton, Western Technology, I-III, and especially his National Suicide: Military Aid to
the Soviet Union (New Rochelle, New York, 1974). The first work cited is nontheoretical, useful
for its wealth of empirical data, but somewhat questionable in the conclusions the author draws
from his data.
53
For example, the recent multivolume publication of the Soviet Academy of Sciences,
Istoriia SSSR (Moscow, 1967), VIII, 503-4. More specialized Soviet studies discuss the American role but tend to minimize its importance. See Kas'ianenko, Kak byla; idem, Zavoevanie. See
also V. K. Furaev, Sovetsko-amerikanskie otnosheniia 1917-1939 (Moscow, 1964).
54
Maurice Hindus, "Henry Ford Conquers Russia," The Outlook (29 June 1927), 282.
Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 88.99.165.207, on 17 Jun 2017 at 00:06:55, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417500013438
436 KENDALL E. BAILES
do, they also became enthusiasts.ss The Fordson tractor became so popular
that peasants were known to name their children after it, and Fordism, that
combination of assembly line methods of mass production and inexpensive
goods, was so commonly known by the mid-1920s that factory workers were
seen carrying banners during holiday parades with Henry Ford's name inscribed upon them, along with those of Lenin, Marx, and Stalin.56 In 1913,
there had been only some 600 tractors in all of Russia, mostly of German
make; by 1930, there were 60,000, three quarters of them manufactured in the
United States.57 One scholar sees the American tractor as a crucial element
responsible for the agricultural surplus which fed the cities and provided an
invaluable export commodity during the early years of collectivization when
the peasants had slaughtered most of their draft animals to protest government
coercion.58 By the early 1930s, the Soviets had shifted from imports to manufacturing their own tractors and automobiles through license agreements with
United States companies. Ford Motor Company and International Harvester,
among other American firms, played a major role in helping to create the
Soviet tractor and automotive industry, one that had been virtually nonexistent
before 1928.59
The popular fervor for Ford products was more than matched by enthusiasm
among the Soviet elite for Fordism as a set of production methods. For
example, in a 1925 document first published in 1977 in a Soviet historical
journal, Felix Dzherzhinsky, head of the secret police and after 1924 in charge
of all major Soviet industry, wrote to two of his assistants in the Supreme
Council of the National Economy (VSNKh):
It is necessary to occupy ourselves with the study and the application in practice of
the methods of Ford . . . . Furthermore, it is necessary to designate people, engineers
and others, who can carry out this business. Give them the opportunity to study the
set-up of similar production enterprises abroad according to the methods of Ford....
In addition it is necessary to gather around us all those in the USSR who believe in the
possibility of our introducing these methods not in words, but in deed. Dilettantes here
are most harmful of all. For they can in fact do nothing. We must attract real engineers
and technicians of high qualifications and with much practical experience. Perhaps it
would be worth hiring from abroad practitioners, organizers of Fordism .. . .60
This note, written in late 1925, was followed not long afterwards with the
beginning of an influx of foreign specialists and skilled workers, experts in
55
Ibid.
New York Times, 13 November 1926.
Dana Dalrymple, "The American Tractor Comes to Soviet Agriculture: The Transfer of a
Technology," Technology and Culture, no. 2 (1964), 191; idem, "American Technology,"
193.
58
Ibid.
59
See Sutton, Western Technology, I, 243-49; II, 177-94.
60
"Zapiska F. Dzherzhinskii V. L. Lederu i V. I. Mezhlauku, Nov. 7, 1925," Voprosy istorii
KPSS, no. 9 (1977), 118.
56
57
Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 88.99.165.207, on 17 Jun 2017 at 00:06:55, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417500013438
IDEOLOGY AND AMERICAN TECHNOLOGY
IN T H E U . S . S . R .
437
Fordism and Taylorism as well as in virtually every other branch of modern
production.
Concessions and technical aid agreements were reinforced by another
method for the transfer of technology: the specialized journal. In the early
1920s the Soviets were receiving only a handful of American technical journals; by the late 1930s the subscriptions to such journals could be counted in
the many thousands. One of the most notable of these journals was the
Russian language publication, Amerikanskaia tekhnika, which began publication in New York during 1924 and was sold mostly in the Soviet Union.61 It
was a journal with more than 5,000 Soviet subscribers, filled with detailed
articles by American engineers on the latest aspects of American technology
and industrial organization. Begun by the Association of Russian Engineers in
America, one of the moving spirits was a Russian engineer who had fled to
America after the 1905 revolution, Walter Polakov. Polakov held a Russian
engineering degree and had worked in Russian factories until 1906 when he
came to the United States. Here he became a follower of Frederick W. Taylor
and a leading figure of the Taylor Society in the 1920s and 1930s. He published many books on Taylorism in English and spent a year and a half in the
Soviet Union as a consultant to Soviet industry between 1929 and 1931.62 As
early as 1924 he became the American agent of the Central Labor Institute in
Moscow, which was the major promoter of scientific management and developer of Taylorist methods for raising Soviet labor productivity through the
use of time and motion studies, payment through progressive piece rates, and
other methods. I have written elsewhere about this institute, its director Alexei
Gastev, and the controversy that surrounded it in early Soviet society.63 Suffice it to say here that Gastev's institute had Lenin's early support and later
that of Soviet industrial managers until Gastev fell afoul of the purges in 1938.
But by then, Gastev had played a major role, training more than a million
Soviet industrial workers in the methods of scientific management and helping
to organize the Stakhanovite movement. By 1938, Taylorist methods had
been firmly established throughout most of Soviet industry, over the scattered
but ineffectual opposition of some trade unionists, left Communists, and
industrial health and safety experts who opposed the intensification of physical labor and the low level of worker initiative which they believed Taylorist
methods involved.
61
See Amerikanskaia tekhnika, no. 1 (1924). It was published first by the Russian Association
of Engineers, Inc. and then by Amtorg (the Soviet bureau for trade with the United States) until
1928.
62
See biography of Polakov in Who's Who in Engineering (New York, 1925), 1655; see also
W. N . Polakov, " T h e Gantt Chart in R u s s i a , " American Machinist (13 August 1931), 2 6 1 - 6 4 ;
Sutton, Western Technology, II, 252.
63
Kendall E . Bailes, "Alexei Gastev and the Soviet Controversy over T a y l o r i s m , " Soviet
Studies (July 1977), 3 7 3 - 9 4 .
Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 88.99.165.207, on 17 Jun 2017 at 00:06:55, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417500013438
438 KENDALL E. BAILES
The Soviet authorities showed little interest in less elitist and directive
experiments in industrial efficiency which were being carried out during the
1920s and 1930s by the critics of Taylor in the West.64 The clear preference of
Soviet officials was for the authoritarian organizational modes of Taylor and
Ford, ones which most Soviet engineers in practice felt were more appropriate
for the mass of unskilled workers flooding into Soviet industry from the
countryside during these years. After Stalin's decree against wage leveling in
1931, the application of Taylorist methods was greatly increased. By the next
year, 76 percent of all Soviet workers were laboring for progressive piece
rates, established through Taylorist methods, a much higher percentage than
the proportion of American industrial workers paid according to such rates.65
It was precisely the narrow specialization of the assembly line workers, as
well as the highly structured and authoritarian atmosphere of a Ford factory
which had allowed Ford to train quickly a mass of unskilled workers from the
countryside and from many immigrant groups in the United States, that appealed to Soviet managers and specialists in their drive to transform millions
of peasants and non-Russians into productive industrial workers within a short
period of time.66
While in borrowing virtually all the technology they used prior to World
War II and adapting it to their own conditions, the Soviets did employ sources
in Germany, Britain, and to a lesser extent France, Sweden, and Italy;
nonetheless, in the debates of this period, the United States was generally
referred to as "the most technologically advanced capitalist country." When
controversies flared among groups of Soviet technologists, industrial managers, and policy makers over what foreign technology should be adopted—as
they did in metallurgy, mining, and the hydroelectric industries, among
others—American technology more often than not won out. For example, in
the iron and steel industry during the 1920s, the advocates of the so-called
German orientation preached not only less mechanization than the
Americanizers but they also considered that it was not profitable to expand the
capacity of blast furnaces from the relatively small German level to that of
American plants like the one in Gary, Indiana, which contained the world's
largest furnaces at this period.67 But Russian engineers who favored the
64
O n these, see Georges Friedmann, Industrial Society: The Emergence of the Human Problems of Automation (New York, 1955), 2 9 2 - 3 0 3 .
65
E . M . Friedman, Russia in Transition: A Businessman's
Appraisal (New York, 1932)
176-77; Deviatsatyi vsesoiuznyi s"ezdprofessional'nykh
soiuzov SSSR. Stenograficheskii
otchet
(Moscow, 1933), 9 0 - 9 1 ; Abram Bergson, The Structure of Soviet Wages (Cambridge, Mass.,
1944).
66
See Alexei Gastev's article, " F o r d i s m , " in Bol'shaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia
(Moscow,
1936), vol. 5 8 , p p . 1 3 2 - 3 3 . See also the book by Zelenko, Sovremennaia Amerika, and the
preface to the Russian translation of Henry Ford's book, Sevodnia i zavtra (Leningrad, 1928), 10.
67
V . Mezentsev, Bardin (Moscow, 1970), 86. See also A . F . Novospasskii, "Istoriia proektirovaniia domennykh pechei i tsekhov za 2 0 l e t , " Sovetskaia metallurgiia,
n o . 11 (1937),
Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 88.99.165.207, on 17 Jun 2017 at 00:06:55, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417500013438
IDEOLOGY AND AMERICAN TECHNOLOGY
IN T H E U . S . S . R .
439
American tendency, such as I. P. Bardin, won out by the late 1920s. Bardin,
who in 1935 became head of the technical sciences division of the Soviet
Academy of Sciences and the dean of Soviet metallurgists until his death in
1960, had worked in the United States in 1910-11, a somewhat mixed experience, according to his autobiography. Unable to secure a job as an engineer in
a Russian metallurgical plant after receiving his diploma in 1910, which
failure he felt was attributable to the domination of such plants by foreign
technical personnel, he moved to America where he took a job as a skilled
worker in the United States Steel Corporation plant at Gary. Here he worked
ten to twelve hours a day and nearly ruined his health, coming home each day
like a squeezed-out turnip, as his biography later put it.68 But he learned a
great deal by observation and by visits to other American metallurgical plants.
His work in the metallurgical giant of Gary proved ' 'to be a very good school
for the organization of production," according to his Soviet biographer.69
In 1923 Bardin also visited Germany and many of the steel plants there. He
remained unimpressed by the small scale and old-fashioned methods of the
German steel industry. When the project for the new Urals-Kuzbass Metallurgical Center was discussed after 1924, as well as the reorganization of older
plants in the Ukraine, Bardin was one of the staunchest supporters of adopting
the American pattern. By 1928 American technology had won out as a model
for most Soviet iron and steel plants. Gipromez, the huge Soviet design
bureau in Leningrad which supervised the construction of new plants and the
redesign of old ones in this industry, had 400 foreign consultants among its
2,000 employees by 1930, most of them American.70
In the coal mining industry, the administration in charge of this branch held
a competition in 1926-27 among foreign firms for the major consulting contract. Each competitor was given two mine shafts to construct according to its
methods. Here, too, American methods proved the favorite, and the American
firm of Charles Stuart and Company held the primary contract in mining until
foreign technical aid was phased out in the early 1930s.71
For the Dnieper Dam, the largest hydroelectric project of the interwar
period, the question was debated in the mid-1920s whether to turn its construction over entirely to a foreign company or to have it built by Soviet
36-51; V. G. Serzhantov, "KPSS—vdokhnovitel' i organizator stroitel'stva i osvoeniia Magnitogorskogo kombinata imeni I. V. Stalina—moschnoi metallurgicheskoi bazy strany 19281937" (Unpublished diss., 1959), Lenin Library. Moscow, 55-107.
68
I. V . Kuznetsov, Liudy russkoi nauki: Tekhnika ( M o s c o w , 1976), I V , 6 9 4 .
69
Ibid.
70
Ekonomicheskaia
zhizn', 8 August 1928; Henry J. Freyn, "Iron and Steel Industry in
Russia," Blast Furnace and Steel Plant (January 1930), 92ff.; R. W . Davies, Science and the
Soviet Economy: Inaugural Lecture (Birmingham, England, 1967), 7.
71
New York Times, 23 February 1928, 2 June 1931, 11 October 1931, 28 May 1932; Fithian,
"Soviet-American Economic R e l a t i o n s , " 165; Amtorg, Economic Review of the Soviet Union,
2:7 (July 1931), 2.
Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 88.99.165.207, on 17 Jun 2017 at 00:06:55, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417500013438
440 KENDALL E. BAILES
personnel, using foreign consultants. The problem was referred to the Politburo, which decided in favor of the latter option. At first, both an American
and a German firm were brought in as consultants. The American company
was that of Colonel Hugh Cooper, chief engineer of the Wilson Dam in
Tennessee and the Coolidge Dam in Washington. A disagreement between
him and the German consultant led to a competition between their methods in
1927. Construction on the dam began from both sides of the river, using
Cooper's method from one bank and the German method from the other. By
the end of 1927, the Soviet engineers in charge were convinced of the
superiority of Cooper's methods, and his company became the sole foreign
consultant on the dam's construction until its completion in 1932. Although
Soviet engineers and workers provided most of the personnel, most of the
construction methods and virtually all of the electrical equipment installed
were American.72
These are some of the most important examples of American involvement
in the development of Soviet industry, but one could cite numerous additional
instances. Yet it should be stressed that the Soviets were very selective in
what they borrowed from the United States; they concentrated primarily on
machinery and processes in certain areas—especially in mining, metallurgy,
machine building, agriculture, and energy production—and on certain kinds
of industrial organization, particularly the more authoritarian forms,
Taylorism and Fordism, applying them in some respects to a greater extent
than they were applied even in the United States. What they did borrow, the
Soviets tended to modify to fit their own natural environment, historical
traditions, social relations, and ideology. At the same time, they rejected a
great deal in the American experience, and developed a critique in the 1920s
and 1930s of the American economy and society which has remained the
dominant image of the United States in official Soviet media. Sometimes what
they refused is as revealing as what they borrowed.
We have already noted their rejection of American commercial methods,
which had an important influence before the revolution, as inappropriate to a
socialist society. The Sixteenth Party Congress, which met in 1930 when
American-Soviet trade was at its highest point, affirmed the practice of hiring
foreign technical consultants and sending Soviet engineers abroad to study.
(Several hundred Soviet engineers were sent to the United States during the
first Five Year Plan, including a current Politburo member, Leonid
Brezhnev's associate V. V. Kuznetsov.) But the congress also warned against
72
New York Times, 17 October 1926; E. B. Kartsovnik, "Leninskii Plan elektrifikatsii i
bor'ba partii za sooruzhenie Dneprovskoi gidroelektrostantsii im. V. I. Lenina" (unpublished
diss., 1964) Lenin Library, Moscow, 45ff.; Engineering News Record, 23 June 1932, p. 877; Za
industrializatsiiu, 20 November 1933, p. 1; 26 June 1937, p. 4; Nashidostizheniia, no. 3 (1930),
32; hvestiia, 6 September 1932, p. 2.
Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 88.99.165.207, on 17 Jun 2017 at 00:06:55, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417500013438
IDEOLOGY AND AMERICAN TECHNOLOGY
IN T H E U . S . S . R .
441
the wholesale borrowing of capitalist methods of industrial organization.73
The most advanced capitalist technology should be borrowed, but borrowing
should not necessarily extend to other, particularly organizational, aspects of
capitalist economies. This was an inhibition which, in fact, has been partially
overcome only since Stalin's death—and particularly under BrezhnevKosygin—with an increase in interest in the techniques of American industrial
management. What is perhaps significant here is the degree of ambivalence
about America to be found in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s.74
While repelled by many aspects of American society, party and government
officials and others often found American examples indispensable in making
an argument for particular kinds of technological change and economic improvement.
Conflicts at the working level also complicated the actual transfer of
technology. Dissension was as much the norm as cooperation in the relationships between the Soviet workers and specialists, on the one hand, and the
American consultants imported during the Five Year Plans, on the other.
Soviet press accounts during this period, as well as reports of American
engineers and skilled workers, give numerous examples of such conflict.
While higher Soviet officials encouraged a friendly environment for the
Americans working there, the latter were not infrequently met with coolness
or even hostility from Soviet technical specialists and workers. A number of
American engineers reported little working contact with their Soviet counterparts and were simply left in their offices to cool their heels or sign occasional
reports. The Soviet technologists as a group had been conditioned to resent the
dominance of imported expertise and specialists, with whom they had had to
compete, often to their disadvantage, before the revolution. They resented the
implication that they were not competent to direct the technical side of Soviet
industrialization. As one Soviet official noted in 1926, the frequent response
of the Soviet technical intelligentsia to the import of foreign experts was,
"We know this business as well as they do. If we had had the resources we
should know how to fix it up just as they do. " 75
Soviet authorities were clearly concerned about discord between the
Americans and the Soviet specialists and workers who resisted learning from
them. As one Komsomol pamphlet published in 1931 described the situation
at the Stalingrad Tractor Plant:
73
KPSS v rezoliutsiiakh i reseniiakh s"ezdov, konferentsii, i plenumov (Moscow, 1953), II,
555-70.
74
A very good example of this can be found in the writings of the prominent Bolshevik, N .
Osinskii (V. Obolensky). See, for instance, his Po tu storonu okeana. It amerikanskikh vpechatlenii i nabliudenii (Moscow, 1926), and his work cited in note 29. See also M. I. Rubinshtein,
Protivorechiia amerikanskogo kapilalizma (Moscow, 1929).
75
XV Konferentsiia
VKP (b) ( M o s c o w , 1927), 2 7 9 .
Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 88.99.165.207, on 17 Jun 2017 at 00:06:55, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417500013438
442 KENDALL E. BAILES
The anti-American feelings with which at first a significant part of the workers,
foremen and sometimes our engineers at the plant were infected were completely
unfounded and extremely harmful. These anti-American feelings found their expression in the lack of desire to learn from the Americans, to see in them representatives of
a higher technical culture. In practice, this spilled over into a refusal by our workers
and foremen to fulfill the instructions and orders of American foremen, in the frustrating of individual knowledgeable American foremen, in the refusal to put into practice
their valuable proposals for production.76
This pamphlet went on to equate such anti-Americanism with the ' 'voice of
everything backward, everything primitive [kustarnogo] in our industry . . .
aiding the work of the class enemy. The party and Komsomol organization,
as well as the plant management, conduct and will continue to conduct the
most active struggle against such feelings, which disorganize production.
According to an order of the plant administration around ten Russian foremen
were fired for active anti-Americanism."77
Some American specialists were able to adapt to these conditions and
proved very effective in transmitting their knowledge to their Soviet counterparts. As one American engineer put it, "the Russian's respect for foreign
specialists is gauged or measured by the respect or interest the specialist
has for him. If you work with him, teach him, be patient with him, and treat
him as your equal, you will never find a better friend. If you cannot be such
a man, the Russian has no place for you." 78 Some could not. Frustrated by
language barriers, difficult living conditions, and differences in working styles,
many gave up and went home. As T. W. Jenkins, an American metallurgical
engineer, expressed his feelings in 1938, "I am going back to the United
States for a rest. I am tired and completely 'fed up' with Soviet working
conditions. It has been an interesting experience for me, but I am glad that
it is over. I assure you that one needs plenty of patience and a cool head in
order to work with any success in the Soviet Union." 79
DECLINE OF SOVIET ENTHUSIASM FOR THE DIRECT TRANSFER OF
AMERICAN TECHNOLOGY
By 1932, most American specialists were already being phased out of the
Soviet economy, and Soviet views of American technology and industrial
expertise had become considerably less enthusiastic. Actually, the turning
point had occurred as early as 1931. Just as World War I had legitimized a
favorable view of America in the eyes of many Soviet citizens in the 1920s, so
the Depression clouded that view because it seemed to cast doubt upon
76
l a . B . Reznik, Ouladeem amerikansko: tekhnikoi (Moscow, 1931), 7 6 .
Ibid. For a similar case, see Za industrializatsiiu,
17, 18 August 1931.
"Interviews with American Engineers in Russia: Summary, H . H . Fisher Collection,
Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford, California, 14.
79
" M e m o r a n d u m of Conversation with Mr. T. W . Jenkins, 1 9 3 8 , " State Department Decimal File, D S 861.6511/40, The National Archives, Washington, D . C .
77
78
Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 88.99.165.207, on 17 Jun 2017 at 00:06:55, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417500013438
IDEOLOGY AND AMERICAN T E C H N O L O G Y
IN T H E U . S . S . R .
443
America's ability to continue with progress in the areas of advanced technology and rapid economic growth.80 To those who took a pragmatic view of the
United States, these areas had formed America's strongest suit as a model.
But another more immediate effect of the Depression, and one which was
perhaps of even greater importance in precipitating the sudden cutback on
technical aid agreements, was that it undermined the Soviet ability to pay for
imported technology and expertise.
By 1930, Russia had already amassed an enormous foreign debt, which it
had hoped to pay by selling grain and other raw materials, in addition to gold
and the art works it could export. But the Depression so drastically lowered
the price of most exports that a crisis for Soviet foreign trade developed by
1931. In May of that year, the government's inner cabinet for economic
affairs, the Council on Labor and Defense (STO), met and reversed the policy
of widespread imports of machinery and expertise through technical aid contracts.81 The number of such contracts declined from a high of 124 in 1931 to
74 in 1932, and fell to 46 in 1933.82 Such agreements were never phased out
completely before World War II, but they were greatly de-emphasized. This
process was accompanied by an increasingly unfavorable opinion of American and other capitalist technology, helping to make a virtue of necessity. The
official view was developed that the Soviet Union had already caught up with
and was surpassing the United States in vital areas of technology and economic growth.
By 1931, the Soviet Union had already developed, in quantitative terms at
least, an impressive research and development network of its own. According
to a recent study by the British scholar, Robert A. Lewis, Russia was probably
spending more of its gross national product on research and development than
was any capitalist country by the early 1930s.83 Because of the enormous
expansion of Soviet technical education after 1928, tens of thousands of new
technologists were flooding into the economy, many of them in the vastly
expanded research and development sector. Also, in 1931 the campaign
against the old technical specialists was largely halted, and measures were
taken to raise the status and authority of the Soviet technical intelligentsia as a
whole.84 This brought back into positions of influence many of the prerevolutionary specialists who had always taken an optimistic view of Russia's
native technological talent and had scant regard for imported technology and
expertise, a feeling easily transmitted to the many new Soviet specialists.
80
See, for example, M. I. Rubinshtein, Bol'shevik, no. 16 (November 1931), 29-49, and no.
17 (December 1931), 60-64.
81
TsGAOR, f. 215, op. 1, d. 39, I. 201, cited in Kas'ianenko, Kak byla, 205.
82
Kas'ianenko, Kak byla, 205.
83
Robert A . Lewis, " S o m e Aspects of the Research and Development Effort o f the Soviet
Union, 1924-1935," Science Studies, 2 (1972), 153-79.
84
Bailes, Technology and Society, 141-58.
Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 88.99.165.207, on 17 Jun 2017 at 00:06:55, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417500013438
444 KENDALL E. BAILES
It is probable that all these factors combined to bring about a major switch
in the official Soviet position. The Stalinist leadership had, of course, made it
a goal from the very start of the Five Year Plans to free the Soviet Union of
imports so far as possible and to make the country self-sufficient. They had
always believed in the potential superiority of the socialist system. As
Mikoyan expressed it to an American in 1930,
Let us take the principles of mass production, standardization, etc. We can apply
these principles more easily than in America. Doubtless in America there are no
technical barriers to the wide application of these principles. The U.S. technically is
sufficiently strong for this, but from the other side they meet great difficulties of a
social character that hinder U.S. progress on the road to standardization, specialization and so forth. If we had such technology as America has then we would succeed
fully in realizing a system of mass production and standardization and we would
reduce wastefulness in the economy to nothing, for in our way there are no such social
barriers, brought forth by the social system as there are in America. We have none of
these hindrances but we have some apparent technical backwardness. When we overcome this technical backwardness. When we overcome this technical backwardness
then doubtless we shall achieve colossal results. We will have a planned economy,
high technology, mass production, standardization and specialization of plants as well
as regions.85
Within a few years Bolshevik leaders evidently felt that the barrier of
technical backwardness was indeed nearly overcome. As early as 1932,
Nikolai Bukharin, who was the head of research and development for heavy
industry, saw a "slackening of technical progress in the West." 86 A Central
Committee resolution the next year supported this appraisal, speaking about
the decline of scientific thought and technology under capitalism,87 and by
1939, Stalin and the Communist Party were declaring the technical superiority
of the Soviet economy.88
Was this sheer boastfulness or was there some foundation for such statements? While greatly exaggerated, there was some factual basis for Stalin's
statement. In a purely quantitative sense, the Soviet Union during the 1930s
had overtaken the capitalist nations, crippled by the Depression, in the growth
rate of its gross national product. Although Stalin acknowledged that the
Soviet Union still lagged behind other states in labor productivity, i.e., in per
capita production, he indicated that his nation would soon overtake
capitalism here as well.89 Soviet technical journals after 1932 also lent some
credence to Stalin's view. For example, in the vital area of metallurgy, Soviet
engineers writing in these journals asserted that they were surpassing the most
85
Mikoyan, "Vospominaniia," 70.
Nikolai Bukharin, Socialist Reconstruction
and the Struggle for Technique
1932), 8.
87
KPSS v rezoliutsiiakh, II, 724-25.
88
XVIII s"ezd VKP(b). Stenograficheskii otchet (Moscow, 1939), 16.
89
Ibid., 17, 6 5 1 .
86
(Moscow,
Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 88.99.165.207, on 17 Jun 2017 at 00:06:55, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417500013438
IDEOLOGY AND AMERICAN TECHNOLOGY
IN T H E U . S . S . R .
445
advanced American technology.90 And in a limited sense, it was true; the
Soviets were, for example, building the largest blast furnaces in the world.91
CHANGE IN THE METHOD OF BORROWING
Despite advances in certain fields, however, an overall survey of Soviet
technology prior to 1941 leads to the conclusion that Stalin's statement was
either self-delusion or a cover-up of actual copying in an attempt to make the
best of the necessity to curb outright purchases of Western technology. While
in some areas, improvements, adaptations to Soviet conditions, and genuine
innovations may have been made, the vast proportion of Soviet technology
prior to World War II was still borrowed. But the change in government
pronouncements is quite significant. It marks the phasing out of the official
enthusiasm for Americanism, and it is in this period of the 1930s that we need
to look for the roots of the technological chauvinism which marked the later
Cold War years, particularly from 1947 until 1953 when the Russians seemed
to have invented everything.
What actually happened after 1931 was that the channel for borrowing
technology took a predominantly different form: copying, without the benefit
of licensing agreements, either from prototypes imported in limited number or
through information derived from, for example, foreign technical journals and
descriptive catalogues. The evidence for this is overwhelming, and in fact the
practice was officially endorsed by the Soviet government.92 The policy of
copying has certain major disadvantages, however, which the Soviets could
only partially overcome. While a machine can be taken apart and its components copied, the materials that go into it and the process by which it is
manufactured are often impossible to determine from an analysis of the end
product.93 Therefore, copying alone, in the absence of license agreements,
was a procedure likely to keep the Soviet Union permanently behind and it
frequently led to products of inferior quality.
But what about the Soviet Union's capacity for indigenous technological
90
See Sovetskaia metallurgiia, n o . 11 (1937), 3 2 - 5 1 .
Ibid., 4 1 . E . P . Everhard was the chief engineer of the Freyn Company. Although he was
critical of many aspects of the Soviet economy, nonetheless in November of 1932 he noted in his
diary (lent to me by his daughter) that the Soviets were doing something new in metallurgy,
"something never done at home or e l s e w h e r e . " He was referring to the metallurgical process
worked out at the Kuznetsk plant, where he was chief consulting engineer during construction.
92
See, for example, the decree by Sergo Ordzhonikidze, commissar of heavy industry, dated
16 June 1933, in lndustrializatsiiaSSSR,
1933-1937 (Moscow, 1971), 248, and the 1940 decree
of the Sovnarkom, in Resheniia panii i pravitel'stva po khoziastvennym
voprosam (Moscow,
1967), II, 786. M y thanks to Bruce B . Parrott of the School for Advanced International Studies,
Johns Hopkins University, who brought these two decrees to my attention. Parrott is completing a
definitive study entitled " T h e Politics of Technological Progress in the U S S R . "
93
Bruce B. Parrott, "Technology and the Soviet Polity: The Problem of Industrial Innovation,
1928 to 1 9 7 3 " (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1976), c h . 3 , p . 152.
91
Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 88.99.165.207, on 17 Jun 2017 at 00:06:55, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417500013438
446
KENDALL E. BAILES
innovation? This capacity certainly increased in the 1930s with the growth of
the scientific-technical research establishment. But as a number of scholars,
myself included, have tried to explain, structural and historical factors in the
Soviet system acted as major impediments to the development of successful
indigenous innovation.94 The Soviets have yet to overcome these hindrances
in most sectors of their economy, as several recent studies have demonstrated.95 The failure to catch up with the West in the area of technological
innovation, together with a decline in Soviet growth rates in recent years as
the input of new workers has fallen, accounts for much of the renewed interest
in borrowing from the United States and from other Western countries and
Japan. Soviet labor productivity and product quality, on the whole, have
remained well behind Western and Japanese levels; and the Soviet leadership
attributes the discrepancy to the slow rate of technological innovation.96 Thus
the view that certain facets of the United States economy were viable practical
models underwent a dramatic revival after Stalin's death and particularly in
the 1960s and early 1970s. As in so many other areas of Soviet life, the
political leadership turned not to major new internal reforms of the economy,
but to precedents from an earlier period, providing part of the Soviet impetus
for detente with the United States. Since 1973, however, because of conflict
with the United States over Soviet emigration policy and over Soviet policies
in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, the Soviets have turned more to other
Western nations and Japan for technological borrowing. But Soviet enthusiasm for American technology remains high in certain key areas where the
United States is considered to retain a substantial lead, such as in computers
and some other electronics fields, as well as in industrial management techniques .
SIGNIFICANCE OF THE SOVIET EXPERIENCE WITH TECHNOLOGY
TRANSFER
In conclusion, I think we can say that perhaps the chief role the United States
played in Soviet industrialization in the interwar period was as a kind of
standard against which the Soviets could measure their own economic progress and success or failure. Somewhat like a kid brother measuring his growth
against pencil marks on a doorframe, hoping to surpass the levels of a taller
sibling, the Soviet Union chose the United States as its standard of comparison
in the economic arena. The drawing of such comparisons remains a common
practice in the Soviet Union today.
94
For a discussion of this, see Bailes, Technology and Society, 337-80; John R. Thomas and
Ursula Kruse-Vaucienne, eds., Soviet Science and Technology: Domestic and Foreign Perspectives (Washington, D.C., 1977).
95
See Ronald A m a n n et al.. The Technological Level of Soviet Industry (New Haven, 1977);
Joseph Berliner, The Innovation Decision in Soviet Industry (Cambridge, M a s s . , 1976).
96
Bruce B . Parrott, "Technological Progress and Soviet Politics," in Thomas and KruseVaucienne, Soviet Science, 3 0 5 - 2 8 .
Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 88.99.165.207, on 17 Jun 2017 at 00:06:55, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417500013438
IDEOLOGY AND AMERICAN TECHNOLOGY
IN T H E U . S . S . R .
447
By the end of the interwar period, the statistical comparisons, together with
a good deal of American technology, were most of what remained of American influence in Soviet society. Imported American expertise had played an
important role in the first Five Year Plan, but that role eventually found itself
limited by the Soviet drive for economic self-sufficiency, by the Soviet inability to purchase much on the world market, and by official views concerning the potential superiority of the Soviet system.
In terms of general significance, this study of the Soviet Union's use of
foreign technologies suggests that foreign role models are most popular in a
period when established ways have been discredited and the legitimacy of an
old regime has been tested and found wanting. At such times minds turn with
greater appreciation toward foreign examples. The most attractive foreign
examples are those which seem to cope well with problems similar to those
faced by the nation in question. In the case of the Soviet Union, political
survival and economic recovery and growth were the problems of most immediate urgency in the decade or so after the end of the Russian civil war in
1921, and the United States provided the most attractive examples for emulation. When public confidence is restored and the newly established system
appears to be working well relative to other nations, then foreign role models
may lose their appeal and a nation may turn inward. This is particularly likely
if something has happened to the role model to call into question its legitimacy and pertinence to the dominant goals of the borrowing nation.
In the case study above, the prosperity and economic growth of the United
States and its role in World War I had legitimized it as at least a partial role
model in the eyes of many Soviet citizens, particularly among the political and
economic elites, whereas its economic decline and the social problems experienced during the Depression called into question America's relevance as a
model. We should make a distinction here between the ideological attraction
of America and the actual borrowing of American methods and techniques,
including economic processes and machinery. Despite the popularity of the
American example reported in the Soviet press during the 1920s and early
1930s, the United States never became the exclusive source of actual borrowing in the economic arena. This circumstance depended as much on factors
such as price, credits, and manpower available, as well as on the attitude of
America and other nations toward the Soviet Union, as it did on the popularity
of the United States in the Soviet public consciousness and particularly among
the elites.
In the same way, the discrediting of the United States as a role model
during the Depression did not lead to the complete cessation of borrowing
from American sources. Although the level of borrowing was highest when
Soviet perception of America's suitability as a model was most vigorous, the
borrowing continued in later years, although in a somewhat changed form. It
tended to be hidden from public view, and technology was not infrequently
Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 88.99.165.207, on 17 Jun 2017 at 00:06:55, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417500013438
448 KENDALL E. BAILES
presented as resulting from Soviet invention and development when it was
actually copied from abroad and adapted to local conditions. Thus, the process of borrowing, this study suggests, may be influenced by, but is probably
never totally dependent upon, the popularity of the source nation as a role
model.
To sum up, in the case of a planned economy like the Soviet Union, the
expected profitability of the business firm, in the neoclassical economic
sense, is replaced as the primary factor in transfers of technology or method
by a complex interplay of political, economic, and ideological factors which
include the military needs, the long-range ideological goals of the particular
regime, and the level of role modeling and nationalistic pride found among the
groups responsible for making the relevant decisions. The precise mix of
factors in any particular set of technology transfers no doubt varies from
situation to situation, and the definition of the mix in any given situation
requires concrete historical analysis, but the role and attitude of the state—as
opposed to that of the individual business firm—is crucial. It is hoped that the
framework of questions and possible answers suggested above will prove
useful in future case studies of transfers of technology between the communist
and noncommunist worlds and, in a wider application, between those nations
in which the state plays the predominant role in organizing economic activity
and those in which private companies and market forces are still vitally
important factors.
Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 88.99.165.207, on 17 Jun 2017 at 00:06:55, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417500013438