Thoughts about the US Role in Soviet Industrialization

A common rightwing criticism of the USSR is to point out that US Firms built Soviet Heavy Industry, the implication being that the USSR and Russians by extensions don’t deserve any credit for the USSRs industrial might. In Russia and especially amongst the Stalinist Nationalist leaning crowd there is an oft repeated claim that every passionate hater of the USSR is someone who just plain doesn’t like Russians. This is not entirely true in my experience, for example though I disagree with him on many, many points Matthew Raphael Johnson is a sincere Russophile and passionate hater of all things Soviet. By passionate I mean anytime the USSR comes up some kind denunciation will be forthcoming almost without exception. When it comes to Western Righwingers there are 5 primary claims that will be advanced to assert the Cold War Wests moral/intellectual superiority over the USSR:

• After the October Revolution the jews/NKVD were running around killing Russians everywhere

• The USSR was built by the West

• The USSR was about to attack Germany when Germany attacked the USSR in June of 1941

• Lend Lease saved the USSR

• The Red Army raped everyone in Europe.

Of those claims the 1st is entirely true, the second is mostly true, the 3rd is just wrong, and the 4th and 5th are debatable but by no means airtight claims. If the Stalinist are wrong that every passionate anti Soviet is also anti Russian then it’s not at all stretch to say that every anti-Russian is anti Soviet in the sense that the only pro Soviet/anti Russians alive are literal Trotskyites and to a Trotskyite the “good” USSR ended with Trotsky’s exile. And the only Trotskyites running around in the world are highly influential jews or antifa, not the sort of people you are going to run into frequently in niche rightwing internet circles. Today we will examine the role US Companies played in industrializing the USSR and just how justified it is to imply that Russians and the USSR deserve no credit for the USSRs industrial might, plus we will speculate on why these US Industrial and Financial institutions offered all this help in the first place. Probably the most obnoxious and cringe aspect to this topic is when people act like it’s something that the USSR, and cringer still modern Russia is trying to cover up. For example, the controlled opposition communist party of the RF writes:

"Stalin took over the country with a plow and left it with an atomic bomb"? Komsomolskaya Pravda reveals the pages of history that are not described in school textbooks. The beginning of industrialization coincided with the time when Joseph Stalin became General Secretary.

https://www.kp.ru/daily/25863.3/2829607/

Even the Kremlin’s house Commie opposition is acting like the role US Firms played in Industrializing the USSR is some bomb shell secret not taught in Russian textbooks. I haven’t read what Russian school textbooks say about this topic but none of my Russian acquaintances are unaware that the USSR had help in its initial rapid industrial expansion. The US based merchant most responsible for industrializing the USSR is one Albert Khan. Screen Grab from wiki:

Kahn was an ethnic Phoenician born in Germany and 19% of all architect designed industrial factories in the US were his work apparently. I don't know exactly what the difference is between an architect designed factory and a normal factory is but if a hardcore anti Soviet Rightwinger were to be consistent he would have to say everything in the US associated with Kahn doesn't count as an American achievement in any way whatsoever. Following from that Detroit in its hey day is not even a remotely American accomplishment, another Wiki Screen Grab:

Respected Readers its seriously not that I’m shilling for the USSR here, its more about consistency and if we apply the same standards to the US that we do the USSR than we accordingly need to start subtracting everything that the jews financed in America and admit that actually America has far fewer “accomplishments” as well. But this is all retarded. Its not Americans fault that it was jews who had the capital to build all this stuff in America and naturally the same jews would be ones to build stuff in the USSR. So a more honest criticism that a Western Rightwinger could make would be “Americas foreign born rootless cosmopolitan merchants that had the capital to finance and build industry in America also built industry in the USSR” but this is less flattering than “America industrialized the USSR”.

The following is from a Russian article:

Albert Kahn was an industrial architect in Detroit. The reason for choosing Kahn was that he had designed all of Ford's factories and had developed a high-performance design methodology for industrial facilities. In the United States, his company, with a staff of 400, could produce working drawings within a week and construct industrial buildings within five months. Kahn was able to demonstrate his ability to do the same in the Soviet Union, as the Stalingrad Tractor Plant project was completed in record time. The construction structures were manufactured in the United States, transported to the Soviet Union, and assembled within six months.

It was the firm Albert Kahn Inc that created a school of advanced industrial architecture in the USSR.

Cities for workers were created along with factories. Ernst May, a German architect, participated in the development of architectural projects for about 20 Soviet cities!

https://exclusive.kz/pravda-o-tom-kak-amerikanczy-postroili-sssr/

So the Soviets specifically picked Kahns people to train Soviet designers because Kahn designed Fords factories…so if we are being consistent this means Ford is no longer an American accomplishment because Fords factories were designed by a German Merchant. I hope my open minded Right leaning Readers are seeing how “none of the USSRs industrial accomplishments count because Americans did them” is not actually the slam dunk for Western Cold War Righteousness that many think it is. What we have is more a situation where the same international jews industrialized both America and the USSR. The fact that Kahn built Fords factories and that Ford also helped kick start the USSRs rapid industrialization is pretty ironic considering his literary preferences.

Henry Ford stated that the USSR could use all of his patents (which, however, the Soviet side had been doing for several years, assembling an unlicensed Fordson tractor in Leningrad), and he was also willing to send his engineers to the USSR and invite Soviet engineers to Detroit to learn advanced production methods. Ford stated that it didn't matter where the industry flourished, as the benefits would be shared worldwide.

https://lr.semnasem.org/albert-kan/

A “German” architect named Ernst May is also mentioned above as having helped plan architectural projects in 20 Soviet cities. About May:

http://tatsut.org/newpage65.html

Its worth sharing that Stalin didn't agree with May about the need to do away with traditional and historically rooted architecture. The following is from a Russian shitlib crying about what could have been:

In early 1932, the political institutions began to change. Architecture and urban planning were increasingly under Stalin's personal control, while internal affairs were overseen by the People's Commissar. The planned economy was replaced by a command economy. Terror emerged as a prominent feature. Conservatism, neoclassicism, and grandiose decorations gained prominence. The simple Neues Bauen was labeled as a decadent remnant of capitalism. German architects were vilified. Ernst May lost his well-deserved position as chief planner of new industrial settlements and was demoted.

Unlike May Stalin found Khan pretty useful and Khans people were indispensable in helping the USSR close the industrial gap between them and the West:

Albert Kahn, It was his company that made the greatest contribution to industrialization. He opened a branch of his company in Moscow, but they worked under the name of Gosproektstroy. Kahn brought 25 engineers with him. In total, Gosproektstroy employed several thousand Soviet engineers, architects, and designers. Over the years, they trained an additional 4,000 specialists who designed and built over five hundred projects. However, you wouldn't argue that these achievements were solely attributed to the 25 Americans.

Many factories were actually bought in their entirety. They were brought in and assembled, and this is true. Over the course of two five-year plans, the Americans built 1,500 factories for us. In addition, more than 9,000 factories were put into operation during these years. As you can see, not all of these factories were built by foreigners. However, even those that were built by foreigners were staffed by Soviet workers, engineers, and designers.

And how they worked. Take the Stalingrad Tractor Factory, for example. According to the American project, the assembly and mechanical workshop was supposed to be completed in 168 days. However, Soviet workers, under the guidance of Soviet engineers, completed it in 28 days. The blacksmith workshop was supposed to be completed in 132 days, but it was completed in 54 days. These construction rates were unprecedented in the world.

That the Soviets Called Khans operation in the USSR “Gosproektstroy” which means something like “State Construction Beaura” is why so many people, even in Russia pretend that there was a communist conspiracy to cover up that foreign capitalist were helping industrialize the USSR. But what exactly should a contractor working for the Government be called? The Soviet Government hired people to build stuff for the Soviet Government. Moscow was the financer and employer after all, and Moscow dictated the terms of the contracts. This is a nuance that needs to be kept in mind when discussing this topic, the US Firms working in the USSR weren't working for free and by the time Stalin was in power they had no power to influence policy decisions unlike in the US and Western Europe. From the same article:

American companies were indeed invited to the USSR. This, by the way, saved these companies, and in many ways, America itself, from bankruptcy. The Great Depression was raging in the Western world. A quarter of the country's population was unemployed. Farmers were dying, factories were closing, and businessmen and bankers were jumping out of skyscrapers. And at that moment, orders began to arrive from the USSR. Orders for projects, workers, engineers, factories, and complete assembly plants. For patents, for technology, for assembly lines. And they paid handsomely for it.

https://dzen.ru/a/Zz2wXnI1nGR-yp-m

We all understand here that the Great Depression was engineered by the same people that industrialized the US and USSR. As a matter of fact Kahns cousins probably caused the Great Depression specifically so they could get contracts for work in the USSR as they could sell working for the commies as a necessary evil during severe economic troubles.

“If you don't let us work for the commies we will go bankrupt and after we go bankrupt the whole country goes bankrupt”

Perhaps the USSR was originally meant to be what China eventually became, had the Trotskyist won that would have been a strong enough possibility. Trotsky was already exiled by 1927 but the Trotskyites weren't totally broken until 1937 roughly. Maybe that’s why we had the great depression and then the rapid industrialization of the USSR. That sequence of events is kind of suspicious, isn't it? Whatever the plan was we still need to acknowledge that the scheme was Moscow was directly paying for services unlike the phenomenon where Western Firms just outsource production to China. Perhaps Stalin beating Trotsky meant that the plan had to be changed, or maybe there is nothing to this and the sequence of Great Depression-Rapid Industrialization of the USSR is actually coincidence. Probably a question naturally arises about from where exactly the USSR got enough money to pay for all this:

The USSR was able to take out a loan from Germany, with which it had active trade. The first loan of 100 million marks was provided in 1925, and by 1931, the debt had increased to 700 million marks (1 billion 130 million rubles). There were also small loans from private banks in the United States, amounting to approximately 350 million dollars. There may have been other loans of a similar nature. By the end of 1931, the USSR's external debt had reached 1.4 billion Soviet gold rubles.

To repay the debt and obtain foreign currency for purchasing imported equipment and repaying loans, the USSR exported grain, timber, oil, and gold. The export of grain and the initial stage of collectivization led to the famine of 1932-1933. The production and sale of gold and art objects increased. The Torgsin system was established in the domestic market for the purchase of foreign currency. In the second half of the 1930s, the USSR became the gold mining. By 1936, compared to 1932, gold production increased by 4.4 times, from 31.9 to 138.8 tons. In the period from 1931 to 1934, the export of gold from the USSR through Riga amounted to approximately 360 million gold rubles (over 260 tons).

https://topwar.ru/246895-stalinskaja-industrializacija-otkuda-sssr-vzjal-dengi-dlja-bolshogo-skachka.html

So, we have a case of Weimar German banks and US “small” banks providing the loans which the USSR used to pay US Firms to industrialize the USSR…. during the Great Depression when everyone in the West was going bankrupt and Germans were using Marks as wallpaper. My personal tin foil theory is that the USSR was never supposed to pay back these loans and accordingly the factories built by US firms would be given to these banks as colleterial for breach of contract. Instead by 1936, which coincides with Stalin finally starting to utterly break the Trotskyites Soviet Gold Production starts multiplying exponentially and the loans are paid off. If the loans had not been paid off and the factories handed over to the banks which were owned by Kahn and Mays cousins than in short order Kahn and his ethnic banker cousins would be dictating policy in the USSR even more overtly than they were in the US, UK and Weimar Germany. This is perhaps what the whole Stalin vs Trotsky fight was about. It was Trotsky that wanted to use Russia as a resource base for world revolution and who referred to Russians as White negros. The scheme would have been Russian slave labor working in the jews Soviet factories in an industrial neo-feudalism set up. Thats 100% pure speculation on my part but it contextualizes the stakes of the Stalin vs Trotsky showdown much better than the standard Western Rightwing take which is something along the lines of “Stalin and Trotsky agreed about everything more or less, Stalin just killed everyone around him because he was paranoid”. In my Holodomor article I touched on how despite Trotsky initially opposing the New Economic Plan that by the time of his exile all his powerful associates in the USSR became its champions against the Stalinist. The NEP as we learned in that article had created an influential and overwhelmingly jewish Petty Bourgeoise. Its seriously not much of an exaggeration to say that pre collectivization the USSR was more or less a turbo capitalist country with jewish characteristics. The NEP had set the precedent that private business for jews was in accordance with communist ideals and of course the banks which financed Soviet Industrialization were jewish owned. If the Trotskyites had won the feud than the NEP would have never been done away with and had the factories been handed over to the banks in the event of the USSR not repaying its loans than you would have had a situation where jews controlled all Soviet production including that of the middle class as private owners. Again, that’s only my speculation but you got to admit that seems like a reasonable assumption for what the original plan A was in regard to creating the USSR.

We read above that Stalin paid off the loans from Weimar Germany and the US that facilitated industrialization by rapidly expanding Soviet gold mining operations. Well, that expansion started in 1927, the year Trotsky was exiled. Thats admittedly weak evidence in support of my theory but absolutely no Soviet industry suffered as much sabotage as Gold Mining. As a matter of fact, it was straight up systematically sabotaged. BTW, Stalin hired an American to get Soviet Mining up and running quick, fast, and in a hurry. The following article is a Russian one about the constant sabotage going on in the Soviet Gold Mines:

On September 23, 1936, a wave of explosions swept through the Siberian mines, the second in nine months. Twelve people were killed. Three days later, Yagoda became the Commissar of Communications, and Yezhov became the Chief of the NKVD. Until then, Stalin had tolerated Yagoda's more or less liberal policies.

The investigation in Siberia led to the arrest of Pyatakov, an old Trotskyist and an assistant to Ordzhonikidze, the Commissar of Heavy Industry since 1932. Ordzhonikidze was close to Stalin and followed a policy of using and retraining bourgeois specialists. In February 1936, he granted amnesty to nine "bourgeois engineers" who had been convicted in 1930 during the large sabotage trial. The radicals, led by Molotov, opposed the bourgeois specialists, whom they did not trust from a political standpoint. They had long been calling for purges. Ordzhonikidze, on the other hand, argued that these specialists were necessary.

The debate about the old specialists with suspicious backgrounds resurfaced after the sabotage at the Siberian mines. An investigation revealed that Pyatakov, Ordzhonikidze's assistant, had extensively used the bourgeois specialists to sabotage the mines.

By “bourgeois specialist” what is specifically meant is a specialist who supported the NEP. We know that without this gold the USSR could not pay off its loans. If the USSR couldn't pay off it loans than is it really too much of stretch to assume that the assets the banks had financed would be handed over to the banks? The American Stalin hired to kick start Soviet mining was John Littlepage. Try as I might I can't find any info about his ethnicity. Littlepage isn't an especially Phoenician name, and I can't make an especially confident call via physiognomy check:

But this is what he had to say about the sabotage in the mines, from the Russian article I just quoted:

Littlepage writes that as soon as he arrived at the Soviet mines in 1928, he realized the extent of industrial sabotage, a method of struggle favored by the enemies of the Soviet regime at the time:

“One day in 1928, I went to the power plant of the Koshbar gold mines. By chance, I placed my hand on one of the main bearings of a large diesel engine and felt sand in the oil. I immediately stopped the engine, and we removed about 1 liter of quartz sand from the oil tank, which could only have been there by someone's malicious intent. Several similar incidents occurred at factories in Koshkar, where we found sand inside equipment such as gearboxes, which are completely enclosed and can only be accessed by removing the protective cover.

...Why, they asked me in America, is such sabotage so common in Soviet Russia and so rare in most other countries? Do Russians have a special penchant for damaging industrial equipment?

People who ask such questions obviously do not realize that the Russian authorities have constantly fought and continue to fight a series of open and hidden civil wars.

https://newsland.com/post/1796549-1937-ochishchenie

The Trotskyites were especially interested in wrecking Gold Mining as means of ruining Soviet Industrialization/Collectivization and saving the Soviet jewish petty bourgeois classes influence first and foremost. No Gold also meant that the industrial operations financed by Western Banks could be handed over to said banks in the event of non-payment which IMO was the whole plan from the get-go.

Let’s now address the common Edgy Western Rightwinger claim that the American based foreign born jews who helped Stalin rapidly industrialize the USSR were doing so specifically because they wanted a strong Communist State capable of destroying Europe in the immediate future. This claim doesn't hold up to scrutiny when we examine why Khan pulled his operation out of the USSR:

March 25, 1932, Albert Kahn was in Moscow, negotiating a renewal of the contract which had oficially ended on March 1. The negotiations broke down when the Soviets proposed to make the future payments not in dollars but in rubles which had no value outside the U.S.S.R. (By 1932 the Soviet government had stopped paying foreign firms and workers in hard currency, causing an exodus of American specialists and termination or failure to renew many foreign aid contracts.)

The Soviet Problem with Two 'Unknowns': How an American Architect and a Soviet Negotiator Jump-Started the Industrialization of Russia, Part I: Albert Kahn

The USSR was running short on foreign currency to pay the foreign specialists. If the whole idea was just to get the USSR, whether Stalinist or Trotskyite, set up right quick to invade Europe at the earliest opportunity than the very same US banks who provided the loans to start industrialization in the first place would have provided dollars, but they didn’t. 5 years after Trotsky’s exile accompanied by the subsequent declining political fortunes of his people in Mocow probably convinced the US banks that the real object of their cooperation with the USSR, the factories/infrastructure itself was no longer a guaranteed acquisition. The Trotskyites, being the bankers people in the USSR probably saw the writing on the wall and even though sabotage had been going in in the Gold Mines since the beginning they got to work extra hard once Khan pulled out. The only way to beat Stalin would be to prevent him from being able to continue financing heavy industry and collectivization and that meant cutting off the Gold Supply. Notice here that Stalin was fine with foreigners leaving by 1932, in a seriously jaw dropping short amount of time Russians had more or less gotten the hang of doing everything themselves. The implicit accusation when anti Russians wave away the USSRs rapid industrialization is that without foreign help Russians would have never been able to do it. This is dumb, given how fast Russians actually learned the problem wasn’t that they were stupid it’s that they had to catch up to the US within a few years. Copying someone else’s best practices when your life is on the line is not a sign of stupidity. The reality is that the USSR would not have been able to industrialize as rapidly as it did without foreign help, not that Russians are too dumb to build industry at all. Let’s close out with an example of just how asinine the implied anti-Russian libel is when certain Rightwingers hold up foreign help during industrialization as evidence of Russian incompetence. The following is from an American auto magazine:

Before WWII, Ford had established operations in Germany, primarily through its subsidiary, Ford-Werke, located in Cologne. By the time the war broke out, Ford-Werke was a major automobile manufacturer in Germany.

So, to be consistent here we would need to say this major automobile manufacturer in NS Germany doesn’t count as German because it was built by Ford…and how ironic is that because we have already read who designed Fords plants.

Nazi Collaboration Controversy: During the war, Ford-Werke produced vehicles, including military trucks, for the German army. Critics have accused Ford’s leadership of continuing business operations in Germany even as the U.S. was at war with the Axis powers.

https://automotiveamerican.com/2024/11/21/ford-motor-company-in-wwii-germany/

I don’t know what percentage exactly of German military vehicles came from Ford Plants and I’m not going to hunt for the numbers but obviously by the anti-Russian rightwingers logic all the vehicles from Ford plants no longer count for anything when it comes to praising NS Germanys industrial and economic achievements. General Motors also had operations in NS Germany, even more so than Ford so we need to also subtract those from NS Germanys achievement ledger. Than there is IG Fabens operations in NS Germany. From a 1998 Washington Post Article:

After the outbreak of war in September 1939, General Motors and Ford became crucial to the German military, according to contemporaneous German documents and postwar investigations by the U.S. Army. James Mooney, the GM director in charge of overseas operations, had discussions with Hitler in Berlin two weeks after the German invasion of Poland.

Typewritten notes by Mooney show that he was involved in the partial conversion of the principal GM automobile plant at Russelsheim to production of engines and other parts for the Junker "Wunderbomber," a key weapon in the German air force, under a government-brokered contract between Opel and the Junker airplane company. Mooney's notes show that he returned to Germany the following February for further discussions with Luftwaffe commander Hermann Goering and a personal inspection of the Russelsheim plant.

Mooney's involvement in the conversion of the Russelsheim plant undermines claims by General Motors that the American branch of the company had nothing to do with the Nazi rearmament effort. In congressional testimony in 1974, GM maintained that American personnel resigned from all management positions in Opel following the outbreak of war in 1939 "rather than participate in the production of war materials."

However, according to documents of the Reich Commissar for the Treatment of Enemy Property, the American parent company continued to have some say in the operations of Opel after September 1939. The documents show that the company issued a general power of attorney to an American manager, Pete Hoglund, in March 1940. Hoglund did not leave Germany until a year later. At that time, the power of attorney was transferred to a prominent Berlin lawyer named Heinrich Richter.

GM spokesman Mueller declined to answer questions from The Washington Post on the power of attorney granted to Hoglund and Richter or to provide access to the personnel files of Hoglund and other wartime managers. He also declined to comment on an assertion by Snell that Opel used French and Belgian prisoners at its Russelsheim plant in the summer of 1940, at a time when the American Hoglund was still looking after GM interests in Germany.

The Nazis had a clear interest in keeping Opel and German Ford under American ownership, despite growing hostility between Washington and Berlin. By the time of Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the American stake in German Ford had declined to 52 percent, but Nazi officials argued against a complete takeover. A memorandum to plant managers dated November 25, 1941, acknowledged that such a step would deprive German Ford of "the excellent sales organization" of the parent company and make it more difficult to bring "the remaining European Ford companies under German influence."

Documents suggest that the principal motivation of both companies during this period was to protect their investments. An FBI report dated July 23, 1941 quoted Mooney as saying that he would refuse to take any action that might "make Hitler mad." In fall 1940, Mooney told the journalist Henry Paynter that he would not return his Nazi medal because such an action might jeopardize GM's $100 million investment in Germany. "Hitler has all the cards," Paynter quoted Mooney as saying.

"Mooney probably thought that the war would be over very quickly, so why should we give our wonderful company away," said German researcher Anita Kugler, who used Nazi archives to trace the company's dealings with Nazi Germany.

Even though GM officials were aware of the conversion of its Russelsheim plant to aircraft engine production, they resisted such conversion efforts in the United States, telling shareholders that their automobile assembly lines in Detroit were "not adaptable to the manufacture of other products" such as planes, according to a company document discovered by Snell.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/daily/nov98/nazicars30.htm

How about that, an American Company was making engines for Junkers and the guy in charge of GMs operations met with Goering himself. Accordingly, all these engines need to be subtracted from NS Germanys industrial output. From a Russian Military Blog:

The scale of investment in Germany from leading American corporations was astounding. Thus, Standard Oil invested $ 120 million in Germany, General Motors — $ 35 million, ITT — $ 30 million, Ford — $ 17.5 million. And it should be understood that a million dollars of the 1930s is by no means a modern million dollars.

https://topwar.ru/155681-kak-amerikanskie-korporacii-podderzhivali-gitlera.html

Finally

This just be like it do. If you happen to be an anti-Russian Hater reading this just know that you are lying to yourself and coping if you are going to wave it all away and scream that it’s just a pack of anti NS lies while condescendingly scoffing at the USSRs rapid industrialization because foreign capitalist were heavily involved. The exact same accusations can be made against NS Germany, albeit on a smaller scale. Still, even if the scale is smaller let’s not understate it. If Americans firms had 70% of NS Germanys auto market cornered than it follows that these US firms contribution to the war were nothing to scoff at. In conclusion, yes, it’s totally true that America played a huge role in the industrialization of the USSR, but this truth is not the effective cudgel with which to shame Russians that some obnoxious SS LARPing anti-Russian Rightwingers think it is.