workers’ state were a complicated and delicate issue. Factory directors, former Tsarist middle managers of questionable loyalty and motivation, lacked authority on the factory floor as workers did not respect their orders. Foreign consultant engineers brought in to advise on improvements despaired at Russian working practices. They noticed large numbers of Soviet workers disappearing on endless smoking breaks. Female workers often carried out heavy manual work in factories, while the men sat idly watching.
Early, piecemeal efforts to improve matters had failed. With their scant foreign exchange reserves, the Soviets had bought small amounts of expensive new manufacturing machinery abroad, which the unskilled Russian workers promptly ruined. Shumovsky noted that most of the new machinery sat unused in the factories, either uninstalled or broken. Spare parts were never on hand, nor were there engineers trained to conduct the regular maintenance required to service the machines. Faulty installation of new equipment was often to blame for the poor quality of the final output. In their current state, Soviet arms factories were incapable of making precisely engineered products even in small numbers. Above all, a chronic shortage of young engineers versed in the latest techniques and methods held the country back. Owing to a decade of war and strife, none had been trained. The armaments industry was in no state to support even a small-scale conflict. Shumovsky’s reports to the Finance Commissariat detailed his dire conclusions. The reports matched similar ones written by the other inspectors, visiting factories across the whole of Soviet industry. The flow of bad news exacerbated a building sense of crisis.
The leadership was aware of the desperate issues and, under an ailing Lenin, a gradualist approach had been adopted. Lenin was a deep admirer of US invention, if not of its capitalist system. He spent considerable time in his office in Moscow’s Kremlin flicking through his subscription copy of the magazine Scientific American, the Advocate of Industry and Enterprise. The US monthly showcased all the latest technological inventions and innovations. Lenin wanted to secure the technology to help build Communism. On the day before his death, 20 January 1924, the leader of the world’s first proletarian state passed the day watching a film about the workings of a tractor assembly line in a Ford factory.2 While Lenin believed that in the American factory, owners used machinery as a means of oppressing the working class, in the USSR the same US-made technology and modern production methods would help build Communism. Introducing modern machines together with efficiency measures in Soviet factories would eventually allow workers greater free time and higher living standards.
Lenin hoped that greedy American businessmen would sell his government everything it wanted, even if the Soviets’ ultimate goal was the destruction of capitalism. He was said to have joked that if he announced the execution of all capitalists, one would sell him the rope to hang the others. As he predicted, the US was intent on selling its technology and had the best on sale, but only for hard cash. Lenin’s plans were expansive, but in the absence of credit he could buy only a limited number of US-built tractors, other advanced farm machinery and some factory equipment. In his business dealings, Lenin favoured market leaders, the likes of International Harvester and Ford, as his trusted partners. When the money ran out, which it soon did, he sold the nation’s treasures. The Kremlin’s famous bells had to be saved by the curator of its museum from being auctioned off abroad.3 It was not only the crown jewels that were given away; in a sign of the Russians’ commercial naivety, Trotsky negotiated to exchange the rights to exploit all Siberia’s vast mineral resources for the next seventy years to one American company for a pittance.4 The Communists had returned to the Tsar’s method of offering long-term concessions to foreign investors. In desperation, the Soviets even resorted to barter; to its complete bemusement, the Douglas Aircraft Company was offered payment for an aircraft in oriental rugs and antiques. For US entrepreneurs venturing into the USSR, the experience of doing business under Lenin’s New Economic Policy (NEP) was disappointing. Once profits began to flow from their Soviet concessions, the intrepid US investors complained that they were subject to unexpected taxes or the sequestration of assets. For the Russians, the results of the programme were all too slow and involved tolerating a wild free market, risking social chaos at the hands of a class of newly rich ‘NEP men’, Russian capitalists who thrived by exploiting others.
The exchange of American ideas for Soviet cash or concessions should have been mutually beneficial. But ideological issues sharply divided the two societies. There were those in the US who flatly opposed doing any business with the Russians. They believed that under direct orders from Moscow, the US Communist Party members were secretly working to destroy the whole American way of life. They argued that if Communism were to spread to the US, it would mean taking away religious freedom, private property and access to justice. To the Communist way of thinking, America was a society built entirely on unfairness and the institutionalised mass exploitation of the working class for the benefit and enrichment of a few. The greatest success of the US had been to mobilise mass consumer demand. The American working class was not political and aspired to a life of consumption that the Soviets viewed as a shallow, material existence. Every Soviet visitor to America would comment on the extraordinary proliferation of advertising hoardings cajoling consumers to purchase the latest model of automobile, Coca-Cola or cigarettes.
The key barrier to greater trade was the US government’s implacable opposition to lending the Communists any money while Russia owed vast sums to US investors. Assets granted to American businessmen by the Tsar had after the revolution been expropriated by the Communists, who refused to pay any compensation. With the debt issue unresolved, the Soviets could not legitimately buy technology in the quantities they required. So they adopted a roundabout approach, which US manufacturers learned about the hard way: the unlicensed reproduction of foreign technology. Foreign cars, tractors, and other machinery exhibited at Soviet trade fairs were examined and copied. Henry Ford’s deputy, Charles Sorensen, on a visit spotted near-perfect copies of Fordson tractors manufactured under the name Red Putilovets.5 The Soviet design originated from technical drawings based on a dismantled American vehicle. Following the re-establishment of diplomatic relations, the first American ambassador to Moscow, William Bullitt, would be plagued by constant complaints from US firms about infringement of their patents.
It was not just mechanised harvesters and cotton pickers that Lenin imported to transform backward Russia, he adopted advanced US management techniques. The Soviet Union introduced the Taylor system of time and motion study – a technique to improve productivity – to encourage the scientific efficiency of labour in its factories. To much puzzlement, an army of officials armed with clipboards, stopwatches and tape measures appeared on factory floors. Russian workers were unimpressed and did not want to be timed, measured and subjected to flip charts. New technology from abroad, augmented with Gantt organisation charts – which broke down processes into their component stages – was supposed to lead to a rapid reduction in working hours and improvement in the quality of workers’ lives. It didn’t.
In a more successful step, the Soviets translated Henry Ford’s works into Russian as essential reading for factory managers. There was an official government campaign to ‘Do It the Ford Way’.6 By such innovative manufacturing techniques of mass production, the United States had overtaken the British Empire as the world’s number-one economy, helped in part by the Great War. Imported to the Soviet Union, these same techniques were expected to bring about the inevitable triumph of socialism. Capitalism was a smart, inventive beast. American business, as well as Marx, had much to teach those embarking on the sure road to socialism. The US had met and defeated the same challenges that confronted the newly formed Soviet Union, including how to industrialise with only untrained, unskilled workers and few managers. The US was the teacher, the model of mass production, an urbanised country boasting the highest living standards in the world. Copying US techniques and methods would turn Russia’s army of uneducated, conservatively minded peasants, tied to their traditions and land, into a progressive communist urban proletariat.
From the 1920s, hundreds of Soviet engineers were sent abroad annually on short foreign trips for hands-on training with new technology. They were instructed to gather as much helpful information as they could on their visits. It was not a difficult task in the US. One engineer described
