Still, there was some opposition to Fordism by left-wing critics who thought the adoption of methods designed to extract more labor from workers went against the fundamental socialist project of diminishing the exploitation and alienation of the working class. One of the sharpest ripostes to them came from Trotsky, a leading advocate of the adoption of Ford methods, just as he had been a leading advocate of the adoption of scientific management. In a 1926 article, he bluntly declared, “The Soviet system shod with American technology will be socialism. . . . American technology . . . will transform our order, liberating it from the heritage of backwardness, primitiveness, and barbarism.”
Trotsky thought the assembly line, or conveyor method as he called it, would supplant piecework as a capitalist means of regulating labor, replacing an individualized mode with a collective one. Socialists needed to adopt the conveyor, too, he argued, but under their control it would be different, since the pace and hours of work would be set by a workers’ regime. Nonetheless, he acknowledged that by its very nature the assembly line degraded human labor. In perhaps the most powerful argument ever made in defense of the Fordist factory, at least from a point of view other than that of those who profited from it, Trotsky answered a question he had been asked, “What about the monotony of labor, depersonalized and despiritualized by the conveyor?” “The fundamental, main, and most important task,” he replied, “is to abolish poverty. It is necessary that human labor shall produce the maximum possible quantity of goods. . . . A high productivity of labor cannot be achieved without mechanization and automation, the finished expression of which is the conveyor.” Just like Edward Filene, Trotsky claimed “The monotony of labor is compensated for by its reduced duration and its increased easiness. There will always be branches of industry in society that demand personal creativity, and those who find their calling in production will make their way to them.” Then came a final flourish: “A voyage in a boat propelled by oars demands great personal creativity. A voyage in a steamboat is more ‘monotonous’ but more comfortable and more certain. Moreover, you can’t cross the ocean in a rowboat. And we have to cross an ocean of human need.”18
Embracing the Giant Factory
Just how to cross that ocean of need became the subject of an intense debate among Soviet leaders in the mid-1920s. The Bolshevik assumption always had been that the survival of their revolution would depend on the spread of socialism to advanced countries in Western Europe, which would then help Russia develop. But by a half-dozen years after World War I, it was clear that in the near future there would be no triumphant revolutions elsewhere. For economic development, the Soviet Union would have to depend on its own very limited resources.
Some Soviet leaders, including Nikolai Bukharin, argued that under the circumstances the best road forward lay in modest, balanced growth, driven by upgrading the agricultural sector. Increased peasant income would expand the market for consumer goods, which could be met through investments in light industry. Heavy industry would have to grow slowly.
Others wanted heavy industry to take the lead, with a faster pace of industrialization and economic growth. In part, they were driven by fears that the Western powers would again use their military forces to try to overthrow the Soviet regime, as they had during the civil war, necessitating the rapid development of an industrial base that could support a powerful army. They also feared placing the fate of the economy in the hands of a peasantry that wavered in its allegiance to the Soviet regime, withholding grain and other goods when prices were low or when there were too few consumer goods available to spend their money on. Instead, advocates of rapid industrialization, including Trotsky, sought to extract more wealth from the peasantry, if need be through levies, selling grain and raw materials abroad to finance industrialization.
A Communist Party congress in late 1927 balanced the two positions. But during the next two years, as a detailed Five-Year Plan for the economy was worked out, policy shifted toward the “super-industrializers” and then went far past even their most ambitious goals. The final plan called for a pace of industrialization unprecedented in human history, in half a decade doubling the fixed capital of the country and increasing iron production fourfold.
The swing coincided with Joseph Stalin’s victory over his rivals in the battle for the leadership of the Communist Party that followed Lenin’s death in January 1924. Having outmaneuvered his most formidable opponent, Trotsky, Stalin appropriated his program of rapid industrialization and vastly accelerated it. Stalin feared that boosting the wealth of the peasantry would increase its political power. To free the party and state once and forever from being held hostage, he sought to diminish the economic resources of the peasantry and ultimately transform it by collectivizing farm production. Wealth squeezed out of agriculture would finance the growth of heavy industry and, with it, an enlarged working class.
The call for very rapid industrialization was central to what historians have dubbed Stalin’s “revolution from above.” Its success was predicated on a revival of the heroic spirit and mass mobilization of the revolution and the civil war. Stalin’s “vision of modernity” embodied in the First Five-Year Plan, wrote historian Orlando Figes, “gave a fresh energy to the utopian hopes of the Bolsheviks. It mobilized a whole new generation of enthusiasts,” including young workers and party activists, for whom the industrialization drive was to be their October. By sheer willpower, the Soviet Union would seize modernity and catch up to and pass its capitalist rivals.19
The giant factory played a pivotal role in the effort. One Soviet planner said that preparing a list of needed new factories was “the soul of five-year plans.” While some funds were invested in renovating and expanding existing plants, building new ones provided the opportunity for installing the most advanced technology available. Some experts proposed adopting European methods and machine designs, their smaller scale and lesser demand for precision standardized parts as more appropriate to the existing state of Soviet industry than American mass production. But Soviet leaders decided to adopt the American model, seeing investment in a few, very large factories, where great economies of scale could be achieved through rationalization, specialization, and mechanization, as a better use of precious investment funds than spreading them thinly to build more, smaller, less technically advanced plants. When one critic of that approach questioned the availability of trained labor to operate American machinery, asking “Maybe you want to breed a new race of people,” Vassily Ivanov, the first manager of the Stalingrad tractor plant, replied “Yes! That is our program!”
The First Five-Year Plan incorporated a few big projects already begun or planned, like the Dnieporstroi dam and hydroelectric project, and proposed massive new ones, like the Magnitogorsk iron and steel complex and the several tractor and automobile factories. These landmark projects would create the transportation and power infrastructure, iron and steel industry, and tractor and vehicle output to transform the whole country and lay the basis for new defense production.
The epic scale of the First Five-Year-Plan projects reflected the utopianism associated with it and the need to stir popular imagination for the massive mobilization and sacrifice it required. Giantism was as much an ideological matter as a technical one. The very scale of the planned industrial complexes made achieving modernity, measured against the most advanced nations, and doing so quickly, seem a palpable possibility, something worth suffering to achieve. Tempo was deemed an existential issue. “We are 50–100 years behind the advanced countries,” Stalin declared in 1931. “We must make up this distance in ten years. Either we do this, or they will crush us.”20
Turning to the West
The Soviet Union lacked the engineering cadre, experience, and capital goods manufacturing capacity to build the Five-Year Plan projects on its own. Necessity forced it to turn to personnel and machinery from the capitalist world. Some foreign experts already were working in the Soviet Union, but their role greatly expanded once the First Five-
Year Plan got under way. Not only did the Soviet Union have too few engineers, industrial architects, and other specialists experienced with large-scale projects; equally important, the Bolsheviks distrusted the experts they had, most of whom had begun their careers working for private firms, had not supported the revolution, and were seen as lacking knowledge of the newest industrial developments and the boldness and initiative found abroad, especially in the United States. The largest group of foreign experts the Soviets recruited came from Germany, with Britain and Switzerland also providing significant numbers of engineers and technicians. But in terms of their role, American companies and consultants were most important, taking on outsized roles in the leading Five-Year Plan projects. Though unsympathetic to the Russian Revolution, American businesses did not hesitate to take advantage of the commercial possibilities it presented.21
The influx began with work on Dnieporstroi, the huge dam and hydroelectric project in the Ukraine, the largest in Europe when it opened in 1932. In 1926, a Soviet delegation visiting the United States signed a contract with Hugh L. Cooper, who had supervised the construction of the dam and power station in Muscle Shoals, Tennessee, to play a similar role for Dnieporstroi. For one or two months a year, Cooper worked on site, while a small group of engineers from his firm stayed year-round. The Soviets purchased much of the heavy equipment for the project in the United States. The Newport News Shipbuilding and Drydock Company built nine turbines for the dam, the largest ever manufactured, and sent engineers to supervise their installation. General Electric built some of the generators, part of its very extensive involvement in Soviet electrification and industrialization during the late 1920s and 1930s.22
American involvement in the Stalingrad tractor plant was even more extensive. The tractor held almost mythical importance in the Soviet Union; Russian-American writer Maurice Hindus, who traveled frequently in his native land, declared the tractor the “arbiter of the peasant’s destiny,” “not a mechanical monster, but a heroic conqueror.” Tractors almost never were sold to individual peasants but rather used as inducements and support for collective cultivation. The tractor station, which housed equipment for use on nearby collective farms, became a key Soviet institution, not only supplying mechanical power but also collecting grain for the state and serving as a symbol of modernity and Bolshevik power. Rebellious villages did not get access to tractors.23
Already spending heavily to import tractors, the Soviet government made their domestic production an investment priority. Having been spurned in its request to Henry Ford to set up a Russian tractor plant, the government turned to the next best thing, Ford’s favorite architect, Albert Kahn. Soviet leaders knew of Kahn because of his work at River Rouge. But in planning what would become the Stalingrad plant, they did due diligence, in November 1928 sending a delegation of engineers to the United States to study tractor production and visit equipment manufacturers and engineering and architectural firms, including Kahn’s. In early May 1929, Amtorg, a trading company controlled by the Soviet government, signed a contract with the Detroit architect to design a factory capable of producing forty thousand tractors a year (a target later raised to fifty thousand). Kahn also agreed to lay out the site, supervise the construction, help procure building materials and equipment from U.S. companies, and supply key personnel for the start-up of the plant.24
Upon signing the Amtorg contract, Kahn presented the problems the Soviet Union faced as technical, with it having many of the same challenges and opportunities as the United States. As would be true in most of his statements about the U.S.S.R., he never mentioned communism and avoided politics. Perhaps to forestall criticism from anticommunist businesses, he portrayed the Soviet Union as a large potential market for U.S. equipment manufacturers.25
In choosing the Kahn firm, Soviet leaders threw in their lot with a company capable of operating at the rapid pace at which they hoped to carry out industrialization. Within two months of signing the contract, two Kahn engineers arrived in the Soviet Union with preliminary drawings for the main buildings. John K. Calder had worked on building Gary, Indiana, and been the chief construction engineer at River Rouge, a role he essentially reprised at the Stalingrad Tractorstroi, working alongside Vassily Ivanov. Leon A. Swajian, another Rouge veteran, assisted him. Other Kahn representatives and engineering recruits soon joined them.
But if leading Bolsheviks and the Kahn firm were largely in tune about pace—if anything the Russians wanted to go faster—as Calder quickly discovered conditions on the ground were anything but conducive to rapid progress. Modern equipment for transportation and construction was all but absent—camels were used to move materials—while many Soviet construction officials objected to the fast-track methods Calder introduced. Ivanov later wrote that he had to confront “the sluggish inertia of Russian building methods” in what became a political as well as technical battle over the all-important issue of “tempo.” A popular play by Nikolai Pogodi, entitled Tempo, would portray the struggle, with a character based on Calder overcoming many obstacles, including bureaucracy and lack of discipline, to push the project forward.
Remarkably, the basic construction at Tractorstroi, which became the largest factory in the Soviet Union, with an assembly building a quarter mile long and large adjacent foundry and forge buildings, was completed in just six months, though it took another half year for all the equipment to arrive and be installed. Meanwhile, factory officials set up a recruiting office in Detroit and hired some three hundred and fifty American engineers, mechanics, and skilled workers to help start up the plant, including fifty from the Rouge, a process made easier by the beginning of the Great Depression. At the same time, young Soviet engineers were sent to collaborate with the Kahn firm on design work and to various American factories to gain experience with the kind of machinery that would be used in the plant. Ivanov himself traveled to meet with equipment suppliers in the United States, where “The straight roads, the abundance of machines, the whole technical equipment . . . convinced me of the correctness of the course we had chosen.”26
Figure 5.2 The Stalingrad Tractor Factory Is Open, the celebratory cover of a 1930 issue of a Soviet magazine.
On June 17, 1930, just fourteen months after Amtorg signed its contract with Kahn, tens of thousands of spectators gathered in Stalingrad to watch the first tractor, decorated with red ribbons and placards, come off the assembly line. By then, a start-up workforce of 7,200 had been assembled, 35 percent female. Stalin sent his congratulations to the workers, declaring, “The fifty thousand tractors which you are to give the country every year are fifty thousand shells blowing up the old bourgeois world and paving the way to the new socialist order in the countryside.” He ended, less bombastically, by giving “Thanks to our teachers in technique, the American specialists and technicians who have rendered help in the building of the Plant.”27
While work on the Tractorstroi was proceeding, Amtorg went on a buying spree in the United States, signing technical assistance and equipment purchase agreements with some four dozen companies. The most important agreement was with Ford. When Kahn signed his contract, Henry Ford seemed to regret not being involved in the great experiment of Soviet industrialization. Publicly, he offered Kahn help and asked him to tell the Soviets “anything we have is theirs—our designs, our work methods, our steel specifications. The more industry we create no matter where it may be in the world, the more all the people of the world will benefit.” Privately, he asked Kahn to signal to the Soviets that he was now willing to make a deal.
Nine months earlier, the Soviet government had set up a commission to build up its vehicle industry, which at the time consisted of only two small factories producing fewer than a thousand trucks a year. In the spring of 1929, the decision had been made to build a giant vehicle plant near Nizhny Novgorod, 250 miles east of Moscow. By then, the Soviets had approached both Ford and General Motors about assistance, but without much progress. Impatient, Stalin personally intervened behind the s
cenes, demanding that Amtorg speed up negotiations. Ford’s new interest was thus a godsend, and by the end of May Amtorg signed an agreement with his firm.
The pact did not revive the idea of Ford setting up a plant in the Soviet Union. Instead, it called for massive assistance to the Soviets in building up an automobile industry under their own aegis. In a nine-year contract, Ford agreed to help design, equip, and run a plant at Nizhny Novgorod capable of manufacturing seventy thousand trucks and thirty thousand cars a year, as well as a smaller assembly plant in Moscow. Ford granted the Soviets the right to use all of its patents and inventions and produce and sell Ford vehicles in the country. It pledged to provide detailed information about the equipment and methods used at River Rouge and to train Soviet workers and engineers at its Detroit-area plants. The agreement also called for the Soviet Union, during the period its own plants were being started up, to buy seventy-two thousand Ford cars, trucks, and equivalent parts. (The vehicles were sent as knocked-down kits to be assembled at Soviet plants.) Although Ford later claimed that it lost money on the agreement, it served both sides well, giving the U.S.S.R. a huge boost in setting up a modern car and truck industry while providing Ford with work during the depth of the Depression and allowing it to sell off the tools and dies for the Model A as it switched to its new V8 model.28
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