How America Helped Build The Soviet Machine
https://www.americanheritage.com/how-am ... et-machine
But beyond politics and national economics, another America has been making a profound impression on Russians for about a century. That is technological America, the developer of the most creative and fecund system of production the world has ever known. Although the idea of America as a moral force has never faded, many foreigners think mainly in terms of inventive, productive America. Witness the thousands of visitors from overseas who headed for the automobile factories of Detroit in the 1920s, the hydroelectric plants of the Tennessee Valley Authority in the 1930s, and Silicon Valley in the 1980s. A fair test of where our greatest national prestige lies would be to ask Mikhail Gorbachev which he would prefer: two weeks in the Cradle of Liberty or three days in Silicon Valley.
V. I. Lenin, Leon Trotsky, and Joseph Stalin all opted for technological America. One of the momentous and almost forgotten chapters of modern history concerns the Bolsheviks’ fierce determination between the two world wars to adopt the industrial legacy of the United States: to re-create the steel mills of Gary, Indiana, behind the Urals; to duplicate Ford’s River Rouge plant in Nizhni Novgorod; to erect a copy of the great dam and generators of Muscle Shoals, Alabama, on the falls of the Dnieper River—all using American methods and American engineers, planners, and managers. Few Americans today can identify Frederick W. Taylor, the father of scientific management, but he and Henry Ford and other modern American industrialists and engineers influenced Soviet history deeply and permanently. For the Bolsheviks in the 1920s, Fordism plus Taylorism equaled Americanism. And Americanism, in that sense, was crucial to the success of the communist state.
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In the 1920s the cream of American firms involved with automobiles, electricity, and workplace management were eager to sell the state of their art—give or take a few years—to the “Reds,” despite powerful anticommunist voices on the right. The Soviets were ready to buy, despite their aversion to capitalism. (They distinguished, as many Americans cannot even today, between America’s history-shaping means of production and our free-enterprise economic superstructure.) The United States had never enjoyed greater worldwide respect—or envy—than after World War I. The Soviets believed that the American system of production could consolidate the Bolshevik Revolution.
By 1926 dreams of “Americanization” were mesmerizing Soviet engineers and managers. Soviet planners believed that their future required large systems of production on a regional scale, larger even than those in the United States; they would be feasible because socialism would not be burdened by the political and economic “contradictions” of capitalism, which constrained the full development of modern production technology. Lenin understood that modern industrialization involved more than machines, processes, and devices; it involved order, centralization, control, and systems. And so the regime drove peasant workers mercilessly to gather grain and cut wood and dig minerals that were exchanged in prodigious quantities for foreign, especially American, technology. Stalin summarized the Soviet celebration of American technology and management in 1924: “The combination of the Russian revolutionary sweep with American efficiency is the essence of Leninism.”
The falls of the Dnieper River, once dominated by a fortress of Ukrainian Cossacks, was chosen as the site of the most ambitious of the new construction schemes, a mammoth hydroelectric plant and regional complex. Often compared to the Muscle Shoals hydroelectric project of 1917 to 1925, which became the first unit in the Tennessee Valley Authority system, the Dnieper effort was done in American style. The Soviets named the American Hugh Cooper as chief consulting engineer. I. Aleksandrov, a Soviet engineer, headed the project. American companies supplied equipment and engineers. International General Electric built five of the nine giant generators needed; the rest were built in Leningrad under American supervision. The Newport News Shipbuilding and Drydock Company constructed the nine 85,000-horsepower turbines, the world’s largest. German and Swedish firms assumed responsibility for other major items, but about 70 percent of the hydroelectric equipment was American. Steam shovels, hoists, locomotives, rock drills, and construction steel also came from the United States. One American who saw the site said it looked like a “Little America” —the only unfamiliar part being the presence of women workers. When the American photographer Margaret Bourke-White visited the construction, she observed four soft-spoken Virginians in charge of the Soviets installing the turbines.
Construction, by tens of thousands of workers, began in 1927. On May 1, 1932, the V. I. Lenin power station was dedicated and began operation as the largest hydroelectric plant in the world. The project schooled countless Soviet engineers and workers in Western technology. Hugh Cooper believed that the experience gained on the Dnieper would enable the Soviet Union, with its abundance of human and natural resources, to take a commanding position as a world power.
In line with Lenin’s insistence on the large-scale, the Dnieper planners proposed to erect a power system like the one that had mushroomed around Niagara Falls and make it the core of “a unified industrial complex economically and technically inter-connected.” They projected a nitrogen-fixation plant, a cement works, an aluminum-production plant, and a steel-producing complex, all knit together by high-voltage power lines and an electrified railway. They built a complex of canals around the falls and dam that made possible unbroken navigation on the Dnieper from northern Russia to the Black Sea—a dream of Catherine the Great. And they planned high-transmission lines to carry power to industry in the Don Basin two hundred miles away. They also envisioned a new city for 150,000 workers in the heart of the Dnieper complex, predicting that the population in the area would grow to as much as eight million.
At the ceremonies dedicating the hydroelectric station, in 1932, the government awarded Hugh Cooper its highest honor, the Order of the Red Star. He was the first foreigner so honored. Born in Sheldon, Minnesota, in 1865, Cooper had built hydroelectric projects throughout the world, including the mile-long Keokuk dam and power plant on the Mississippi and the U.S. government installation at Muscle Shoals. While under contract to the Soviet government, from 1927 to 1932, he spent one or two months each year at the Dnieper site. He and his American staff lived in a special foreign section, with comfortable housing, excellent imported provisions, and access to a swimming pool and a golf course.
Cooper, a dry and cautious man, once said that he did not accept any “isms” except good, old-fashioned American common-sense-ism, but he added that he found all the Soviet leaders with whom he dealt—including Joseph Stalin—men of great intellectual ability, committed to improving living conditions through technology. He commended their forthright business dealings and their lack of corruption, and he also liked Russian workers, whom he found eager to help on his huge project. Trying to teach peasant laborers to use complex equipment could be heartbreakingly frustrating, but he made headway. The Soviet managers’ clear authority over their workers and their use of piecework wages also pleased Cooper.
