“The Soviet Problem With Two ‘Unknowns’: How an American Architect and a Soviet Negotiator Jump-Started the Industrialization of Russia, Part I: Albert Kahn”, 2010 (; backlinks):
[cf. 2017] This is the first half of a 2-part article by on the relationship forged in the late 1920s between American industrialists, especially Albert Kahn, the renowned factory architect, and the Soviet government, which in the late 1920s and early 1930s sought the help of Americans to move the Soviet Union from a peasant society to an industrial one.
This first part focuses on that phase of Soviet-American interaction from the perspective of Kahn’s architectural firm.
The second part, which will be published in the next issue of Industrial Archaeology (volume 37, nos. 1–2), will focus on the Soviet-American commercial relationship from the perspective of Saul G. Bron, who headed the American Trading Corporation (Amtorg), the Soviet-controlled agency responsible for contracting with the American private sector.
Soviet industrialization was a complex economic and political undertaking about which much remains unclear.
Rather than examine the process as a whole, this essay focuses on 2 fairly unknown players in the history of Soviet-American relations—one American firm and one Soviet negotiator—and their contribution to the amazingly rapid Soviet industrialization of the early 1930s, emphasizing some human and business factors behind Stalin’s Five-Year Plan.
Saul G. Bron, during his tenure as chairman of Amtorg Trading Corporation in 1927–3193094ya, contracted with leading American companies to help build Soviet industrial infrastructure and commissioned the firm of the foremost American industrial architect from Detroit, Albert Kahn, as consulting architects to the Soviet Government. The work of both played a major role in laying the foundation of the Soviet automotive, tractor, and tank industry and led to the development of Soviet defense capabilities, which in turn played an important role in the Allies’ defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II.
Drawing on Russian and English-language sources, this essay is based on comprehensive research including previously-unknown archival documents, contemporaneous and current materials, and private archives.
See Also:
“Computer and Dynamo: The Modern Productivity Paradox In A Not-Too Distant Mirror”
“The Institutional Causes of China’s Great Famine, 1959–2196163ya”
“‘Automation’ of Manufacturing in the Late 19th Century: The Hand and Machine Labor Study”
“The Great Leap Forward: Anatomy of a Central Planning Disaster”