Amerikanskii biznes i Sovetskii Soiuz v 1920–1930-e gody: Labirinty ekonomicheskogo sotrudnichestva by B. M. Shpotov (review)

About two-thirds of the way through Boris Shpotov’s brilliantly conceived and executed account of American-Soviet business relations during the 1920s and ‘30s, he observes that “the commissioning of factories ahead of schedule, the triumphal reports of their full preparedness, and the congratulations extended by party and government leaders often led to embarrassment, and belated revelations instead of victorious fanfares” (207). Such, Shpotov suggests, was the modus operandi of Soviet industrialism—bombast and celebration giving way to consternation; initial fanfare replaced sooner or later by a harder critical edge. Such also characterizes the arc of writing about Soviet industrial development, at least by historians such as Shpotov who started their careers in Soviet times but have enjoyed far greater latitude since then.

The book covers both the concessions of the 1920s and the technical assistance agreements that overtook them in the subsequent decade. In the case of concessions, the Soviet government granted foreign enterprises rights to develop certain industries for which capital and expertise was lacking in the USSR. In return for their investments, the enterprises could repatriate their profits at least in theory. Technical assistance agreements were essentially shorter-term contracts paid in foreign currency for services rendered by foreign companies or individuals including plant installations and training of Soviet technical personnel. Some of the biggest names in US business during this heyday of American industrialism—among them, Armand Hammer; the industrial architect, Albert Kahn; and Henry Ford himself (about whom Shpotov has written a biography, now in its second edition)—were party to one or the other of these arrangements. Most, as Shpotov amply demonstrates, were fraught with misunderstandings, conflict, and disappointments.

Anyone who has ventured into this field will have encountered the work of Antony C. Sutton, a British-born economist who, while a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, wrote Western Technology and Soviet Economic Development, 1917–1965 (1968–73). The thrust of Sutton’s argument in this three-volume work (as well as condensed version published as National Suicide: Military Aid to the Soviet Union in 1973) was that the Soviet Union obtained the vast majority of its technology from the West. Oil extraction and refining, ball bearings, automobile production, military weapons systems—you name it, some implicitly traitorous Western corporation had provided it. Even as access to Soviet archives denied to Sutton fostered more nuanced accounts, his work continued to exercise considerable influence. Shpotov, a former Fulbright scholar who has mined the National Archives in Washington, D.C., company papers in various US locations, and Soviet archives too, cites Sutton early and often. But he has another point or two to make.

One is to explain to his Russian audience why the American version of industrial capitalism was so dynamic, at least before the Great Depression. Shpotov actually interrupts his narrative of American involvement in concessions and technical assistance agreements to devote a chapter to “The American Path of Industrial Development.” This follows the lead of the American economic historians Alfred D. Chandler and Richard S. Tedlow, both of whom emphasized the advantages US business derived from economies of scale, the former with respect to “the visible hand” of management, and the latter mass marketing. Amerikanskii biznes i Sovetskii Soiuz cites several Soviet engineers who sang the praises of the American “know how” (in Russian, nou-khou) they had experienced on visits to the United States. Among them was Aleksandr Pavlovich Serebrovskii (1884–1938), director of the oil trust Azneft throughout the 1920s. Dubbed “the Russian Rockefeller” by the American press, Serebrovskii published a highly appreciative account of the US oil and gas industry based on a business trip in 1924. Another Soviet petroleum engineer, A. F. Pritula, visited the US in 1927 and again in 1933, eulogizing—in print, in Soviet publications—the efficiency of the network of pipelines and other transportation systems he observed. Shpotov cites yet a third specialist...