Yanks for Stalin
Interview Transcript

Abel Aganbegyan    (cont)

A.  No.  He was an average capitalist with an open mind, as had many other capitalists, who were ready to make deals with the devil himself if it would prove advantageous and profitable.  Of course, he always spoke highly of his trading partners, praised them, and you would do the same.  And why not?  If you spit on me, I certainly will not deal with you again.  As you see, he behaved naturally, he quite naturally wanted to enable economic cooperation.  Many entrepreneurs dislike war.  It's not profitable.  Neither are iron curtains.  Business works against such artificial barriers.  He was global in his heart, big business is multinational.

Q.  According to the propaganda, Hammer practically saved Russia in the 1920s.  Is it true?

A.  No.  Nothing of the sort.  Russia is an enormous country.  Can one person save all of Russia?  Delusions, all delusions, I think. 

Q.  But he differed from Ford?

A.  I think that Ford was more important for Russia, because thanks to Ford the Gorkovskiy plant was built.  It was built using Ford's ideas and technology, and we built trucks at that time.  Ford was an innovator, an inventor, he invented the assembly line, a new capitalist system for the division of labor, which is used in many---

Q.  In what ways did Hammer differ from Ford?

A.  It seems to me that Ford influenced the development of our industry much more than Hammer did, because our automotive plants were built using Ford's technology, like the Gorkovskiy plant, for example.  Ford had many new ideas for the automotive industry, and they were successfully applied here.  Hammer is justifiably hailed for helping Russia, but for a country that in its worst year still harvested several billion poods of grain, perhaps four or five billion, well, a million tons is, well, you understand, vital assistance for one city of moderate size.  It is significant, though.  It is a sign, a significant quantity.  The quantity isn't so important as the fact of the effort.

Q.  We saw a poster in the museum declaring "Fordization."  What does that mean?

A.  Ford was the most technologically-advanced automotive enterprise in the world.  In building a completely new automotive industry, we wanted to use Ford's expertise to bypass previous steps in the evolution of the automotive industry, which was extraordinarily important.  We wanted to build a modern industry, and in the years before the war we managed to do so, creating aviation, automobile and tractor industries.  And we did so at a fairly sophisticated level.  Some of our industries, especially tanks and the T-34, were the best in the world in terms of technological advancement, engines and many other factors, such as armor.  You know our armor, the "Spets-steel," which up until the war it was practically the best in the world.  We achieved such great things thanks to Western expertise.  After all, many of our best managers studied in the West.

Q.  Why was industrialization necessary in this, a starving country?  What was Stalin's role?

A.  A country without industry is doomed, primarily because such a country cannot possess adequate means to defend itself.  It cannot possess military technology.  Military technology is the product of modern industry.  We were a country in which socialism had triumphed, and we were surrounded by hostile forces.  History confirms that theory.  War did break out.  It could have broken out in the East, too.  At that time, Japan was a militaristic state, had a militaristic government.  We had very little time to develop a modern industrial base, a defense industry.  We created these things thanks to industrialization.  Of course, industrialization was conducted in a semi-barbaric fashion, as were many things in those days.  Cruelty, prison labor, the confiscation of agricultural products.  Industrialization cannot be viewed as being separate from the barbarity it brought.  It caused the deaths of millions of peasants, brought on by dispossession, arrests, then later, by starvation.  It's all interconnected in a historic sense.  Industrialization was essential to our country, but it could have been carried out using less barbaric methods.  Maybe.  I'm not a historian, and I don't know the history of the subjunctive mood, all the what ifs, the if onlys, but I'm convinced that we could have done without the concentration camps.  I don't think that forced labor is more effective than the labor of free people.

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