Yanks for Stalin
Interview Transcript

Abel Aganbegyan    (cont)

A.  That's difficult to say.  Obviously, the attitude toward them changed.  It began after the assassination of Kirov, and the authorities began to tighten the screws:  increased security, the hunt for spies and saboteurs.  It became dangerous to socialize with foreigners.  I don't know whether this was because of Stalin, but it wasn't so long ago that, if you wanted to invite a foreigner to your home for dinner you had to apply for permission.  If you traveled abroad and lectured or spoke, you were required to present the text of your speech for examination.  You had to type the speech verbatim, with no digressions.  You would receive instructions, mission requirements for your trip abroad, assigned tasks, as it were.  It was forbidden to visit foreigners at their homes.  Permission was required to conduct written correspondence with a foreigner.  Even I had to apply for permission, and I was a Ph.D., a member of the USSR Academy of Sciences, engaged in scientific research.  It was humiliating.

A.  But I'm speaking of the 1950s, 60s and 70s.  Concerning the events of the 1930s, we can only guess from the documents of that era.  You could be arrested for speaking to a foreigner.  The situation had changed, and the foreigners felt that and began to leave.  Those who didn't leave regretted it in 1937.  And if they weren't arrested in 1937, then the struggle against cosmopolitanism caught up with them, because that struggle exposed the cosmopolites, those who weren't so-called Soviet people.

Q.  So all the foreigners that we invited in the 1930s were cosmopolites?

A.  Ours was a horrible, totalitarian country that, in many ways, we should be ashamed of still.  We need to do penance.

Q.  We talked about building everything to be the biggest.  Which factories would you call the biggest?

A.  Indeed, we built enormous factories, and it is possible that this was the correct thing to do at that time.  It was a different time.  It was a time before the concept of division of labor, before cooperation, when we only had begun to work on a large scale.  We built factories that much resembled feudalist systems.  Everything belonged to the factory, the nearby settlements, the electric trams.  In Magnitogorsk there was a communications system that was a department of the city's factory.  Each had its own education system.  And they played a very positive role in the war, because our factories were self-sustainable.  Later, huge metallurgical plants were built, huge automotive plants, and not only here.  It was practiced the world over.  In the postwar period everything began to change.  Suddenly, small business was being encouraged.  We also supported such a policy.  And we continued in the 1930s, building VAZ, Kamaz, Avtomash, among other enormous facilities that did not correspond to new levels of division of labor, cooperative structures, integration, new market tendencies.

 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8