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An American Businessman in the Soviet Union: The Reimer Report

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 June 2012

Robert W. Clawson
Robert W. Clawson
Affiliation:
Associate Professor of Political Science, Kent State University
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Abstract

In 1930 Jacob Reimer, along with sixteen other employees of International Harvester, went to the Soviet Union for one year to service agricultural implements and to train Soviet workers in their use. This document describes his experiences.

Type
Research Article
Information
Business History Review , Volume 50 , Issue 2 , Summer 1976 , pp. 203 - 218
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 1976

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References

1 During 1929, orders for nearly 7000 American tractors and spare parts were placed with the International Harvester Company and Deere and Company. This dual purchase was handled through the Soviet Amtorg Trading Corporation in New York for the agricultural foreign trade organization Selskosoyuz. It was the single largest Soviet purchase of American equipment up to that date, involving substantial short term (three-year) credits. Some of the machines were sent in July, 1929 to help in the current harvest, while the bulk was to arrive during 1930. In order to train Soviet users, their technicians came to the U.S., and according to the contract, the American firms supplied personnel for field work in the Soviet Union. See the Amtorg Economic Review of the Soviet Union, July 1, 1929, 239.

2 Arcos Ltd., (an acronym for the All-Russian Cooperative Society, Ltd.) was established in London in 1920 under the fiction that it was a trading agency of the Moscow “non-governmental” cooperative, Centrosoyuz. Arcos was involved in a propaganda and subversion scandal that resulted in the 1927 break in British diplomatic relations with the U.S.S.R., and suffered a blow from which it never really recovered, even after diplomatic relations were restored in 1929. See Quigley, John, The Soviet Foreign Trade Monopoly (Columbus, Ohio, 1974), 21, 49.Google Scholar

3 Amtorg (acronym for the Russian “American Trade”) was incorporated under New York law in 1924 to conduct trade with the United States. Amtorg was the principal purchasing office for U.S. products, services, and technology during the trade expansion years of 1929–1933, and during World War II. It has not, however, figured prominently in the expansion of U.S.-Soviet commercial relations in the 1970s. Ibid., 90–91.

4 The Promparty (Industrial Party) was an early Vyshinsky fabrication that sought to link a formidable number of economists, engineers, and technicians together in a counter revolutionary conspiracy to commit industrial sabotage. It all culminated in a Promparty trial lasting from November 25 to December 7, 1930. The five “leaders,” including Leonid Konstantinovich Ramzin, a prominent heat power engineer, all confessed and were given ten years' penal servitude. This was really a spin-off of other campaigns against right wing deviation in the Party. See Katkov, George, The Trial of Bukharin (New York, 1969), 76.Google Scholar

5 Imperial Russian and Soviet officials alike have shown a remarkably broad oscillation in their attitudes toward those who have opposed their power. Revolutionaries like those who seized the Potemkin were lured back to Russia by trick and then exiled or executed. See Hough, Richard A., The Potemkin Mutiny (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1963).Google Scholar Counter revolutionaries were imprisoned, exiled, or worse, no matter whose passport they carried. This is nowhere better documented than in Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956, Vol. 1 (New York, 1973), 24–92.Google Scholar Also see Levytsky, Boris, The Uses of Terror (New York, 1972), 11–73.Google Scholar But in 1931, considerations of détente were strong enough to result in a significant number of former imperial Russian citizens returning as representatives of European or American firms. A similar phenomenon is now occurring in relation to those Soviets who refused repatriation to Stalin's U.S.S.R. after World War II imprisonment in German-occupied Europe. For details of the Allied repatriation policy, see Bethell, Nicholas, The Last Secret (New York, 1974).Google Scholar

6 Zernotrest (Soviet Grain trust) ran an enormous complex of Soviet State Farms (Sovkhozi) specializing in large single-crop grain production. Organized in 1928, by the next year it had put some 4,000,000 acres under its control, and by 1930, over 11,000,000, worked by some seventy Sovkhozi. As of 1929, the Sovkhozi of Zernotrest were situated in the following regions:

The years 1929–1931 were key ones for Zernotrest, a massive expansion of sown land being planned. A significant amount of foreign currency was allocated for the purchase of farm machinery abroad, along with technical instructors to train Soviet personnel in using and maintaining the equipment. Amtorg Economic Review of the Soviet Union, August 1, 1929, 266.

7 The Zernosovkhoz was a typical Soviet State Farm. Though relatively few in number, these agricultural “factories” accounted for most of the Soviet grain produced during the early 1930s. The Sovkhoz was a state-owned and state-operated enterprise. The personnel worked as regular employees, drawing salaries based on their work designation. This form of enterprise was thought by Stalin to be more productive than any other. His expectations were not realized, however, and by the end of the 1930s this form had been downgraded in favor of the collective farm (kolkhoz) where those who joined shared in the success or failure of the crop without any kind of regular salary. The state farm system was to be later expanded again for the development of the “virgin lands” and proved itself extremely effective when properly organized and adequately supplied with machinery, fertilizer, and agricultural expertise. Ann Dryden, “A Note on the Conversion of Collective Farms into State Farms”, Association for the Study of Soviet Type Economics Bulletin, VII, No. 3, 17–19.

8 Forty thousand hectares is equal to 100,000 acres. The “substations” were complete administrative units in charge of working specific areas of land.

9 Ten quintals per hectare is equal to 1.25 tons per acre.

10 Surrounding the land of the Zernosovkhoz were newly organized small-acreage collective farms, or kolkhozi. Beginning in 1929, strong official pressure, amounting in many areas to simple brute force, was applied on independent peasants throughout the Soviet Union to convince them to join these collective farms. The exact reasons for Stalin's decision to collectivize the peasantry are not well detailed even yet, but it is clear that breaking the economic power of the richer peasants (kulaks) was an important motive.

Each member of the kolkhoz shared in its output in proportion to the quality and quantity of his work. The state-levied quotas of output first had to be met – free of charge – and whatever was left over was to be distributed to the members of the kolkhoz partly in the form of money, partly in kind.

The forced collectivization and the catastrophic social, economic, and political dislocation resulted in very poor crop years in the early thirties. Poor weather conditions increased the general misery, and the total result was a severe famine the year after Jacob Reimer left the U.S.S.R. Reimer seems to have witnessed very little of the turmoil described by observers in Western Russia and the Ukraine. See Volin, Lazar, “The Russian Peasant: From Emancipation to Kolkhoz” in Black, Cyril, ed., The Transformation of Russian Society (Cambridge, Mass., 1960), 292–311.Google Scholar

11 The Soviet CTZ Tractor was a licensed copy of the International Harvester machine. The arrangement was not a totally satisfactory one for IHC but in the new era of increased trade begun in 1929, protests were not in good business taste. Besides, as Reimer noted, the copy was not serious competition for IHC.

12 Eleven quintales per hectare is equal to about one and ⅜ tons per acre. Four quintales per hectare is equal to ½ ton per acre.

13 The coats of arms were removed subsequently in 1937 on Stalin's orders. Rubies were said to have been ground to make a paste which was then cast in the form of the giant Red stars, which presently adom the Kremlin towers. Light bulbs placed inside added a final, typically Stalinist, touch. Florinsky, Michael T., ed., Encyclopedia of Russia and the Soviet Union, (New York, 1961), 290.Google Scholar

14 This project and various other similar ones rumored, never materialized. No Kremlin churches were demolished, and the only major new structure built within the Kremlin walls since the revolution was the Great Hall of Congresses, finished in 1961.

15 Reimer probably is referring to the widespread outbreaks of peasant unrest that took place between the fall of 1920 and the spring of 1921, culminating in the Kronstadt rebellion of March, 1921. Shapiro, Leonard, The Origin of the Communist Autocracy (New York, 1965), 296–361.Google Scholar Also see Carr, E. H., The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917–1923 (Baltimore, Md., 1952), 269–279.CrossRefGoogle Scholar