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The American Connection: Ideology and the Transfer of American Technology to the Soviet Union, 1917–1941

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

Kendall E. Bailes
Kendall E. Bailes
Affiliation:
University of California, Irvine
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Extract

When one nation looks to another as an example for social and economic change, as the Soviet Union did to certain aspects of American experience for a time after 1917, the results are likely to reveal much about the borrower nation—its dominant values as well as its economy and social structure. The role which foreign, and particularly American, technology and industrial expertise played in the Soviet economy during the interwar period is still inadequately understood and is a subject of some controversy, with implications not only for an understanding of Soviet history and society but for the study of international technology transfers. (The term technology will be used here not only in the sense of “machinery” and processes, but in the broader sense of Simon Kuznets's phrase, “stock of knowledge,” that is, the knowledge of techniques of production, including economic organization.) Such transfers, particularly those between economically advanced and less-developed countries, have played an important but as yet inadequately studied role in modern history.

Type
The Transfer of Technology
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 23 , Issue 3 , July 1981 , pp. 421 - 448
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1981

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References

Portions of this article were presented to the annual meeting of the American Historical Association in New York, December 1979; the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association in Honolulu, August 1979; and at the Seminar on Russian and East European Studies, University of California at Los Angeles, November 1976. My thanks to Hans Rogger, FredCarstensen, David Joravsky, John Stephan, Bruce B. Parrott, and others for their suggestions and comments.

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