Who Built the USSR?
By Arthur Herman
This article appears in the Winter 2026 issue of the Coolidge Review. Request a free copy of a future print issue.
One of the epic stories of World War II is how Russian troops held the Stalingrad tractor factory against repeated assaults by German units from August to October 1942. That factory, the historians tell us, had produced more than half of the Soviet Union’s tractors before the war, and had begun manufacturing T-34 tanks in 1941. The factory finally fell in battle, but it was rebuilt after the war as a symbol of Soviet resistance to fascism—and an enduring icon of the economic miracle of Soviet socialism.
The truth was, the Stalingrad factory had been designed and built by American engineers and American workers living on-site in the early 1930s, and then outfitted by a dozen or so American companies, including International Harvester. The McClintic-Marshall Company made the plant’s steel structures, which then shipped to Stalingrad for assembly. The first tractors to roll off the assembly line in June 1930 were designed by the McCormick Deering company.
In other words, this supposed icon of Soviet industrial prowess was one of many examples where American companies, engineers, and workers helped transform the USSR into a major economic power.
Yet the myth persists that socialism and capitalism represent two alternate paths to industrialization and modernization. It’s a myth that haunts much of the history of the twentieth century, from Mao’s Great Leap Forward to Castro’s Cuba. The idea that socialism offered a viable alternative to capitalism even shaped the 2025 mayoral race in New York City.
In fact, there is only one reliable path to human prosperity: that of free-market capitalism. In the 1920s and 1930s, American capitalists showed up in Russia to rebuild every sector of its economy, from tractors and trucks, to iron and steel production, to electrification and railroads, to the oil and gas industry that sustains Russia’s economy to this day.
During those years more than 1,200 American architects, engineers, designers, and foremen—plus thousands of American volunteers—created the Soviet industrial revolution. In just three years, from 1929 to 1932, they built upward of 500 factories and trained more than 3,000 Soviet staff to run them.
It’s time to dispel the myth that has hung heavily over political economy debates for more than a century. Because when we pose the question Who really built the USSR?, the answer is unequivocal: the avatars of American capitalism.
America to the Rescue
One could even argue that without American capitalism and capitalists, there would be no Soviet Union at all. It was the American Relief Administration under Herbert Hoover that saved Russia from mass starvation following the Russian civil war. In a powerful gesture of humanitarianism and the desire to relieve human suffering, Hoover and ARA provided approximately $70 million worth of food and medical supplies (more than $1 billion today) to the fledgling Soviet Union, including 900,000 tons of food. There is every reason to believe that without Hoover and ARA, Lenin’s Bolshevik regime would never have survived.
Even so, civil war and early efforts at collectivization left Russia’s economy in ruins. Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin all eagerly looked to the United States to help rebuild their shattered nation and modernize the Soviet economy through the Communist Party’s Five-Year Plans. Whether they called it Taylorism, after the supposed expert on industrial management Frederick W. Taylor, or Fordism, after the inventor of the Model T, the Soviet aim was the same: emulate the American model, if possible with direct American help.
As it turned out, Americans were happy to oblige, starting with Henry Ford himself. Russia’s biggest need in the 1920s was not automobiles but tractors, to revive its agricultural base. Ford sent out one of the engineers who had built his new River Rouge plant, Leon Swajian, to construct tractor plants in Leningrad and Kharkov.
Stalingrad, however, proved to be the pride of the pack. Designed by Ford’s favorite industrial architect, Albert Kahn, the massive facility had another American, John Calder, as chief construction engineer. More than four hundred Americans lived full-time in Stalingrad, completing a plant that doubled the size of its model, the International Harvester plant in Milwaukee. A similar plant came together in Chelyabinsk in Siberia, covering nearly 2,500 acres with four miles of underground tunnels, all built with imported U.S. steel. When finished, the Chelyabinsk plant would turn out 55,000 tractors a year.
The cumulative result was startling. In 1924 there were 1,000 tractors in all of Russia. Ten years later, the Soviet Union had more than 200,000, thanks to Ford, International Harvester, and other American companies. By 1927, an estimated 85 percent of all trucks and tractors in the USSR were Ford-built.
Manufacturing tractors and other vehicles requires steel. In 1930 an American engineering firm, Arthur G. McKee & Company of Cleveland, undertook construction of a steel plant at Magnitogorsk that aimed to be the biggest in the world. The Russian steelworks was modeled on the U.S. Steel plant in Gary, Indiana. Once again, American workers arrived to help with the construction and train Russian managers to run a modern steel foundry.
Other steel plants around the country soon followed, including one in Kuznetsk designed and built by Freyn Engineering, another American company. John Calder himself wound up in charge of ninety Soviet steel plants in 1931, most of them American-designed and engineered.
Industrial plants in turn demand electrical power, far more than anything Soviet Russia could provide. Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin brought in an American engineer, Hugh Cooper, to build a massive hydroelectric dam at Dnieprostroi. Cooper’s station revolutionized the Soviet hydroelectric industry. He received the Red Banner of Labor award.
Land of OPPORTUNITY
What drove most American companies to the Soviet Union wasn’t ideological solidarity, or naivete. In the early 1930s, the Soviets offered opportunities for big projects that an America hit by the Great Depression could not. American industrial consultants poured into the USSR.
Albert Kahn, for example, opened an office in Moscow and designed hundreds of factories and plants. Americans also reorganized Soviet railroads, which would get an additional boost thanks to Lend-Lease during World War II. Something similar happened in the Soviet oil industry, owing largely to the founder of Koch Industries. Frank Koch, father of Charles and David, built fifteen modern oil refineries in the Soviet Union between 1929 and 1932.
American workers flooded in, too—as many as ten thousand at one point in the early 1930s. One of them, John Scott, published an account of his time working at Magnitogorsk, Behind the Urals: An American Worker in Russia’s City of Steel. Scott arrived with all the enthusiasm of a socialist true believer. But he and other Americans were soon discouraged by the Communist regime’s impossible timelines and incompetent management style.
For example, the Soviet authorities set an unrealistic deadline for completing the blast furnace. One worker later recalled seeing the slogan “Blast Furnace by the Deadline!” posted “literally everywhere” in the plant, including the bathrooms. Even with crews working around the clock, the furnace wasn’t ready by the October 1931 deadline. Nor was it finished by the revised deadline, more than a month later. The Communist Party then set a final deadline: February 1932.
As historian Stephen Kotkin recounts, the McKee company objected, knowing that Russia’s severe winter—when temperatures reached 20 degrees below zero—would make the task impossible. When the Soviets chose to move ahead anyway, McKee officials ordered their on-site manager not to cooperate.
On February 1, Magnitogorsk began operating the blast furnace, to great fanfare. But the furnace was only three-quarters complete, according to a McKee employee. An accident that same day forced a shutdown. Kotkin writes that “there were no fewer than 550 stoppages of the furnace in the first year alone.” In November 1933 the Soviets had to shut down the furnace for good.
Scott and his American coworkers also discovered that most of their Russian counterparts were in effect slave labor. Tens of thousands of Russia’s forced laborers fled Magnitogorsk when they could, while tens of thousands more were dragged in to replace them. All across the Soviet Union, the industrial sites built by American capitalist enterprise became prison work camps for the Communist regime.
In the end, the brutal administrative methods of Soviet socialism, which rewarded incompetence and corruption, became impossible obstacles to further cooperation with Americans. Disillusioned companies pulled out when they could. Calder returned to the United States in 1933, stating that the Soviets were “broke.” Others saw their investments in Soviet enterprises vanish, through either business failure or Soviet collectivization.
That was when things were going well. When Stalin’s purges kicked in after 1936, thousands of American workers found themselves caught in the gulag dragnet. Their horrific stories of arrest and torture are told in Tim Tzouliadis’s book The Forsaken. The men and women who had built the USSR wound up as its victims, through imprisonment and even execution.
But the historical record is clear. Without the assistance of American capitalist companies and engineers, the Soviet economy would never have gotten off the ground. And without the millions of dollars of U.S. assistance during World War II, Stalin’s regime could never have survived the Nazi onslaught.
For example, through the Lend-Lease agreement, the United States saved the Soviet railway system, which proved crucial to transporting troops and supplies during the war. America provided almost half of the iron rails the USSR used in the war, plus thousands of locomotives and boxcars when Soviet production plummeted. Between 1941 and 1945, the Russian historian Boris Sokolov writes, the United States delivered 2.4 times as many locomotives as the Soviets produced domestically.
That influx of American infrastructure aid also enabled the Soviet economy to rebound when the war ended.
Dining with the Devil
The lessons of American capitalism’s essential role in building Soviet socialism extend into our own time. When the full story of Communist China’s economic “miracle” in the 1980s and 1990s is written, it will likewise turn out that American companies, engineers, and technologies, and even the U.S. government, made it possible for China to become the world’s second biggest economy.
Meanwhile, Apple is just the latest company in Communist China learning what Arthur G. McKee, Freyn Engineering, and dozens of other American firms learned in the Communist Soviet Union in the 1930s: when you dine with the devil, as the saying goes, you’d better bring a long spoon.
Arthur Herman is a historian and a Pulitzer Prize finalist. He is the author of many books, including Freedom’s Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II and the forthcoming Founder’s Fire: From 1776 to the Age of Trump (April).
This article appears in the Winter 2026 issue of the Coolidge Review. Request a free copy of a future print issue.