The Forsaken: an American Tragedy in Stallin's Russia

The Forsaken: an American Tragedy in Stallin's Russia

No other firm in the united state, conducted as business with Joseph Stalin as the Ford motor company between 1929 and 1936. Henry Ford understood very well that the power and allure of the automobile transcended ideology. The whole of mankind was in love with speed and, in that respect at least, Bolsheviks were no different. The simplicity, speed, and scale of the industrial operation were a miraculous achievement. The construction of Soviet Detroit, therefore, was deemed essential to the Bolshevik cause. Henry Ford’s unpalatable hatred of labor unions would have to be politely ignored as the Soviet ideologues embraced Ford as a secular saint holding the keys to a mechanical heaven. The Ford Motor Company had constructed a giant auto plant on the empty Russian steppe. Henry ford had been too delighted to sell the Soviets the necessary industrial blue prints and machinery, together with seventy-five thousand knocked down Ford model A’s from the River Rouge plant. It was a deal sweetened by the guarantee of five years of technical assistance and the promise of American labor and know-how. The soviet contract was worth forty million dollars paid for in gold at the height of depression. Henry Ford could hardly suppress his joy at the prospects of being paid forty million dollars for old Model A plant he had only been planning to scrap. Henry ford point of view, it was simply too great an opportunity to refuse. Ford’s operations in Russia proved to be an economic suicide. Ford’s main strength was cheap mass production but Soviet management couldn’t even grasp the most basic principal of mass production and they were producing different incomplete cars and trucks one after the other. Russian’s active measures tried to pretend this disaster into a success of their mass production through propaganda initially but that couldn’t last longer. The death of Kirov was an act of terror that triggered evens of repression on the part of the soviet regime that made even the...

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