Guarded ambivalence characterized the Soviet attitude towards the US in the interwar period. Although the US was one of the participants in the Allied intervention, this facet of US-Soviet relations did not loom large in the interwar Russian press, unlike the Cold War. Although the US was clearly a member of the capitalist camp, Soviet interwar writings often evinced a curious attraction to American modernity and methods.
Even though both American Fordism and Taylorism were a tool of modern capital, these systems were highly attractive to Soviet leaders as a modern scientifically-vindicated means to efficiently organize production. In a famous 1914 article "The Taylor System—Man’s Enslavement by the Machine" by Lenin encapsulated this mixture of repulsion and attraction to American methods. Although Lenin held that Taylorism was a means to chain the workers to their machines, he averred that:
The Taylor system—without its initiators knowing or wishing it—is preparing the time when the proletariat will take over all social production and appoint its own workers’ committees for the purpose of properly distributing and rationalizing all social labor. Large-scale production, machinery, railways, telephone—all provide thousands of opportunities to cut by three-fourths the working time of the organized workers and make them four times better off than they are today.
And these workers’ committees, assisted by the workers’ unions, will be able to apply these principles of rational distribution of social labor when the latter is freed from its enslavement by capital.
Soviet planners were also heavily influenced by America's seemingly can-do attitude and use of science and technology to solve its problems. The fact that the US had been able to provide its population modern amenities like radios and automobiles in unprecedented numbers was a facet of American life that greatly interested many Soviet planners. The US's formal recognition of the USSR in 1933 led to an increasing number of trade delegations to the US and the importation of American machinery to feed a few mega-projects of the Stalinist Five-Year Plans. According to one Soviet memoirist, Stalin decided he needed his own counterpart to the steel-works of Gary, Indiana after receiving a report on it. The massive steel Soviet urban center Magnitogorsk was to be the Soviet Gary. From engineering projects like the Golden Gate Bridge to consumer items like radios or hamburgers, America's whole-hearted embrace of modernity made it an attractive subject for analysis. Imported US machines had a high reputation for quality and reliability.
Of course an interest in American methods and products did not necessarily translate into an acceptance of the United States's capitalism or government. Perhaps because the popular awareness of the US's modernity among the greater Soviet public, the state began to emphasize Jim Crow and the repression of African-Americans in its propaganda. Although African-American communists were the first to breach this problem to the Bolsheviks, the idea that underneath American modernity was racial repression became a common theme in Soviet writings on the US from the late 1920s through the Cold War. Soviet architects would often extol American skyscrapers' technical merits but would castigate their soullessness and attention to bourgeois ornamentalism. The two Soviet Flâneurs Il'ia Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov wrote a highly popular travelogue on the US One-storied America which sought to explicitly dispel popular myths about the US. The title referred to the substance beneath the America's slick image:
America is primarily a country of one- or two-story buildings. This is the primary unavoidable condition with which you shall have to reconcile yourselves comrades, if you want to see the energetic, smiling, yet at the same time sickly and oversensitive face of the United States.
Ilf and Petrov would report not only on the giant skyscrapers and factories, but also the allegedly narrow-minded and constricted nature of small-town American life.
But although both Ilf and Petrov attack Main Street USA, they never extend their critique to the entirety of American culture and society. They reported warmly on their contacts with individual Americans ranging from working-class individuals to artists and intellectuals.
This paradoxical estimation of America, simultaneously emulating and rejecting American modernity, would be resolved with the advent of the Cold War when extolling American modernity meant undercutting Soviet claims to have already mastered it.
Sources
Clark, Katerina. Moscow, the Fourth Rome Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Evolution of Soviet Culture, 1931-1941. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2011.
Fitzpatrick, Sheila, Alexander Rabinowitch, and Richard Stites. Russia in the Era of NEP: Explorations in Soviet Society and Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991.
Kotkin, Stephen. Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism As a Civilization. Berkeley, Calif: Univ. of California Press, 1995.
Schlögel, Karl. Moscow, 1937. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2012.