Not only were they observing industrial activities in other nations, they were actively recruiting people from heavily industrialized places to come help plan and build the industrial infrastructure of the Soviet Union. One of the best examples of this phenomenon was in the city of Magnitogorsk, which was explicitly designed with Gary, Indiana in mind as a template for an industrial city. Magnitogorsk was built literally from the ground up where there had been no city before, at the southern tip of the Urals, with the goal of being the model Soviet, transformative industrial project.

But it was more than an industrial strategy, there was a cultural element here as well. Stephen Kotkin elaborates in his comprehensive and excellent book on Magnitogorsk Magnetic Mountain:

What Magnitogorsk and Gary shared was a sense that they constituted no merely a single city, however important, but an entire civilization, and that their civilization could rightfully lay claim to being the vanguard of progressive humanity. It was no accident that Gary became the model for Magnitogorsk, for after the revolution in the Russian empire there was an enormous amount of admiring discussion of the United States as the world’s most advanced civilization, and of a kind of “Soviet Americanism” as history’s next stage. The Soviet cult of America – a young, dynamic country that appeared to have made itself – took many forms, from the worship of industrial technology to a sense among large segment of the population that they had inherited from the Americans the mantle of civilization and enlightenment, even as their envy and imitation persisted.

Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (University of California Press, 1995), 363.

In 1930, Arthur Mckee and Co., an American firm Cleveland, won a bid with the Soviet government to provide technical assistance in building Magnitogorsk. Mckee played an enormous role in the initial planning for Magnitogorsk’s industrial facilities including the huge steel plant at the center of the city’s industrial aspirations. Kotkin also wrote substantially on this arrangement in the same book cited above.

The firm was also responsible for directing work on the site until the factory and mine were put into operation, for consulting on equipment orders, for building an electric power station and a damn, an for training Soviet engineers both at the site and in the United States. ... The agreement further specified… that Mckee was to design everything to be as large as possible, allow for future expansion, economize on the use of materials and on fuel, avoid unnecessary complications or specification s for unusual equipment, keep in mind the availability of construction materials in the USSR, follow Soviet standards and norms, prepare all designs in both English and Russia, using the metric system. (Kotkin, 43-45)

McKee engineers arrived in May or June 1930 and didn’t make it out to the Magnitogorsk site until summer, according to Kotkin. The actual conditions were so fire that the McKee plan could barely be put into action – the transportation was awful, the infrastructure was barely existent, and it seemed like one problem simply led to another. The McKee employees at the site were given a huge amount of power to do as they pleased to direct the construction, but they were largely not trained in nor capable of managing such a large task themselves, and the plans they had created had been created in only a couple of months (per the timeline the Soviet government had demanded), so they were unable to meet many of their initial goals. Eventually there was a falling out between McKee and the Soviet government because of the failure to produce results at the rate the government demanded, and the McKee employees were sent home. Nonetheless, the Soviet officials at the Magnitogorsk site still had the plans and tried to implement them. German and Ukrainian firms were brought into help fill the gaps, but I’m afraid I don’t know many of the details there.

Additionally, many Americans went to the Soviet Union following the revolution in an attempt to help build socialism. Turning again to Magnitogorsk, one of the most famous examples of an American taking part in the industrialization of the Soviet Union is John Scott, who worked in Magnitogorsk. Scott was becoming disillusioned with the United States because of the depression (as were many Americans), and Scott decided to travel to the Soviet Union. In his memoir, Scott wrote:

I was about to participate in the construction of this society. I was going to be on eof many who cared not to own a second p[air of shoes, but who built blast furnaces which were their own. It was September, 1932 and I was twenty years old.

John Scott, Behind the Urals: An American Worker in Russia’s City of Steel. Enlarged Edition. (Indiana University Press, 1989), 5. (the original was published in 1942 and I have an oddball edition, so page numbers for you will vary).

Scott was obviously very idealistic about what he was going to participate in, but he, like many Soviet citizens too, viewed the project as having a huge reward – building a new civilization. The conditions were often terrible – cold, dangerous, without quite enough food, uncomfortable – but the idea was that they were the generation that would bear the hardship of building the new world so that the next generations could benefit. This was a very real feeling among people who believed in the Soviet project – and many did – during the extreme hardship of rapid industrialization in the Soviet 1930s. Scott’s memoir (citation above) is absolutely worth a read and gives an amazing window in both the idealism and the difficulty that was so prevalent in the period of “building socialism” in the Soviet Union.