The Soviet Union in the 1930s introduced a large number of advanced techniques and technologies from the West, mainly through the medium of foreign firms and engineers and experts, which led to great achievements in the socialist industrialization of the USSR.On August 14, 1933, it was written in the Soviet magazine, "For the sake of industrialization", that "the combination of American commerce and science with the ingenuity of the Bolsheviks has, in the course of three or four years In three or four years the combination of American business and science with Bolshevik ingenuity has produced tremendous results. ......" [1] (pp. 1-2) In October 1929, the Soviet government approved more than seventy agreements on foreign technical assistance and technical advice, of which the United States accounted for fifty-five, or seventy-eight per cent, of the projects to which the USSR received assistance [2] (p. 207). Of the 104 technical assistance agreements executed in 1930, about 84 were with American and German companies. between 1929 and 1945, about 200 technical assistance agreements between the USSR and foreign companies were in execution [1] (p.16). It can be said that in the 1930s all the backbone of large enterprises in the USSR were armed with advanced foreign technology. in June 1944 Stalin had told the Americans that about 2/3 of the large enterprises in the USSR were built with the help or technical assistance of the United States, and the remaining 1/3 with the help or technical assistance of Germany, France, Great Britain, Sweden, Italy, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Finland, and Japan. The remaining one-third was built "with the help or technical assistance" of Germany, France, Britain, Sweden, Italy, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland and Japan.
The three largest steel plants in the Soviet Union, Magnitogorsk, Kuznets and Zaporozhye, were built with U.S. assistance. Among them, the Magnitogorsk Iron and Steel Works was designed on the model of the Gerry Plant of U.S. Steel, the world's largest steel conglomerate at the time, while the rest of the 20 original iron and steel plants were technologically upgraded with foreign help. The largest hydroelectric power plant on the Dnieper River in the USSR was built in 1933 by introducing American technical equipment and employing American technical experts. The famous Gorky automobile plant was a new plant built in the early 1930s with the assistance of the American Ford Motor Company, while the two old plants in Moscow and Yaroslavl were expanded and completely re-equipped with new foreign workhorses. These three plants, together with a smaller Moscow assembly plant opened in 1940, constituted the Soviet automobile industry before World War II. The Stalingrad Tractor Plant was built in its entirety in the U.S. and then dismantled and shipped to the USSR, with some 80 U.S. manufacturers building all of the equipment for the plant, which was assembled in the USSR by the Americans and Germans. The Kharkov Tractor Plant was also built with foreign aid, with equipment made in Germany and the United States, and with an American as chief engineer of construction. In the production of airplanes and engines, the United States supplied Soviet aircraft or aircraft accessories and gave technical assistance.
In addition to the introduction of advanced Western technology in heavy industry, the Soviet Union at the same time introduced a large number of advanced Western technology and equipment in light industry, agriculture and transportation. For example, the production of cotton fabrics in the Soviet Union was revitalized with the assistance of Germany and the importation of American raw cotton financed by the Chase Bank of the United States. Later, land irrigation projects in Turkestan and Transcaucasia, the concentrated cotton-producing regions of the USSR, were assisted by Davis, a renowned irrigation engineer who served as a consultant on the construction of the Panama Canal and as the head of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. Davis had already surveyed the possibility of irrigating the Karagan wastelands, the "hungry steppes" of Central Asia, in 1913 and had advised the Russian authorities to carry out more in-depth surveys and design work, and in June 1929 he was invited to Moscow and told that his plans were already underway. He stayed on as general adviser to the General Administration of Cotton of the USSR and was responsible for the entire engineering of the Central Asia irrigation scheme.
2. The introduction of Western technicians and specialists.
The Soviet Union imported Western technicians and experts in large numbers along with advanced Western technology. "A Soviet document of 1936 reported that in 1932 there were about 6,800 foreign specialists of various kinds working in the heavy industry sector, and another Soviet document reported that about 1,700 American engineers were working in the heavy industry sector." During the first five-year plan, about 400-500 American Finns worked in the Soviet Union. In 1932, 200 Germans were in Magnitogorsk, and 730 American engineers and specialists worked at various times at the Stalingrad Tractor Plant. 350 construction workers from the British Metropolitan-Wick Company worked in the Soviet Union before 1933.
3. Funds were brought in to solve financial difficulties.
Before the economic crisis, the USSR was ostracized and isolated, and it was difficult to get loans supported by the West. Before 1926, the USSR only got a small number of short-term corporate loans from the West, and the interest rate was as high as 15-20%. After the crisis, in 1929 Britain introduced a system of credit guarantees for Soviet exports, and in 1930 Italy provided state guarantees for loans of 200 million lire to the Soviet Union, which was increased in 1937 to 350 million lire. Germany, Sweden, Denmark, and Norway also provided such credits, and in 1935 the USSR received its first financial loan from Germany for five years at an interest rate of only 6 percent, and in 1936 the interest rate on a British loan to the USSR was lowered to 5.5 percent. In August 1939, Nazi Germany and the USSR signed a trade agreement to provide loans to the USSR for the importation of German equipment. Molotov said, "This agreement was favorable to us because its credit terms (seven-year term) enabled us to order a large additional amount of equipment that we urgently needed." [1] (p.3) The availability of these credits solved the problem of financing the import of equipment into the USSR and provided financial security for the development of socialist industrialization in the USSR.