Page 48 - The Chief Culprit

Industrialization and Collectivization y 25

the maximum production of gold was 64 tons, in 1913; average annual gold production in
the world in 1930–39 was 803 tons. erefore, just the Kolyma camps were providing Stalin
with 12 percent of the world’s gold production.
5
Siberian and Far East gold was the golden key to the success of industrialization. But
Dal’stroy was not the only place where gold was mined. Stalin also paid for foreign technol-
ogy with coal, nickel, manganese, petroleum, cotton, and also with lumber, caviar, and furs.
In 1930, the main Soviet export became grain. ey managed to get 883 million gold rubles
for the exported grain. e sales of oil and oil products and also timber and timber products
produced another 430 million gold rubles. Capitalists paid almost 500 million gold rubles
for flax and furs.
Later on, because of grain overproduction in the United States, world grain prices
dropped. In 1932–33, the overall revenue from grain sales, at very low “dumping” prices,
was only 369 million gold rubles. In 1933, the revenue from grain sales was only 8 percent of
overall export revenues. Even half of the grain sold during 1932–33 would have been enough
to save all of the country’s regions from starvation. 6
Millions of slaves of communism fulfilled the first Five Year Plan, while at the same time
the United States experienced an unprecedented economic crisis, which spread to Europe. e
crisis gave additional impulse to Stalin’s buildup. Finding themselves in the midst of the Great
Depression, inventors and businessmen in America, Germany, Great Britain, and France sold
technology at low prices. Fortunately, Stalin had plenty of gold in reserve. Western technol-
ogy was the main key to success. In the beginning of the 1930s, the USSR became the world’s
biggest importer of machinery and equipment. e People’s Commissar of Heavy Industry,
Sergo Ordzhonikidze, declared with satisfaction: “Our plants, our mines, our factories are
now equipped with such outstanding technology that no other country has. . . .Where did
we get it from? We bought from the Americans, from the Germans, from the French, from
the British the most advanced technological achievement and then outfitted our enterprises.”
And then he added, with a dig: “ ey, themselves, still have their plants and mines equipped
with nineteenth- and early twentieth-century equipment.” 7
American engineers traveled to the Soviet Union and designed factories, while Stalin’s
slaves dug pits, poured concrete roads, and erected walls. Right away, cranes, tools, and
equipment came from abroad, and the foreign engineers mounted, set, and tested all this. In
the early 1930s, to the amazement of the entire world, in the city of Nizhny Tagil sprang up
the most powerful industrial enterprise in the world—Uralvagonzavod (the Ural Railroad
Car Factory).
Americans talk with deserved pride of the giant factory which they designed and built
not in America, but in the Soviet Union. During the course of six decades, until the very
crumbling of the Soviet Union, Uralvagonzavod remained the largest enterprise in the world
(the Guinness book of world records confirms this). Uralvagonzavod was built in such a man-
ner that it could at any moment switch from producing railroad cars to producing tanks. In
1941, an order was issued to produce tanks, and Uralvagonzavod without any delays began
mass production. During four years of war, Uralvagonzavod produced 35,000 T-34 tanks. It
also produced other weapons.
e Chelyabinsk tractor factory was also built in the Urals at the same time. It also was
built according to American designs and fully outfitted with American equipment, and it also
was built in such a way that at any moment it could stop producing tractors and instead begin