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382
3 MauriceHindus,
HumanityUprooted (New York, 1929), 355-69; idem, BrokenEarth (New
York, 1931), 29, 107, 106; Walter Duranty, "Talk of Ford Favors Thrills Moscow," New York
Times, 17 February 1928, p. 7; idem, Duranty Reports (New York, 1934), 19, 246; Theodore
Dreiser, Dreiser Looks at Russia (New York, 1928), 76, 52.
4 Dreiser, Dreiser Looks at Russia; Hindus,
Humanity Uprooted, 355. Henry Ford's 1922
autobiography,My Life and Work(translatedas Moia zhizn', moi dostizheniia), had four Russian
editions in 1924 alone; an eighth appearedin Leningradin 1927. His Today and Tomorrow,
publishedin 1926, had at least three Russian editions. The third, published in Leningradin 1928
under the title Segodnia i zavtra, carried a preface by D. I. Zaslavskii which was designed to
counter the infatuationwith Ford of which the book at hand was an example. Also see S. G.
Ledenev, Preface, Za stankomu Forda (Moscow, 1927); and 0. E. Ermanskii,Legenda o Forde
(n.p., n.d.). For other warnings against the excesses of Americanism, see note 74 below.
just like a machine. But in the end the Russiansagree to work at a pace that is
even faster than the American one.5
In two of his novels, Ilya Ehrenburgmocks the figure of the Americanized
Soviet managerwhose deficiencies of charactermake him indistinguishable
from his American counterpartand call into question his dedication to com-
munism. One of these, Boris Ilyin, is a directorof the fisheries trust, behaves
like an American magnate, smokes Manila cigars, thinks only in millions of
tons or billions of rubles, and regulateshis life by the clock. Anotheris Boris
K., a young executive of the state petroleumsyndicate, who has actuallybeen
to the United States and brought back with him a Dictaphone, which is his
chief instrumentof communicationwith his fellow workersand the measure
of his alienationfrom them. He too lives by a stricttimetable, in which there
are only minutes for the girl whose love he does not return,and whose death
he causes when she accidentally runs into his speeding Ford car. He speaks
enthusiastically of the United States, of the Ford factory, and of splendid
bathrooms and rational bookkeeping, adding perfunctorily:"Naturally, we
must give it all anothercontent, but we should acquire the technique."6
Yet there was ideological warrantfor Americanism, if not for its excesses.
Lenin had posited the necessity of catching up with and overtakingthe most
advanced countries economically on the eve of the October Revolution. In
early 1918, he elaborated:"Soviet power + the orderof the Prussianrailroads
+ American technique and the organization of trusts + American public
education etc. etc. + + = L = socialism." Nikolai Bukharin, one of the
party's chief theoreticians, declared in a speech of February 1923 that the
resumptionof the advance toward socialism requiredcadres who combined
the best qualities of the old Russian intelligentsia-Marxist training,theoreti-
cal scope, and analytical penetration-with an American grasp. "We need
Marxism plus Americanism."7
Just weeks afterLenin's death in January1924, Joseph Stalin, in a series of
lecturesbefore the men and women who were to staff the burgeoningapparat
of the Bolshevik Party, restated elaborately, and with enormous resonance,
what Lenin and Bukharinhad said more privately, more sketchily, or more
casually. Appearingin Pravda in April and May of that year, and republished
many times under the title Foundations of Leninism, the lectures were de-
signed to establish their author'scredentialsas an interpreterand systematizer
of Lenin's thought and to help buttress Stalin's claim to the late leader's
political legacy. Of particularinterest for present purposes is the concluding
section, "Style in Work." There, having set out to define what constitutedthe
special Leninist style in partyand governmentwork, Stalin characterizedit as
a combinationof "Russianrevolutionarysweep" and, surprisingly, "Ameri-
can efficiency." The Russian word he used, delovitost', also suggests the
condition of being practical, businesslike, workmanlike.8
Russian revolutionarysweep, of course, came first. It was, Stalin said, the
antidoteto inertia, routine, conservatism, mental stagnation, and the unques-
tioning acceptance of tradition. Without its life-giving force, no forward
movement was possible. But by itself, unchecked by American practicality,
Russianrevolutionarysweep ran the risk of degeneratinginto Manilovism,the
kind of futile daydreamingto which a characterin Gogol's Dead Souls had
given his name, and of which there was all too much among too many
Communists. "American efficiency," Stalin hymned, "is that indomitable
force which neitherknows nor recognizes obstacles; which continues at a task
once starteduntil it is finished, even if it is a minor task; and without which
serious constructive work is impossible.... The combination of Russian
revolutionarysweep and American efficiency is the essence of Leninism in
party and state work."9
Making American delovitost' a chief ingredientof Leninism, and doing so
in such rhapsodicterms, still appearsextravagant,even if Stalin's advocacyof
the American style was not, per se, a radical departurefrom orthodoxy. To
ask that Russian Communistsadopt the work methods and habits of the most
advancedof the capitalistcountrieswas no violation of a doctrinewhich held
that the achievementsof capitalismwere a way-stationon mankind'smarchto
the socialist future. In July 1924, for example, Trotsky balanced an indict-
ment of Americanexpansionismwith a call for copying Americantechniques
and skills: "Americanized Bolshevism will triumph and smash imperialist
Americanism."10 It remainsto be explained, nonetheless, why Stalin chose to
recommend American virtues above all others to his listeners, why he as-
sumed that his appeal would evoke a positive response, why Americanism
did, in fact, find such a loud and lasting echo, and why for years to come
slogans exhortingRussia to catch up with and outstripAmerica were thought
8 I. V.
Stalin, Sochineniia (Moscow, 1947), VI, 186-88; idem, Problems of Leninism
(Moscow, 1954), 109-111.
9 Stalin, Problems of Leninism, 111; Sochineniia, idem, VI, 188.
10 L. D. Trotskii, "K voprosu o perspektivakh
mirovogo razvitiia," Izvestiia, 5 August 1924,
pp. 3-4.
the lower price of bread.... Whatis needed to move the mountainsof routine
and prejudice is faith... that the golden age lies not behind but ahead of
mankind."13 That faith, which Saint-Simongave to Franceand FriedrichList
to Germany, orthodoxMarxism, Gerschenkronbelieved, had given to Russia
in the 1890s. Marxismhad reconciledan intelligentsiaenamoredof the village
commune and the craft cooperativeto the adventof capitalistindustrialization
by representingit as the result of an iron law of historicaldevelopment. It was
this that explained the power of Marxist thought over men whose Wel-
tanschauung was altogether alien to the ideas of Marxian socialism. "In
conditions of Russia's 'absolute' backwardness... a much more powerful
ideology was required to grease the intellectual and emotional wheels of
industrializationthan either in France or Germany." What Gerschenkron
called the "hybrid ideological concoction that went under the misnomer of
Marxism" was employed years laterto sanction Stalinistmethodsof industri-
alization.14
Gerschenkronwas, of course, correct in crediting Marxism with causing
much of the Russian intelligentsia to welcome what it had once feared and
resisted. Historianshave often describedhow Marxism swept the intellectual
arena in the 1890s and how profoundlyit affected the terms of political and
economic debate, in large part because it was Western and affirmed a se-
quence of developmental stages through which Russia, too, would have to
pass. But there were those in the intelligentsia, and many more outside its
ranks, who rejected Marxism in whole or in part for one or several reasons:
because they could not abide its acceptanceof the inevitabilityof mass suffer-
ing or because of its neglect (borderingon contempt)of the peasantry;because
it sought abundanceout of mechanizedproductionratherthanthe distributive
justice of other brandsof socialism; or because it was atheistic, antinational,
and egalitarian. And Marxism held no appeal for that very business and
governmentalclass whose memberswere among the naturalleaders and pro-
ponents of economic development, and little for a large and growing number
of engineers and architects,agronomistsand economists, teachersand doctors
who did not sharethe intelligentsia'spredispositionfor ultimatesolutions and
who sought more pragmatic,less ideological, answersfor Russia's problems.
And then, both before and afterthe Bolshevik Revolution, therewere men and
women who found the complexities of Marxist theory difficult to grasp and
who were left unmoved by its grandabstractionsand broadhistoricalvistas.
That is why Americanism, the advocacy and invocation of the American
13
Alexander Gerschenkron, "Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective," in The
Progress of UnderdevelopedAreas, B. F. Hoselitz, ed. (Chicago, 1952), 3-39. Quotations:23,
25.
14 Gerschenkron, "Economic Backwardness"; idem, "Problems and Patterns of Russian
Economic Development," in The Transformationof Russian Society, Cyril Black, ed. (Cam-
bridge, Mass., 1960), 115.
15 See Richard
Kindersley, TheFirst RussianRevisionists(Oxford, 1962), 29-67. Cf. Richard
Pipes, Struve.Liberalon the Left, 1870-1905 (Cambridge,Mass., 1970), 52-64, 111-13; Arthur
P. Mendel, Dilemmas of Progress in Tsarist Russia (Cambridge,Mass., 1961), 139ff.
papers, their books and lectures, were discussed, reviewed, and cited and,
judging by the familiarityand recurrenceof theirthemes and theses, they must
have had a cumulativeeffect. Together with Americanand Europeanwriters,
who were read both in the original and in translation,these Russians shaped
an image of America that, albeit with negative connotations, even its critics
adopted and perpetuated. When Dostoevsky, for example, on reading and
disliking a journalist's glowing reports from the United States, remarkedin
1878 that "mankindcan live without America, without railroads,even with-
out bread," he was indirectly paying tribute to America's most envied
achievements. The horrorinspired in the populist philosopher Nikolai Mik-
hailovskii by the soulless and mindless American machine he saw in 1873,
a machine that turnedout a shoe every seven minutes and robbed maker and
product alike of humanity and individuality, was only the reverse side of
the coin on which, some forty years later, the poet Ilya Zdanevichstampedthe
outrageousclaim thatan Americanshoe was superiorto the Venus de Milo.16
No doubt to a Russianpeasantor worker, Zdanevich's slogan was true, and
Americanshoes came to be known, liked, and manufacturedin Russia, a fact
which reveals anotherof Americanism's attractions.Precisely because it was
not a movement or ideology, an all-embracingfaith that prescribed for all
areasof life and demandedtotal commitment,could it have such broadappeal
and gain so many adherents. Pace Gerschenkron,it was the lower price of
bread and the better allocation of resources that made America, the visible
embodiment of high productivityand well-being, the model for their attain-
ment. It was exactly its pragmatism, its concentrationon bread-and-butter
issues and everyday concerns, that permittedAmericanismto evade ideologi-
cal or political issues of great moment and allowed Russians of widely diver-
gent persuasionsto choose from its stock of techniques, methods, and motives
only those which they found congenial to their own purposes and beliefs.
True, it was the liberals and technocrats who found it easiest to accept
Americanmodels. But conservativesand socialists could also point to Ameri-
ca's free press and schools, the social and geographicalmobility of its people,
and their freedom from governmentcontrols and tutelage as prime factors of
Americaningenuity and brillianteconomic success, and thereforerecommend
imitation. In 1834, the authorof an article on Americanrailroadstried to still
fears that the building of railways in Russia would dangerouslyfacilitate the
circulation of people and ideas by arguing that there was no connection
between the flourishingof this new mode of transportationand the republican
institutionsof the United States; the American spirit of enterprisewas inde-
pendent of political forms and resulted from the love of profit alone.17And
16
F. M. Dostoevskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh (Leningrad, 1972- ), XI,
233; David Hecht, "Mikhailovskij and the United States," Harvard Slavic Studies, 4 (1957),
268; Vladimir Markov, Russian Futurism (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1968), 185.
17 R. M.
Haywood, The Beginnings of Railway Development in Russia in the Reign of
Nicholas 1, 1835-1852 (Durham, N.C., 1969), 177.
18 0. Savich and I. Ehrenburg,My i oni: Frantsiia (Berlin, 1931); M. Kh. Reutem, "Vliianie
ekonomicheskago kharakteranaroda na obrazovanie kapitalov," Morskoi sbornik, 46:5 (April
1860), 59.
19 The poet Alexander Pushkin, writing in 1834, provided an early example of the horror
English industrialismcould inspire: "Read the complaintsof the English factory workers;your
hair will standon end. How much repulsiveoppression, incomprehensiblesufferings! Whatcold
barbarismon the one hand, and what appallingpoverty on the other. You will think that we are
speaking of the constructionof the Egyptianpyramids, of Jews working underEgyptian lashes.
Not at all: We are talking aboutthe textiles of Mr. Smithor the needles of Mr. Jackson. And note
that all this are not abuses, not crimes, but occurrenceswhich take place within the strictlimits of
legality. It seems there is no creaturein the world more unfortunatethan the English worker."
A. S. Pushkin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v desiati tomakh (Moscow-Leningrad, 1949), VII,
289-90, as cited in RichardPipes, Russia under the Old Regime (London, 1974), 149.
20 A. P.
Lopukhin, Zhizn' za okeanom (Saint Petersburg, 1882), 397; P. I. Ogorodnikov,
V strane svobody (Saint Petersburg, 1882), pt. II, 257; A. I. Vasil'chikov, 0 samoupravlenii
(Saint Petersburg, 1872), I, 336.
21 R. B. Fisher, "American Investment in Pre-Soviet Russia," American Slavic and East
* * *
22 Cited in
Boden, Amerikabild, 46. Cf. N. N. Bolkhovitinov's Rossiia i voina SShA za
nezavisimost' (Moscow, 1976), 105-131 and his Stanovlenie russko-amerikanskikh otnoshenii
(Moscow, 1966), 240ff. For a popularbiographyby an authorwho also wrote on Fulton, see Ia.
V. Abramov, Veniamin Franklin i ego vremia (Saint Petersburg, 1891).
cans put it would come to be considered among their greatest and most
enviable triumphs.Only steam rivaled electricity as an Americanmarvel, and
in its practicalapplicationsdid so sooner and longer.
The earliest visitor to publish accounts of the "transatlanticrepublic" was
Pavel Svin'in, who was secretaryto the Russian consul-generalat Philadel-
phia from 1811 to 1813, and who a year laterdevoted the first of his articlesto
a "Description of the Steamboat" and the progress of manufactures. "The
craftsmenwho came from Europe combined their knowledge and their skill
with the enterprisingspirit of the Americans and, encouragedby protective
laws and by freedom, surpassedthemselves ...." Lacking England's capital
and cheap labor, they had made a virtue of necessity and by putting their
ingenuityto work, had perfectedand simplified variousmachines. "Mechan-
ical devices have completely replaced human hands in the United States.
There, everythingis done by machines;they saw rocks, make bricks, hammer
out nails, cobble shoes, etc."23
Nothing, however, impressed Svin'in as much as the steamboat. He wit-
nessed the first voyage of Fulton's Paragon and admired its luxurious ap-
pointments, which were availableto anyone who had the money, as much as
the steam ferries that carried large wagons, their teams, passengers, and
freight. Svin'in's effort to obtain a license from Fulton for building steam-
boats at home failed, and nothing came of the agreement Fulton had con-
cluded with the Tsar's governmentprior to his death in 1815. His death was
reportedand his achievementcelebratedin a Russianreview which statedthat
his vessel was already in wide use on the waterwaysof the United States.24
The authorof the notice called for the employment of stimboty on Russian
rivers, as had Svin'in, who hoped that they would replace human drudgery
and be as profitablefor Russian tradersas for Americans, even if the equality
of condition and the commercialspirit of the latterwere absent. Svin'in also
wrote of the restless passion for mercantileenterprisein which all classes of
Americansshared, and of the public benefits their privateinitiatives yielded.
There was, for example, the expedition outfittedby the New York merchant
Ivan Astor at a cost of 250,000 rubles to find a short overland route to the
Pacific-"what an undertakingfor a private citizen!"-and the small part
played by governmentin building roads, canals, and bridges as comparedto
that of private enterprise. Bridges remarkablefor their strength and beauty
23 P. P. Svin'in
published four articles about the United States between 1814 and 1829, and
two editions of a book which reproducedthe contents of the first two articles:Opytzhivopisnago
puteshestviiapo Severnoi Amerike(Saint Petersburg, 1815, 1818), 81-108. References here are
to an English version preparedby AvrahmYarmolinsky,Picturesque United States of America,
1811, 1812, 1813: Being a Memoiron Paul Svinin (New York, 1930), 7-10, 14-16. Cf. Boden,
Amerikabild,53-72, and Valentin Kiparsky, English and AmericanCharactersin Russian Fic-
tion (Berlin, 1964), 134.
24 V. S. Virginskii, Robert Ful'ton (Moscow, 1965), 209, 214-51; Bolkhovitinov, Stanov-
lenie, 564.
25 P. I. Poletika, A Sketch the Internal Conditions the United States America and
of of of of
TheirPolitical Relationswith Europe, by a Russian. Translatedfromthe French by an American,
withNotes (Baltimore, 1826), 11, 136. Poletika(p. 71) intendedhis book for a Russianaudience,
but only excerpts appeared in Russia in 1825 and 1830. See Boden, Amerikabild, 75-77;
Bolkhovitinov, Stanovlenie, 587-590.
26 William L.
Blackwell, The Beginnings of Russian Industrialization (Princeton, 1968),
280-315; EufrosinaDvoichenko-Markov,"Americans in the CrimeanWar," Russian Review,
13:2 (April 1954), 137-45; Albert Parry, Whistler'sFather (Indianapolis-NewYork, 1939),
145-60; Norman Saul, "Beverly C. Sanders and the Expansion of Russian-AmericanTrade,
1853-1855," Maryland Historical Magazine, 67:2 (Summer 1972), 156-71; Alexandre Tar-
saidze, Czars and Presidents (New York, 1958), 119ff.; idem, "Berdanka," Russian Review,
9:1 (January1950), 31-32; Susan Dallas, ed., The Dairy of George MifflinDallas (Philadelphia,
1892), 11.
27 Avrahm
Yarmolinsky, Turgenev(New York, 1959), 267, 331; PerryMcDonoughCollins,
Siberian Journey (Madison, Wisconsin, 1962), 87, 276, 297; Ronald Jensen, "The Alaska
Purchase and Russian-American Relations" (Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, 1971), 34-36;
Albert Parry, "Cassius Clay's Glimpse into the Future," Russian Review, 2:2 (Spring 1943),
54-57; JamesR. Robertson,A Kentuckianat the Courtof the Tsars (Berea, Ky., 1935), 217-23.
beginning to compete with Russian exports. How could the crops of the
American plains, raised with expensive labor and carried across an ocean
challenge Russian grain in the much closer markets of Europe? American
wheat in Europe would be unthinkableif its cultivation, on family-owned
farms, were not for the most partcarriedon by the farmersthemselves, with
improved methods and machines reducing labor costs and increasing yields,
and with railroads, canals, and steamships lowering costs of transportation
and ultimately prices. "No mechanical device fails to be applied broadly
which will, even in the slightest degree, ease the burdenof labor or replace
humanhands by steam, to the same end of cheapness and abundance." Rare
and expensive machines for which there was only a seasonal need, such as
steam plows or threshers, could be rented;for other implements, there were
mechanics and even universities in nearby towns to provide service and in-
struction. Besides, everyone learned in school the basic principles of
mechanics and how to handle complicated machinery. In Buffalo and
Chicago, Lakier was struck by the sight of huge wooden structuresfor the
storage of grain, the "so-called elevatory." They obviated loadings and
unloadingsby wheelbarrowor on the backs of men, whose places were taken
by steam-poweredmachines of simple design and operation. Within an hour,
Lakierwas assured, a trainloadof wheat could be transferredto the holds of a
ship. In no other country, he was convinced, were technical innovations
adopted so quickly; nowhere else were the inducementsfor their adoptionas
great for worker and employer alike.33
In the decade of reforms that followed the accession of Alexander II in
1855, the Russian horizon expanded beyond the familiar and heretoforeau-
thoritative standard set by Western Europe to include the United States.
There, wrote a proponent of rural credit associations, foreigners and their
capital were welcomed, ratherthan feared, and had enrichedthe nation. "It is
an example worthyof imitation. We are fortunatethat... we can make use of
the lessons taughtby those who have overtakenus in civilization and citizen-
ship." Some thoughtthe lessons could be learnedin Americanclassrooms. A
well-known pedagogue who was for many years editor of the Journal of the
Ministry of Public Instruction advised imitating the generous public support
given to education in the United States and relying less on governmentfiat.
The Americanshad recognized the importanceof educationto state and soci-
ety and had acted with theirusual energy. Unlike the Germansor French,they
had made schooling compulsorywithout centralization,kept the clergy out of
it, designed the schools for childrenof all classes, and opened them to girls as
well as boys with good results for both. To decide whetherwomen should be
admitted to the Medico-Surgical Academy of Saint Petersburg,the Russian
spawned a major industry, of the lamps that used the oil discovered in
Pennsylvania,of the sewing and knittingmachines, and of the great varietyof
agriculturalimplements.36
For those Russians who were less concerned with individual or collective
salvation than with railroads and bread, America in the last third of the
century became ever more often an object of study, a source of ideas for
Russia's betterment, a goal of journeys motivated by general curiosity or a
practical interest in learning how specific questions of economy and society
were being solved there. For them, whetherthey were partisansof democracy
or not, the victory of the North in the AmericanCivil War proved the advan-
tages of materialmight in war and peace and engenderedthe wish to acquire
the secrets of that might as speedily as had the Americans. The tourists who
complained that America lacked charm and grace, that the whole place was
like a huge, clamorous factory, might be right, a critic and minor novelist
conceded;but why, if they had no interestin factories, no wish to know about
their processes and purposes, had they come at all?37 If, to speak with
Turgenev's sons, the world was turning from a temple into a workshop,
America was assuredly in the vanguardof that transformation.
The spate of accounts of Americantravel appearingin the 1870s caused a
reviewer for a radical-democraticmonthly to speak of a particularweakness
among Russian readersand writersfor the United States and to ask, tongue in
cheek, why America, ratherthan Turkeyor China?Was it, he wondered, the
avoidance of the familiar and the attractionof opposites, an attractionthat
would be quite praiseworthyand useful if only it were not so abstractand
without practical consequences. "We sympathize with American arrange-
ments, but only in principle, and... nothing comes of our sympathy but
epistolary exercises." In the eyes of leading figures of Left and Right, even
such a purely platonic yearningappearedto threatencherishedprinciples. For
the populist philosopherPetr Lavrov, the countrywhose revolution and con-
stitution had once placed it at the forefrontof mankindhad by 1876 turned
into the "republic of humbug and the empire of the dollar," and one which
was not likely to solve the social question by its empty political formulas.
Dostoevsky, fearful that a liberalism of Western origin would usher in the
worst kind of Godless materialismand radicalism, reacted angrily when "al-
most the only journal that stands for the beliefs I now hold dearerthan life"
carriedthe American diaries of P. I. Ogorodnikov.38
An army officer cashiered for his sympathies with Polish rebels, then a
36 I. V. Gaurovits,
Voenno-sanitarnyeuchrezhdeniia Severo-AmerikanskikhSoedinennykh
Shtatov vo vremiaposlednei voiny (Saint Petersburg, 1868), 134-39.
37 A. V. Druzhinin, Sobranie Sochinenii (Saint
Petersburg, 1865), V, 609.
38 "Novye knigi," Delo, No. 6 (June 1873), 27; Hecht, Russian Radicals, 152; F. M.
Dostoevskii, Pis'ma (Moscow-Leningrad, 1930), II, 299-300.
with the great reforms of Alexander II, Russia, like America, had entered onto
the road that would take both countries to an equally great destiny was a thesis
described by one writer as commonplace. Except for similarities of size,
relative youth, and the mission Providence had supposedly assigned the two
peoples, he thought the analogy imperfect. Russians, though they were enter-
prising, trusted too much to luck; they lacked the calculation, the steadiness,
the self-control, and the inventiveness of the Americans. These qualities could
only be imparted by education and by a greater tolerance for religious dissen-
ters, who alone in Russia possessed the sobriety, the diligence, and the so-
lidity of the American worker.40
E. R. Tsimmerman-who was the most widely read and travelled of the
Russians who were writing about the United States41-observed on the second
of his visits (1869-70) that the Americans had extended toleration even to
Jews, who participated in business and all manner of public affairs, and that
the influence of a multitude of sects was held in check by the laws and a large
measure of indifferentism. It was the school that was the "true temple of
popular felicity" of the Americans, who would find it as strange to imagine
that a community could not afford to teach its children as it would be unthink-
able to Russian peasants to say that their village had not the means to build a
church. In many a town, the school house, built before the church, served as
such on Sundays, just as in others the house of prayer became a schoolroom
during the week. There was a lesson here for those Russians, Tsimmerman
wrote, who claimed to believe in popular literacy but lamented the lack of
funds to erect schools for the people. He made much of the connection
between schooling and economic progress, schooling that took place in pleas-
ant classrooms which were for the many not the few, for girls as well as boys,
and where order was maintained by kindness and trust rather than harshness.
Having seen such a school one is no longer quite so surprisedat the achievementsin
the field of production by which the Americans are distinguished above all other
peoples in the world, achievements which owe much to the importantcircumstance
that in America public education builds from below, from the foundations.In Russia,
notwithstandingour gymnasiumsand universities, the mass of the people is deprived
almost entirely of all opportunitiesfor an education, whereas in the United States both
governmentand society make it theirfirstcare to see to it thatpublic schools accessible
to all are opened everywhere.42
40 A. V. Nikitenko, Dnevnik (Moscow, 1955-56), III, 144-45; anon., Russland, von einem
Russen(Leipzig,1871),88-90.
41 A
graduate in mathematics of Moscow University, E. R. Tsimmerman made his first
American trip in 1857-58, a second in 1869-70, and a third in 1884. He published numerous
articleson his travels, two books, and a study of Americanagriculture:Puteshestviepo Amerikev
1869-1870 g. (Moscow, 1872); SoedinennyeShtatySevernoiAmeriki;iz puteshestvii 1857-58 i
1869-70 godov (Moscow, 1873); Ocherki amerikanskogo sel's-kogo khoziaistva (Moscow,
1897).
42 Idem, Puteshestvie, 277-78.
Nor did America know the gulf between life and learning that Russian
reformers assailed. The practical aims of its educational system derived from
a view of life as a continuous process of learning and experience in which
each supplemented and served the other. Practicality was not so much a matter
of preparing the young for specific trades as of a close link between school
and society; that was the true meaning of "public" education. In elementary
schools or universities, to be practical meant to be contemporary, concrete,
comprehensible, and competent.
If the historically unprecedenteddrive and boldness of Americancivilization amazes
us; if, still young and not yet fully formed, it has alreadydemonstratedto mankindthe
workingsof popularself-governmentand revealedto it new ways of productiveactiv-
ity; if it has laid rails across a continent that join the oceans and gave the world the
steamshipand the telegraph, harvestingand sewing machines and many other inven-
tions for the well-being of man, then these successes must be credited to the public
school and to a rational education that is based on mathematicsand the naturalsci-
ences.43
There was more to American schooling, however, than what went on in
children's classrooms, and it too had a bearing on the country's technological
and industrial preeminence. Chicago's rise from prairie village to metropolis
would have been impossible without workers who had acquired a high level of
skills and useful knowledge at the evening courses, lectures, and reading
rooms of the city's Mechanics' Institute. New York's Cooper Union and
Astor Library, Detroit's Industrial Institute and Commercial College, the
educational and cultural activities of the Lowell textile mills and the Boston
Public Library provided the working class with means for its economic and
spiritual betterment, and industry with trained hands. The tasks of instruction
and education were shared by a large number of periodical publications. It
was not unusual for a farmer in some out-of-the-way place to receive several
newspapers as well as a magazine containing advice for the improved man-
agement of his fields and herd. He could get guidance also at the country fair
where his animals were judged and where he could examine the latest farm
machines, many of them suitable for Russian soils. And for the farmer's son
there were, or soon would be, the colleges for which the Morrill Act of 1862
had provided endowments of public land. In that year a department of agricul-
ture had been established which disseminated information, plants, and seeds,
and maintained a museum, library, and laboratory. These facilities could not
answer their purpose half so well if they were not freely accessible to all.
"Visiting them... you find neither doorkeepers nor guards and no one pays
the least attention to you until you yourself find it necessary to ask for help or
information. "44
This absence of formality and officiousness Tsimmerman had found re-
43 Idem, SoedinennyeShtaty, I, 177.
44 Idem, Puteshestvie, 79-80, 422. Cf. SoedinennyeShtaty, I, 62-63, 127, 171, 180.
The tsar and other conservatives feared for the survival of traditional politi-
cal and social arrangements if Witte should succeed in industrializing Russia;
so did the sage of Iasnaia Poliana, although for different reasons. To a visitor
from the United States, Tolstoy in 1901 deplored the American preoccupation
with material things, with "mills and railroads and the like," and he thought
it "too bad" to see Russian statesmen following "in the footsteps of yours in
the matter of manufacturing and commercialism in general."
Look at the hideous smokestacks of the great factories that are now scattered over
Russia. They disfigure God's landscape.... It is all a mistake. We have no more than
100 million people. Scarcely more than one million of these are engaged in manufac-
turing.... How unjust that the remaindershould be burdened for these few! Our
countryis naturallyagricultural.We are an agriculturalpeople. No good can come from
turningus away from the naturalcurrentof our capabilities and physical condition.48
Populist writers also argued in the 1880s and 1890s against capitalism and
industrialism-the two becoming practically synonymous in public debates-
on both humanitarian and practical grounds and denied that the American
experience had any relevance for a peasant Russia that lacked virgin soil,
modem technology, a home market for its factories and was, besides, too
ignorant and too heavily burdened by taxes to compete abroad. They too
dreaded the rule of the banks and stock exchanges, the cancer of the pro-
letariat, and the destruction of the village commune and with it of the chance
for a socialist future of cooperation and community.
With these many challenges to industrialization, it was essential, Witte
realized, that the goals he had set-and which much of society resisted-be
decisively affirmed and propagated by the state and its head. Leadership was
needed to make the nation accept present hardship for future greatness, and in
Russia, leadership could come only from the throne. As early as 1882, the
great chemist Dmitrii Mendeleev (1834-1907), who later became associated
with Witte as the most famous prophet of Russia's industrial future, spoke to a
congress of manufacturers of the need for a banner-Gerschenkron's industri-
alizing ideology-to rally the forces of technical and economic progress and
called on the tsar to raise that banner. Only he could make his people under-
stand and undertake the great tasks demanding their energies and attention.49
But no such guidance came from above and America became a standard with
which non-Marxist advocates of industrial development tried to rally a follow-
ing in the business and academic communities and in the country at large.
Although Mendeleev had not liked much of what he had seen in the United
States in 1876 and was no admirer of its unbridled laisser-faire capitalism,
during the last two decades of his life he time and again asked his countrymen
48 Albert J. Beveridge, The Russian Advance (New York, 1904), 430.
49 A one-volume selection of Mendeleev's writings, Problemy ekonomicheskogo razvitiia
Rossii (Moscow, 1960), includes the speech, but it omits the appeal to the tsar, which I have
taken from P. A. Berlin, Russkaia burzhuaziiav staroe i novoe vremia (Moscow, 1922), 123,
quoting from an earlier text.
52
I. I. Ianzhul, Vospominaniia(Saint Petersburg, 1910-11), II, 126.
53 Ibid., 12-17, 120-153; idem, Promyslovyesindikaty... v SoedinennykhShtatakhSevernoi
Ameriki(Saint Petersburg, 1895); idem, Mezhdudelom (Saint Petersburg,1904), 1-21, 99-106,
162-92, 420-26; idem, Chasy Dosuga (Moscow, 1896), 227-374; idem, V poiskakh luchshago
budushchago (Saint Petersburg, 1893), 232-56, 339-42; Ekaterina Ianzhul, Amerikanskaia
shkola (Saint Petersburg, 1902, 1904).
recognized that its economy could only benefit from their contribution.Light
and airy Washington, with its broad, tree-lined boulevards and smoothly
runningstreetcarswas the ideal which the Europeancity of the future should
strive to realize. The assistanceoffered by the Departmentof Agriculturewas
an impressive example of the services the state could render to its people.
Insteadof a ministrywith numerousfunctionariesand clerks busily filling up
papers, there were scientists and technicians, laboratoriesand experimental
stations, statisticiansand metereologists-the whole more like a universityin
aim and spirit than a bureauof government. The practicaleconomic benefits
of all this "scientific-administrative"activity were beyond calculation.
If Russianstraditionallyhad no thoughtfor the morrowand no inclination
to save-a matterof no small momentin a countryshortof capital-why not
inculcate upon children, as American schools and parents did, the habit of
saving, of working at an early age for pocket money, and a sense of self-
reliance? American millionaires were to be praised for their gifts to cultural
and philanthropicinstitutions;universitiesfor not stifling students'minds with
dead knowledge and theirbodies with excessive hoursof study;state and local
governmentsfor fostering agriculture,education, and sobriety;manufacturers
for not looking to the state for orders and assistance. Even the sensationalist
press was a positive force for maintaininggeneral literacy and morality in
politics and business. Whatwas needed to make the lattertruly responsive to
the public interestwithoutlosing the advantagesof size, of rationalproduction
and distribution,was not unhinderedcompetition but state regulation of the
trustsand protectionof their workers. As always, there was the public school
to help explain the greater efficiency and productivityof American labor.
Ekaterina Ianzhul's book, The Economic Value of Education, to which her
husband, Chuprov, and others contributed,cited the Americanprinciplethat
no child should enter the world of work without at least a primaryeducation,
"for a class of uneducatedworkersis forever a loss and danger to state and
society." Thatprinciple, she thought, was entirelyapplicableto Russia where
a carpenterwould build better houses and a millhand weave better cloth for
knowing how to read and write.54
The railroad expert and the mechanical engineer, the oil man and the
industrialchemist, the educatorsand the guardsofficer, the geodesist and the
sightseers,55all of whom had come to the New Worldat the same time as the
54 Ekaterina Ianzhul, Ekonomicheskaia otsenka narodnago obrazovaniia (Saint Petersburg,
1899), 83.
55 S. D. Kareisha, Severo-amerikanskie zheleznyiia dorogi (Saint Petersburg, 1896); V. L.
Kirpichev, Otchet o komandirovke direktora Khar'kovskago tekhnologicheskago instituta Kir-
picheva v Severnuiu Ameriku (Saint Petersburg, 1895); S. I. Gulishambarov, Neftianaia prom-
yshlennost' Soedinennykh Shtatov Severnoi Ameriki v sviazi s obshchim promyshlennym razvitiem
strany (Saint Petersburg, 1894); D. P. Konovalov, Promyshlennost' Soedinennykh Shtatov
Severnoi Ameriki i sovremennye priemy khimicheskoi tekhnologii (Saint Petersburg, 1895); E. P.
Kovalevskii, et al., Narodnoe obrazovanie v Soedinennykh Shtatakh Severnoi Ameriki (Saint
That an industrial trade journal should hail the poem as a call to respect the
neglected cultural and economic contributions of mines and mills, their own-
ers and managers, is not very surprising. But there is better evidence to show
that Blok's "New America" reflected a mood that was not felt in the business
community alone. N. V. Vol'skii, an editor for several years of the liberal
daily Russian Word recalled that although he had little liking for most of
Blok's poetry, he would, if he had still been at the paper, have published
"New America." It spoke to him of the new spirit that was visibly transform-
ing Russia and creating a new kind of life, a new kind of worker, peasant, and
intelligent. He saw the change in the American tempo with which new build-
ings went up and the coal mines and steel mills of the Donets Basin were
developed, at trade fairs, and in the consciousness of the people. "New
America" represented in artistic form the two principles contesting for
supremacy in Russian life--"the untouched, immobile Rus' of old and the
new Russia which is being Americanized. "64
The literary critic A. K. Sokolov (writing under the pseudonym S. Vol'skii)
described the United States in familiar terms when he discussed Whitman,
London, and 0. Henry in early 1914. Rich in things but poor in spirit,
Americans had become almost as simple as machines, whereas their machines
had been made almost as complicated as human beings. Nowhere else was
submission to the capitalist Minotaur so complete, his worship so open and
shameless. Yet, it might well be the American of will and action rather than
the Russian intelligent of reflection and analysis who would be the man of the
postcapitalist future. Whatever their shortcomings, one thing was certain
about the Americans.
They strive, they struggle, they act. They approachthe world with the will. And those
among them-as yet only a few-who wantto change the psychology of the traderalso
respondto life with the will and the deed. They take the world not as an abstractwhole,
but as infinitely varied diversity. Nothing is passed over or ignored, for only living
reality teaches a man to hate and to love actively. For the Russianintelligent, life is an
equation; he sees his task as defining the meaning of the x's and the y's. For the
American, whether he is of the intelligentsia or not, life is an elemental, disorderly,
endlessly interestingprocess. He is not troubledby the search for final answers; for
him it is the separatelinks in the process which are important,links which he can
change or make over.65
"Russia is ready to be Americanized," a purchasing agent sent by the
Imperial government to buy refrigerator cars told the New York Times in
1913. Although his intent was to spread good will as much as to state a fact
and to open new channels of commerce, thereby lessening Russia's depen-
dence on Germany and other European trading partners, the comment was not
all hyperbole. In spite of the abrogation in 1912 of the Russian-American
64 Rougle, Three Russians, 74-75; N. V. Vol'skii (N. Valentinov) Dva goda s simvolistami
(Stanford, 1969), 232-34.
65 S. Vol'skii
(A. K. Sokolov), "Dva priatiiamira," Zavety, no. 4 (1914), 67.
66 Jeanette E. Tuve,
"Changing Directions in Russian-American Economic Relations,"
Slavic Review, 31:1 (March 1972), 52-70; M. la. Gefter, "Iz istorii proniknoveniia
amerikanskogokapitalav tsarskuiuRossiiu do pervoi mirovoi voiny," Istoricheskiezapiski, 35
(1950), 62-86.
67
Kohlenberg, "Russian-American Economic Relations," 121ff; George S. Queen, "The
United States and the Material Advance in Russia, 1881-1906" (Ph.D. diss. University of
Illinois, 1941; V. V. Lebedev, Russko-amerikanskieeknomicheskiiaotnosheniia, 1900-1917
(Moscow, 1964); Louise Bryant, Six Red Months in Russia (New York, 1918), 176-77; E. T.
Heald, Witness to Revolution (Kent, Ohio, 1972), 3, 17, 41, 47, 64, 78, 125; G. T. Marye,
Nearing the End in Imperial Russia (Philadelphia, 1929), 476-77; Thomas Stevens, Through
Russia on a Mustang (Boston, 1891), 78; M. L. Taft, Strange Siberia (New York, 1911), 120,
200, 215; W. H. Beable, CommercialRussia (London, 1918), 211; ArthurRuhl, WhiteNights
and Other Russian Impressions (New York, 1917), 182; FrederickV. Carstensen, "American
MultinationalCorporationsin ImperialRussia" (Ph.D. diss. Yale University, 1976), 377.
* * *
70
Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, XXXVII, 59, 83.
71 Duranty, Duranty Reports, 19.
stress its political ratherthan technical aspects, an assignment for the pro-
letariatand the masses in general thatwould be popular,graspable,and clear,
and engage them in the tasks of reconstruction. "In ten to twenty years we
shall electrify all of Russia-industry as well as agriculture .... I repeat, it is
necessary to fire the enthusiasm of the masses of workers and conscious
peasants for a great programof from ten to twenty years."72
Apparently even electrification was too much of an abstractionto lend
meaning, substance, and conviction to the remotegoal of the establishmentof
communism, which is why Bukharin,Trotsky, and Stalin made Americanism
part of the equationthat would, when joined with Marxism, Bolshevism, or
Russian revolutionarysweep, yield the desired result. Stalin had evidently
sensed and was respondingto a mood in much of the partyand in the country
at large that was weary of chopping still finer the fine points of doctrine. He
was appealing for supportboth to opportunistslike Ehrenburg'smanagers,
who had their eyes on the clock and the main chance, and to idealists like
Pogodin's Maksimkaand Stepan who wanted to speed up the clock of history
for larger and more generous ends. In any case, Stalin must have felt
confident-and justly so, judging by DorothyThompson'sreportof a peasant
quoting him73-of finding both understandingand sympathy for a brand of
Americanismwhose foundationshad been laid long before.
Soviet Americanism, therefore, can be understoodas a case of ideological
transfer-it was so understoodby guardiansof orthodoxywho warnedagainst
romanticizingits countryof origin74-and it probablymade as decisive, pro-
found, and lasting a contributionto the development of Soviet society and
economy as did the transferof Americantechnology, perhapsa greaterone.
Indeed, for most of the 1920s, during the very years when poets and politi-
cians were loudest in their praise of Americanismand wanted to imbue Rus-
sian workersand managerswith the drive, tempo, and competence of Ameri-
can "biznes"; when the new Soviet man was not only to acquire American
features but was even to be called a "Russian American,"75it was not, in
fact, the United States but Germanythat was the principalsupplierof foreign
expertise and equipment. Even during the First Five Year Plan, when the
United States for a time displaced Germany as the chief source of Soviet
72
Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, XL, 62-63.
73
Thompson, TheNew Russia, 167. Cf. I. B. Sheinman, Chto ia videl v Amerike;chto delal v
SSSR (Moscow, 1934), 19.
74 N. Osinskii (V. V. Obolenskii), Po tu storonu okeana (Moscow-Leningrad, 1926); idem,
Moilzheucheniiao SShA (Moscow, 1926); Mikhail Levidov, "Amerikanizmatragifars," LEF,
no. 2 (1923), 45-46; E. M. Friedman,Russia in Transition(New York, 1932), 252. A translation
of William Collier's Americanism:A WorldMenace (London, 1925) also suggests thattherewas
sentimentfor resisting the American infatuation.
75KorneliiZelinskii, "Sotsialisticheskii biznes," in Biznes. Sbornik literaturnogo tsentra
konstruktivistov,K. Zelinskii and I. Sel'vinskii, eds. (Moscow, 1929), 50-64; Ren6 Fuelop-
Miller, Geist und Gesicht des Bolschewismus (Zuerich-Leipzig-Wien, 1929), 27-32; Franziska
Baumgarten,Arbeitswissenschaftund Psychotechnik(Munich-Berlin, 1924), 117-18.