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Comment by trhway | Hacker News Reader

reminded about another, and extremely significant, jump start of USSR tech by a US business around the same time - the car factory GAZ set up by Ford : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GAZ#1929_to_2000

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In 1930s, USSR was buying American and European technology like crazy, especially the heavy industry technology. USSR was able to pay gold for that; gold still was the monetary metal at the time. The gold was earned by selling wheat and other agricultural supplies. The wheat was also produced like crazy, but, being a dictatorship, Soviet authorities just took however much they could from the collective farms (private farming was mostly eliminated). This likely contributed to a famine in 1932-33 in Ukraine, then a part of the USSR [1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor

It's worth remembering that, while the famine had its peak in Ukraine, and claimed by far the most lives there, it didn't end at the border between Soviet republics - adjacent regions of RSFSR and Kazakhstan were also affected. The term "Holodomor" usually specifically refers to the events in Ukraine, while the famine as a whole is just the "Soviet famine of 1932-33":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_famine_of_1932%E2%80%93...

You also have to wonder how WW2 would have turned out had the USSR not been in such a rush to industrialize (not that they knew at the time)? Then again, they may have had more people to fight the Nazi's.

Manpower wasn't the limiting factor in the war.

Mismanagement, and lack of materials was. An agrarian Soviet Union would have had no chance.

> (not that they knew at the time)

well, the previous 1000 years of history there could have been a hint :) By the 192x-193x that history took specific forms of "export of revolution" (into which hundreds of years of the Russian Empire's expansion morphed) on one side and the Mein Kampf's "new living space for Germans" (into which the hundreds of years, from the times of Teutonic Order, of "Drang nach Osten" morphed) on the other side.

If Germany didn't attack USSR in 1941, it would be pretty real possibility that USSR would attack it few years later. Especially in the alternative Universe where Stalin didn't destroy the very modern-military-technology-minded Red Army leadership - like Tuchachevsky and his elk - in the 1936.

> but, being a dictatorship, Soviet authorities just took however much they could from the collective farms

This phrasing makes it sound like they were just swimming around in big piles of wheat like Scrooge McDuck except with a much higher chance of asphyxiation.

What I tried to depict is not swimming, but rather sweeping: sweeping out everything, down to the last grain.

People actively tried to hide some of the wheat, to keep themselves from starving, so the methods of taking were rather harsh.

Not even slightly isolated examples:

https://archive.org/details/Sutton--Western-Technology-1917-...

Neither Americans nor Russians wanted to say much about this, especially after 1945. So, memory hole.

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