They Were Here Before
JACOBS, DAN N.
Soviet Visitors to U.S. they were here before By DAN N. JACOBS The United States may soon be playing host to delegations of Soviet officials and citizens. At the invitation of the Des Moines...
...Arrangements for all Soviet visi-tors to this country were made by the Amtorg Trading Corporation, the Soviet import-export company in the United States...
...Their number decreased steadily through 1932-1933 and 1933-1934...
...There were few women among the Soviet experts...
...from the late spring of 1927 through 1930 has never been equaled in time of peace...
...the Soviets were familiar with ice cream, but not the soda combination...
...This was not the case during the remainder of the first Five Year Plan, when younger men who could put the acquired techniques into on-the-job practice were dispatched here...
...The Russian Bureau of Agricultural Information opened an office at 136 Liberty Street in New York City in order to keep in touch with the developments on U.S...
...During the mid-Twenties, the period of the NEP, there had been some delegations from the USSR, but mere driblets when contrasted with what was to follow once Stalin had launched Russia on the path of forced industrialization and collectivization...
...He spoke before several American commercial groups and even wrote a letter to the New York Times...
...At the time the Soviet spokesman in the United States did not refute the testimony...
...one agricultural expert, who was accused before the Fish Committee of "Communistic activities" while in this country, attracted public attention for a few days when his application for an extension was turned down...
...In the Shakhty trial, it is obvious that some of the defendants hardly had time to return from the U.S...
...But most of the visitors left, as they had entered, quietly...
...It was under this ruling that Gregory Piatakov...
...Louisville, Cincinnati, Cleveland...
...Then, as now, the sights of Soviet industry were set upon the United States...
...received evidence of a number of instances where Soviet visitors who had refused to return home were shanghaied...
...The list goes on and on, and covers pages...
...More than one of the delegates declined to return home...
...There were occasional groups who came here during the remainder of the Thirties...
...The influx of Soviet visitors reached its peak in 1929...
...The number dropped slightly in 1930, more sharply the following year...
...and publicity was desired???Amtorg would summon the press to its offices for brief interviews...
...Rarely, a professor of note might be accompanied by his daughter who was also a specialist in her father's field, or a husband might bring his wife as a translator...
...during this period were "students," their primary assignment here being to learn...
...Usually, the visitors had little enough to say, the language impasse being reinforced by what must have been recognized as the wisdom of silence...
...Now, again, visitors are expected...
...the plans were canceled...
...To a greater or less degree, all of those who came to the U.S...
...A tour was arranged: ten days in New York, then Boston, Detroit, Chicago...
...Some of these have been alluded to previously...
...At least two of the Soviet representatives, who at the time held lesser rank, have now achieved considerable distinction: Deputy Premier Maxim Z. Saburov, the Party Presidium's expert on planning, and Vassily V. Kuznetsov, First Deputy Foreign Minister...
...Virtually every technical specialty sent its delegation...
...The 1928 Shakhty or "Technicians' " trial in the USSR, the Ramzin trial in late 1930 and the Menshevik trial early the next year created an understandable doubt in the minds of the Soviet specialists as to the wisdom of returning home...
...Berlin or Hamburg...
...annually from 1929 through 1931...
...Commissar Mikoyan arrived in New York aboard the Normandy and advised the assembled reporters that he was interested in the ice cream soda...
...There were a few Soviet students on American campuses in the fall of 1928...
...This was during the late Twenties and early Thirties when the Soviet Union had just embarked upon its series of Five Year Plans...
...However, there were a few English-speaking representatives, such as V. I. Meshlauk, vice-chairman of the Supreme Economic Council, in charge of the Ford negotiations, who visited the U.S...
...But he was a marked exception...
...A young engineer who had been in this country for a year developing the design for a mining plant in the Urals asked for asylum and told the press that he feared to go back...
...The slogan of the day was "Overtake and pass America...
...was turned down in 1928...
...In the years immediately following the first Five Year Plan came the humorists Ilf and Petrov, the airplane designer A. G. Tupolev, the heroes of Soviet aviation S. Levanevsky and V. Chkalov...
...One of the largest Soviet delegations ever to come here attended the First International Congress of Soil Science at Washington, D. C. The Chief Director of the Fishing Industry Division of the Supreme Economic Council toured fishing centers at Boston, Seattle, Los Angeles, New Orleans...
...experimental stations...
...Instead, he stated: "I can only say that every one who comes here from Russia has to have the approval of American Consuls abroad and that, though hundreds of men have come, we have heard of no official protest involving any of them...
...Last year, for the first time since the inception of the cold war, there were visits to these shores by "non-diplomatic" persons: a team of Soviet chess champions, a pair of skiers, two professors who represented the Soviet Academy of Sciences at the closing ceremonies of Columbia University's Bicentennial...
...But not often: These were not pleasure trips...
...but was granted a visa in 1931 after the U.S...
...While the police reported the death as a suicide, the press noted that he had confided to friends his desire not to go back to the Soviet Union, and that a number of the rooms on the floor from which he plunged were occupied by Amtorg officials...
...V. V. Ossinsky, who became one of the chiefs of Gosplan and was a major prosecution witness in the 1938 trial of the "Rights...
...before they received death sentences, if indeed they were not arrested in this country...
...If the delegates were of high station or if their missions were of particular importance...
...Among others, came P. R. Baranov, one of the leaders of Soviet military aviation: Professor I. G. Alexandrov, originator of the Dnie-perstroi project: a chairman of the Gosbank...
...Moreover, the State Department barred visas to anyone who had participated in the activities of the Comintern...
...Then, as now, there was a great need to increase food production...
...In another instance, a young bureaucrat, who allegedly wished too remain in this country, "jumped" to his death from a window of the Hotel Carteret, on the comer of Twenty-third Street and Seventh Avenue...
...With the Nazi attack on Russia and consequent American-Soviet cooperation, we were again visited by numbers of Soviet scientists and engineers, to whom our industrial facilities were thrown open...
...Minneapolis...
...A large percentage of those who came here in 1927 and 1928 held the titles professor or doctor...
...Then, in 1936 and 1937, the newspapers several times featured reports of Soviet flights between Moscow and American points, and in the opposite direction...
...In 1927-1923 there were representatives of the more consumer-directed industries, as well: the Sugar Trust, the Leningrad Leather and Shoe Trust, the Ukrainian Sewing Industries, the Porcelain and Glass Trust, the Ukrainian Cooperative League...
...From the first, the goal was to produce as much coal and steel, as many tractors and trucks, not as Germany or Great Britain, ambitious targets in themselves, hut as the U.S...
...The Five Year Plan called for the plant on which he had been working to be ready for operation in October, 1931...
...In the first place, because there was no American diplomatic representative in Moscow, visas had to be acquired through the Consul in Riga...
...But some of their number formally matriculated at our colleges and universities...
...There were representatives of the Precision Machinery Trust and the Rubber Trust, the Atbassov Non-ferrous Metal Trust, the Dnieperstroi project, the Metal Institute, the Leningrad Mining Trust, the Red Puti-lovtsev Metal Works, the Gold Trust, the Dzerzhinsky tractor plant, the Soviet Southern Ore Trust, the Donu-gol Coal Trust, the Autotrust, the Electrotechnical Trust of Weak Current Factories, the Embaneft Oil Trust, the Building Trust, the Moscow subway...
...Obtaining a visa to enter the United States was not an easy matter for the Soviets...
...In 1930 there was testimony before an investigating committee of the House of Representatives that the Soviet "businessmen" who were entering the country included agents of the OGPU...
...At the invitation of the Des Moines Register, a Soviet group will come to study Iowa farming methods, and other groups may follow...
...The canning trusts sent representatives here on several occasions...
...At the right hand of Foreign Minister Molo-tov these days is a former Swarth-more College student, Oleg Troya-novsky, son of a former Soviet Ambassador to Washington...
...The 1930 trial took the name of its leading defendant Professor L. K. Ramzin, who had been here in 1927...
...Undoubtedly, Soviet agents had a variety of assignments to carry out here not the least of which was keeping a close check on other Soviet visitors...
...In addition, there were a few delegates to scholarly conventions and a scattering of industrial experts, intent on acquiring new machines that the Soviet Union had not developed as yet or learning techniques in fields where Russia lagged badly...
...when the Soviet Government briefly turned its attention to consumer needs, it dispatched its light industry expert, Anastas I. Mikoyan, to this country to study our baking, canning, packing and other industries...
...The stream of Soviet visitors which entered the U.S...
...But the Hitler-Stalin Pact and the war intervened...
...They came in under six-month visas and the majority were here for only two or three months...
...Pittsburgh, Baltimore and Philadelphia...
...Although their names were hardly of household currency even in the USSR, these delegates were often prominent members of the Soviet hierarchy...
...recognized the USSR...
...The city of Orenburg, birthplace of Georgi Malenkov was renamed after the latter...
...By 1932, visitors were rather rare...
...but the major enrollment was not achieved until 1931-1932 when there were some three score of them, concentrated mostly in the Eastern colleges but as far West as the Colorado School of Mines...
...In light of our present interest in the potential Soviet visitors, it seems striking how little attention was paid to those of a quarter-century ago...
...the chief engineer of the Moscow Subway...
...Dan N. Jacobs has studied at the Yale and Columbia Russian Institutes...
...Then came the cold war...
...It was already March, 1931, and the plans were not even complete...
...Since those who were executed or exiled in consequence of public trials were but an infinitesimal fraction of those who were sentenced during the purges, it can only be wondered how many of those earlier visitors-at the outside, there were 1500 of them survive, or had the privilege of a natural death...
...Those who had been here returned to the Soviet Union to implement the lessons learned...
...A great many of these later callers were interested in our aeronautical developments...
...However, there were exceptions...
...the future Vice Commissar for Heavy Industry and 1937 purge victim, was refused permission to enter the United States...
...At the time, there were also visits by some luminaries of the Russian artistic world, such on-again off-again residents of the USSR as Sergei Eisenstein, the motion picture director, Alexander Nemirovich-Danchenko, one of the founders of the Moscow Art Theater, the writer Boris Pilnyak all of whom had unhappy experiences in Hollywood...
...In the autumn of 1939 there loomed the possibility of a sizeable cultural invasion: A Red Army Song and Dance Ensemble was to come here...
...They were almost all postgraduate engineers with several years of field experience...
...several vice-chairmen of the Supreme Economic Council...
...Louis...
...Most of those who sought extensions had little difficulty, particularly when they were engaged in such projects as the establishment of technical bureaus in Detroit, Schenectady and elsewhere, as called for in contracts concluded with American concerns...
...Compared to the handful of visitors who may come here in 1955, there was a time when a flood of representatives of Soviet science and industry visited the U.S...
...Amtorg arranged itineraries and shepherded the Soviet citizens about the country...
...When their comings and goings were reported at all, it was in the back pages, near the bottom...
...Not without reason: Every major purge trial of the decade following 1928 (with the exception of the Metro-Vickers trial of 1933 which implicated British and Russian employees of a British concern operating in the USSR) involved, as a defendant or prosecution witness, one or more veterans of trips to the United States...
...But as the Five Year Plan accelerated, light industry was relegated increasingly to the background...
...In 1936...
...The Fish Committee investigating the activities of Communists in the U.S...
Vol. 38 • June 1955 • No. 25
