Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928

by Stephen Kotkin

The Depression afforded Stalin unprecedented leverage: suddenly, the capitalists needed the Soviet market as much as the Soviets needed their advanced technology. Without the Great Depression would the capitalists have developed such overwhelming incentives to pursue the Soviet market no matter what? Indeed, the capitalist powers not only sold their best technology to the Communist regime, they continued doing so even after the Soviets were found to be violating contracts by purchasing designs for one factory and using them for others, trickery that was amply recorded in indignant internal foreign company records; the capitalist had no other customers for massive capital goods. Scholars who write of Moscow facing an “uncooperative world economy” have it exactly backward.28 Ideology and the party monopoly were the constraints; the global economy, the enabler. In fact, the global economic crisis was a double gift. Nothing did more to legitimate Stalin’s system. But Stalin had no idea that a Great Depression was around the corner, and that it would bring the foreign capitalists on bended knee.