Serving the Soviets: The Long History of America Conspiring With Russia
Unsurprised by Donald Trump's overt support for Russia, Piotr R Frankowski recounts four past examples of the US propping up, and profiting from, Russian regimes
Some people have professed surprise at Donald Trump's overt support for the Russian dictator; they deemed it unthinkable that a Republican America would aid and abet a seemingly eternal foe, the posthumous offspring of Soviet Russia. Having written books on the true history of the Soviet Union, I was not surprised in the least.
In the past, the United States of America had already bailed out the Soviets, averting the demise of the red empire, no less than four times.
The Communist economic concept does not work. The big guns of today's apparently communist economies – China and Vietnam – pretend to work while being completely capitalist. Lenin, having murdered thousands of Russians and robbed the others clean, found out quickly enough. Hence his New Economic Policy (NEP), ostensibly a loosening of Marxist zeal, but in fact the reintroduction of capitalism into the rotten fabric of the country.
Starving people are more likely to rebel instead of faithfully following orders. The 1920 attempt to hastily conquer Europe failed; the riches of the Western nations remained untouched. The 1921 famine would have wiped out the Red Terror and the fear which burning and gassing entire villages had instilled. Lenin's order from January 1919 sanctioned the requisition of "surplus" grain from peasants, many of whom subsequently rebelled. And a totalitarian dictator fears nothing more than the wrath of his subjects.
Germany was sympathetic, but its reserves were depleted, and it could not feed the Leninist behemoth. Unexpectedly, an imperialist, capitalist, enemy nation rallied to help. The American Relief Administration (ARA), headed by Herbert Hoover, the future US President, had been formed in 1919 by the US Congress and endowed with a budget of 100 million dollars (about 1.8 billion in today's money). Private donations, also coming from non-affluent, individual citizens brought in another 100 million. The ARA had helped the reborn Republic of Poland during its defensive war against the Soviets.
The ARA in Soviet Russia
Soon thereafter, the idea was born that it could help save the population of Soviet Russia from starvation and thus demonstrate the superiority of capitalism. Congress found another 20 million dollars and in 1921 the ARA began to feed over 10 million Soviet Russian citizens daily. It also helped the inept Soviet administration deal with a typhus epidemic. In 1923, when ARA officials learned that the Reds had restarted wheat exports to pay for weapon purchases in the West, the American Relief Administration shut down its operation. This was the first instance of the American taxpayer and the American citizen saving the Soviet regime: for two years it had no longer had to feed all its citizens and could safely concentrate on consolidating its limitless power.
Stalin learned the lesson of the 1920 defeat at the hands of the Poles: the Red Army had to be so overwhelmingly large and well equipped that even with imbeciles as commanders it could capture all of Europe in one fell swoop. To accomplish that he needed modern weapons and ancillary equipment which had to be manufactured locally. But where?
All that remained from the already obsolete Tsarist industry was now rubble, overgrown with weeds. Initial attempts to industrialise the Marxist paradise with the sole help of Germany partly failed because Moscow demanded too much too quickly, and the American backers of Germany's banks, facing the weakness of the Weimar Republic's post-Versailles economy, could not carry the weight of what the Kremlin wanted to achieve. However, Germany provided generous (also American bank-backed) trade loans which kept being extended and renewed all the way until 1941, without interruption.
Soviet Industry Built by America
Moscow needed a bigger partner, in fact the biggest. Most of what happened started long before the two countries restored diplomatic relations in 1933. The Great Depression –partly fuelled by Germany's inability to pay enormous reparations which created a domino effect with American banks – meant that US industry had no customers. The only world leader willing to pay for factories, tools, licenses and technologies was the Soviet dictator, Stalin. What did he pay with? Some raw materials, lumber etc, but the main means of payment was grain, Ukrainian grain. Nobody cared whether the peasants would eat, "the man of steel" (which is what "Stalin", a fake name, meant) had to have his tanks, warships, and combat aircraft.
Nobody else in the world could create entire factories in series, move them and reassemble them at greenfield sites. Nobody but the US of A. This was partly due to the fact that optimised production lines worked very well in buildings created for just that purpose; modular, streamlined, simplified. The kind that Albert Kahn and Associates designed for the Detroit greats like Packard. The famous Tractor Factory in Stalingrad, which later produced the T-34 tank, based on patents of the American engineer Christie, was entirely constructed in the US, disassembled, shipped to Soviet Russia, and reassembled in 6 months under the supervision of an entire crowd of American engineers. Kahn's team designed 531 factories and production plants for the Soviet Union and trained 4,000 Soviet architects.
Stalin's five-year plans did not originate at Gosplan, the Russian State Planning Committee, but in the USA, mostly at Amtorg, the organisation which managed the American industrialisation of the Soviet Union.
Amtorg Trading Corporation was created in New York City in 1924 (and operated officially until 1998), theoretically only to service the USSR's foreign trade after the lifting of the American embargo. During the Great Depression, when Amtorg called on unemployed Americans to sign up for construction work in the Soviet Union, 100,000 men applied for such jobs.
At the same time, Soviet propaganda extolled the successful progress of its independently conducted industrialisation, feeding the naïve people a series of pictures of obese capitalists who angrily expressed their envy at the great economic success of the Stalinist empire. Hard to find a more blatant form of hypocrisy.
Not only the iron and steel industry, but the cotton industry, oil refining, coal mining, oil mining and gold mining industries were all built and managed by Americans in the USSR, living in specially built compounds with well-stocked shops. The iron ore industry was handled by them. In the period between 1928 and 1934, the American Oglebay Norton Company from Cleveland (whose owners today completely omit that fact from their company history) ran ALL the Soviet iron ore mines. In 1934, 95% of all the iron ore mined in Soviet Russia came from mines improved by Oglebay Norton. This was the second time that American imperialist capitalist saved the bacon of the anticapitalist Soviet Union. And made a pile of money doing so.
All the political propaganda of the Bolshevik party, right up to WWII, was based on the premise that evil Western capitalists, aided by native traitors, wreckers and kulaks, did their utmost to prevent rapid Soviet industrialisation by sabotaging the Five-Year Plans. But the truth was that it was those very capitalists, American, German, Italian, who created those plans and made them into reality: so that Stalin could have the army of his dreams with which he could conquer the world. A famous propaganda poster of the period shows a small child with a globe, a globe with a map without borders, and the caption reads: "someday it will all be ours".
The first three Soviet five-year plans brought the creation of over 9,000 huge, new factories. They also brought an illusion of economic growth due to the increase of iron and steel output. Social costs? Not only the one and a half BILLION roubles in gold and Ukrainian wheat, paid to the West in just one year, 1933, but also a dramatic drop in agricultural production and a virtual disappearance of the manufacturing of even the most basic consumer goods. The forced collectivisation of villages and the ruthless assault on kulaks, those convenient scapegoats, made the living conditions in the Marxist-Leninist paradise even more of a hell than before.
Stalin really needed a war that would help him feed his citizens before they mutinied. And he was prepared to make himself one, but that is another story. What matters here is that Stalin's massive shopping spree was the main reason behind Holodomor, the genocide in Ukraine: wheat was needed to pay Americans, the survival of Ukrainian peasants was optional. The American journalist Walter Duranty, who for his widely publicised lies about the famine in Ukraine received a Pulitzer Prize, consciously helped uphold the illusion which big American business needed so much; his Pulitzer has not been revoked. To this day.
It is much easier to comprehend Roosevelt's behaviour towards Stalin during WWII, sometimes inexplicably servile, when we realise that the US President was surrounded by people who had amassed unimaginable wealth thanks to their involvement with the creation of Soviet industry. By people such as Averell Harriman, the wartime US ambassador in Moscow. In 1944, Stalin told his friend Harriman that, in fact, two thirds of the entire Soviet industry had been built by American hands.
American Profiteering, Soviet Imperialism
The third lifeline thrown by imperialist America to the Communists of Soviet Russia came after the pre-emptive strike by Hitler's Wehrmacht prevented the Soviets, the only real ally the Third Reich had, from launching their assault on Europe. Once Roosevelt was convinced, incorrectly, that he needed Stalin to counter the Japanese in the Pacific, he was ready to bail out the ruthless dictator, using American taxpayer money and spending it, you guessed it, with American businesses.
The Roosevelt administration sent Stalin a colossal amount of aid within the Lend-Lease scheme: American industry grew rich on taxpayer money because Stalin had promised that, at some future time, he would help the US in the war against Japan in the Pacific region. This "promise" was made more formal only at the Tehran summit in 1943.
The Americans sent the USSR no less than 427,284 trucks, 13,000 tanks, 14,000 combat aircraft, 8,000 tractors, almost 2,000 railway locomotives, over 11,000 railway carriages, 15 million pairs of military boots, 4.5 million tons of food, nearly 60% of all fuel used by Soviet aviation until the end of WWII (in total, 2.7 million tons of all petroleum products) plus 53% of the ENTIRE American ammunition production.
In Moscow, in 1944, Stalin promised again that he would attack Japan, but also demanded much more American military aid to make that possible. In total, he received goods with a value of 11.3 billion dollars, which in today's money would be at least 180 billion dollars. Who represented the US government during those talks? Who else but the same W. Averell Harriman who had made staggering profits on building weapon factories for Stalin the dictator in the 1930s (together with his business partner, Armand Hammer – more about him later).
In Yalta, Stalin vowed to strike the Japanese not later than three months after the cessation of hostilities in Europe; this translated to not later than 8/9 August 1945, once the date of the German unconditional surrender date became known. Stalin had signed a non-aggression treaty with Tokyo in 1941 and did not breach it until August 1945. So, when did the Red Army launch its operation against the Japanese who, even after the A-bomb attack on Hiroshima still naïvely counted on Moscow acting as a mediator in the negotiations with the US and US allies?
Tokyo asked Stalin to help it obtain better surrender conditions in return for large territorial concessions: Stalin agreed, but delayed a settlement on the details of this cooperation.
Stalin declared war on the Empire of Japan on 8 August 1945, two days after Hiroshima and one day before Nagasaki, in fact on the very last day of the period agreed upon with the Allies in Yalta. The fate of the Land of the Rising Sun was sealed, and the Soviets knew it. Fulfilling an obligation towards America, they were actually using the opportunity to seize, with impunity, huge swathes of Asia. The imperialist ambitions of Stalin were realised, having been financed by the American taxpayer.
Armand Hammer
The fourth instance of US capitalists propping up the murderous Soviet regime played out over a longer period and involved a man who in the 1980s was a celebrity and a companion to US presidents. His father, Julius Hammer, ran an operation via Latvia right after the Bolshevik Revolution, supplying the Communist leaders with goods banned by the trade embargo in exchange for diamonds. Later his son, Armand, went to Soviet Russia in 1921, gaining the trust of Lenin and his court to such a degree that he became a permanent conduit between the two worlds: the workers' paradise and the rapacious capitalist one.
He imported thousands of Fordson tractors to Soviet Russia, he supplied the Communist bureaucracy with stationery, he facilitated numerous business deals, and probably also financed and enabled Soviet spy networks. How did he get paid by the misers in the Kremlin? It is suspected that initially in Fabergé eggs and Fabergé's hallmarking tools which made it possible to produce fake eggs in quantity. Later in diamonds, lucrative contracts, and art from museums; which contributed to his art collection and to his international image as a patron of art.
Lenin loved him and gave him a painted portrait of himself, Stalin trusted him, all the subsequent Soviet leaders relied on him, including the ever-distrustful Brezhnev. Armand Hammer's company, Occidental Petroleum, had a long-term deal with the notorious Libyan dictator, Muammar Gaddafi, Hammer was friendly with Yuri Andropov, the architect of the USSR's bloody intervention in Hungary in 1956. None of this prevented him from donating to the campaigns of several US Presidents.
So is This Business As Usual?
The fifth instance of American support aimed at preventing the fall of the regime in the Kremlin appears to be President Trump.
Piotr R Frankowski is a Polish journalist and author, resident in Britain. His latest book on the secret German-Soviet cooperation is out in Poland with its English version due to be published in April 2026.