“The formation of US Steel as the largest corporation ever created added to the sense that steel had to be a matter of public concern, not strictly a private endeavour.” This is what constituted “Americanism” for Lenin, one of the champions of Soviet industrialisation and an admirer of Frederick Winslow Taylor, the leading proponent of the assembly line system and of the rational exploitation of human power. “We must organise the study and teaching of the Taylor system,” declared Lenin, “and… adapt it to our purposes.” By 1930 Tractorstroi, near Stalingrad, had become the largest factory in the Soviet Union.
