The Brain Import That Saved The Soviet Union

January 8, 2025 by Jacob Fraden

Difficult times produce strong people.

Strong people create good times.

Good times produce weak people.

Weak people create difficult times.

Plato, 380 BC

I’ve been thinking about the technological miracle of the USSR in the 1930s, which occurred after the Bolsheviks took power in 1917, when the country committed intellectual suicide. Almost the entire scientific and technical elite was either exterminated, sent to camps, or emigrated. Scientific and technical specialists have almost completely disappeared from the country. The USSR’s response is relevant to the H-1B debate going on today.

After the Revolution, Russia’s industrial infrastructure was destroyed. Even by the most conservative estimates, it would take at least two generations or about half a century of normal human life to make up for all these colossal losses. The USSR, however, had neither time nor normal conditions. But then, there was a miracle: In only 10 years (1930-1940), the USSR’s technological and scientific sector was not only fully restored but, in many respects, surpassed the European level. For example, at the beginning of the war with Germany in 1941, the USSR had significantly more tanks and aircraft than the Germans, even though there had been no tank or aircraft industry in the USSR some 12 years before!

There is a true saying that “There’s no substitute for experience.” No matter how much you learn from books, no matter how much you copy what’s being made in other countries, and no matter how much you steal someone else’s technology, you can’t produce quality goods until you get hands-on experience. Nevertheless, in an incredibly short time, technical experience in the USSR reappeared. Where did it come from?

Image: Soviet tanks, 1942. RIA Novosti archive, image #1274 / V. Kaushanov / CC-BY-SA 3.0.

When planning the “world revolution,” i.e., the enslavement of Europe, comrade Stalin understood that it would not be possible to conquer other countries without a powerful military industry. Therefore, in 1929, the Soviets, through the US company “Amtorg,” brought in about 10 thousand American specialists (almost all of whom later perished in the Gulag) and purchased from the US nearly 600 heavy industry factories for the production of weapons. Almost the entire military industry of the USSR was built in the 1930s by the United States.

There are obvious parallels to the soft revolution we had in the United States, beginning in the 1960s and accelerating in the 21st century.

World War II, for all its horrors and suffering, had a great positive effect on the United States. It led to the strongest growth in almost all industries, much of which was based on scientific breakthroughs, significantly increasing Americans’ standard of living. At a time when Europe and Asia were in ruins, life in the U.S. was comfortable and getting better every year. Millions of soldiers returning from the war could get a free education, buy homes, start families, and get well-paying jobs.

But as Plato wisely observed, easy times change people. America’s high standard of living changed attitudes, with many young people disinterested in study and work. Why bother when you’ve got it so good already?

This same flabbiness, aided by leftism in academia, has led to intellectual degradation. Mediocrity has become the norm. US colleges value the ability to play football more than knowledge of mathematics. When high school graduates go to colleges and universities, they usually take the so-called “liberal arts.” These disciplines require much less effort than studying the fundamental sciences, do not contribute to the development of analytical and abstract thinking, and, therefore, do not prepare students for productive lives.

Many waiters in American restaurants have liberal arts degrees. Most “liberal art folks” can’t find a professional job and spend their free time on all sorts of nonsense, like fighting climate change or protesting...anything, as long as it’s “against.”

As in the USSR, after this intellectual “revolution” in the United States, there was an acute shortage of scientists and engineers. That’s why at almost any university, in the hard sciences, the students, researchers, and teachers are disproportionately from Asia or other non-Western parts of the world.

The same is true in any high-tech company, where the creative and technical work is done by either recent immigrants or foreigners. In Silicon Valley, almost 80% of the technology workers are foreign-born. American-born people work in marketing, sales, customer service, and other “liberal” jobs where a high intellectual level is not a job requirement. To solve this brain shortage problem, the government followed the same path as Comrade Stalin in 1929: importing specialists from abroad.

In 1990, President George H.W. Bush created a special work visa called H1-B. Sixty-five thousand such visas are granted annually to foreigners with bachelor’s degrees, plus 20,000 to those with master’s degrees. In addition, 309,000 such visas are renewed each year. Seventy percent of the work visas are granted to people from India, about 10% to people from China, and others to Canadians, Koreans, Filipinos, Mexicans, and Taiwanese. It should be noted that the H1-B is not an immigrant visa but a work visa. It’s issued for three years and does not entitle one to a green card or citizenship.

During his first presidential term, Trump strongly opposed this visa, believing that foreigners were taking jobs away from Americans. His personal experience in business did not allow him to understand that construction and real estate require much less education than, say, developing AI, creating new drugs, or manufacturing rockets and cars.

But before the new term began, he wisely changed his mind, probably under the influence of his “performance auditors” Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. Interestingly, some Republicans who support Trump in his other projects (like Steve Bannon) oppose the H1-B visa, not realizing that importing foreign specialists is done for a very vital reason. This measure will be necessary until and if it becomes possible to resurrect our educational system and bring up our own scientific and technical personnel.

Author’s website: www.fraden.com