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The Soon Coming Judgment Of God Upon America and How To Escape It 245
industrious. Therefore, any aid needed to come from outside the country. The Soviets needed aid
in the form of capital, new industrial equipment and trained personnel to operate it. The first to
come to their aid was International Barnsdall Corporation a subsidiary of Barnsdall Corp., which
held a 75% interest. Barnsdall Corp. was wholly owned by Guaranty Trust, Lee Higginson Co.
and W. A. Harriman.
Barnsdall provided new equipment and trained personnel to the Russians to revitalize the
Caucasus oil fields, which had fallen into severe decline as a result of the Russian revolution. In
1901 the Caucasus oil fields had accounted for more than one-half of the worlds crude oil output.
This had put a big crimp in Standard Oils monopoly. But the oilfields production severely
declined because they required constant investment. Under the Communists, oil drilling had
declined by 99.3% from 50,000 feet per month prior to the revolution to 370 feet per month in
1921. International Barnsdall provided new equipment and trained personnel that would enable
the Soviets to greatly exceed the pre-Soviet oil drilling rates. This provided the Soviets needed
capital and critical crude oil for the nations energy needs.
961
The aid provided by Americans in the Caucasus oil fields came to the attention of the US
State Department. State Department Archives contain the following quotation from Rykov, dated
October 1922:
The one comparatively bright spot in Russia is the petroleum industry, and
this is due largely to the fact that a number of American workers have been
brought into the oil fields to superintend their operation.
962
In 1925, contrary to US law, W. A. Harriman Co. made yet another investment in the
Soviet Union that greatly aided them. Harriman invested $4 million in the modernization of
Russian manganese. In 1913, Russia produced 52% of the world’s manganese but as in the oil
fields, production had fallen under Soviet control. By 1920 manganese production had fallen to
zero and the best Soviet efforts could only achieve modest improvements by 1924. Harriman
provided the capital needed to modernize their production and therefore providing even more
needed capital to the Soviet government from the sale of the manganese.
What the Soviets needed most was a large national industrial-manufacturing enterprise,
which they were incapable of building on their own. “Chase National Bank was instrumental in
establishing the American-Russian Chamber of Commerce in 1922”, which was established to
foster investment in the Soviet Union. The Russians would find the help they so desperately
needed through American industry.
963
Anthony C. Sutton in his book National Suicide provides extensive detail on how the US,
beginning in the late 1920’s, built up the Soviet Unions industrial complex. W. Averell Harriman
confirmed this in a report to the State Department in 1944. Harriman reported that Joseph Stalin
“paid tribute to the assistance rendered by the United States to Soviet industry before and during
the war (WWII). He said that about two-thirds of all the large industrial enterprises in the Soviet
Union had been built with United States help or technical assistance”. Sutton notes that the
remaining one-third of the industrial enterprises was built mostly from assistance from other
Western nations.
964
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