This is Amy Wagenaar from the Historical Society of Michigan with a Michigan History Moment.

The tractor was called the Fordson. Farmers all over the world used Ford tractors to till their fields. A lesser known story is the role the ubiquitous Fordsen played in the Soviet Union. Michigan automaker Henry Ford believed that a small mass produced farm tractor could have a huge market. He began experimenting with tractor designs in 1907 and in 1917 began mass producing the Fordson tractor. Orders poured in from all over the world. By 1918, Ford was the world's largest tractor manufacturer. In the meantime, the Bolshevik revolution had swept through Russia. World War I and the Revolution left that country's agricultural system in shambles. Russia needed tractors to rebuild. In 1924 the new union of Soviet Socialist Republics formed the Amtor Trading Corporation to deal directly with foreign companies such as Ford. In 1925, Amtorg placed an order for 10,000 Fordsons. By 1927 it had purchased 25,000 of the Ford tractors. But the Soviets wanted to do more than buy tractors. They wanted to make them. A delegation from Ford went to Russia and toured a factory works at Leningrad. The factory was producing a copy of the Fordson and the Ford men reported that the Russians had a lot to learn. It took 800 Russian laborers more than a day to build one tractor. Amtorg asked Detroit architect Albert Kahn, who designed many of Ford's factories, to consult on Joseph Stalin's first five year plan for industrialization. Kahn and his team designed more than 500 factories in the Soviet Union and helped the Russians build Fordsons efficiently. Ford Motor Company itself built an automobile factory in Russia. The contract gave Ford exclusive permission to license, manufacture and sell Model A cars and Model AA trucks in the Soviet Union. As Ford phased out the Model A In the early 1930s, the the unneeded parts and equipment went to the Soviet Union. Between 1929 and 1936, sales of the Fordson tractor and other collaborative ventures brought in $40 million to Ford. It was a welcome infusion of cash that helped see Ford through the Great Depression. Today, visitors to a museum courtyard in the city of Pskov, Russia will find a Fordson tractor on display. That tractor bears witness to the rise Soviet industrialization and the tractor that helped transform Russian agriculture.

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