Yelfimov discussed the supposed independence of Belarus and Russia from Western technology on April 1, 2025, during a broadcast on Radio Minsk and the Minsk News agency’s YouTube channel, alongside political expert Sergei Dik.
“I’ll say this outright: sanctions are a blessing. Honestly. Let’s go back to the Russian Empire — it was always under sanctions too. Did anyone ever bring us any technology from Germany or England? Please, tell me — I’ll gladly write a doctoral dissertation on it. But that never happened. Same goes for the Soviet era. There was that famous GATT, right? The General Agency on Tariffs and Customs (speaker probably refers to General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade—editor's note)which was basically just censorship, a way to keep Western technology out,” Yelfimov said.
There’s more than one dissertation on the Soviet Union’s use of Western technology. For example, in 2022, Russian scholar Maksim Ganin wrote a dissertation titled “Transfer of Industrial Technologies Between the USSR and Germany in the 1920s and Early 1930s.” Using Leningrad as a case study, he explored why Soviet scientists and engineers traveled to Germany, how foreign specialists helped rebuild factories in the city, what equipment and technology the USSR purchased, and how effective it turned out to be.
An earlier dissertation was written in 2018 by scholar Olga Rezanenko. She studied the role of foreign specialists at industrial enterprises in Stalingrad in the late 1920s and 1930s. During the NEP era, the Soviet government actively drew on foreign expertise — sending workers abroad, inviting foreign specialists, and signing contracts with international companies for equipment and patents.
According to Russian historians, the GAZ automobile plant was designed by Henry Ford’s company, and its first cars were assembled using modified blueprints of Ford models. The tractor plants in Stalingrad, Kharkiv, and Chelyabinsk along with the Magnitogorsk Iron and Steel Works, were designed by the firm of American architect Albert Kahn. Much of the equipment for these sites was manufactured in the United States. The Dnipro Hydroelectric Station was built on a Soviet blueprint, but American and German consultants played a key role in the project.
The first Soviet tracked tractor, the Kommunar, was based on the popular German Hanomag model. The first wheeled tractor, the Fordson-Putilovets, was built under license from Ford.
The Moskvich car was a copy of the Opel. Engineers used documentation from a German factory that survived the war as the foundation. The Zhiguli was built on the platform of the Italian Fiat, while the Volga combined features of American Fords and Chevrolets. Another American car, the Packard, inspired Soviet designers to create the Chaika and ZIS models. Both included design elements borrowed from Chrysler. The USSR’s automotive research institute regularly purchased Western car models for analysis, then produced domestic versions. Sometimes the cars were copied outright; other times, only specific design features or engineering elements were borrowed.