Adding Sight to Sound in Stalin�s Russia: RCA and the Transfer of Television Technology to the Soviet Union
Alexander B. Magoun David Sarnoff Library Princeton, New Jersey

In June 1937, Radio Corporation of America (RCA) engineer Loren Jones arrived in Moscow with a six-man contingent to fulfill the company�s end of a technical assistance contract signed 21 months before in the RCA Building in Manhattan. Jones and the other RCA engineers spent nearly twelve months overseeing the transfer of RCA�s electron tube and radio manufacturing technology to factories in Leningrad and Voronezh and, in Jones�s case, the construction of a state-of-the-art electronic television system in Moscow. In return the Soviet Union paid RCA $2.9 million for their services and licensed access to RCA�s pool of electronics patents, as well as an additional sum for the 180 tons of television equipment built in and shipped from the RCA Victor factory in Camden, New Jersey.
Studies of technology transfer by historians of technology typically address the confirmation of a claim of transfer, the nature of the transfer process, or the reception of the transferred technology in its new environment. In this case, the documentation exists, if discreetly, and the nature of the transfer itself is not unusual; what Vernon Ruttan and Yujiro Hayami found for the progressive stages of technology transfer between advanced and developing countries with regard to agriculture apply to electronics as well. Under Josef Stalin, the Soviet Union was determined to achieve high technological self-sufficiency and here, with the purchase of RCA prototypes, intellectual property, and manufacturing techniques, it appeared to reach that goal.
This episode offers, however, an opportunity to address not only the challenges surrounding the diffusion of a technology from an advanced to a developing country. The above issues have their place here and will be addressed, but there are more basic or broader questions to be explored. In this case, the United States and the Soviet Union represent polar opposites in their approaches to political economy. Why would the United States government agree to let RCA sell a technology that the company had not yet commercialized or militarized domestically to a nation whose explicit ideology avowed the destruction of the American way of life?
This is not a new question, either with regard to Soviet-American agreements, or with the more recent transfer of technologies from the United States to Afghanistan or Iraq. An answer in this case offers the reminder that the transfer of high technology depends as much on domestic and external political calculus as the cultural factors often cited as crucial to its success. There were, after all, increasingly obvious military applications of very high frequency and microwave technologies on which electronic television was based. An examination of RCA�s experiences in technology transfer to the Soviet Union contributes to the history of the diffusion of television technology, to the history of Stalin�s efforts to modernize his country, and, more broadly, to the social construction of technology transfer. It explores the political, economic, and technical incentives and obstacles on both sides to sending the Soviets the latest information on electronic technologies; the process by which it took place; and the consequences for both parties.
This paper also provides qualifiers to two assertions about the Soviet acquisition of western technologies. First, in his biography of Soviet inventor Lev Termen, Albert Glinsky argues that the Soviet Union engaged in a broad program of industrial espionage that had a significant impact on Soviet technical and military development. The evidence here indicates that the United States government and leading corporations sold and gave up detailed technical information with few illusions or misgivings, and that the transfers of sophisticated technology, at least, had little immediate effect on the course of Soviet industrialization. Second, George Holliday, in his analysis of the role of western technology in Soviet industrialization, asserts that the Soviet Union�s attitude toward transfers from other countries was periodized, based on perceived needs. Perhaps this is true for the technologies of the first and second industrial revolutions, but few scholars have examined the Soviet demand for electronics before the development of computers. This article indicates that in this field, Stalin�s demands for western technology were continuous from 1928, differing only in the desired applications and form of transfer before being cut off twenty years later. In exploring the motivations of the three parties involved in this transaction, then, we can shine a bit more light on the politics of technology transfer that makes such strange bedfellows and often inhibits the benefits of sending the black box of technology to dictators.

The Soviet Union
Josef Stalin ruled the Soviet Union for thirty years from 1923, a period in Russian history defined by his shaping of a communist state based on his personal paranoia, totalitarian terrorism on the USSR�s citizens, deep distrust of capitalist countries, and a drive for economic self-sufficiency. To attain the latter, the Soviets had to come to terms with those same capitalist countries. A break in Anglo-Soviet economic relations in 1927 and the establishment in 1928 of the first Soviet Five-Year Plan to modernize its heavy industry led to contracts with thirty American companies by October 1929, including RCA. These contracts were part of nearly 300 foreign concessions and technical assistance agreements made by western businesses with the Soviets by the end of 1929. As the global economic depression spread and the Soviet trade imbalance threatened Soviet credit overseas, Stalin gave an interview published in December 1931 in which he praised �Fordism,� the quality of industrial efficiency stimulated partly by what the Soviet premier understood as democratic production practices.
Beyond the economic problems the USSR faced in upgrading its technology, its successful acceptance and innovation of western technologies and industries suffered from domestic political agendas. As the Five-Year Plan began, Stalin began purging society of pre-revolutionary, bourgeois elements; undercutting the professional technocrats and scientists who threatened the authority of the Communist Party; and, later, punishing those who failed to attain the goals of the plan. By June 1931, the purge subsided. It had had the desired effect politically and a new class of technically trained party members began arriving in industry and the institutes from the Soviet universities and lower industry ranks. They could be trusted politically by reasons of patronage or indoctrination to follow Stalin�s line and cooperate more with American engineers on the various projects of the Plan.
By the early 1930s Stalin also had good external reasons for courting the United States and acquiring its latest technologies. First, Stalin faced rising military threats on two fronts. Adolf Hitler�s National Socialism Party dominated elections in Germany early in 1933 while Japan�s assimilation of Manchuria in 1931 boded ill for the USSR�s Far Eastern domain. Second, the Soviet system was under as much pressure to survive in the early 1930s as the western political economies. Stalin could not starve and murder his population indefinitely without increased communication of the communist regime�s message to a mostly illiterate population and some reward for the suffering of the proletariat. Broadcast technology would serve two domestic needs of the Soviet state. It offered another tool to unify the disparate, often illiterate, ethnic groups under the state�s dominion. The Second Five-Year Plan called, therefore, for enormous increases in electronic communications capacity, including a network of �huge radio centers� to unite the state�s populations through automatic, short-wave, radio transmitters and receivers. The Soviet people would listen on eight million small radios; they also have opportunities to receive �television and phototelegraphy[,] increasing the size of images to that of a full newspaper page.� Electronic television, like radio, would not only transmit to the Soviet peoples the practical accomplishments of a political economy instituted by force, but legitimate it as scientifically effective. In this respect it fulfilled the same purpose as planning and publicity for the Soviet attainment of aviation records for altitude, speed, and distance, which took place almost simultaneously with the Soviet expression of interest in RCA�s television system. The entertainment content and home ownership of this nascent technology would also show a potentially restive population that the Soviet political economy worked as promised.
Yet between 1932 and 1933 production of broadcast radio receivers in the Soviet Union dropped 25% to 22,200. To continue his modernization drive, improve his defenses, and justify the Communist system to Soviet consumers, Stalin needed American technical and industrial assistance, unimpeded by tariffs, short-term credit restrictions, or political interference over Soviet agreements with American corporations.
The Soviet interest in RCA�s work in television in particular is not surprising given, first, the state of its television research at the time, and second, the recent publicity for RCA�s advances. The purges of 1928-31 halted the work of Russia�s electronic television pioneer, Boris Rozing, who had shown images on a cathode-ray tube in his laboratory at the St. Petersburg Institute of Technology in 1908. Rozing was tried and exiled to the Forestry Institute of Technology in Archangel in 1931, where he died two years later. Ten different labs in the USSR worked on different aspects of the technology; lacking any significant funding, the researchers focused on the theory and mathematics of electron behavior in a television system. Two scientists filed patents in 1930 and 1931 for one- and two-sided photoelectric mosaics that seem to follow �migr� Vladimir Zworykin�s 1923 and 1925 applications on behalf of the Westinghouse Electric Corporation. None of this, however, resulted in demonstrable electronic equipment. Instead, beginning in 1931, stations in four cities transmitted images of 30 lines per frame moving at 12.5 frames per second, using John Logie Baird�s adaptation of Paul Nipkow�s electromechanical disc. This increasingly archaic novelty remained in place five years later. Thus when Zworykin, a prot�g� of Rozing�s who had left Russia in 1919 and was now employed by RCA, began publicizing in the summer of 1933 the electronic camera that he and his team had developed, it was natural that Soviet political-technical authorities should invite him to the USSR.

RCA
RCA�s relationship with the Soviets began in July 1928 with a wireless communications contract that would connect the USSR with the rest of RCA�s global radiotelegraphy system. The company�s initial agreement with the State Electro Technical Trust of Weak Current Factories covered point-to-point wireless communications consisting of telegraphy, telephony, facsimile, and picture transmission, but �not including television.� Both parties provided the other with a radio traffic agreement and the rights they controlled for patents related to these technologies�along with the technical exchange program in which Jones reluctantly participated. RCA also provided the information necessary for manufacturing facsimile terminals. RCA was less interested in what it might learn from the Soviets than on initiating an exclusive wireless traffic agreement for its RCA Communications division. Agreement was reached on October 18, 1929. Resolving the division of receipts between the two parties required the intercession of RCA president J. G. Harbord, executive vice president David Sarnoff, and a special emissary to the People�s Commissariat for Posts and Telegraphs of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).
The contract included visits in alternate years by engineers from each country. In January 1931 the 25-year-old Loren Jones filled in for RCA�s European manager and made his first visit to the Soviet Union in partial fulfillment of the agreement. The director of the Radio Research Laboratory of the Ministry of Communications, Professor Minz, escorted Jones for lectures to radio engineering groups in Moscow and Leningrad. Jones also put on hip-high boots for a tour of the world�s first 500-kilowatt station outside of Leningrad. His chief memories were not of what he learned technically from his audiences but of the bitter cold after spending five months in Rome, the poverty and starvation apparent in the streets of Moscow, and the frustration of dealing with the hotel staff and plumbing at his hotel. It is not clear how much RCA�s expertise or products aided the improvement of the USSR�s wireless communications system; Jones noted only the size of the station he visited. The observation that it typified �the Russian fetish for bigness� was odd from an engineer who helped build the first of the 500Kw radio stations for the United States.
By 1932, the agreement had disintegrated. The Soviet Union�s ballooning foreign trade imbalance left it, through its agent Amtorg Trading Company, unable to pay RCA and other companies for equipment it had ordered. Few American companies or banks were willing to provide the Soviets with long-term credit arrangements. The rising tariff wall that the United States Congress began enacting, as the global economy collapsed in the Great Depression, did not help. By the end of 1933, Russia�s purchases of American goods were one-sixteenth of those in 1929-30.
For RCA, the requirements of economic survival and technological development also outweighed ideological concerns. By 1933 the company had lost money for the third consecutive year, laid off 4,000 of 22,000 employees, and cut the pay of the survivors�including Sarnoff. Some 60 employees were employed to develop Vladimir Zworykin�s electronic television system into a product, but its innovation was postponed indefinitely as the challenges and costs of commercialization proved more complicated and expensive than Zworykin had initially proposed in 1929. RCA cut his staff to ten in the following years.
At the nadir of RCA�s fortunes, however, in the late spring of 1933, Zworykin introduced his electronic television camera tube, the Iconoscope, after eight years of experimentation. Between scans of each frame, the tube stored light from an image as electronic charges, making possible the first, practical, high-definition television system. Zworykin explained its principles at the Institute of Radio Engineers� (IRE) annual meeting in June, resulting in page-one and Sunday coverage in the New York Times and publication of the paper in British, French, and German technical journals as well as the IRE�s Proceedings. That summer, he toured Western Europe to promote the Iconoscope.
He also visited the Soviet Union for the first time since 1920. The circumstances of the USSR�s inclusion in the itinerary are unclear, as RCA�s 1928 agreement had expired, but Zworykin received a visa from the Soviet Consulate in Paris for the trip further east. He presented his paper at the Moscow Home of Scientists to a group of radio researchers in August before returning home the next month. That fall, S. A. Vekshinsky, whose lab specialized in CRT television displays, and A. F. Shorin, whose lab was experimenting with film scanning technologies, visited the RCA Victor plant in Camden. There they watched live, 243-line, flicker-free video on Zworykin�s bright and focused Kinescope CRT when no one in the Soviet Union was watching more than thirty flickering, dimly lit lines in a frame.
Transmission engineers at RCA had been busy as well. In the spring of 1932, Jones and a small team installed the first television transmitter antenna atop the Empire State Building in New York City, and broadcast a live address by RCA president David Sarnoff through an electronic flying spot scanner and CRT displays providing five square inches of image. Sarnoff appeared to RCA�s patent licensees at 120 lines per frame, and 24 frames per second. What appealed most to the Soviets, perhaps, was the high-altitude antenna; the prospect of superpowered television broadcasting fit the centralized paradigm of Russian culture.
A year later, Zworykin returned to the Soviet Union to give a series of lectures on the electronic system RCA continued to develop. During a full lecture and tour schedule, Zworykin found that he spent more time answering questions than in giving his talks. In Moscow he met the head of the communications trust, who proposed that RCA install a television transmitter and some receivers in the city; the proposal was repeated after a tour of some provincial cities. Zworykin returned to the United States in November 1934 and reported on the Soviets� interest to RCA president David Sarnoff. Three months later he returned to Leningrad for more lectures and discussions at the newly formed All-Union Scientific Research Institute for Television.
Sarnoff�s thoughts are difficult to discern from documentary evidence if only because he left nothing regarding this episode beyond the reference in a typed note on a meeting with U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt, and two photos of the contract signing in one of his photo albums. With the onset of the Cold War in the late 1940s, he become a champion of opposition to communism, but a decade earlier he was more concerned with the threat of Hitler, who took office in 1933 and put an end to the World War I reparations agreement Sarnoff helped negotiate with German finance minister Hjalmar Schacht in 1929.
The prospect of Soviet access to television and the military applications that Sarnoff and Zworykin were began proposing to the U.S. Army Air Force was less threatening if the USSR might also develop it for use against a common enemy. There was however an economic angle to consider as well. The contract would also pay for an airplane to be used in aerial television research and development at RCA Victor in Camden. According to RCA�s leading radar engineer during the 1930s, the American military was unconcerned with Soviet access to the company�s work on aerial television; in the mid-1930s none of the services had significant budgets to underwrite RCA�s research on radar or television. Thus military and corporate penury reinforced one another: if another party proved willing to underwrite some of the millions of dollars involved in testing and prototyping television, neither RCA�s president nor the American armed forces would complain.
Finally, the development of a Soviet system based on the one RCA was then field-testing offered RCA�s technical and manufacturing staff more experience in testing and producing the system. Not only did the contract underwrite some of RCA�s own research but the cash earned from licensing and manufacturing went straight to the RCA Victor Division�s bottom line. It had not turned a profit since its establishment in 1930-31 and Victor�s Soviet income would make a considerable difference in the division�s health. The experience would also help the RCA Victor engineers reduce the cost for television system manufacture while American industry and the Federal Communications Commission decided on a standard for television broadcasting domestically.

The United States Government
As for the United States, there was no real reason not to recognize the Soviet Union�not, at least, under Roosevelt, who took office in March 1933 and established full diplomatic relations eight months later. His sources in Russia relayed news of the country�s economic revival while Europe and the Americas wallowed in the trough of the Depression. Warding off the State Department�s suspicions and warnings, Roosevelt signed what he regarded as a gentleman�s agreement with Soviet foreign minister Maxim Litvinov deferring resolution of over $600 million in tsarist debts and overlooked Stalin�s establishment of state-supported subversion through Comintern. Before the collapse of trade between the two nations, the Soviets had purchased $129 million worth of industrial equipment in 1929-30, making them one of the United States� ten largest trade partners. Despite an ideology that avowed the destruction of the American political economy, the Soviets offered to left-wing Democrats in Roosevelt�s administration an alternative model of economic success, a market for the products of American factories, and a counterweight to the militaristic governments in Germany, Italy, and Japan.
From recognition followed a reduction in tariffs and the establishment of the Export and Import Bank of Washington in February 1934 with a capitalization of $11 million to finance Soviet imports. Yet this did not lead to a broad thaw in Soviet-American economic relations. The State Department tried to use the lure of the bank�s credits to force the Soviets to accept responsibility for tsarist debts, with no success. After American ambassador William F. Bullitt found that Litvinov had snookered Roosevelt on the specifics of debt repayment, he gave up trying to work with the Soviets and assured them that difficulties at the political level did not prevent them from negotiating contracts directly with American companies. This avenue hit a roadblock when Congress passed the Johnson Debt Default Act in 1934, making it illegal for private individuals or organizations to loan money to the USSR.
During 1934 Sarnoff met with Roosevelt several times to discuss various issues related to economic health of the nation�s radio monopoly and largest radio network. While the president kept no notes on his meetings and Sarnoff kept them for only one of his, we can assume the issue of the Soviet contract came up for discussion. Nine months of negotiation between RCA and the USSR resulted in a contract signed in RCA�s boardroom in the RCA Building in Rockefeller Center in July 1935, shortly after Sarnoff�s May announcement of RCA�s million-dollar field test of its 343-line system. On December 26, Sarnoff visited the White House and discussed a variety of subjects with Roosevelt, including the Soviet contract and the president�s view of Soviet-American relations.
The State, Army, and Navy Departments all signed off on the deal and the contract between Glavesprom and RCA was completed September 30, 1935, signed by RCA�s chairman of the board General J. G. Harbord and Glavesprom director Leonid A. Lutov on December 3. There is no pretense at a technical exchange; the contract opens with the notice that RCA controlled �plants and laboratories embodying [the] latest technical achievements in radio, television and allied fields;� that Glavesprom �is desirous of obtaining from RCA . . . technical assistance�in respect of radio, television and other apparatus, inventions and discoveries, whether patented or unpatented;� and that RCA was willing �to render available to Glavesprom technical and manufacturing information�technical assistance�to the extent of its experience, in accordance with the most advanced technique in use at the time by RCA.�
The agreement covered radio and television as well as phonographs and disc records, all types of electron tubes, motion picture sound technology, remote control devices, and the equipment and materials to manufacture these products. RCA�s $2.9 million fee covered access to these technologies until December 31, 1940. It did not include the 180 tons of television transmitter, studio, and antenna equipment ordered by Glavesprom or the costs related to transporting, housing, and paying for the fifty engineers Glavesprom could underwrite at RCA�s factories, radio stations, and laboratories, or the five RCA engineers that it could request for consultation in the U.S.S.R. in any one year.

Outcomes Once again, as with the agreements signed during the First Five-Year Plan, Stalin�s purges complicated the transfer of western technology to the dictatorship of the proletariat. The RCA team arrived in Moscow on June 30, 1937, shortly after Marshal Tukhachevsky and six other members of the Red Army�s general staff were executed. Two of the three Soviet signatories to the RCA contract at Rockefeller Center were �gathered� during the contract, including General Sinyavsky of the Communications Ministry. Jones, who supervised the project on RCA�s behalf, found that of �the many Russian television engineers whom [sic] we knew well in Camden, none who speak English have appeared and we have seen only three altogether.� A fourth of the six with whom Jones worked closely eventually appeared, but none of them invited the Americans to their homes for the informal exchanges of information and friendship that smooth a technical exchange.
The process of actually installing the Moscow system would have proved challenging even without the Soviet suffering during The Great Fear. Jones represents another of the self-selected American technical experts who went to the USSR on their corporation�s behalf. Like Hugh Lincoln Cooper, he looked forward to working�and socializing�with the local population at the same time that he insisted on certain perquisites of his position: in his case, a Chrysler sedan he wanted to drive himself. His letters and memoirs are full of good-humored commentary on the bureaucratic, linguistic, and material obstacles that made working in the USSR a constant struggle. Exchanging ideas through someone who combined the tasks of an engineer, translator, and secretary made it obvious that �even more time and money spent on Russian lessons in Philadelphia would have been worthwhile.� The translations of the Russian Radio Trust on damage to the shipped equipment indicate similar problems in the other direction: �All the jacks are shaking.� �Some compensator keys are also loose, what is quite inadmissible.� �When framing the case, the hinges were snatched from the screws.� Communicating with fellow staff in Leningrad and Voronezh was made difficult by a telephone system where connections took one to nearly twelve hours.
Nonetheless, with the efforts of several hundred male and female laborers and engineers on the Television Center, the Soviet Union had the world�s fourth all-electronic television station operational with a temporary antenna on December 26; the final antenna on Shukov Tower February 28, 1938. By April the Russians had accepted the work, by which time they had broadcast �occasional programs� to the RCA-made receivers and ten Soviet-made receivers distributed to that point. After testing reception in the homes of some of the Moscow engineers, Jones journeyed one winter night to a cottage 30 kilometers away that was accessible only through �deep snow.� He found reception of a Russian movie broadcast to a TV receiver both �excellent� and �weird.� The installation of television in Moscow gave RCA what it desired. The company gained useful field and production experience in building, installing, and testing a fully electronic television system in the further innovation of a broadcast standard. This did not hold back innovation at home, for the vast bulk of its engineers were continuing field tests in the United States with thorough surveys of reception around New York and Philadelphia. There the varieties of electrical and electronic interference were far more complex than those encountered in a country with few electronic ignitions or transmitters. In addition RCA increased the display�s line density to 441 from the 343 used in the 1936 tests; it is unclear whether the Soviets adopted the higher definition as well.
RCA�s improvements to Soviet factory production were less apparent in the face of the flight of skilled Russian technical staff from production during the purges of the 1930s. Radio receiver output actually declined from a peak of 334,000 in 1936 to 200,000 in 1937; in 1940 the figure was 160,500. As for television, the Soviets produced 300 receivers in 1940, and apparently did not produce another set for ten years. In 1950, production resumed with 11,900 sets, a figure that climbed dramatically to 1.3 million by the end of the decade. This does not describe, of course, the quality of production.
RCA�s relationship with Soviet television and the broader transfer of electronic technologies was renewed with American support of the eastern front during World War II, although without the assistance of Jones, who refused to return to the USSR on political grounds. The RCA Victor factory in Camden contracted to build radios for Soviet tanks, aiding their coordination in the maneuvers during the world�s largest tank battle at Kursk in 1943. As the war began to reach its denouement, the company prepared a new licensing agreement covering every technology and manufacturing technique not classified for military purposes in the fall of 1944. At the end of December, the Federal Bureau of Investigation was told that military departments had approved a visit to the Soviet Union by five RCA staff, which was awaiting approval from the Department of State. The trip apparently never took place; the proposed contract underwent further legal and commercial review with a final draft prepared on Valentine�s Day, 1945.
This was apparently signed, and new Russian engineers appeared at RCA�s factories. They gained access to the licensing bulletins and craft knowledge behind RCA�s electron microscope, a device championed by Zworykin as another, more beneficent means of �distant vision;� the latest in cathode-ray tube technologies for radar and television displays; radio-frequency heating for industrial processes; the beginnings of electronic computer memory; and RCA�s image orthicon, developed for guided missiles during the war and converted to commercial cameras 100 to 1,000 times more sensitive than the pre-war iconoscope. The sale of information and technology came to a halt when the U.S. Commerce Department established an export control system in 1949 to go into effect by one Monday midnight. Between the announcement Saturday and the deadline, a sympathetic American Amtorg official located a cargo ship and arranged for the loading of $5 million of machinery. This included RCA cameras and electron microscopes, useful in the processing of materials for nuclear weapons. By the time the FBI arrived to impound the goods, the ship was already in international waters.

Conclusion
Nathan Rosenberg once wrote with regard to American and Soviet transfers that �when modern technology is carried to points remote from its source, without adequate supportive services, it will often shrivel and die.� Was that the case here? In legal technological transfers between democracies and totalitarian regimes, there are three parties involved in the contract: the governments of the two nations and the company bearing the technology itself. In the case of the transfer of the American electronic television to the Soviet Union in the 1930s, wrapped within a larger cluster of electronic technologies, it is fairly clear what RCA gained from the process. Its point man, Loren Jones, lived an experience that became the highlight of his career; its manufacturing company gained useful experience in producing television systems; and RCA received a vital profit at a time when the country and the company backslid economically during the recession of 1937.
For the United States and the Soviet Union, the consequences are less clear. The United States failed to accomplish its foreign policy objectives in recognizing Soviet sovereignty and opening the door to renewed economic relations. Neither the Soviets nor the Americans had any significant effect on Japanese advances in mainland Asia and the Soviet-German non-aggression pact of 1939 was completely antithetical to Roosevelt�s goals. In permitting RCA and other companies to negotiate their own deals with the USSR, the American government helped maintain domestic employment and subsidize the incremental innovation of electronic television as the Depression dragged on through the mid-1930s.
In the Soviet Union, the consequences are typically less clear, but they are suggestive. For nearly $3 million in hard currency, the Soviet government and its researchers and manufacturers gained complete access not only to some of the most advanced technology on earth, but to engineers who could show how to implement its production within Russia. Despite the problems of language and other cultural impediments, the evidence suggests that RCA�s fulfilled their side of the bargain in the Soviet Union. Stalin�s purges, organized in support of ideological purity and personal survival, eliminated all the advantages gained. Contrary to Rosenberg�s assertion, western electronic technology did not �shrivel and die.� The Soviet Union began to catch up with the west in the provisioning of its citizenry with electronic television in the late 1950s, although by then the United States, Europe, and Japan were beginning to diffuse RCA�s 1950 invention of electronic color television. In the USSR, domestic politics trumped high-technology innovation for military purposes, much as Saddam Hussein�s increasing paranoia fragmented Iraqi research and development into the nuclear, biological, and chemical technologies donated by or bought or smuggled from the United States and western Europe before 1991. These special cases of technological transfer, between democracies and dictators, help confirm Kranzberg�s fourth law of technology, that while technology might be a prime element in many public issues, nontechnical factors take precedence in technology-policy decisions. Technology was at the heart of the Soviet Five-Year Plans in the 1930s and Hussein�s ambitions in the 1990s but other, often deadly, non-technical factors severely distorted the anticipated technological outcomes. With this lesson in mind capitalist democracies might be more sanguine about the potential for sophisticated threats by totalitarian states that obtain western technologies, although it appears that there will be new test cases in the years to come.