Non-hustly

One longstanding puzzle is why we decided to hate Russia. We started invading and occupying Russia in 1918, gave up during the blessed Lucid Interval, then started again with a vengeance immediately after President Lucid died in 1945.

Here’s a clue to our previous attitude, which isn’t exactly warlike but definitely treats Russians as subhuman. From an 1892 NCR internal newsletter for salesmen.

= = = = = START NCR:

With reference to Russia, I think, under the existing state of affairs in that poverty stricken country, it would be advisable not to go to any great expense of collecting names for Hustlers and establishing agencies there just now.

While Russia, so well known for crookedness and dishonesty, ought to be a magnificent field for the sale of Registers, yet, to secure good reliable pushing agents in that territory would be as difficult a matter as to find them here in Germany.

My experience has been that it is no trouble to find some willing and ambitious party to undertake the sale of a Register, but it is quite a different thing to find a man that has nerve enough to hold on long enough to effect a sale.

= = = = = END NCR.

This is similar to Henry Ford’s observation after he tried to run a factory in Leningrad in the ’20s. He found that Russians were too individualistic, not inclined to Hustle for mass production. The factory continued making Ford tractors under license through the ’30s, but no longer under company control.

Why did Russians look undisciplined and non-Hustly to Americans? Probably because Russia has never been corrupted by the London / NYC sweatshoppers, never ruined by “meritocracy” and “rights”. Russians still live with a peasant attitude, expecting a two-way service contract. The peasant works hard when needed, the master maintains the peasant for life, not only during work hours and work years. NCR and Ford were closer to peasant style than most US corporations at the time, but still accustomed to the sweatshop attitude where the peasant has the “right” to starve and the master has the “right” to kill him.