Russian-American Industrial Corporation
The Russian-American Industrial Corporation (RAIC) (Russian: Русско-американская индустриальная корпорация) was an international economic development venture launched in 1922 by the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America in conjunction with the government of Soviet Russia.
In the United States many of those most anxious to help were those recent émigrés from the Russian Empire, including hundreds of thousands of Jews who had escaped the anti-Semitic regime in seeking a better life in the new world.
As a youth Hillman had become a Marxist and had actively worked for the revolutionary overthrow of Tsarism from 1903 as a member of the Bund and the Menshevik wing of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP).
[1] It would be Hillman who would conceive of the institution known as the Russian-American Industrial Corporation as a mechanism to import garment-making machinery and organizational know-how to Soviet Russia in a tangible effort to aid the successful development of the Russian Revolution.
Already in that year there was a model American-inspired industrial colony established in the Kuznetsk Basin of Western Siberia, the brainchild of émigré IWW activist William "Big Bill" Haywood and Dutch communist S. J.
[2] This input of American organizational know-how and technology had been credited with a tenfold rise in worker productivity in the Kemerovo coal mines, and had spurred the interest of Soviet government officials in replication of the program in other fields.
[4] Shocked by the famine and disrepair, Hillman advocated the immediate appropriation of financial aid to Soviet Russia, believing that infusion of foreign capital would be required to restore the Russian industrial base.
"[12] Following approval of the RAIC program by the convention of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, Hillman returned to Soviet Russia in the summer of 1922 to hammer out additional details of the enterprise.
[13] Despite promises to raise $1 million to fully finance the effort, American fundraising through sale of stock fell short of the mark, although an initial payment of $200,000 was made early in 1923.
[19] In addition to a lessened Soviet need for foreign investment in consumer dry goods production, a contributing factor to the end of RAIC was economic necessity on the American side, with the coffers of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers and the personal finances of its members drained by a protracted tailoring strike in 1925.
