Saul Bron
Saul Grigorievich (Shoil Gershkovich) Bron was born 25 January 1887 in Odessa (Ukraine, Russian Empire), in a Jewish family.
He graduated the Odessa gymnasium and began his higher education at the Kiev Institute of Commerce (now Kyiv National Economic University).
From 1905 to 1907 he continued his education in Europe, where he studied the grain trade and earned a doctorate in economics from the University of Zurich.
As a student at Kiev Commercial Institute Bron was involved in the social-democratic movement, popular among secular Jews in Ukraine as a reaction to anti-Semitism in the Russian Empire.
Bron was the first president of Amtorg whose command of English enabled him to negotiate without the aid of interpreters (he was also fluent in German and French).
[2] His tenure (1927–1930) concurred with the introduction of the first five-year plan, and his role was to contract with major American companies to help build Soviet industrial infrastructure.
[3] In Dearborn, Michigan, he negotiated the US$30m contract with the Ford Motor Company for assistance in building the first Soviet automobile plant (GAZ) near Nizhnii Novgorod (Gorky).
[5] On 8 May 1929 Bron signed an historic contract with the firm of the leading American industrial architect from Detroit, Albert Kahn, to design the first Soviet tractor plant in Stalingrad (now Volgograd).
On 9 January 1930 he signed the second contract with Kahn for his firm to become consulting architects for all industrial construction in the Soviet Union.
Among other American firms, commissioned by Bron to provide technical aid to the USSR, were Hugh L. Cooper (construction of the Dneproges Dam), Arthur G. McKee (design and construction of Magnitogorsk Metallurgical Plant), Freyn Engineering (Novokuznetsk Metallurgical Plant), DuPont de Nemours, Radio Corporation of America, and more than a hundred other companies.
[6] In 1930 Bron was transferred to London, where he was appointed chairman of ARCOS and head of the USSR Trade Delegation in Great Britain.
He remained a member of the Collegium of the Commissariat of Foreign Trade and in 1933 was appointed Chairman of the Chamber of Commerce of the USSR.
However, in 1935, he was demoted and given a job as a deputy to the head of the State publishing agency OGIZ, Mikhail P. Tomsky.
After five months in Lubyanka prison, on 21 April 1938 he was tried in a closed session by the troika (the three-member Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR).
Soviet Economic Development and American Business: Results of the first year under five-year plan and further perspectives.
(abstract) Rasstrel'nye spiski: Moskva, 1937–1941: "Kommunarka", Butovo: kniga pamiati zhertv politicheskikh repressii L. S. Eremina, A.
