© UnknownStudebaker • Ray McGovern • Russian General
A Russian general who had driven "Studers" through the mud of a war that ate his generation whole gave an American stranger a bear hug because the stranger understood, in Russian, what had been lost and what had been shared.
There is a moment, small and human, that cuts through decades of geopolitical noise like a blade through fog. In April 2015, in Moscow, Ray McGovern, a former CIA analyst who spent 27 years briefing American presidents, attended a ceremony hosted by the Russians. This event marked the 70th anniversary of the Meeting on the Elbe. In April 1945, American and Soviet troops joined hands on a bridge in Germany, realizing together that the war was nearly over.
McGovern had recited Nekrasov's devastating anti-war poem in both Russian and English. When he stepped back from the podium, a towering Russian general, chest armored in medals, approached.
The general spoke no English. But he took McGovern by the shoulders and said the one word in his vocabulary that bridged the two worlds: "Studebaker! Studebaker!" And then came the Russian bear hug.
Blacksmith's Shop to World's Largest Wagon Maker
The Studebaker story begins, as the best American stories do, with almost nothing. In 1852, brothers Clement and Henry Studebaker opened a blacksmith shop in South Bend, Indiana.
Their starting capital was $68 and two forges. What they possessed in abundance was something that money cannot easily manufacture: the willingness to build things with their hands, better than the next man, and to stand behind what they made. They built wagons. Then thousands of wagons.
By the 1870s, Studebaker was the world's largest wagon and carriage manufacturer, making tens of thousands of vehicles a year, and supplied more than 100,000 wagons to the Union Army during the Civil War.
They helped outfit the great westward migration of a young nation that was literally building itself out of a raw continent. As historian Thomas Bonsall wrote of Studebaker's arc, it was "in microcosm, the story of the industrial development of America itself." This was the capitalism of tangible creation.
Companies built things; they were hubs for communities; they invested in equipment and expertise, and their prosperity hinged on what they produced. The South Bend Studebaker company had no isolated existence but was woven into the fabric of American industrial society, from the blast furnaces of Pittsburgh and the assembly line of Detroit to the shipyards of Baltimore. Looking back, it is astonishing just how completely all of it was disassembled. And, crucially, with the arrival of the automobile, Studebaker did not cede the playing field; it reconfigured it.
It made its first electric car in 1902 and its first gas-powered model two years later. By the 1920s, it stood in total assets behind only Ford and General Motors, an extraordinary position for an Indiana family firm that had started by hammering iron. The company's strategy was simple and coherent: make durable, quality vehicles at competitive prices, invest in talent, and treat the product with respect. That strategy would define its golden years, and, in a painful irony, make its eventual death at the hands of financial mechanics all the more instructive.
Raymond Loewy and the marriage of Steel and Beauty
The 1930s meant near ruin, bankruptcy in 1933, the Depression, and retrenchment. But Studebaker survived, reorganized, and did something that set it apart from most survivors: it hired a genius. Beginning in 1936, Studebaker hired French-born industrial designer Raymond Loewy, whose impact on the company led to some of the most iconic automotive designs in American history. In the course of the Second World War, the government limited the design of civilian cars for Ford, General Motors, and Chrysler.
Because Loewy's firm was independent, no such restrictions applied to Studebaker, which permitted it to launch the first all-new postwar automobile in 1947, two years ahead of the Big Three.
Called by automotive historians one of the most beautiful cars ever designed in America, the 1953 Starliner coupe was low-slung, aerodynamic, and almost impossibly elegant for the era. Loewy's work brought aeroplane styling and aerodynamic principles that would become standard practice throughout the entire auto industry, influencing designers from BMW to Jaguar to Rolls-Royce.
His final collaboration with Studebaker, the Avanti, was so far ahead of its time that it became the only contemporary American automobile placed on permanent display at the Smithsonian Institution. Here was an American company producing objects of genuine beauty, engineering ambition, and durable function, a company treating its products as worthy of serious attention.
The tragedy of what followed is not merely economic. It is civilizational.
When an Indiana Factory Armed the Red Army
But before the tragedy, there was the war, and a chapter in Studebaker's history that should be remembered on every anniversary of the Allied victory, in every country that fought one.
During World War II, Studebaker shifted its entire operation to wartime production, manufacturing the US6 truck series, aircraft engines for the B-17 Flying Fortress, and the M29 Weasel amphibious carrier. It manufactured 63,789 Wright Cyclone aircraft engines for the legendary B-17. But its most historically consequential contribution was the US6 truck, a rugged, all-terrain, all-weather 2.5-ton workhorse that became the logistical backbone of the Soviet Red Army's advance from Stalingrad to Berlin.
Of the 200,000 shipped, the most went to the Soviet Union, where it was the most exported vehicle to the USSR in the Lend-Lease program. The Soviet soldiers called it the Studer and loved it with the sort of devotion soldiers give to equipment that does not let them down when everything else is falling apart. The Studebaker deserves a monument like the T-34 tank, which is honoured everywhere, wrote artilleryman Ilya Maryasin. The truck was indispensable for towing artillery and anti-tank guns, for transporting troops over long distances, and as the basis for the famous Katyusha multiple rocket launchers. "The U.S. Studebaker trucks were a godsend," recalled signalman Semyon Brevdo.
They came with a steel-cable winch above the front bumper. Having one or two Studebakers in the column was the difference between success and failure. The truck became affectionately known as the "King of Roads" by Soviet soldiers, and its importance was recognized by Joseph Stalin himself, who sent a personal letter of appreciation to the Studebaker Corporation. The Soviet Union was so impressed by its design that it was closely copied as the ZiS/ZiL 151 and 157 family of trucks, which continued in production until 1966, and the GAZ-51 postwar truck used the Studebaker cab as its direct template.
This is what that Russian general was remembering. Not abstract history. Not a diplomatic communiqué. The Studer: the truck that helped carry his people's 27 million dead from the killing fields to victory. An American company, from Indiana, of all places, had shown up when it mattered, in iron and steel, and the debt of gratitude had never been fully spoken aloud...until McGovern recited a Russian poem in Moscow, and a general found the one English word he needed.
The Great Unraveling: How Wall Street Devoured the Builders
Studebaker Champion Regal Starliner Coupe 07
In December 1963, Studebaker shuttered its South Bend plant, ending American car production. Its Canadian operations limped on until 1966, and the company itself vanished entirely from the American business scene by 1979. A company that had existed for 111 years, that had helped settle the American West, supplied the Union Army, armed the Red Army, and produced the most beautiful cars of its generation, was gone. Absorbed, fragmented, dissolved into conglomerates.
The Studebaker ending was a harbinger. What killed the independent American industrial company was not incompetence. It was a structure, a financial system that increasingly rewarded short-term returns over long-term investment, that punished capital-intensive manufacturing and celebrated asset-light speculation, that valued the extraction of value over its creation.
By the 1970s, the transformation had become structural and intentional. In 1980, the financial industry accounted for only 6 percent of corporate profits in the United States. Today it accounts for close to 50 percent. Meanwhile, manufacturing now accounts for just 12 percent of the US economy, down from a peak of 28 percent in 1953. The idea that companies exist primarily to create value for shareholders became the dominant management philosophy.
Public markets demanded that corporations focus on "core competencies" and divest everything else. This resulted in asset-light organizations with fewer employees, less diversity, and less vertical integration.
The number of manufacturing plants in America with more than 5,000 workers fell from 192 in 1977 to only 49 in 2007. South Bend, Indiana, a city that once had one of the largest manufacturing complexes in the world, built the wagons for westward expansion and the trucks that drove the Wehrmacht back through Ukraine. It became a cautionary tale of the Rust Belt.
What Studebaker's demise previewed, the broader American economy subsequently confirmed: a civilization that once built things for the world had chosen, through deliberate policy and financial incentive, to extract money instead. And it called this progress.
From Allies to Adversaries: The Cold War's Original Sin
The same postwar decades that saw American industrial capitalism begin its long financial mutation also saw the burial of the wartime alliance.
The men who met on the Elbe in 1945, who had fought on the same side, died in a common cause, equipped each other with trucks and aircraft and food, were swiftly reconfigured as existential enemies. The Cold War was, among other things, a machine for forgetting what cooperation had made possible. What followed across seven decades does not need to be rehearsed in full detail here. The key point is that NATO's post-Cold War expansion, its deliberate, documented advance toward Russia's borders in defiance of explicit assurances given to Soviet and then Russian leadership at the Cold War's close, was not a defensive reflex.
It was a strategic choice, made by Western elites who had decided that American primacy, rather than a genuine security architecture, was the organizing principle of the post-Soviet world. The Maidan coup of 2014, backed and celebrated by Washington, was not the beginning of the Ukraine crisis.
It was an accelerant poured onto embers that Western policy had spent years banking. The general who gave McGovern a bear hug in 2015 was already living in a country that had been told, clearly and repeatedly by NATO expansion, that its security concerns were irrelevant. That the wartime alliance was not a precedent for partnership but merely an inconvenient historical memory. That the country which had absorbed 27 million deaths defeating Nazism should now accept a military alliance on its doorstep as the price of "Western values."
The Tears That Do Not Forget
On June 22, 2016, the 75th anniversary of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, a day that President Putin called "a lump in the throat," ex-CIA officer Ray McGovern stood in Yalta, Crimea, with a small group of American citizens invited by Russian hosts. It was, as he noted, the first unofficial American delegation welcomed since the US-backed Maidan coup in Kyiv had cut many ties between the two peoples.
He was asked to speak, so he recited the same Nekrasov poem he had shared in Moscow. Nikolay Nekrasov was a 19th-century Russian poet known for his moving verse about the suffering of ordinary Russian people, which made him a hero among the intelligentsia.
His poem about war, written in another century, about other wars, was written for every war. Including the ones not yet fought. Including this one. McGovern recalled the mothers and widows in the audience who were old enough to have lived what the poem described. We close with that poem, in the original Russian, and in McGovern's own translation, because it says something that no geopolitical analysis can say:
Николай Некрасов "Внимая ужасам войны"
Внимая ужасам войны,
При каждой новой жертве боя
Мне жаль не друга, не жены
Мне жаль не самого героя.
Увы! Утешится жена,
И друга лучший друг забудет;
Но где-то есть душа одна -
Она до гроба помнить будет!
Средь лицемерных наших дел
И всякой пошлости и прозы
Одни я в мире подсмотрел
Святые, искренние слезы -
То слезы бедных матерей!
Им не забыть своих детей,
Погибших на кровавой ниве,
Как не поднять плакучей иве
Своих поникнувших ветвей.
Heeding the horrors of war,
At every new victim of battle
I feel sorry not for his friend, nor for his wife,
I feel sorry not even for the hero himself.
Alas, the wife will be comforted,
And best friends forget their friend;
But somewhere there is one soul
Who will remember unto the grave!
Amidst the hypocrisy of our affairs
And all the banality and triviality
Unique among what I have observed in the world
Sacred, sincere tears -
The tears of poor mothers
They do not forget their own children,
Who have perished on the bloody battlefield,
Just as the weeping willow never lifts
Its dangling branches.
A Russian general who had driven "Studers" through the mud of a war that ate his generation whole gave an American stranger a bear hug because the stranger understood, in Russian, what had been lost and what had been shared.
That transaction was worth more than every NATO summit communiqué combined. That grief in a Russian mother's heart, and let me surprise you by saying, or a Ukrainian mother's heart, is worth way more than any geopolitical interest, or have we really lost track of what it's all about?!
McGovern recalled that revelatory moment in a recent interview with dark irony. "I'll bet," he said, "that JD Vance doesn't know what that was all about."
But we know what it's about.
WE DO KNOW.
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