Business: Red Tractors In the Midwest

A Kremlin subsidiary

A Minnesota wheat farmer plowing up the south 40 in a Soviet-built tractor? It sounds about as likely as a Muscovite munching black-eyed peas—but it shouldn't. During the past three years, Satra Corp., a New York City-based firm that markets Soviet exports in the West, has managed to sell more than 1,000 sturdy Soviet-built Belarus tractors to American farmers. This may not be much when measured as a percentage of the total U.S. tractor market (1976 sales: 153,000 units), but it was enough to convince the Soviet state corporation Traktoroexport that it was time to cut out the middleman...