To design the Moscow assembly plant and a temporary assembly plant in Nizhny Novgorod, the Soviets again turned to Kahn. But for the main Nizhny Novgorod factory, which was to be the largest automobile plant in Europe—conceived of as a scaled-down version of the Rouge, a fully integrated, mass production facility—and for a nearby city to accommodate thirty-five thousand workers and their families, the Soviets signed a contract with the Cleveland-based Austin Company, one of the leading industrial builders in the United States, which had recently erected a huge Pontiac factory for General Motors. If Kahn’s firm was noted for its design innovations, Austin was best known for its one-stop approach, planning, building, and equipping complete industrial facilities using standardized designs and highly rationalized techniques. Though experienced with big projects, the Soviet commission was larger than anything it had ever undertaken.29
Like the Kahn engineers in Stalingrad, the first fifteen Austin engineers to arrive at Nizhny Novgorod—there would be forty at the peak—faced challenges quite unlike anything they had known. Living conditions were difficult and good food scarce. Chronic shortages of materials and labor delayed construction (though at the height of the effort forty thousand workers—40 percent female—were on the job). Water, heat, and power facilities and systems for transporting and storing equipment and supplies had to be built from scratch. The Soviets lacked the managerial experience or tools for a project of this scope. Expensive imported equipment was lost, misplaced, left outside to deteriorate, and stolen, while primitive machinery and brute force were used in its stead. Layer upon layer of bureaucracy, competition among organizations involved in the project, and constant personnel changes made decisions torturous and their implementation difficult. Cost-cutting forced last-minute design changes and the redoing of carefully worked out plans. And then there were the natural conditions, months and months of extreme cold, springtime floods, and massive fields of mud.30
Austin largely retained control over the design and engineering of the factory complex, but the Soviets ultimately took over planning the adjacent city. The urban center would be one of the first new cities built in the Soviet Union and as such became an opportunity to envision what a socialist city should look like. A design competition led to a plan that included extensive communal facilities and, in some sections, no traditional living units.
The first phase of the city had thirty four-story residential buildings. Most were divided into individual apartments housing several families each (already the urban norm in the face of a massive national housing shortage), but some buildings were designed for an experiment in social reorganization. Clusters of five of these buildings, connected by enclosed elevated walkways, were to be living and social units for a thousand persons each. Each unit had its own clubhouse with social, educational, and recreational facilities and a large communal dining room, where it was anticipated that most meals would be consumed. Showers were clustered communally and there were library, reading, chess, and telephone rooms and special spaces for the study of political matters, military science, and science experimentation (to encourage innovation and technical expertise, allowing the country to free itself of dependence on foreigners). Kindergartens and nurseries allowed parents to leave their children as long as they chose, including, essentially, full time. Living spaces were small, meant largely for sleeping, with no individual cooking facilities. The top floors of the “community units” had larger rooms designed for “communes” of three or four young people who would live, work, and study together.
The utopianism of the auto city quickly floundered in an ocean of need and the desire of construction workers and later automobile workers for individual apartments. Even before the first residential buildings were completed, they were flooded with squatters, workers who had been living in tents, dugouts, and other improvised structures through a long winter. Cots and little individual stoves appeared everywhere. Planners expected that communal living would become more popular, allowing them to convert buildings divided into traditional apartments to the community unit model, but in the end the conversions went the other way, as workers sought more private, individualized spaces. Also, cost-cutting meant that after the first buildings were completed, designs for communal facilities were reduced, and eventually the whole master plan for the city was abandoned. Still, even in its truncated form, the new workers’ city represented a particularly elaborate realization of a broader effort to provide extensive social, cultural, and recreational programs and benefits through the workplace, with factories all over the Soviet Union taking responsibility for housing and feeding their workers and their families, educating them, and uplifting their cultural level. The Soviet welfare state centered on the large factory.31
In spite of all the obstacles, the huge auto complex at Nizhny Novgorod, soon to be renamed Gorky, was essentially completed in November 1931, just eighteen months after the first American engineers arrived (though construction of the accompanying city lagged behind). Specialists from the United States and the application of American methods accounted for some of the success. But much of the credit had to go to Soviet government and party officials, who, in spite of their inexperience, bureaucratic ways, and frequent ineptitude, proved able to mobilize heroic efforts by Soviet workers. They could do so because they could capitalize on a reservoir of deep commitment by at least some workers, particularly young ones, to crash development—industrialization as a form of revolution. Engaged in what they understood as a world-historic project and defense of the revolution, Soviet workers made extraordinary sacrifices, living in miserable circumstances, volunteering to work unpaid Saturdays, joining “shock brigades,” accepting dangerous worksite conditions, and putting up with the bumbling and arrogance of officials in charge of the big Five-Year Plan projects. For at least a brief moment, many Soviet workers saw the factories they were building as theirs, as the means to a brighter future, to a different kind of society, and were willing to do whatever was necessary to complete them.32
The Kahn Brothers in Moscow
The Stalingrad tractor plant and the Gorky automobile factory were among the best-known Soviet projects in the West, receiving extensive coverage in the American press. The New York Times, Detroit Times, Detroit Free Press, Time, trade journals, and other publications regularly ran stories about them.33 But there were many other large Soviet projects with Americans involved, too. Du Pont helped set up fertilizer factories, Seiberling Rubber Company assisted in constructing a large tire factory, C. F. Seabrook built roads in Moscow, other companies advised on coal mines, and the list went on and on.34
Albert Kahn took on an expanded role after work on the Tractorstroi started. In early 1930, his firm signed a two-year contract with Amtorg that made it the consulting architect for all industrial construction in the Soviet Union. Under the agreement, twenty-five Soviet engineers worked with the firm in its Detroit offices. But more importantly, it established a Kahn firm outpost in Moscow within a newly created, centralized Soviet design and construction agency. Albert’s younger brother Moritz led a team of twenty-five American architects and engineers in the new Russian office, not only designing buildings but also teaching Soviet architects, engineers, and specialists the methods of the Kahn firm.
The contract with the Soviet Union provided a boon for Kahn, enabling his firm to survive through the trough of the Great Depression, when virtually no new construction took place in the United States. But more than just expediency, the Soviet-Kahn partnership grew organically from a shared vision of progress through physical construction and rationalized methods. Moritz relished the opportunity to apply the “standardized mass production” system of the automobile industry to construction—a notoriously chaotic industry making custom products—which would be possible in the U.S.S.R. because there would be one centralized design agency and one customer, the Soviet government, allowing the development of designs for particular types of factories that could be used over and over. Moritz pointed out that govern
ment ownership would eliminate the costs associated with advertising, sales promotion, and middlemen and allow the rationalization of transportation and warehousing, all of which appealed to his technocratic sensibility. Albert was more patronizing; he told the Detroit Times, “My attitude toward Russia is that of a doctor toward his patient.”35
The joint Moscow design center proved challenging but ultimately successful. There were few qualified Soviet architects, engineers, or draftsmen available when it began and a lack of basic supplies, from pencils to drafting boards, with only one blueprint machine in all of Moscow. Nonetheless, in two years the Kahn team supervised the design and construction of over five hundred factories across the Soviet Union, using the Fordist methods the firm had perfected in Detroit. Equally important, some four thousand Soviet architects, engineers, and draftsmen were trained by the Kahn experts, including in formal classes taught in the evenings. They, in turn, took the approach to design and construction developed by Kahn, in collaboration with Ford and other U.S. manufacturing firms, and spread it throughout the country. Kahn’s methods, according to Sonia Melnikova-Raich, who chronicled his Soviet collaboration, “became standard in the Soviet building industry for many decades.”36
Kahn also did more Soviet design work in his Detroit office, including two new tractor plants to meet the insatiable demand for mechanized agricultural equipment. A plant in the Ukraine, on the outskirts of Kharkov, was virtually a copy of the Stalingrad plant, designed to produce the same model tractor and varying only in the greater use of reinforced concrete, as the Soviets diminished their expensive steel imports from the United States. Leon Swajian, after finishing up as number two at the Stalingrad plant, served as general superintendent for the construction (receiving the Order of Lenin for his role). The other plant was the biggest yet. Located in Chelyabinsk, some 1,100 miles due east of Moscow, just east of the Urals near the border between Europe and Asia, it was designed to produce tractors with metal crawlers rather than wheels. The buildings in the complex, looking like a chunk of Detroit industry planted in the Russian wilds, had a combined floor area of 1,780,000 square feet, laid out on a tract of 2,471 acres (twice as large as the Rouge). Though the Soviets began building the plant without American advisors on site, when things got bogged down, American engineers, including Calder and Swajian, were called in to help.37
Starting Up
If building the gigant Soviet factories had been an enormous challenge, getting them to actually produce goods proved even more difficult. Their start-up became a moment of truth for the idea that the Soviet Union could leapfrog into modernity by adopting the most advanced capitalist methods on a giant scale, building a socialist society without going through an extended process of industrialization like the United States and the Western European powers had experienced.
The Stalingrad Tractorstroi was the first test. Stalin’s June 1930 message congratulating the tractor-factory workers on beginning production of fifty thousand tractors a year proved wildly premature. During the first month and a half, the factory produced only five tractors. During its first six months, only just over a thousand. During all of 1931, 18,410.
Not all the equipment had arrived and been installed when the plant opened. But the bigger problem was the utter unfamiliarity of the vast bulk of the workers and Russian supervisors with basic industrial processes, let alone advanced mass production. When Margaret Bourke-White visited the factory during its first summer of operation, she reported, “the Russians have no more idea how to use the conveyor than a group of school children.” In the plant, “the production line usually stands perfectly still. Half-way down the factory is a partly completed tractor. One Russian is screwing in a tiny bolt and twenty other Russians are standing around him watching, talking it over, smoking cigarettes, arguing.”38
The American workers, engineers, and supervisors hired to help start up production and teach the workforce necessary skills had their hands full. Henry Ford’s dictum, that mass production could occur only if parts were so standardized that no custom fitting was required, immediately proved a trial. The skilled Russian workers the plant did have largely had been trained in craft ways. Plant manager Vassily Ivanov raced around the factory in a rage when he saw foremen using files to fit together parts (probably because some parts were not truly interchangeable, a problem at Highland Park as late as 1918). As usual in the Stalinist universe, the metaphor of war was used to describe the situation: “We were fighting our first battle,” Ivanov later said, “against handicraft ‘Asiatic’ methods,” making the traditional Marxist equation of Asia with backwardness and Europe with modernity.
Unskilled workers posed, if anything, a greater problem. Many had just arrived from small peasant villages, never having seen a telephone, let alone a precision machine tool. Frank Honey, an American toolmaker, described the first worker sent to him to train as a spring maker as “a typical peasant . . . dressed as he was in some strange, countrified sort of clothes.” Such workers did not have any notion of basic factory procedures. Bearings in expensive new machines were quickly damaged because they did not know to keep oil free of dirt. Discipline was often lax, with a great deal of standing around doing nothing. It required a slow, painstaking process to teach the new workforce, which swelled to fifteen thousand, how to operate the sophisticated machinery, especially as the American instructors had to work through translators.
Furthermore, the Soviet Union lacked the well-developed supply chains on which Fordism rested. High-speed machine tools required steel of precise specifications, but when the tractor factory could get the raw materials and supplies it needed at all (which was often not the case), the composition and quality varied from batch to batch, making for spoiled parts, damaged tools, and long delays.
Fordism also required complex coordination, which the plant management had no experience in achieving. Workers and managers spent endless time in consultations and meetings, but nonetheless things did not arrive where and when they were expected. When Sergo Orjonikidje, the Commissar for Heavy Industry, in charge of implementing the Five-Year industrialization plan, visited the factory as political pressure mounted to get production going, he reported, “What I see here is not tempo but fuss.”
With Stalin personally monitoring daily production figures—a measure of how important the plant was seen to the future of the country—personnel changes came quickly. Ivanov was replaced by a more technically knowledgeable communist official to work alongside a new top engineering specialist. The Soviet Automobile Trust sent yet another American engineer to the plant, an expert on assembly-line production, to try to straighten out the mess. To help establish order, the plant cut back from three daily shifts to just one.
Slowly, production began to improve, though product quality remained a problem. Much of the advance came from the growing experience of the workforce and skills gained though a massive training and education effort. The peasant newcomer whom Honey schooled eventually became a skilled worker and later foreman of the spring department. (Rapid promotions for such workers, though, created more problems, as their replacements needed to be trained.) During the first six months of 1933, the plant turned out 15,837 tractors, a significant improvement, but, after three years of operation, still well below the projected annual production of “fifty thousand shells blowing up the old bourgeois world.”39
At the Nizhny Novgorod auto plant, managers tried to avoid the start-up problems encountered at Stalingrad. They sent hundreds of workers to Detroit to learn production techniques at Ford, while recruiting hundreds of Americans to come help get the plant going. (The presence of a female Soviet metallurgist studying heat treatment at Ford merited a headline in the New York Times, part of an unending fascination among American reporters and engineers with Soviet women holding blue-collar jobs that in the United States were strictly male.) Production was begun gradually, first just assembling car and truck part kits sent from Detroit before beginning to make all the needed parts on site. Sti
ll, the plant took longer than expected to get up to speed.40
Again, shortages of supplies and managerial ineptitude were part of the problem, but a shortage of labor, especially skilled labor, would have made a rapid start-up impossible under the best conditions. Larger than the Stalingrad Tractorstroi, what was soon named GAZ (Gorkovsky Avtomobilny Zavod [“Gorky Automobile Factory”]) had thirty-two thousand workers. Few had any industrial experience or much work experience of any kind. When the plant opened, 60 percent of the workers were under age twenty-three and only 20 percent over age thirty. Nearly a quarter of the manual workers were female. It was almost like being in an early British or American textile mill, in a world of the young.
New workers and their foreign teachers confronted difficult conditions. Living quarters were primitive, if somewhat better for the Americans, and meat, fish, fresh fruit, and vegetables nearly impossible to find. When Victor and Walter Reuther, auto union activists from Detroit, arrived at the plant in late 1933 to work as tool- and die-makers, most of the complex had no heat. They were forced to perform and teach precision metalworking in temperatures far below freezing, periodically going into the heat-treatment room to warm their hands.
As at Stalingrad, political pressure quickly mounted to get production going. Even before the plant opened, ineptitude became criminalized; nine officials were tried for “willful neglect and suppression” of suggestions made by American workers and technical specialists. After a show trial in Moscow before several thousand spectators, light sentences—at most the loss of two months’ pay—were handed out, in a warning to other managers. Three months after production began, Orjonikidje came to inspect, accompanied by Lazar Kaganovich, like him a member of the Politburo, the top communist ruling body. The pair blamed local communists and unionists for mismanagement and slandering engineering and technical personnel, resulting in the firing of some plant and regional party officials.
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