Moscow, 1937

by Karl Schlogel

  Betty Glan, the long-standing director and the ‘soul of the park’, which recorded over 11 million visitors in 1937, was arrested in June of that year. According to one version she was accused of having placed a bomb under the visitors’ stand during a visit to the park by Stalin. Betty Glan spent almost seventeen years in prison and exile.13

  28

  ‘Avtozavodtsy’: The Workforce of the Stalin Car Factories

  ‘A postcard has arrived from the amateur theatre of the Joseph Stalin car plant, asking M.A. to write a sketch for the twentieth anniversary of the October Revolution’, Elena Bulgakova noted in her diary on 15 March 1937.1 The Palace of Culture of the Stalin automobile plant (ZIS) was completed in November 1937, just in time for the twentieth anniversary of the Revolution. The construction process had lasted many years, but it produced one of the model buildings of Soviet club architecture – the architects were the brothers Aleksandr and Viktor Vesnin. Above all, it was a show building which formed part of the obligatory programme for both Soviet and foreign visitors to Moscow. And rightly so, since, with its club rooms, its theatre and sports halls, its winter garden, its laboratories and its massive programme, the complex symbolized the need to satisfy people’s limitless thirst for knowledge and education in this, the most important workers’ quarter of the capital. The flood of peasant immigrants seeking work in Moscow homed in on this proletarian district with its numerous factories, many of them newly built. The explosive growth of the district could not continue without its share of clashes and conflicts. These were inevitable, but were also to some extent consciously stirred up. The opening of the Palace of Culture took place in the midst of the upheavals that disrupted the normal work routine and undermined the orderly processes of production. The production figures of the Stalin automobile plant at the end of 1937, the last year of the Second Five-Year Plan, fell far below the growth rates envisaged in the plan. The two aspects of this process can be seen simultaneously here, as if in a prism: the paralysis of any burgeoning sense of solidarity among the immigrants flooding into the town from the countryside coincided with their moulding into something like a homogeneous mass that gradually came to identify with their work and with the process of industrialization, culminating in the development of a kind of ‘factory patriotism’.2

  ‘Shanghai’: city of immigrants, city on the periphery

  The Stalin automobile plant was situated in Proletarskii District, far from the centre, down in the south-east of the city. The actual site of the car works had a long history; it lay within the extensive grounds of the Simonov Monastery, which dated back to the fourteenth century but had been largely demolished and levelled at the end of the 1920s to make way for the Palace of Culture. Simonovka, as the district was also known, had developed in the late nineteenth century into an industrial zone criss-crossed by rail tracks. Even then it was a place of ill repute, known for its bars, doss-houses and brawling. One of its most important factories was the AMO (Avtomobil'noe Moskovskoe Obshchestvo), the car factory built by the important Moscow industrial dynasty of the Riabushinskiis. After the outbreak of the First World War, the Russians too realized the need for their own automotive industry. In 1916 the foundation stone was laid for the AMO, which began by assembling cars from parts manufactured by Fiat. However, the real history of Moscow car manufacture began after the Revolution and notably during the First Five-Year Plan, at a time when other major manufacturing facilities were established in Proletarskii District. They formed a triangle: Hammer and Sickle (Serp i Molot – SIM), the car plant (AMO-ZIS) and the Dynamo engineering works. During this period Moscow became a major centre of metalworking and heavy engineering industry with the establishment of other large factories – the aircraft engine works, the bicycle factory, the Kaganovich ball-bearing factory, the Moscow Cable Works, the compressor factory, the KIM automobile plant [KIM stands for Young Communist International – Trans.] and the milling and gauging plant. Moscow shed its pre-revolutionary reputation of being no more than the leading textile manufacturing city of Russia and became a serious rival to Leningrad, which had traditionally held the technological leadership. Thus Proletarskii District with its factories became the central focus of the industrialization of what had been an agrarian country. Moscow now stood for technical and even high-tech progress. The textile-based Moscow now became the metal-based Moscow, as the propaganda of the day put it. Moscow supplied the country’s hunger for technology and progress with the machinery it craved – AMO-ZIS provided above all automobiles, trucks, buses and private cars. Even though the heart of the old AMO works of 1916 still existed, the building of the Stalin works was basically an innovation. The plant, which occupied an area of 500 hectares, was built by thousands of immigrant peasants, who were turned into building workers and bricklayers through a learning-by-doing process, under the command of a small number of foremen and brigade leaders and an even smaller number of technical experts and engineers. The majority lived on the factory site or nearby, initially in improvised shelters or dugouts with the minimum of protection from the elements. If you were lucky you could find a place in the much sought-after and hastily constructed barracks, ’ in which hundreds of people slept cheek-by-jowl in huge dormitories, separated from one another at best by a curtain. The luckiest ones of all had found a place in communal apartments, where they shared living space with other families and each person had a room to himself. Even in Proletarskii District, where so many new factories had been built, living conditions must have been atrocious: no running water, no heating, no sewerage, no lighting, no trams, and only gradually did the rudimentary provision of hygienic and other public amenities come into being: public baths, a general store, sports facilities, schools. In the language of the Five-Year Plan, when such tent cities and shanty towns sprang up everywhere on the building sites of the Soviet Union, they were referred to as ‘Shanghai’ , while the massive stone houses and villas that were built for the specialists and foreign engineers became known as ‘Amerikanka’.3 Many workers slept under the work benches on the factory floor. Their whole lives revolved around work. They were fed in the canteens; goods were distributed through the factory’s own special shops, as were housing and holiday trips organized by the trade unions. ‘The automotive plant established its own supply network around Moscow, administering its own collective farms, greenhouses and market gardens.’4 During the period when rationing was in force, the factory was in practice the source of provisions for tens of thousands of people and their families.5 With its Palace of Culture, it was also the place that opened up access to culture – to books, music and dance. The car factory was a city within a city, a giant site of 500 hectares, with a main street over 2.5 kilometres long, ambitious architectural design, sculptures, and meticulously tended lawns and herbaceous borders.6 The works were almost synonymous with Proletarskii District. Half the deputies of the local Soviet worked in the car plant, where they also had an office of their own.7

  Figure 28.1 In Proletarskii District, the site of the Stalin automobile plant, the capital’s largest palace of culture was opened, based on designs by the Vesnin brothers. It replaced the old Simonov Monastery.

  ‘The car factory was a city within a city, a giant site of 500 hectares, with a main street over 2.5 kilometres long, ambitious architectural design, sculptures, and meticulously tended lawns and herbaceous borders.

  The workforce of the AMO – the plant was renamed ‘Stalin Works’ (Zavod imeni Stalina – ZIS) on 1 October 1931 – leapt from 1,798 in 1928 to 19,329 in 1932. In 1937 the number of employees stood at 37,000 and in 1940 it had reached 40,000.8 The population of Proletarskii District grew equally fast. It had doubled during the First Five-Year Plan, and this brought it above the rate of population growth in the city as a whole, which was itself growing at a frantic pace. The share of workers in the overall growth was itself above average. The proportion of workers in Moscow as a whole had risen during the First Five-Year Plan, from 31.6 per cent to 39 per cent, while in Prole
tarskii District it grew from 37.9 per cent to 58 per cent.9 As for housing on the Moscow periphery, what was typical were not the few model estates dating back to the twenties – such as Dubrovka and Dangauerovka – but the wooden houses and the jerry-built barracks. If you did not want to spend hours walking to work, you had to live in the south-eastern part of the city.10

  The new working class that began to form there can be clearly defined: it was exclusively rural, it was young, and there was a constantly growing preponderance of women. Initially, these workers could neither read nor write, but the number of illiterates decreased rapidly, so that by the end of the twenties there were hardly any left. In 1932, roughly half the workers in the car factories were under twenty-three. Similar figures can be produced for the two other large factories in the district, Hammer and Sickle and Dynamo. Apart from the nucleus of ‘traditional proletarians’, whose relative and absolute numbers continued to decline, this working class consisted of unskilled workers with no qualifications. Since the technical schools were unable to cope with the huge demand, training took place on the spot, on the building site, in the workshop or by the blast furnace, a process in which the more experienced worker took over the chore of initiating the new arrivals and supervising their progress.

  The number of women among the factory workers grew exponentially. At the beginning of the First Five-Year Plan in 1928, women made up 24.6 per cent of the total workforce; by 1939 this had risen to 43 per cent. Their numbers would grow to over 50 per cent during the Second World War.

  The outstanding feature of this new working class, however, was that it had been recruited directly from the rural population: 40 to 60 per cent of the workers recruited during the First Five-Year Plan came from the villages, and even subsequently the proportion remained high, although recruitment was gradually replaced by ‘self-reproduction’ from the ranks of the new working class. The figures given for Hammer and Sickle probably hold good for the car factories too. There the proportion of workers coming from the countryside was 48.8 per cent. In some years it was even higher and stood at 70.2 per cent.11 While collectivization, the deportations and the millions of deaths from famine meant that, for many people, flight from the village offered the only chance of survival, the ambitious and frequently improvised projects had a vast and almost insatiable need for workers – modern machinery and technology were simply not available. These projects just had to make do with the workforce that was ready to hand. This led to a wave of migration and flight, assisted on the one hand by self-help networks of acquaintances and local contacts, and on the other by the industry’s recruitment campaign. The peasants simply turned up at the factory gates, where they were taken on without more ado. As always in such situations, the new arrivals ended up with the dirtiest, most dangerous and worst paid jobs, and in so doing proved to themselves and others that they had become ‘real proletarians’. Proletarskii District, and especially the factories, thus became a kind of frontier, a gateway between town and country, between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

  Ivan Likhachev, captain of industry

  ‘Over the last ten years of its existence, our Stalin automobile plant (formerly the AMO) has experienced a remarkable development. Its history is the history of the establishment of the Soviet car industry and the creation of the Soviet car workers (avtomobilisty).’ This was the conclusion of a contribution to Moscow, a book that appeared in 1935 in connection with the approval of the General Plan for the Reconstruction of Moscow. The author of this contribution was Ivan A. Likhachev, the director of the car plant. The history of the Stalin automobile plant is inextricably linked with his name, his image and his personality.12

  Ivan Likhachev was just thirty years old when he took over the management of the AMO works in 1926. Born in 1896 into a peasant family in Ozertsy, near Tula, he started work in the Putilov Works in St Petersburg in 1908. During the First World War he served as a seaman in the Baltic Fleet from 1914 to 1918, joining the Bolshevik Party in 1917. In the Civil War he fought in the ranks of the Red Guard and the Cheka. Following the end of the war he received a technical education at the Mining Academy and the Institute for Electrical and Mechanical Engineering. He became famous as director of the AMO automobile plant, where apart from a short break he remained in charge between 1926 and 1950. He is one of the very few ‘Red managers’ to have served for twenty-five years in the same position – apart from a brief interruption in 1939, when he was the People’s Commissar for Engineering. In 1941 he was in charge of evacuating the plant; after 1953 he even became minister for transport. In 1956, during the process of de-Stalinization, the Stalin automobile plant was renamed the Likhachev automobile plant (ZIL) in his honour.13

  His biography combines almost all the elements characteristic of the first generation of the Soviet Union’s industrial elite: village origins, migration to one of the largest factories in St Petersburg, politicization and radicalization during the war, a leadership position in the military or the police during the Civil War. This was followed by a belated period of training at the end of hostilities, the transition from ‘class warrior’ to ‘business executive’ (khoziaistvennik).14 In 1926, when Likhachev took over the management and the overhaul of the old Moscow car plant run by Ryabushinsky, he already had one life behind him. He also possessed the experience and the competence that would now stand him in good stead. He was familiar with the background of the peasants who were now in the process of moving from the villages into the towns; he himself had undergone the same process of adaptation and even submission to factory discipline. He had spent an entire decade acquainting himself with the complexities of the prevailing political and military structures, hierarchies and manners. These now served him well in his role as commander-in-chief of a giant army of immigrants that needed to be welded together into a workforce, a factory collective and an efficient production team. The sparse information about Likhachev’s life makes it clear that his authority was firmly based, enabling him to emerge after the massive upheavals of 1937–8 as one of the few ‘Red managers’ to survive the purges unscathed. The fate of the middle and upper echelons of the car factory was very different. ‘The grade of shop superintendent was almost entirely eliminated [in 1937], and the plant administration lost its chief engineer and his deputies and production superintendents.’15 Likhachev was in almost daily contact with Ordzhonikidze, the People’s Commissar for Heavy Industry, whose suicide in February 1937 meant the end of their career for many managers. This was the case with Petr Stepanov, the director of the Hammer and Sickle Works, which was also located in Proletarskii District. Stepanov fell victim to the purges, which cost him his position, although he managed to escape with his life.16 Stepanov too had had a model career: he had been a lathe operator in the old-established Bromley Works in Moscow, which was renamed Red Proletarian after the Revolution. He joined the Party in 1919 and from 1925 was the Director of the Hammer and Sickle Works.17

  Likhachev became something of a symbol of successful industrialization and above all of the development of the automotive industry. The car became a symbol of the First and Second Five-Year Plans, and progress was measured by the growth in the output of vehicles. The Stalin automobile plant was supposed to deliver top-quality products, especially of the showpiece black limousines that became the very epitome of Soviet comfort and power. The growth in car output was indeed impressive. Production began practically at zero in 1924 – only ten cars that year – rising to 60,000 in 1937. Planned production, however, was even more ambitious. Following the second reconstruction, the Moscow works were supposed to deliver 80,000 units, predominantly trucks, and around 10,000 private cars annually. Top of the range products like the first seven-seat model of the luxury limousine ZIS-101 were put on display in the Kremlin in April 1936.18

  Likhachev was not simply a talented manager with a phenomenal memory and an exact knowledge of all relevant details. He also had an unbounded admiration for technical progress. His car plants were the fir
st in the USSR to introduce Fordist production methods. The modernization and expansion of the works in the First Five-Year Plan was achieved with the aid of American companies. Subsequently, Likhachev sent his engineers and skilled workers abroad for further training – to the USA, but also to Daimler-Benz in Germany. Likhachev himself met Henry Ford in person and told him that the Americans would soon be coming to the Soviet Union to learn from the Russians.19 He praised his own factory as the largest truck manufacturer in the world and thought it comparable to the American factories he had visited. He was convinced that his own plant was superior to those of General Motors, Leyland and Daimler-Benz. ‘Once we had built the factory on the basis of the best American technology, we did not rest on our laurels, but instead worked systematically to raise the technical standards of the plant.’20