How the East Was Won

Eighty years ago, on October 25, 1931, the first Soviet-made truck, the AMO-3, rolled off the new production line at Moscow’.s ZIS factory (ZIS = Zavod imeny Stalina; Stalin Factory). Soon, output was ramped up and the factory, under the leadership of Ivan Likhachyov, was proclaimed a showpiece of Soviet engineering prowess. The Soviets had been producing F-15 trucks (photo above), the design licensed from Fiat, since 1924. In 1927, the plant was retooled to build a 2.5 ton truck, the AMO-3, based on an American design. &lduo;The first in the line of giant plants that we are building,” bragged Pravda in a banner headline the day after the ceremonial opening in October 1931.1

A few months later, the paper gleefully reported Detroit’.s troubles when American autoworkers were laid off in the Great Depression. And just after the factory’.s first anniversary, Pravda ran a cartoon proclaiming that it was now Russian tractors that ploughed Russian fields and Russian automobiles that carried comrades on Russian roads. The cartoon depicted an AMO-3 truck and a Russian-built tractor. The banner flying behind the truck held a quote, purportedly from Stalin, that reminded readers how tough it was going to be for the capitalists to keep up with a motorized Soviet Union on wheels.

What Pravda overlooked, however, was Russia’.s roadlessness (&lduo;rasputitsa”). In fact, by 1931, the absence of decent Soviet highways was already being widely debated, even satirized. That year, Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov resurrected Ostap Bender (murdered at the end of The Twelve Chairs) in The Little Golden Calf, their shrewdly comic sequel. At the start of the novel, Ostap Bender makes a reckless drive through Russia, affecting to be traveling in the lead vehicle of a road rally designed to highlight the paucity of roads in Russia.

Such rallies were common from the late 1920s, most of them promoted by AVTODOR,2 a pressure group founded in 1927 to advance the cause of road building in the Soviet Union. Ostap Bender nicely tapped into the mood of the moment. Even Russian peasants with no hope of ever traveling far beyond their home village were seduced by AVTODOR into believing that, while roads were expensive, roadlessness was even more expensive.

In The Little Golden Calf, Ostap and his fellow travelers sweep into a rural community — a place conspicuously devoid of any vehicle but Ostap’.s — to find local comrades proclaiming the merits of the automobile. &lduo;Everyone join AVTODOR” is the call-to-arms, and Bender, ever the opportunist, dismisses any ideological worries with the explanation &lduo;The automobile isn’.t a luxury, it’.s a means of locomotion.” Anxious to press on, he shouts out, &lduo;Improve the roads. Merci for the reception,” and speeds off over the horizon.

Against this backdrop, it is easy to see why the automobile rally in Russia developed very differently from its counterpart in western Europe. The Monte-Carlo Rally, which this year marks the centenary of its inauguration by Prince Albert I of Monaco, was essentially a celebration of a blossoming automobile industry and carried more than a hint of glitz and glamour.

Russian rallies, like that parodied in The Little Golden Calf, had a more developmental agenda, becoming part of the great Soviet experiment, as a socialist society showed it could tame a vast wilderness. These were rallies, not races, and the focus was on agitation and propaganda rather than fierce competition between participants.

True, there had been one very famous auto-rally across Russian territory in the pre-Revolutionary period. The five vehicles that took part in the 1907 Peking to Paris rally included Russia en route. Drivers traversed vast tracts of roadless terrain from the Mongolian frontier, skirting the southern edge of Lake Baikal and then heading west across Siberia to the Urals. Progress was better, the drivers reported, in areas where no roads existed than on the occasional stretches where some effort had been made to create a thoroughfare, so echoing Chekhov’.s description of Siberian roads as the worst in the world.

This was adventurous stuff, good for the Italian prince who reached Paris first and good news too for the manufacturers of his Italian car. But the epic journey did nothing for Russia and the Russians, and by the time Russia developed home-grown rallies in the 1920s, the post-Revolutionary piety demanded an approach that was very different from Peking-to-Paris bravado or Monte Carlo glitz.

Local media reports of the Pan-Russian Car Rally of 1923 emphasized the performance of Russian-built vehicles, though in fact less than half of the five-dozen cars that participated in the ten-day rally were constructed in Russia. The emphasis in the 1000-mile journey from Moscow to Vitebsk and back was on road-testing vehicles to assess which were most able to endure Russia’.s terrible roads. A follow-up avtoprobeg two years later was three times as long as the 1923 event, and introduced a new dimension to Soviet rallies: they became a way of &lduo;marking” territory as now being firmly within the Soviet fold.

In 1924, Soviet forces had quashed the Menshevik agvistos adzhankeba (August Uprising) in Georgia, and the 1925 All-Union Car Rally went from Leningrad to Tbilisi and then back to Moscow. The route included some formidably difficult terrain in the North Caucasus region, with participants driving up the Terek Valley south from Vladikavkaz and following the old Military Highway3 to skirt Mount Kazbek and drop down into Georgia. The Moscow and Leningrad media reported in glowing terms on the progress of this exceptional convoy, and the entire rally came to embody the emerging force of the Soviet Union. Georgians watching the rally progress towards Tbilisi were in no doubt that Russians were now masters in their land.

In 1933, the Soviet Union hosted one of the most ambitious car rallies ever, with vehicles tackling a 6000-mile route from Moscow to the eastern Caspian Region and back that included a crossing of the fierce Karakum Desert (modern Turkmenistan). Conquering the desert symbolized Soviet supremacy over nature. Media reports walked a tightrope, sometimes emphasizing how the Russian drivers were heroes in their efforts to traverse such harsh terrain. But as the 86-day rally crossed tamer country further north, the papers reported on the remarkable efforts of each collective to ensure that its territory had at least one reasonable road.

Pravda reported how such roads were a matter of honor for each kolkhoz. One rally leader is said to have especially commended the Chuvash Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic for its handsome roads, which he pronounced as being on a par with those in Germany. Soviet newsreels pounced on &lduo;the Chuvash phenomenon” and were soon showing clips of a peasant carrying a full pail of milk as she sat in a truck speeding over perfectly smooth Chuvash highways. If ever a drop of the milk was spilt, the newsreel cameras failed to catch the moment. The Chuvash road was the highway to modernity.

Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov who, like their hero Ostap Bender, were quick to pounce on any hint of conceit, took a less benign view of Soviet roads. In the travelogue and photo-essay reporting on their 1935 road trip through America (One-Storied America), the two authors highlighted — no doubt much to the discomfort of the Soviet authorities — that in the United States the motorist could take his pick of over a million different highways.

Today, a new breed of rally driver jostles for space on Russia’.s crowded roads. In February 2005, seventy cars set off from a lighthouse on the Kola Peninsula in northwest Russia. Their destination was Vladivostok on Russia’.s Pacific coast. The 9,000-mile journey was billed as the world’.s toughest winter rally. Those who hoped that the event might capture some of the pioneering spirit and political theater of the exploratory car rallies of the 1920s and 1930s were disappointed. The event included &lduo;New Russians” aplenty, more glitz and glamour than the Monte Carlo rally, and a first prize of more than 20 pounds of pure gold. Ostap Bender would have loved it, and would surely have played light with the rules to ensure that he reached Vladivostok first to scoop the prize. RL