60 years ago, the main news of Ogonyok was the release in Gorky (now Nizhny Novgorod) of a new passenger car GAZ-M12, or simply “ZiM” - “Molotov Plant”. Stalin instructed the leaders of the automotive industry to create a universal passenger car in just a year, which could be used both for executive purposes and for official purposes, for example, for an ambulance or a taxi. The winning design was developed by ZiM general designer Andrei Lipgart, the author of the legendary “Victory” and winner of four Stalin Prizes. As the magazine wrote, to speed up the work process, Andrei Aleksandrovich temporarily moved his workplace to a group of design artists led by the famous graphic artist Lev Eremeev. And this approach paid off: even today the ZiM style looks like a standard for many automobile designers (by the way, ZiM is one of the few domestic cars that is not a copy of any specific foreign brand). Stalin's task was completed, and in March 1951, the first three cars that rolled off the plant's assembly line were sent for state tests, after which Lipgart received the fifth Stalin Prize. True, the magazines did not write then that in the same 1951 he was removed from the post of chief designer and was actually exiled as an ordinary engineer to the Ural Automobile Plant in Miass. Only many years later did the true reason for Stalin’s anger at his favorite become clear. It turns out that one of Lipgart’s subordinates wrote a banal denunciation against him to the NKVD. The author of the denunciation was an engineer who worked on individual components of various models. At the very beginning of 1951, Lipgart entrusted him with work on the NAMI-011 army amphibian project, which six months later was considered unpromising. And the engineer decided to “take revenge”, accusing the boss of “deliberately holding back the supply of amphibious vehicles to the army.” The local NKVD wanted to stir up a new “high-profile case” of sabotage, but Stalin pulled the security officers back, ordering the case to be closed and Lipgart himself to be removed from work at ZiM.

Magazine "Ogonyok" No. 12 dated March 28, 2011, p. 52

Dates – Ogonyok No. 12 (5170) from 03/28/2011