The project of motorization of the USSR Osinsky

Motorization, perhaps, is the most everyday and mass phenomenon of modernization of the 20th century. In the USSR of the 1920s, the key expert in the development of world and domestic vehicles was Obolensky Valerian Valerianovich, better known in the country and party in his party nickname Nikolai Osinsky. The revolutionary, the ally of Lenin, along with his friend Nikolai Bukharin, he was a colorful representative of the intellectual Bolshevism. Just like Bukharin, until the end of the 1920s, sometimes expressed his personal point of view, which could diverge with the opinion of the majority in the Central Committee and Stalin himself. In addition, Osinsky successfully managed to combine speculative scientific work in the leading institutions of the Academy of Sciences and the State Planning Commission with practical activist activities in public organizations-in the late 1920s he headed the Avtodor-the Society for the Promotion of Car Roads and the Improvement of the Roads of the USSR, and also became the editor-in-chief of the new Soviet magazine “Behind the wheel”.

Motorization in the world and the USSR

The real splash in the Soviet Union was caused by the article by Osinsky “American car or Russian cart”, published in the August Pravda of 1927. At the beginning of the article, Osinsky shared his impressions of visiting the cities of Europe and America, where even in Warsaw a real car revolution took place by 1927: “ Warsaw immediately looked like a European capital, sharply changed its appearance, unlike Moscow ... The picture of Moscow street life was always different from its European backwardness, asian. Now the difference has grown sharply and catches your eye. ” Then Osinsky said that the cities of Europe live in another transport and technical era. In Moscow, horses are still everywhere, and on the American or European city pavement you can meet a horse no more often than a cow. Along the streets of Berlin, Paris, Stockholma, only cars are moving with a thick system. In comparison with these cities, Moscow is still only a large village. Osinsky supplemented his phenomenological impressions of the motorization of the Western world with statistical information.

By the beginning of 1927, there were 12 thousand vehicles in all of the USSR. With these indicators, the Soviet Union was in 40th place in the world. In the first place were the United States, possessing 23 million 431 thousand cars, which amounted to 85% of the total fleet of the planet. Throughout Europe there were 3 million 103 thousand cars, or 11% of their world. There were 4% of cars for all other countries of the world, of which there were 15 thousand of them in China, and in India (at that time of the colony of England) - 100 thousand. At the same time, England itself had 984 thousand vehicles, France - 901 thousand, Sweden - 99 thousand, Holland - 65 thousand, former colonies of Russia: Finland - 18 thousand, Poland - 16 thousand, Poland, Poland - 16 thousand, 16 thousand. Even Romania - 14 thousand, and occupying one part of the land of the USSR with 150 million citizens had only 12 thousand cars! Of these, their own Soviet machines were produced annually in an actually semi -custacean way of 600-700 pieces. Meanwhile, Peugeot produced 25 thousand cars per year, Citroen - 100 thousand, and the American giants “Chevrolet” and “Ford” produced from 1 to 1.5 million cars a year.

Osinsky emphasized that if the electrical and a number of strategic industrial industries managed to get stronger and actually form in tsarist Russia, and in Soviet times they are all the more increased, then the automotive industry was not lucky here. Before the First World War in Russia, promising experiments were made to produce a certain number of cars of the domestic structure, but basically Russia imported cars from abroad. Mostly these were expensive and powerful cars for the upper layers of society, as well as for the army and navy. In the First World War, due to an acute vehicle shortage at the front and in the rear, several automobile plants were urgently started at once, but because of the revolution and civil war, the case did not come anywhere to the production of vehicles, except for the Moscow AMO plant and not at once, but only in 1924 it was possible to release the first Soviet trucks with the initial orientation on the technical experience of the Italian company Fiat.

So, if in 1914 tsarist Russia had 16 thousand cars, occupying in their number fourth place in the world, now, 12 years later, the USSR had 12 thousand cars and 40th place in the world!

In his article, Osinsky beat the alarm in connection with the ongoing monstrous underestimation of motorization in socialist planning. He cited an example of the United States as an example, where, among the 10 most important sectors of American industry, auto -building was the most important industry that took first place. And in the calculations of the Soviet state plan there was not even a separate paragraph, a separate table specially dedicated to the automotive industry.

The car fits into a five -year plan

Largely thanks to Osinsky, the car, speaking metaphorically, managed to jump into the last car of the planes of the first five -year plan gaining speed. Following the Soviet public, falling asleep the editorial office of Pravda with its sympathetic responses to an article about cart and car, the country's party leadership also seriously concerned about the prospects of the domestic automotive industry, listening to many recommendations of Osinsky, the most important of which were reduced to the following points:

• accept a promising 15-year plan of mass, millionth motorization of the whole country;
• In order to fulfill this strategic task, to begin in the first five -year plan for the construction of a car factory that produces at least 100 thousand simple and cheap cars a year, as well as two more factories producing several tens of thousands of trucks;
• Expanding international automotive cooperation in every way, primarily with the leading automobile power of the US world;
• To light up the automobile enthusiasm of the population, creating a voluntary society to promote the development of automotive industry.

Indeed, in the first and subsequent pre -war five -year planes in the USSR, the Nizhny Novgorod automobile giant GAZ, the Yaroslavl plant of trucks Yagaz, Moscow plants of Kim and ZIS were built (or reconstructed), designed (or reconstructed), the Kim and ZIS.

By the end of the 1930s, the USSR reached the first in Europe and the second place in the world for the production of trucks. By 1941, more than a million Soviet cars were produced, as Osinsky proposed.

But the achievement of a worthy of the number and quality of cars in the Osinsky project was not so much a goal as a means of creating a new person and a new society. Like Henry Ford, who sincerely believed that his car serves the ennolation of capitalism, Osinsky considered in the USSR the development of motorization as the identical to the creation of a socialist society and a new socialist person, overcoming the backwardness and prejudice of the old world.

Event, off -road and utopia

Discussing with its many readers about the prospects of the Soviet car, Osinsky identified typical, in his opinion, everyday Soviet prejudices that slow down the motorization. For example, that the car is a “bourgeois crew”, which, at Soviet labor productivity and prices, will remain a luxury accessible only to the authorities, and not a means of moving ordinary citizens. In response, Osinsky argued that we are able to establish mass conveyor production of inexpensive cars, which should be available to ordinary Soviet people. He himself criticized the purchase of expensive limousines by the Soviet People's Commissariats for his own high -ranking nobles, offering at the same time to the Soviet leaders to learn how to drive a car himself, thus saving significant state funds due to the reduction of the number of personal chaffers.

On the other hand, Osinsky was also against the barracks equalizer, very popular in the early USSR. He with sympathy cited as an example a letter of one motorist who got and repaired the old car with enormous labors, but was constantly subjected to the evil attacks of others who called him bourgeois, explaining to him that our people did not drive cars.

Osinsky also criticized the utopian sentiments of Soviet people who proposed to focus on mass aircraft, thus hit the massive use of the aircraft on the lack of cars and off -road. By the way, some Soviet citizens reasonably remarked that cars require good roads for themselves, and imperialist countries will penetrate the deep roads deep into the USSR on good roads. On the contrary, preserving the off -road, the USSR creates natural barriers to invade the enemy’s motorized armies. Overcoming all these arguments, Osinsky argued that mass production of cars would entail the construction of high -quality roads, as well as modern motorized troops of the Red Army, which will be more native "walls", that is, roads, will help more than the enemy.

And, of course, the car will be especially useful for the development of rural Russia. For peasant cooperatives, Osinsky offered special credit benefits in the purchase of cars. It is no coincidence that he ended his article about the Russian cart and the American car: “ Not only the“ Proletarian for the car ”, but also in particular -“ peasant for the car ”.”

In 1928, the naive Osinsky posted even a short utility story “A letter written on November 6, 1937” about his imaginary journey on the eve of the anniversary anniversary of the revolution by car from Moscow to Voronezh, which began with the following words: “Dear friend, this trip to Voronezh on the twenty years of October is one of the best pleasures, ever to me tested. " Indeed, there was nothing to come to pleasure in this utopian country: the highways are beautiful, gas-fire stations with cafes and hotels around them are comfortable, there are full cars and trucks around which workers and peasants travel in their collective-cooperative, as well as personal matters. Under Serpukhov, when refueling with gasoline, the author of the letter even met a respectable German with a family making a trip from Germany to the Crimea in a car in order to still have time to catch the end of the velvet season. However, so many foreigners are working in the USSR by studying the successes of building humanistic socialism that thanks to this, the workers of the Soviet gas stations begin to communicate quite to foreign languages ​​... But the real Stalinist motorization of the 1930s, hierarchical and Autarchy, turned out to be rather anti-utopia directed against Osinsky’s Graz.

Hierarchical Autarchy - Anti -Utopia

The last slogan of the Osinsky “peasant on the car”, as it turned out, was very diverge from the Stalin line, although Stalin and the Central Committee when discussing the plans of the first five -year plan and took into account the car alarm of Osinsky, appointing it at the beginning of the five -year plan by the actually chief ideologist and the ruber of socialist motorization. And by the end of the first five-year plan of Osinsky, they largely loaded other, no less important planning and statistical work, finding new ideological and technical curators of the Soviet automotive industry.

Stalin's motorization was carried out carefully. The Soviet cars under construction were intended primarily for state -owned use by Soviet officials, and in a certain hierarchical order. Under Stalin, the workers, the intelligentsia, especially the peasants (with the exception of especially honored science, culture, as well as the Stakhanovites), had almost no chance of possessing a car for personal use.

Special barriers in motorization stood in front of the peasantry. In the Soviet hierarchy of using transport, the peasantry had to be content with only a body for a long time. In response to Osinsky’s calls, to catch up with capitalism through the most democratic use of cars (and, above all in the interests of the development of rural Russia), Stalin in 1929 in the article “The Year of the Great Fracture” proclaimed: “We are going on all pairs along the path of industrialization - to socialism, leaving behind our centenary“ Vysoy ”backwardness ... and when we land on the USS Tractor, let them try to catch up with venerable capitalists, boasting of their “civilization”. ”

In the USSR, the car was intended for a Soviet official and a working-worker, traveling according to the needs of the state, while a rural man is a tractor who, of course, will also be state-owned, belonging to the state farm or MTS (machine-tractor station), and not a peasant-chief.

Osinsky, in his thoughts on Soviet cars, paid special attention to the development of a class of light trucks and autofurgs, which, in his opinion, would be very useful for Soviet rural cooperatives (conducting modern analogies, this class of cars can be compared with domestic autofurgons and “gazelles”, especially popular among small and medium-sized businesses). Osinsky, of course, emphasized the importance of heavy trucks for the development of the national economy, but the share of production of medium and heavy trucks (with insignificance of the number of light trucks and passenger cars) in the Stalinist auto industry was unprecedentedly high compared to the economies of other countries. For example, in 1935-1939, in the USSR, 8.5 trucks had one passenger car (Osinsky offered a proportion to the plans of the 1930s: for 3 trucks-7 cars), in the USA, there were 8 cars for 2 trucks! But on the basis of Soviet heavy trucks, the production of a large family of light armored vehicles of the Soviet Army flourished.

Osinsky strove for the integration of the Soviet automobile industry into international automobile production, pushing domestic automotive industry to the manufacture of modern competitive products. Since the mid-1930s, the USSR has largely curtails international automobile projects, condemning its auto industry into an auto-existence, which predetermined the chronic lag of the Soviet automobile industry from the West. Finally, Osinsky, by the way of the hereditary nobleman Obolensky, was the spirit of the hierarchical status of a society of prestigious consumption. With hostility, he retold the American proverb of the 1920s to Soviet readers and conclusions from it: “Tell me what kind of car you drive and I will tell you who you are. If you go to Loko 48 worth $ 7460 (the most expensive car), then you are obvious by the bourgeois. Well, if you roll on the old Ford, on the occasion of $ 25-50 bought, then it is clear that you belong to the despicable ink. ” Osinsky proposed to buy cheap foreign cars abroad for all Soviet citizens. The poor Stalinist USSR of the 1930s bought mainly expensive and prestigious American limousines-Lincolnes and Buyiks-for party and economic bonz, among which its own “bourgeois” quasi-called (closed from prying eyes) the style of prestigious consumption. In the autobiographical novel “The Cool Route”, Evgeny Ginzburg, whose family belonged to the average level of party elites of the 1930s, recalled the family visit of the closed party sanatorium in 1937 and about the morals of the princes of Vyazemsky, the Pushkin’s place, the Pushkin’s place, was in due time “Livadia” scale. During the winter holidays, “responsible children” rested in large numbers there, dividing all those around them into categories, respectively, the brand of cars. The Lincolners and the Beeshniki were quoted high, the “form -nostrils” were touched. We belonged to the last ...

Despite the fact that in Astafyev they fed, as in the best restaurant, and the vases with fruits stood in every room and replenished as they devastated, some ladies, going in Kurzala, out of her outbreak of local food, comparing it with food in the “pines” and “Barvicha”.

It was a real feast during the plague. After all, 90% of the then Astafyevsky population was doomed, and almost all of them over the next months replaced the comfortable Astafyevsky rooms to the upper and lower bunks of Butyrskaya prison. Their children, so well versed in the stamps of cars, became pets of special orphanages. И даже шоферы были привлечены за „соучастие“ в чем-то…»

Осинский, обвиненный во вредительстве и шпионаже, был казнен в 1938 году.

Alexander Nikulin

Другие статьи цикла см. в ТрВ-Наука № 209 от 26 июля 2016 года (cтр. 8–9, http://trv-science.ru/2016/07/26/traktornyj-eksperiment-lenina-uejra/ ) и № 210 от 9 августа 2016 года (cтр. 12, http://trv-science.ru/2016/08/09/krestyanstvo-i-fermerstvo-vremen-nep/ ).