To fully understand the "epic" dimension of the construction of the VAZ, VoljsKij Automobilnyj Zavod, the car plant built by Fiat in Togliatti in the Soviet Union, it is first of all necessary to place it correctly in the space and time that belonged to it. Read the first part of the service.
The space: the city of Togliatti (the former Stavropol, which in 1964 took the new name of Togliatti, maintained even after the fall of the Soviet regime) stands on the banks of the Volga on the edge of the Russian steppe. The climate that characterizes it is typically continental: very long winters with abundant snowfalls and temperatures often close to 40 degrees below zero and short, rainy summers, whose distinctive and most typical sign is the presence of actual mud lakes.
The time: the Soviet Union of the 60s with its extreme poverty, its rudimentary services, first of all communications and housing, the official distrust towards the foreigner raised to the system.
The temporal and geographical-climatic dimensions added up at the time to the immense problems of the urban reality of Togliatti in impetuous expansion linked to the Soviet decision to allocate a large production basin there, exploiting the hydroelectric resources of the area.
As a result of the government's incentive policies for relocation, the city grew from 60 inhabitants in 71 to over XNUMX in XNUMX.
This growth, considered together with the shortage of housing that has always afflicted the USSR, can explain, at least in part, the enormous difficulties encountered by the local authorities at the time in accommodating Italian personnel (residences and hotels were semi, if not entirely, concepts unknown).
To these factors must naturally be added the cultural one: the distance, primarily linguistic, which separated Fiat personnel (used in the majority of cases to still speak Piedmontese in the factory) from the Soviet workers and technicians with whom they were called to collaborate and live together. Others no less relevant were added to this first aspect: the differential approach to problems between the engineers of the two sides, one extremely pragmatic, the other often conditioned by ideology; and we must not forget the provincial roots in the sixties of Fiat technicians and workers, albeit qualified, called to abruptly break away from the only living areas known up to then (the banks of the Po, the Asti hills, the Langhe or at most Genoa as in the song by Paolo Conte).
In this picture, the entire effort made by Fiat to guarantee its expatriate personnel, a total of around 1500 workers in the period, decent accommodation, at least partly family food, adequate clothing and adequate medical and social services, always partially , to that standard of living to which the boom of the 60s had begun to accustom the average Italian.
The enterprise was truly titanic from the logistical point of view to bring or recreate in Togliatti, that is thousands of kilometers from Turin, everything that was needed to guarantee a decent life and such as to make one endure the long Russian winter and the feeling of isolation that it soon fell to the Italian workers.
Fiat therefore procured cooks and occasionally Italian foods, as they were contingent upon them by the Soviet authorities, dealt with a thousand difficulties in maintaining contacts between divided families, organized the most disparate recreational activities, organizing among other things shows and concerts with the major companies Italian theater and singers: all to make the wait for the return as light as possible.
However, the Togliatti epic did not mean a kind of one-way exodus: in fact, the number of Russians who, for the most varied professional reasons, were able to spend long periods in Turin was almost equal. When the presence of technicians in training and high-level delegations increased, this small community was housed in the Santa Rita district of Turin: there was even talk of a small Moscow.
For a few years the Russians became a constant presence in the neighbourhood, above all in the square where there is not only the sanctuary dedicated to the saint but also a well-known rotisserie where the Russians, every late afternoon, after leaving Mirafiori, lined up in long and silent queues to buy roast chicken and potatoes: at that time, if you wanted chicken for dinner, you had to rush to that rotisserie before 18 pm; later it was too late, there were the Russians and you had to get in line.
The management of the expatriate personnel, however, encountered great difficulties almost immediately, not so much in the selection and the first dispatch of technicians and workers on site, as in guaranteeing the return to Togliatti after the first return home, i.e. once the effect curiosity and experienced the harshness of life in the Soviet Union.
Another no less significant factor was the sense of extraneousness to the company and of isolation that many of the most qualified technicians and managers felt, once they returned to Turin and their professional routine. The feeling of parking and sometimes of uselessness, which many felt, was in any case attributable to the scarce propensity on the part of the companies of the time to resort to planning techniques for career paths and alternative uses to be offered to personnel, even in such special conditions.
Among the considerations on the human aspect of the story, reference cannot be omitted to the effects generated by the realization of the Togliatti plant project on the Fiat personnel who experienced it firsthand, but from Turin, experiencing, perhaps first, difficulties and misunderstandings that characterized the period.
Those who followed the Project for a longer time, in particular those employed in vocational education and training, in contract management and in interpreting work, who maintained daily contact with Soviet technicians, were in practice physically isolated in branch offices, but above all morally from the judgement, or rather from the prejudice, of colleagues and superiors for fear that attendance could have generated ideological distortions, unacceptable due to the austere and moralizing climate that still permeated all circles in the late sixties and early seventies.
It is easy to imagine that the end of the project was greeted as a real liberation by the personnel who had followed him from Turin, while it constituted an opportunity for many technicians and executives to return to Fiat as it coincided with the start of another project: that of the construction of an automobile plant in Brazil, the FIASA (Fiat Automoveis SA).
In the wake of contacts with the Soviet world, which had provided a more international framework and mentality, the first economic/contractual relations with the Brazilian reality began, thus creating an opportunity for those who were interested in continuing to work abroad: and it is easy to imagine that few of them, this time, encountered excessive difficulties in living and working in Brazil.
I wrote these two pieces on Fiat in the Soviet Union on the wave of memories. I joined Fiat in 1972 (remaining there for the next 40 years) when the return of the Italians from the Russian adventure was ending and in those years I was able to get to know the personal stories and experiences of some of them.
Moreover, testimonies that proved to be of great value when, at the beginning of the nineties, it was necessary to send personnel, albeit with lower numbers, to another cold eastern country, Poland, at the time still characterized by delays on standards of European life, where Fiat, after the fall of communism, had repurchased from the Polish government the factory of the FSO car company, actually the former Fiat Polski founded in the early XNUMXs, closed during the Nazi invasion and subsequently nationalized by the state Polish.
