AvtoVAZ: Thirty times as much labour-time to produce a single car

One of the most conspicuous problems of the bureaucratic planning system in the Soviet Union was that, while giving priority to the quantitative fulfilment of production targets, it relegated labour productivity and the quality of the goods produced to secondary importance. In an earlier article entitled Magnitogorsk Iron and Steel Production Complex: A microcosm of the structural problems of Soviet industry, I examined a striking example of this problem in heavy industry. Despite its enormous production capacity, Magnitogorsk employed many times more workers and consumed far greater quantities of raw materials and energy than its US competitors to produce the same quantity of steel -and steel of much lower quality at that.

A similar picture emerges in the Soviet automotive industry. One particularly striking example was the Volga Automobile Plant, later known as AvtoVAZ.

Built in Tolyatti under an agreement signed between the Soviet government and the Italian car manufacturer Fiat in August 1966, this vast plant was by no means one of Soviet industry’s ageing and technologically backward factories. Fiat did not merely grant a licence to produce the Fiat 124; it also helped design and equip the plant and establish its production system. The first VAZ-2101 cars rolled off the assembly line in 1970. Adapted to Soviet conditions, the car would come to be known as the Zhiguli on the domestic market and the Lada abroad. The factory was designed to produce approximately 600,000-660,000 cars a year.

AvtoVAZ thus became one of the largest centres not only of the Soviet automotive industry but of car production worldwide. Yet even this vast plant, technologically more advanced than much of Soviet industry, could not overcome the fundamental problems of the top-down bureaucratic planning system. The problem of the Stalinist regime, then, was not merely its failure to employ the latest technologies in production; the fundamental problem was that even the most advanced technology could not be used efficiently within a bureaucratic system of planning and management in which the working class was denied any democratic voice or decision-making power.

The American historian Stephen Kotkin makes the following striking comparison in the caption accompanying a photograph of AvtoVAZ in his book Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970-2000:

The AvtoVAZ car factory purchased from Fiat in the 1960s, and more modern than the bulk of Soviet manufacturing. AvtoVAZ made more cars than any other factory in the world, but required thirty times more man-hours to produce a car than did a US or Japanese factory, to say nothing of quality.[*]

The picture presented by Kotkin is consistent with a much broader phenomenon familiar from other sectors of the Soviet economy: AvtoVAZ produced cars in vast numbers, but expended many times more labour-time on each one than its competitors in the United States and Japan. In other words, producing the same quantity of use-value required far more labour-power to be employed for much longer. Moreover, the resulting products lagged behind cars manufactured in the advanced capitalist countries in terms of quality, reliability and technological innovation.

Badge awarded by the Soviet
Ministry of the Automotive Industry
(MinAvtoProm) to automotive workers
for “outstanding achievement in
socialist competition”.

The performance of factory managers was measured not by their ability to reduce costs, ensure the efficient use of labour-power and raw materials, produce a higher-quality car that met consumers’ needs, or minimise the environmental damage caused by production, but by their fulfilment of quantitative production targets set from above by bureaucratic means. Disruptions in the supply of components, low-quality inputs, bottlenecks in the production process, a lack of coordination between enterprises, workers’ alienation from production and the employment of far more workers than were technically necessary thus became mutually reinforcing problems.

The large number of cars produced at this plant therefore did not show how effectively Soviet society was able to utilise the productive forces at its disposal. Assessing this also required examining how much labour-time, raw materials and energy were expended to produce a given volume of output, and the extent to which the resulting products met people’s needs. In the case of AvtoVAZ, there were enormous losses both in labour productivity and in the quality of the use-values produced.

The sheer scale of AvtoVAZ’s output did not in itself mean that cars were abundant in the Soviet Union. A car was not an ordinary durable consumer good that anyone with enough money could simply go out and buy. To secure the right to purchase one, people generally had to put their names on lists administered through their workplace or trade union and then wait for years. Membership of the Stalinist bureaucratic caste, or affiliation with a privileged institution or occupational group, conferred a considerable advantage in this respect. Those without such privileges often resorted to blat networks based on personal connections and reciprocal favours -or, in some cases, bribery- to bypass the queue or move up it. There was therefore a vast gulf between hundreds of thousands of cars rolling off the assembly lines of an enormous factory and the equitable and rational fulfilment of society’s need for cars. Mass production at AvtoVAZ had not altered the car’s character as a scarce and privileged use-value in the Soviet Union.

This picture is also consistent with the observations I discussed in an earlier article entitled Anatoly Chernyaev’s 1972 diary (3): The Soviet automotive industry through the eyes of a Renault executive. In this diary entry from 1972, Chernyaev summarises the astonishment of a senior Renault executive who had visited the USSR at the disorganisation, waste of resources and overstaffing he encountered in Soviet car factories.

In the same caption, Kotkin also notes that, from the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s, AvtoVAZ was “looted by management”. Yet the word “management” obscures the social and political character of this plunder. Those who pillaged the factory were not newcomers who had appeared out of nowhere. Members of the Stalinist bureaucracy -and enterprise managers were, of course, among them- converted state property into their own private fortunes in the course of capitalist restoration. The dissolution of the Soviet Union and the restoration of capitalism constituted the bureaucratic caste’s final betrayal of the October Revolution. By directly plundering state property, the Stalinist bureaucracy ceased to be a privileged caste and transformed itself into a genuine capitalist ruling class.

The history of AvtoVAZ thus brings together, in a single example, two distinct yet interconnected tragedies of the Soviet economy: first, immense productive forces were stunted under bureaucratic management lacking democratic control by the working class; those same productive forces were then plundered by managers and future oligarchs who emerged from that very bureaucracy.

[*] Stephen Kotkin, Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970-2000, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003, p. xxiv.