Building Utopia: Erecting Russia's First Modern City, 1930

by Richard Cartwright Austin

Perhaps the most challenging project under Stalin’s first five-year plan was the race to build Europe’s largest automobile factory and an adjacent city in just eighteen months. The site chosen was Nizhny Novgorod, later named Gorky, near the Volga River, 500 miles east of Moscow. To design and construct both factory and city, Soviet officials approached the premier industrial builder in America, the Austin Company of Cleveland, Ohio. The Austin Company was an innovative designer and builder, as well as a capitalist enterprise, with unusually rigorous ethical standards. Soviet engineers and managers who worked with the Americans were inexperienced and driven by an ideology that often led to conflicts. The remote location, the unskilled labor force, the looming deadline, and the destabilizing impact of the worldwide depression combined to aggravate tensions. Allan Austin, son of the president of the Austin Company, was the youngest of twenty American engineers supervising construction. He wrote many letters to his father and took photographs detailing the human struggles involved in this vast undertaking. Author Richard Cartwright Austin uses his father’s letters, Russian and American documents, and extensive photographic resources to tell how this cooperation between capitalist and communist, American and Russian, was achieved. From near-breakdown during the initial months, through a Russian winter that called for bravery and ingenuity, to a frantic race toward completion in the final months, Building Utopia reveals the common humanity of both communists and capitalists and the contrasts between Russian and American cultures. Historians as well as scholars interested in early U.S.-Soviet cooperation or in the history of technology will be attracted to this compelling story.

240 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 2004

Reviews

[Jon · Rating 4 out of 5]

A descendant of the Austin Construction firm's founder tells the tale of the building of the great auto city of Gorky in the Soviet Union of 1930-31. Richard C Austin uses his father's letters and photographs quite effectively, in the story of the incredible effort it took to build both a workers city and a massive factory complex.

Anyone who thinks that there is nothing to be learned or nothing positive about the Soviet Union should read this book.

It takes you back to another time, during the beginning of the Great Depression, when a teetotaling Methodist construction company from the US heartland found unlikely friends in Russia, and found both appalling backwardness to be overcome, and much to admire in the idealistic communists who still survived in the early days of Stalinism.

It was also a time that saw US itinerant auto workers Victor and Walter Reuther working in the new Soviet plant alongside Russian workers, learning some things the influenced their later career in the US UAW.

One can also glimpse, although it was still in its infancy, the confusion of means and ends that led many years later, to the end of the socialist experiment in Russia.

Highly Recommended.

[Richard Newbold · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting foray down one of the more obscure byways of 20th century history, the Utopia of the title is of course the Soviet Union before Stalin's purges of the 1930s, and more specifically an almost off-the peg project to build an automotive factory (in co-operation with Ford) and an accompanying "Worker's City" close by the town of Nizhny Novgorod, near the Volga River.

The source material for the book is mostly the letters of a young American engineer, Allan Austin, to his family, describing the trials, tribulations and eventually triumphs of this undertaking - in a sense very much an innocent abroad, his observations of the Russian people (very sympathetic), the Soviet system (highly critical but not unfairly so I think) help build the book into a tale of technology with a human dimension, though the interest in the engineering itself and the challenges to labour from this new venture aren't covered in much detail.

[Walt · Rating 3 out of 5]

I hoped to read more about the planning and construction of the city; but instead it was largely an analysis of letters from a project manager to his parents back home.

The project manager was a the son of the company owner who had the contract to build the Russian utopia. Consequently, much of the book is little more than a capitalist's adventures in dealing with communist Russia. It is more a critique about the pitfalls of communism than anything else. However, the author defends the Russian people; he clearly had other attitudes - understandable - towards their economic and governmental policies.

[Rock · Rating 3 out of 5]

The author brings a unique perspective on a unique project - he is the son of an American brought to Russia to build a model Communist city and a huge automobile factory. The book relies heavily on the author's parents old letters, so the material is heavy on logistics and light on theory, but is full of fun details on adapting to life on the Russian steppe.