As investment plunged and domestic economic activity began to spiral downward, unemployment rates doubled. This was particularly worrying in the so-called monotowns—the urban legacy of Stalinist industrialization.16 On October 16, 2008, Igor Sechin, Putin’s right hand, convened an industrywide brainstorming session on the car industry at Togliatti, the company town of AvtoVAZ, the bankrupt inheritor of the Soviet car industry.
