Author Archives: Dmitry Yakimenko

Labour Riots in Novocherkassk: Soviet ‘Tiananmen’

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1962 maslo1 500x332 Labour Riots in Novocherkassk: Soviet Tiananmen

Meat, but­ter, pay rise!

Novocherkassk is a small town in the South of Rus­sia, also known as the unof­fi­cial cap­i­tal of the Cos­sacks, the Slavic mil­i­tary com­mu­nity. Unfor­tu­nately this town was the place of a huge tragedy, when in 1962 the civil­ian demon­stra­tion was opened fire on.

The tur­moil started on June, 1 when the Soviet gov­ern­ment announced the gro­cery price increase of about 30 per cent. The riot began at the pro­gres­sive elec­tro loco­mo­tive fac­tory: just before the price increase, the salary had been low­ered, which already was below the liv­ing min­i­mum (about a hun­dred rub­bles). The work­ers demanded an expla­na­tion, and threat­ened to strike. Faced with an ulti­ma­tum, the CEO Kurochkin mounted the plat­form and demanded that peo­ple went back to work. ‘If you do not have enough money for meat, buy the liver pie’ answered Kurochkin with the snarl.

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The case of The Kremlin Doctors and its Consequences: the State of Anti-Semitism

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display diligence The case of The Kremlin Doctors and its Consequences: the State of Anti Semitism

Be Vig­i­lant! Dis­close an Enemy Under any Mask!

1953 was the last year of long and ter­ri­fy­ing gov­ern­ing of Stalin. In Jan­u­ary the huge coun­try although accus­tomed to repres­sions shud­dered from the new hor­ror –  this time the enemies-saboteurs were Krem­lin doc­tors of a Jew­ish ori­gin. The com­menced per­se­cu­tion also applied to ordi­nary doc­tors.  Soviet peo­ple who believed to the polit­i­cally edited sto­ries broad­cast in the media were scared to be patients of Jew­ish doc­tors. On March, 5 of 1953 Stalin passed away and the case of Krem­lin doc­tors was dis­missed. Humil­i­ated, maimed doc­tors were released. How­ever this was only the begin­ning of the polit­i­cal repres­sions of the Jew­ish spe­cial­ists and today we would like to intro­duce you to a strik­ing exam­ple — the story of my family.

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The Great Patriotic War: the Villainous Hitler’s Plan or the Provoсation?

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43504001 1241631100 427 big 500x330 The Great Patriotic War: the Villainous Hitlers Plan or the Provoсation?

Mil­i­tary Parade in Moscow

In accor­dance with the offi­cial his­tory the Sec­ond World War  (in Rus­sia called ‘the Great Patri­otic War’) was com­menced on the Soviet ter­ri­tory by Ger­many: the treach­er­ous attack on 22 June, 1941when they invaded into the USSR.  This offi­cial ver­sion of the Soviet Gov­ern­ment is writ­ten in every his­tory book.  At the same time there is numer­ous evi­dence of Stalin’s desire to start the war first with the inten­tion sim­i­lar to Hitler’s . And that is why there is the the­ory that Stalin pro­voked Ger­man aggres­sion against the USSR.

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Soviet Cars: History of the Copy-and-Paste Industry — Part 3 of 3

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A good exam­ple of how the ideas to make a new car were born is the story of the fac­tory “Com­mu­nar”. The Min­is­ter of Car Man­u­fac­tur­ing made a call to the fac­tory where design­ers thought over the scheme of a new Ukrain­ian car and lit­er­ally said: “I heard you were going to make a spring sus­pen­sion from the “Volk­swa­gen” but I actu­ally like the Ital­ian Fiat-600”. Shortly the fac­tory com­menced the pro­duc­tion of ZAZ-965 –nearly the exact copy of the Fiat.

zaz9651 500x248 Soviet Cars: History of the Copy and Paste Industry Part 3 of 3

ZAZ-965

By the way, the next model of ZAZ was the replica of Ger­man NSU Prinz 4. This car was remem­bered by the nick­names “Soap Box” and “Big-eared”.

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Soviet Cars: History of the Copy-and-Paste Industry — Part 2 of 3

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In early 1930s with­out any licens­ing arrange­ments the Soviet engi­neers copied the first lim­ou­sine car  for the Com­mu­nist party exec­u­tives. In 1932 six lim­ou­sines were copied off the Amer­i­can Buick 90L. How­ever,  later the fac­tory pro­duc­tion line was switched to pro­duc­ing cater­pil­lar tractors,so the lim­ou­sine busi­ness was shifted to Moscow Stalin Factory.

101 6 500x361 Soviet Cars: History of the Copy and Paste Industry Part 2 of 3

ZIS-101

The car, based on the engine of the Buick and the body copied off the Cadil­lac, was given another non-poetic name, ZIS — 101.  It also had Buick radi­a­tor bars.

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Soviet Cars: History of the Copy-and-Paste Industry — Part 1 of 3

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Once some music com­poser said  that “There are only seven notes which com­pose all the music in the world.  No wod­ner some songs sound alike”.  Undoubt­edly,  all cars  have got four wheels, so pla­gia­rism in the auto­mo­bile indus­try is hard to pinch.  In this arti­cle we delib­er­ately ignore a pop­u­lar Soviet point of view that a steam loco­mo­tive, an air­plane and the radio were not invented in Rus­sia.  All we attempt here is to make a small digres­sion into the his­tory of Soviet auto­mo­bile indus­try in order to iden­tify its ori­gins and its development.

sovetskiy avtomobil 078 500x369 Soviet Cars: History of the Copy and Paste Industry Part 1 of 3

ZIS-110

A Russ­ian  philoso­pher Vasiliy Rosanov once noted that in Rus­sia every sin­gle case of wealth orig­i­nates from theft or extor­tion.  His­tor­i­cally, the econ­omy of the Russ­ian Empire before the 1917 was so deeply inte­grated into the Euro­pean econ­omy that the exchange of ideas, some­thing, which now would have been hugely copy­righted, was very com­mon.  Like, in 1901 in St Peters­burg the car­riage fac­tory Freze and the Riga bicy­cle fac­tory Leit­ner suc­cess­fully assem­bled the French oil engines De Dion Buton as part of Russ­ian car­riages. Another fac­tory Aksai in Rostov-on-Don pur­chased the license for the pro­duc­tion of the Amer­i­can Oldsmo­bile Carved Dash.  In 1906 a Russ­ian engi­neer Boris Lut­skoy organ­ised the assem­bling of  Mer­cedes cars for the Russ­ian mar­ket. At last, the main pride of Rus­sia – the auto­mo­bile Russo-Balt — was made from for­eign parts – the chas­sis with four-cylinder engine was adopted from a Bel­gian com­pany with a Swiss name Fondu.

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