Towards Mobility. Varieties of Automobilism in East and West FPD Forschungen Positionen Dokumente 03
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Towards Mobility. Varieties of Automobilism in East and West FPD Forschungen Positionen Dokumente 03 Schriften zur Unternehmensgeschichte von Volkswagen, Band 3 Towards Mobility. Varieties of Automobilism in East and West IMPRINT EDITORS for Corporate History Department of Volkswagen Aktiengesellschaft Manfred Grieger, Ulrike Gutzmann, Dirk Schlinkert EDITORIAL WORK in cooperation with the German Historical Institute Moscow by Corinna Kuhr-Korolev, Dirk Schlinkert DESIGN design agenten, Hanover PRINTED BY Hahn Druckerei ISSN 1613-5776 ISBN 978-3-935112-34-5 © Volkswagen AG Wolfsburg 2009 Towards Mobility. Varieties of Automobilism in East and West Table of contents 1. Introduction 09 2. The Impact of Motorization on Soviet Society after 1945 Lewis Siegelbaum 21 3. The Wheels of Desire. Automobility Discourses in the Soviet Union Luminita Gatejel 31 4. The Introduction of Motor Vehicles on a Mass Scale in the USSR: from Idea to Implementation Maria R. Zezina 43 5. Motorization of German Societies in East and West Kurt Möser 55 6. The Use of German Industrial and Scientific Technical Potential in the Development of the Soviet Motor Industry, 1945-1950 Andrei I. Miniuk 73 7. Difficult Relations: German Automobile Construction and the Economic Alliance in Eastern Europe, 1945-1990 Burghard Ciesla 87 8. Business with the Socialist Automotive Industry. Volkswagen’s Economic Relations with the Soviet Union and the German Democratic Republic Manfred Grieger 101 9. Skill Formation in Škoda’s Path to Mass Production: Reworking Imported Technological and Organizational Knowledge Valentina Fava 111 10. “Corporate Culture”– some Remarks on Concept and Practice and a Brief Case Study Dirk Schlinkert 121 11. Changes in the Workforce at the Volga Motor Works during the Soviet Period Andrei K. Sokolov 129 12. The End of the Line: American Corporate Cultures and the Growth and Decline of the Automobile Industry, 1945-1990 Steve Meyer 151 13. Corporate Culture in French Automobile Industry: the Changes from 1944 to 2004 Patrick Fridenson 165 14. “German Quality Work”– Did it Shape the Production of Automobiles in (West-) Germany after 1945? Alf Lüdtke 175 15. AvtoVAZ during the Radical Economic Transformations of the 1990s Vladimir M. Iamashchev 191 16. Owners and Hired Workers: on the Social History of AvtoVAZ in the Post-Soviet Period Sergei V. Zhuravlev 199 8 FPD 03 TOWARDS MOBILITY 9 01 Introduction 10 FPD 03 INTRODUCTION A Dutch-Russian love story from the Second World War took the Corporate _1 Olga und Piet. Eine Liebe in zwei History Department of Volkswagen to Moscow in the winter of 2006. “Olga and Diktaturen, Wolfsburg 2006 Piet. A love under two dictatorship,” a book tracing the history of a Dutch student (Historische Notate, hrsg. von der Historischen Kommunikation der and a young Russian girl who met and fell in love while they were forced laborers at Volkswagen Aktiengesellschaft, Heft 12). the Volkswagenwerk in the “Stadt des KdF-Wagens” in 19431, was presented at the German Historical Institute in Moscow. During the event, a discussion evolved on the _2 Name of the plant since 1968: history of the automobile in the Soviet Union, on motorization in Russia since 1990 Avtomobilnyi zavod im. and on the strategies and investment projects of international automobile corpora- Leninskogo komsomola (AZLK). tions in the Russian market. While in the past foreign investors hesitated for a long _3 Meanwhile, in June 2008, time before setting up production plants in Russia, the mindset would now appear to Lewis Siegelbaum, Corinna have changed. Kuhr-Korolev and Luminita Gatejel organized a workshop in Berlin on “The Socialist car”, The Volkswagen Group commissioned a plant with a planned annual capacity of where participants discussed questions of automobilization 150,000 vehicles in Kaluga, 160 kilometers south west of Moscow, in November 2007; in the Eastern Bloc countries PSA Peugeot Citroën also plans to locate in Kaluga; Renault has taken over the Moscow after 1945. Automotive Plant2, which built the Moskvich until 1988, under the name of Auto- framos; BMW AG has been running a CKD line at Avtotor AG in Kaliningrad since October 1999; General Motors, the American parent company of Opel, cooperates with AvtoVAZ to build the Niva SUV and is planning plants in Russia, Ukraine, Serbia and Uzbekistan; Toyota and Nissan are investing in new production capacities in the St. Petersburg region. It is not easy for automakers from the United States, Europe or Japan to success- fully gain a foothold in the Russian market. There are many structural and political reasons for this, all of them analyzed by economic experts and market researchers. But there are also historical facts and cultural conditions whose diagnosis furnishes valuable findings for economic forecasts and a reliable orientation regarding the present problems confronting automobile firms. Thus the idea to devote an inter- national conference on the comparative history of the automobile and mobility since 1945 to these “soft” factors was born. There is always a certain momentum about conference preparations. In our particular case, it was the content focus that shifted slightly. It became clear during our preparations that the time is not yet ripe for drawing parallels between East and West that are based on an equal footing. Compared with the USA or Western Europe, there is an enormous backlog in historical research on the history of mobility and the auto- mobile in Eastern Europe, and in the Soviet Union in particular. So we decided to take the first step, to identify where such research originates, to present the findings to date and thus set the process of historical discussion in motion.3 FPD 03 INTRODUCTION 11 _4 Sergei Zhuravlev of the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sergei V. Zhuravlev/Maria R. Zezina/Rudol’f G. Pichoia/Andrei Sciences was in charge of planning the conference content. Together with Andrei K. Sokolov: AvtoVAZ mezhdu Sokolov and Maria Zezina, he recently completed a complex project on the history proshlym i budushchim. Istoriia volzhskogo avtomobil’nogo of AvtoVAZ.4 Excerpts from the research findings were presented at the conference. zavoda 1966-2005, Moskva 2006. This was one reason why special attention was devoted to the Soviet Union (L. Siegel- _5 baum, L. Gatejel) and its “automotive foreign relations” with Germany in particular There is still a difference in price between Russian cars and foreign (M. Grieger, B. Ciesla). Flanking this, contributions on the history of the automobile models. Depending on the equip- and the corporate cultures of American (S. Meyer), German (D. Schlinkert, A. Lüdtke) ment, the price of a new Lada is between 3,500 and 4,000 euros. or French automakers (P. Fridenson) provided a rich and contrasting tapestry for Models such as the Kalina, Niva or Samara cost between 5,500 and a dialog. There were four main themes: Mobility visions and automobile cultures, 6,500 euros. The starting price international competition and technical cooperation across ideological blocs, for the cheapest foreign models in this class is 8,000 euros. In workforces and corporate cultures, and the transformation of the socialist the early 1990s the price of new automotive industry following the end of the Cold War. foreign vehicles was even higher due to the lack of sales structures. Drastic changes have engulfed the automobile industry in Eastern and South East- ern Europe since 1990. In the former GDR, the Trabant and Wartburg stood little chance of holding out against competition from West German or Japanese automak- ers. Production shut down in 1991. Škoda in the Czech Republic emerged as a com- pany that successfully mastered the transition from a planned economy to a market economy following the “Velvet Revolution.” The brand from Mladá Boleslav with a rich automobile tradition became part of the Volkswagen Group in December 1990; its Fabia, Octavia, Superb and Roomster models have all found customers on the auto- mobile market in the West. The commissioning of the CKD plants in Solomonovo (Ukraine) 2003 and Ust-Kamenogorsk (Kazakhstan) in 2005 formed part of Škoda’s investment in the emerging markets in Asia and Eastern Europe. ZAZ remained the largest automaker in Ukraine. This is where the successors to the Zaporozhets, the Tavria and Slavuta models, as well as the Russian Lada are produced alongside foreign models for the Daewoo, Chevrolet and Opel brands. The Russian automobile industry was able to withstand competitive pressure from the West for a long time. This was due to many factors: the lack of purchasing power in the 1990s, the significantly more favorable price of domestically produced automobiles compared with the price of foreign models, the high cost of buying and repairing a foreign car, and delays in delivering spare parts for autos built by foreign manufacturers.5 Consequently, investments by American, European or Japanese automakers in Russia back then were both cautious and rare. The picture has since changed and the demise of the “fatherland” automotive industry seems almost inevitable. Renault has been producing the Clio at the Moscow Automotive Plant since 2002 and the Logan since 2005. There has been a very sharp decline in produc- 12 FPD 03 INTRODUCTION tion of the Volga, once the automobile of the Soviet elite, at the GAZ factory in Nizhnyi _6 In his presentation, Andrei Novgorod (formerly Gorki), and there is a question mark as to how long the brand can Sokolov provides a vivid descrip- continue in existence. The future of the plant lies in the cooperation concluded with tion of the escalating situation at AvtoVAZ in the 1990s. In a more Chrysler in 2006. The first fruit of this cooperation is the new Saiber limousine; the general context: Christina Otten: Korruption gehört zum Alltag in first model left the assembly line in March 2008. Russland, in: Handelsblatt.com, 15 September 2006; Jens Hartmann: In Putins Russland blüht die Only AvtoVAZ, the gigantic automobile plant in the Central Volga region built in Korruption, in: Welt-Online, 28 1966 with support from Fiat, is still producing cars for the domestic market and for November 2007; Verena Diet- helm: Russische Autoindustrie export.