Biography of a City

Evgenii Astakhov, Right to a Biography. 1979

Translated by Lewis Siegebaum

Evgenii Astakhov, a local writer, fictionalized the building of VAZ and the adjacent Auto Factory District (Avtograd) in a standard Brezhnev-era construction novel in which many of the characters were drawn from actuality. The main character, Ivan Tveritin, a former student of architecture but now a journalist, is probably a stand-in for the author.

Original Source: Evgenii Astakhov, Pravo na biografiiu (Moscow: Izd. Pol. Lit., 1979), pp. 21, 23, 49, 62-63, 106, 294, 303-04.

This is a book about communists -- workers, engineers, and party leaders -- taking on their shoulders the most difficult burden of the first three-and-a-half years of constructing a new city. It is a book about talented, self-reliant people of pure spirit, people dedicated to the party, the people, and the fatherland. [inside cover]

[Tol'iatti] was a made-to-order city. But I wonder whether people will understand this expression because there are dozens of meanings to this word "standard." Stanislav Petrovich Polikarpov, how do you understand "made-to order," as in "made-to-order city?"

Very simply, a city where people will live comfortably and happily. Where there will be no crowding -- not on the streets or in apartments, or in stores. Where it will be beautiful -- in the apartments and on the streets, in the shops of the factory -- everywhere! A city in which one can go from one end to the other on foot in an hour and not going beyond its limits do everything that one could desire: earn a living, pick up the kids from kindergarten, get a ticket to the sports palace, the cinema, the stadium, have a look into the polyclinic, call on one's mother-in-law, relax in a prophylactorium, make necessary purchases, reserve a table in a restaurant for Saturday, sail on a yacht, swim in a pool, take a new novel off the shelf at the library ... This is not some pretty dream, but an iron-clad engineered reality.

Tveritin tried to remember how these places looked before the beginning of VAZ's construction. It was all steppe here as flat as a table, kolkhoz fields, cut by narrow paths, lost in the thick stalks of grain. Now it is all mud and holes in the ground, but the residential zone (Avtograd) will be a beacon. It will differ markedly from the residential areas of 1955-68, the barracks of Port-City, Komsomol'sk, and so forth. The difference will be so striking that after five or seven years, it will be difficult to explain why VAZ's workers live in better-built and more comfortable apartments than workers of enterprises located in the Shliuz or Komsomol'sk districts. Now it is crowded in the dormitories, but eventually, they will have polished furniture, electric stoves in the kitchen, fridges. There will be a wing for small families, dozens of buildings with improved layouts, parquet floors even!

Tveritin asked Nikolai Kharitonovich Obolonkov, former party secretary at the Kuibyshev Hydroelectric Construction Project, now city party first secretary, about those cadre-workers who still don't have apartments. "Why these veterans of construction, after ten years, still haven't received well-built housing, I don't know. But believe me, I share their frustration, understand the justice of their complaint, and want to help them."

[Later, in the novel, Obolonkov notes:] "No two cities are alike, just as no two rivers are alike ... One hears often that in the past 20 years only two or three types of housing styles have been used in mass construction of the new micro-districts and that as a result all our cities resemble each other. Many in fact do lack a vertical profile, are monotonous to look at, and so forth. All this is right, although the talk is not about identical, standard cities so much as the lack of individuality in the architectural style. Micro-districts are alike, but the character of the cities, their internal features are different and the attentive person always knows one from the other.

When one talks about Tol'iatti, calling it a city of youth, rising from empty space in a short period of time and now containing a huge industrial plant with a half million people, one is only right in part. Yes, of course the history of this city is unusual and at the same time very typical for the era of developed socialism. Its popularity, especially among young people, its headlong growth, combination of modern buildings with massive stands of primeval pine forest -- all this in a significant degree distinguishes Tol'iatii from cities of equal size.