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Soviet Car Rallies of the 1920s and 1930s and the Road to SocialismAuthor(s): Lewis H. SiegelbaumSource: Slavic Review, Vol. 64, No. 2 (Summer, 2005), pp. 247-273Published by:Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3649984 .

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ARTICLES

Soviet Car Rallies of the 1920s and 1930s and the Road to Socialism

Lewis H. Siegelbaum

When, on the morning of 6 July 1929, Nikolai Osinskii left Red Square at the head of a small caravan of five cars, it was not to take an ordinary automobile trip. Then again, Osinskii was hardly an ordinary automobilist. An aristocrat by social origin, an economist by training, and a Bolshevik since 1907, he had served variously in the Soviet government as assistant Commissar of Agriculture, director of the Central Statistical Administra- tion, and a member of the State Planning Commission (Gosplan), before

becoming assistant Commissar of the Supreme Council of the National

Economy in 1929. Two years earlier, he had made an unusually strong case for the "automobilization" of the USSR in a lengthy Pravda article, "The American Automobile or the Russian Cart?"' The article, reissued as a

pamphlet, sparked the formation of the Society for Cooperation in the

Development of Automobilism and Road Improvement (Avtodor), which Osinskii served as president.2 In 1928, Osinskii traveled to the United States for talks with the Ford Motor Company. The fruit of these and other discussions was a contract signed with Ford in May 1929 for the building of a Soviet factory capable of producing 100,000 vehicles a year.3

The research for this article was made possible by support from the College of Arts and Letters, Michigan State University. Earlier versions were presented at the Center for Rus- sian and European Studies at Michigan State University, 31 October 2003; at the 35th national convention of the AAASS in Toronto, 23 November 2003; and at the Russian His- tory Workshop at the University of Chicago, 20 April 2004. I am grateful to the participants in these forums for their comments and suggestions, and to Marcie Cowley for research assistance.

1. N. Osinskii, "Amerikanskii avtomobil' ili rossiiskaia telega?" Pravda, 20, 21, 22 July 1927. For biographical information see Bol'shaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia, 3rd ed., 30 vols. (Moscow, 1970-78), 18:558. Osinskii's enthusiasm for the automobile may have come from his trip to the United States in 1925-26 about which he wrote an account for the general public. See N. Osinskii, Po tu storonu okeana: Iz amerikanskikh vpechatlenii i nabliudenii (Moscow, 1926). He noted inter alia that "it is characteristic of America that cars are used much more often than they are needed," and that "Americans are so rich that they want to drive only huge four-wheeled vehicles" (61- 62).

2. N. Osinskii, Amerikanskii avtomobil' ili rossiiskaia telega (Moscow, 1927). One of Avtodor's first activities was to sponsor two "disputy" about the kind of mass-produced ve- hicle suitable for Soviet roads (or the absence thereof). The stenographic reports of the debates can be found in Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii, Moscow (GARF), f. 4426 (Society for Cooperation in the Development of Automobiles, Roads, and Trans- portation [Avtodor]), op. 1, d. 59,11. 1-94 (28 November 1927); d. 317,11. 4-51 (23Janu- ary 1928).

3. For the negotiations and the contract's contents see Allan Nevins and Frank E. Hill, Ford: Expansion and Challenge, 1915-1933 (New York, 1957), appendix 1; Antony C. Sutton,

Slavic Review 64, no. 2 (Summer 2005)



248 Slavic Review

Flushed with the success of his efforts, Osinskii set out on his six-day, two-thousand-kilometer trip that he described in Avtodor's journal as "not a 'real' rally [avtoprobeg] from the automotive-technological and

sporting points of view." Rather than the advance of technology or the

pure pursuit of sport, its ostensible purpose was to test four different

foreign models (Ford, Chevrolet, Willy's-Overland, and Durant) to deter- mine which stood up best to Soviet road conditions when driven by non-

professional drivers over an identical route.4 The distinction is an important one, for it points to the Soviet adaptation of a sporting practice that had evolved since the infancy of the automobile itself in the late nine- teenth century.

This essay, part of a larger project on the history of the Soviet automobile, analyzes the Stalin-era variant of the car rally known as the avto-

probeg. Elaborately staged and extensively covered in the press, these rallies were a slightly earlier and less spectacular version of the transcon- tinental and polar flights, in which "technological development, visions of

modernity, and the public imagination ... fully converged."5 It is also possible to consider them as exemplary of whatJeffrey Brooks has termed the Stalinist "theater state," in which the rituals of theater-both dramatic and comedic-were employed "to draw citizens into public displays of

support."6 While I intend to employ elements of both interpretive frame- works, I also want to stress the specificity of automobiles in the Soviet Union as objects of popular fascination and symbols of the country's economic independence, the material and metaphorical significance of roads and road building, and the significance of car rallies as events

staged at least in part to promote the state's control over what automobilism should mean.

Cars, like other mechanized means of ground transportation, require roads to get from one point to another, and therefore operate within

space that is already known (if not to the driver, then to surveyors, engineers, road builders, and other drivers). Rallies, because they usually in- volve travel in remote regions where roads are scarce or nonexistent, of- fer something of a pioneering experience, a blazing of new paths. This abandonment of conventional limitations combined with their novelty made rallies newsworthy and popular events in Europe's interwar period.

Western Technology and Soviet Economic Development, vol. 1, 1917 to 1930 (Stanford, 1968), 243-49; and Kurt S. Schultz, "Building the 'Soviet Detroit': The Construction of the Nizh- nii-Novgorod Automobile Factory, 1927-1932," Slavic Review 49, no. 2 (Summer 1990): 200-202. See also the statement by the Ford Motor Company in "Kompaniia Forda ob Avtomobilizatsii SSSR," Za rulem, no. 3 (1928): 3-4.

4. N. Osinskii, "Dve tysiachi kilometrov na avtomobile," Za rulem, no. 15 (1929): 12. 5. John McCannon, Red Arctic: Polar Exploration and the Myth of the North in the Soviet

Union, 1932-1939 (Oxford, 1998), 68. See also Emma Widdis, Visions of a New Land: Soviet Film from the Revolution to the Second World War (New Haven, 2003), 128-35.

6. Jeffrey Brooks, Thank You, Comrade Stalin! Soviet Public Culture from Revolution to Cold War (Princeton, 2000), xvi-xvii, 74-78. Another analogy would be the Physical Culture Day parades described by Robert Edelman as "not a sporting event" but rather "a theatri- cally orchestrated political event." See his Serious Fun: A History of Spectator Sports in the U.S.S.R. (New York, 1993), 41.



Soviet Car Rallies and the Road to Socialism 249

The same combination of road reliance and defiance, of travel through what can be conceived of as zones of indeterminacy to reach a preset goal, resonated with one of the most frequently used metaphors in Bol- shevik discourse-the path to socialism-and made rallies irresistible to Sovietization.7

The Soviet version of car rallies, essentially invented by Osinskii in 1929, persisted for some seven or eight years until rallies reverted to their non-Soviet, sporting origins. In what follows I will be arguing that dur-

ing their heyday, and particularly evident in the exemplary rally of 1933

through the Kara-Kum desert, accounts of avtoprobegy drew on and reinforced a discursively constructed geography of the Soviet Union.8

They also relied on two images, or "moving metaphors," that were central to Bolshevik discourse. One was the surmounting of obstacles or "fortresses" by "the Bolsheviks" via a combination of heroism and a correct

reading of the terrain. This typically applied to both the rally participants themselves-that is, the drivers, mechanics, and navigators as they nego- tiated the route, dealt with mishaps, battled fatigue, and assisted each other-and their cars, particularly in the case of rallies in which there were Soviet-made models. The other image, more outwardly directed towards the peoples and landscape through which the rallies passed, par- took of the path metaphor that placed the entire Soviet Union on the road to socialism. The essay concludes with some reflections on these

tropes and the new roles avtoprobegy assumed in the late 1930s.

Rallies as Sport

Like many sporting events, rallying, which originated in France and

spread to other parts of Europe (including Russia) before World War I, was a composite, even contradictory affair.9 On the one hand, a rally had the very straight-forward purpose of testing the reliability and durability of cars and their equipment by subjecting them to unusually difficult and

occasionally dangerous conditions over long distances. Automobile clubs

7. The path metaphor lying at "the heart of the governing ideology of the Soviet Union" is stressed by Lars Lih, "The Soviet Union and the Road to Communism," in Ronald G. Suny, ed., The Cambridge History of Russia, vol. 3, The Twentieth Century (Cam- bridge, forthcoming). Lih cites Nikolai Bukharin, Put' k sotsializmu i raboche-krest'ianskii soiuz (Moscow, 1925), as a key text. For an example of Osinskii's use of the path metaphor (at the Fifteenth Party Congress in 1927) see E. H. Carr and R. W. Davies, Foundations of a Planned Economy, 1926-1929 (Harmondsworth, England, 1969), 1:45-46.

8. On the discursive construction of the Soviet landscape, see Mark Bassin, "Russia between Europe and Asia: The Ideological Construction of Geographical Space," Slavic Review 50, no. 1 (Spring 1991): 1-17; James van (sic) Geldern, "The Centre and the Pe- riphery: Cultural and Social Geography in the Mass Culture of the 1930s," in Stephen White, ed., New Directions in Soviet History (Cambridge, 1992), 62-80; Widdis, Visions of a New Land; and Evgeny Dobrenko and Eric Naiman, eds., The Landscape of Stalinism: The Art and Ideology of Soviet Space (Seattle, 2003).

9. For a capsule history of automobile rallies in tsarist Russia, including three "large" rallies in 1911, see F. Borisov, "Avtomobil'nyi sport v staroi Rossii i SSSR," Za rulem, no. 9 (1928): 6-9.



250 Slavic Review

used rallies to promote interest in driving, and car manufacturers as well as tire and oil companies used them to promote their products.10 Stop watches, speedometers, fuel gauges, and other measuring devices recorded indices of performance analogous to what had become the stock in trade of factories and their rationalizing and Taylorizing engineers. Ral-

lying was thus a highly technical activity that depended on a good deal of teamwork among mechanics, navigators, and drivers.

On the other hand, European rallying represented an escape of sorts from the confines of an increasingly urbanized, "mass" environment. It offered the thrill to drivers-and, if only vicariously, to spectators and readers of their exploits-of being pushed to the limit, of facing and over-

coming danger, of a state of hyperalertness, of recklessness but also

self-discipline, all of which was reminiscent of both gambling and military combat. This (overwhelmingly masculine) appeal of rallying might ex-

plain both the early popularity of the Rallye Automobile vers Monte Carlo and the prevalence among rally drivers of war veterans and retired officers.1l

For reasons that remain obscure, the term "rally" (in Russian, ralli) was not used in the Soviet Union in connection with events of this sort until 1955 when the Leningrad City Auto-Motor Club sponsored a two- thousand-kilometer competition. Two years later the first All-Union rally was held, and in 1958 Soviet drivers debuted in international competition at Finland's Thousand Lakes rally.12 Before that such competitions on So- viet soil went under the name of avtoprobegy. In September 1923, fifty-one touring cars competed over a ten-day period in the first (and only) All- Russian Automobile Rally (Vserossiiskii avtomobil'nyi probeg). As in international rallies, participants received a booklet of rules listing penalties for

damage to car engines, bodies, and individual parts, expenditures of fuel and oil were meticulously recorded, and prizes were awarded to winners in various categories.13

10. Stephen L. Harp, Marketing Michelin: Advertising & Cultural Identity in Twentieth- Century France (Baltimore, 2001), 17-19.

11. See Wolfgang Sachs, ForLove oftheAutomobile: LookingBack into the History of ourDe- sires (Berkeley, 1992), 112-15; Michael Frostick, A History of the Monte Carlo Rally (London, 1963); Donald Cowbourne, British Rally Drivers: Their Cars & Awards, 1925-1939 (Otley, 1996).

12. Personal communication (2 January 2003) from Anton Borisenko, a St. Peters- burg-based rally driver who runs a web site called "Rally & Russia" (http://www.rally.spb .ru/, last consulted 20 January 2005) and writes for an online magazine "Avtosport.ru" (http://www.avtosport.ru/, last consulted 20 January 2005). GARF, f. 9552, op. 5, d. 1 (Protocols and reports of judicial collegia for international competition in automobile and motorcycle sport, 18 May-26 October 1958), 11. 60-65. A. Kurdzikauskas and L. Shugurov, Avtomobil'nyi sport v SSSR. Spravochnik (Vilnius, 1976), 23, 40-42. See also A. Dmitrievskii, "Sovetskie sportsmeny v mezhdunarodnykh avtomobil'nykh ralli," in Avtomobilist-liubitel' (Moscow, 1963), 74-77.

13. Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv ekonomiki (RGAE), f. 1884, op. 5, ed. kh. 104 (Rules and conditions of participation of cars in the All-Russian Automobile Rally), ed. kh. 93,11. 103, 117; Pravda, 16 September 1923, 3; 26 September 1923, 6. Plans were developed for a konkurs (competition) of automobiles to take place in August 1923 through the Transcaucasian Federated Soviet Republic, but I have no information confirming its oc- currence. See RGAE, f. 1884, op. 5, ed. kh. 92 (Protocols of the competition committee).



Soviet Car Rallies and the Road to Socialism

ij- ILutfA, Ji a

It*rgE r ?E Irw, i,! w T

I 0 I 1

Figure 1. Touring cars leaving Moscow on the All-Russian Automobile Rally, Sep- tember 1923. Photograph courtesy of Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv kinofoto- dokumentov (RGAKFD).

At the time of the 1923 rally, automobiles were still something of a rar- ity outside Moscow and Petrograd. Of a total of 18,125 registered vehicles of all kinds (cars, trucks, buses, and other "special vehicles") in Soviet Rus- sia, over half (9,756) were garaged in those two cities.14 The overwhelm- ing majority of vehicles in the country were imported and of prerevo- lutionary vintage.15 Not until October 1922 did a Soviet factory-the former Russo-Balt, evacuated from Riga in 1916 to the Moscow suburb of Fili and indecorously renamed the First Armored Tank and Automobile Factory (BTAZ)-assemble a car, the "Prombron," named after the con- glomerate of which BTAZ was part.16 Two of the five Prombrons that had been produced were entered in and completed the all-Russian rally.

A considerably more ambitious All-Union Automobile Rally-actually three separate rallies, for touring cars, trucks, and motorcycles-was held

14. A. Dupouy, L'Automobile en URSS: Chronologie de 1917 d 1990 (Grenoble, 1991), 21, citing Avtomobil'nyi spravochnik (Leningrad, 1924). This put Soviet Russia in sixteenth place in number of vehicles among all nations, just behind Switzerland and ahead of Norway.

15. L. M. Shugurov, Avtomobili Rossii i SSSR, 2 vols. (Moscow, 1993), 1:50. Shugurov cites a figure of "not more than ten percent" for the number of Russian-made cars in 1914.

16. Dupouy, LAutomobile en URSS, 19-20; L. M. Shugurov and V P. Shirshov, Avtomo- bili strany sovetov (Moscow, 1983), 22-23; Pravda, 10 October 1922; L. Shugurov, "K 50- letiiu sovetskogo avtomobilestroeniia," Za rulem, no. 5 (1974): 36; Shugurov, "Pervyi sovet- skii," Za rulem, no. 11 (1973), 6-7. The car was presented to Mikhail Kalinin who described it as the "first breach in the technological backwardness of the country."

251



252 Slavic Review

in 1925 under the joint auspices of the Moscow Automobile Club and the Board of Road Transport (Glavdortrans) of the Commissariat of Commu- nications. Eighty-three cars traveled from Leningrad to Moscow and thence to Tiflis and back to Moscow, a distance of some 4,700 kilometers. The event attracted veterans of the European rally circuit including "the famous racer, Scholl," who left Leningrad three days after the start of the

rally but made up for lost time by averaging "not less than 100 kilometers

per hour."17 It also received a great deal of attention from the government and, thanks to extensive coverage in the press, the public as well.18 In Mos- cow, participants were honored before their departure with a "fraternal dinner" attended by some one thousand guests. They were addressed by A. S. Enukidze, secretary of the Central Executive Committee's Presidium and honorary chairman of the rally's organizational committee. Provin- cial party and government leaders similarly celebrated the arrival of the four columns of cars, which were hailed along the route by enthusias- tic crowds waving banners and shouting encouragement to the accompa- niment of music (typically, the Internationale) performed by bands.19 A team of five doctors ("with surgical training") was provided to the

rally with special instructions from People's Commissar of Health N. A. Semashko.20

The All-Union rally was a sporting event in the tradition of its 1923

predecessor and auto rallies abroad.21 Osinskii's and Avtodor's subsequent renunciation of this tradition may have been, as Osinskii asserted, because their objective of simulating the most ordinary conditions of driving mil- itated against a competitive sporting motif.22 Then again, many foreign rallies also simulated ordinary conditions but were considered no less

sporting. Perhaps the shift away from individual competition reflected the then-regnant cultural-revolutionary values of egalitarianism, collec- tivism, and the earnestness of knowledge-production as opposed to game- playing.23 Whatever the case, the car rallies sponsored by Avtodor af- forded splendid opportunities for participants to indulge their desire for adventure, for accompanying journalists to extol advances in the prov-

17. Pravda, 26 August 1925. 18. Coverage by Pravda's correspondent, A. Perovskii, was daily. See also E. Chudakov,

"Avtomobil'nyi probeg i avtomobil'noe delo v Respublike," Motor, no. 12 (1925): 229-33; B. E. Shprink, "Rezul'taty Vsesoiuznogo avtoprobega 1925 g.," Motor, nos. 13-14 (1925): 254-60; nos. 17-18 (1925): 312-20.

19. Pravda, 22 August 1925; 30 August 1925; 1 September 1925. 20. Pravda, 23 August 1925. Accidents happened. On 27 August, Werle, the German

driver of a Benz, succumbed to food poisoning and died in a Rostov-on-Don hospital after having consumed ice cream "on the road" in Artemovsk. Two Russian drivers also took ill but recovered. Two days later it was reported that an American motorcycle driver had been struck by an apple thrown by a peasant girl (interpreted by the reporter as a sign of "greeting") on the road from Orel to Tula. His eye-glasses were broken and he suffered "light injuries" to his eyes. See Pravda, 28 August 1925; 30 August 1925.

21. Enukidze claimed otherwise, but in light of the extensive coverage of the com- petitiveness, penalty points, and prizes, his assertion rings hollow. Cf. Motor, no. 2 (1925): 46; Pravda, 22 August 1925; and Pravda, 29 August 1925.

22. Osinskii, "Dve tysiachi kilometrov na avtomobile," 17. 23. I thank Diane Koenker for suggesting this connection.




. .. . . .

Figure 2. Before the start of the All-Union Automobile Rally, Leningrad, Au- gust 1925. Photograph courtesy of RGAKFD.

inces and/or criticize the lack thereof, and for readers of their accounts to engage in "imaginary tourism." 24 This was a form of instruction and en- tertainment well suited to the didactic thrust of Bolshevism. As we shall see, it could be appropriated for satirical purposes as well.

Although Osinskii's trip coincided with the approach of the most in- tense period of collectivization, his account contains barely a mention of that momentous campaign, or, for that matter, anything but the most mundane and unflattering details of Soviet rural life. Collapsing from ex- haustion on cots provided by a sovkhoz outside of Elets, the drivers were unaware of the "cockroaches descending on them." Cockroaches, of course, were not exactly absent from Russia's cities, but Osinskii could not resist noting how "unfortunate" it was that "in our sovkhozes many still consider cockroaches a sign of wealth." This particular (unnamed) sovkhoz had no other such signs: many of its buildings' windows were broken (vybito), the gates were off their hinges, and the courtyard was dirty and disorderly-"clear testimony to the fact that our sovkhozes are ex- tremely neglected and that the most energetic measures are needed for their restoration." In general, the rural folk were friendly enough, though also on one occasion "semi-inebriated." Full of curiosity, they crowded around the cars and provided guides who accompanied the rally from one village to the next-if only to experience the novelty of an automobile

24. I have taken this term from Widdis, Visions of a New Land, 124.

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Slavic Review

ride-but they also exhibited the incredulity of rubes. In one place, upon seeing the cars' headlights they sounded the fire alarm, which sent people running "from all directions."25

The photographs accompanying Osinskii's article do nothing to di- minish the impression of the cars and their drivers as interlopers in essentially alien territory. One shows a horse-drawn cart passing a car that has pulled over to the side of the road with a tire puncture. Another has three participants in the rally hovering over a map "searching for the correct path." In a third, several men are standing on what is identified as "a whole span of a bridge" that has "collapsed"; while a fourth shows one of the cars stuck in mud.26

Searching for Roads

"Roadlessness" (bezdorozh'e) was one of the banes of the country and a subject to which Avtodor devoted much attention. "It is simply amazing," Osinskii noted, "how people can live and work inasmuch as movement on these 'roads' is simply impossible." So poorly maintained were Voronezh's provincial roads that they provoked "wonder whether someone fearing the invasion of an enemy intentionally spoiled [them] to make movement more difficult.... In truth," he wrote, "our attitude towards roads is one of the clearest manifestations of the survival of barbarism, Asiaticness, in- dolence, and idleness." At one point, things looked so grim that the correspondent for Moscow newspapers accompanying the rally dispatched a "panicked telegram" citing accidents, breakdown, and other mishaps. To be sure, the drivers did suffer from the stress and strain of the journey but nonetheless were able to complete it intact and in good humor. Such was their heroism. But what about the road to socialism? This essentially was displaced to the future when, Osinskii hoped, "such trips will cease to be considered test runs and become normal routes for tens and hundreds of thousands of Avtodor members sitting behind the wheel."27

This is a surprisingly deflating account. Not only is the "socialist of- fensive" absent, but there is nothing to indicate that the upheavals sur- rounding what Francine Hirsch has referred to as the "virtual tours" provided by ethnographic exhibits had the slightest impact on Osinskii's representation of the peasant other.28 The conquest of nature, a characteristic theme of First Five-Year Plan rhetoric, is not even hinted at. On the contrary, it looked as if nature (cockroaches, potted roads, mud) al- most conquered the automobiles and their drivers. Osinskii's account is, however, akin to the contemporary "'explorations' of the periphery" that Emma Widdis noted as a characteristic feature of Soviet cinema of the late

25. Osinskii, "Dve tysiachi kilometrov na avtomobile," 13, 15. 26. Ibid., 15. 27. Ibid., 17. Cf. his earlier "grandiose" slogan: "to seat each worker and peasant in a

car within a period of not more than ten to fifteen years." Pravda, 21 July 1927. 28. Francine Hirsch, "Getting to Know 'The Peoples of the USSR': Ethnographic

Exhibits as Soviet Virtual Tourism, 1923-1934," Slavic Review 62, no. 4 (Winter 2003): 683-709.

254




1920s. Such films did not assimilate the periphery to the center but rather

emphasized in "a key moment in Soviet spatial imaginings . . . the

specificity and difference that constituted the Soviet national space."29 Perhaps Saltfor Svanetiia, Mikhail Kalatozov's film of 1930, came closest to Osinskii's account in this respect. This was the story of an isolated region in the Caucasus that was "cut off from the world" and "waiting for a wide

path [doroga] " that, by the end of the film, thousands of Svanetians decide to build.30

In both cases, the message was that the road to socialism lay in road

building. Without roads one could celebrate the heroism of automobilists but hardly the socialist transformation of the countryside.31 This point was made in a fourteen-page report that one Bronnikov sent to Avtodor's central council. The report described an "agitational" rally undertaken

through Viatka province in June-July 1929 as a series of barnstorming episodes. Riding in a prewar Packard and a half-ton Peugeot truck, the ten automobile enthusiasts, including representatives from the party's provincial committee (gubkom) and provincial press, a photographer, and a

projectionist, would arrive in a village, where they lectured on "automobilization," distributed copies of pamphlets and books produced by Avtodor, gave "demonstration rides" to peasants, showed a film called Buinaia doroga (The wild road), and sold lottery tickets. But between vil-

lages, one or the other and sometimes both of the vehicles frequently got stuck in the mud and required the assistance of the nearby peasants. As a result of delays, crowds that had been gathered to greet the rally sometimes waited in vain and eventually dispersed. "I must say," noted Bronnikov, "that the abominable roads, the mud on our cars, the dirt on our faces and clothes, and the film ... were the best agitators for improv- ing the roads and constructing new ones."32 Once again, progressing along the road to socialism seemed to depend on building decent roads.

Road building and maintenance is an important topic that deserves a

study in its own right. Suffice it to say here that funding for these purposes was so limited that the state relied primarily on perpetuating the system of labor duty (trudovaia povinnost') widely practiced in other respects during the era of war communism but generally abandoned thereafter. Succes- sive resolutions of the USSR Central Executive Committee and Council of

People's Commissars (Sovnarkom) of 17 August 1925 and 28 November 1928 defined the obligation of the "rural population" (selskoe naselenie) as

consisting of a maximum of six days per year per adult person, less if ac-

companied by working cattle, and waived entirely if substituted by a mon-

etary payment not to exceed 20 percent of the agricultural or cartage

29. Widdis, Visions of a New Land, 111. 30. Ibid., 106-7. 31. In fact, the heroism of the drivers was at least in some sense dependent on the ar-

duousness of the journey. As detailed below, this implicit contradiction in the two moving metaphors was resolved in the case of the Kara-Kum rally by exempting Central Asia from the evolutionary stages through which the rest of the Soviet Union had to pass.

32. GARF, f. 4426, op. 1, d. 328, 11. 1-14 (Report on the Viatka provincial rally, June- July 1929).



Slavic Review

tax.33 Estimates of the number of people who actually performed this service and the amount of labor days extracted from them varied, but as a member of Avtodor's central council put it after hearing a report that characterized the execution of the law up to April 1930 as "insignificant," "We publish many good laws and count on their application in life. We soothe ourselves and then start looking for whom to blame for the failure to fulfill them and, as a result, fall behind our most important campaigns."34 A report on the year 1931 indicated that compliance was quite spotty: nearly 100 percent in Nizhnii Novgorod and Leningrad oblasts and the Chuvash Republic; no more than 30 percent in the North Caucasus and Lower Volga; and negligible in Crimea, Kazakhstan, Turkmeniia and Tajikistan.35 Perhaps the reason why most of the RSFSR's 1.1 million kilometers of roads went without maintenance or repair (or, as one official from Glavdortrans put it, "are simply horse paths") is that the mechanisms for enforcing labor duty were ineffective and the funds for mechanical equipment inadequate.36

Avtodor's "struggle against roadlessness" took a new turn when its central council approved a proposal inJune 1930 for a 9,500 kilometer, three- month "reconnaissance rally" from Vladivostok to Moscow. Perhaps the very grandiosity of the trans-Eurasian undertaking was what appealed to members' imaginations. Or maybe it was the enthusiasm and persistence of Engineer N. M. Zaborovskii, the principal author of the proposal. If there were no fortresses the Bolsheviks could not take, then there were no paths they could not uncover. With supreme confidence, Zaborovskii told the central council that "Our task is to give the country a road, and this road we will find." But that was not all. It would seem that the "dizziness" that losif Stalin condemned in March 1930 was not confined to the "success" of collectivization.37 Zaborovskii cited the "wave of resettlement directed towards the Far East" from various regions of the European part of the country as justification for extending the rally's route beyond Moscow-"for agitational purposes"-to Ukraine and Belarus. He also justified the rally in terms of it popularizing road construction among peasants in connection with the law of November 1928 and determining

33. Za rulem, no. 9 (1929): 32. For a brief overview of road building and maintenance during the 1920s and 1930s, see T. K. Pavlova, ed., Dorogi Rossii: Istoricheskii aspekt (Moscow, 1996), 71-99.

34. GARF, f. 4426, op. 1, d. 5 (Stenographic report of session of 16 May 1930), 11. 73ob., 79. See also "Na ukhabakh dorozhnoi povinnosti," Za rulem, no. 12 (1930): 15; Sheikovskii, "Chto meshaet uspekhu dorozhnoi povinnosti," Za rulem, no. 17-18 (1930): 26.

35. Izvestiia, 25 April 1932, 3. According to this report, the total number of labor days "given" to this task in the RSFSR in 1931 was 25.366 million. If, as indicated in another source, some 19 million people were eligible for such service, that would mean an average of 1.33 labor days.

36. GARF, f. 4426, op. 1, d. 5 (Stenographic report of session of 21 April 1930), 1. 55; Izvestiia, 22June 1931, 1.

37. I am referring to Stalin's letter "Dizzy with Success," published in Pravda, 1 March 1930.

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"the shortest route in the tour around the world" so that "we can show the road to tourists rather than waiting for them to show it to us."38

Finding that road proved more difficult than anticipated. As the commander of the rally S. A. Zaikin put it in his postmortem report, "you don't come across such roads here as we are accustomed to think of them in the Russian sense of the term." What the participants did come across-or rather what they encountered as they tried to cross a railway bridge some 200 kilometers from the starting point-was a locomotive coming from the opposite direction. Two of the three automobiles were knocked off the bridge into the swamp below, from which they were extracted the next

day. This was a fitting end to a rally that seemed cursed from the start. Al- though "a whole stack of telegrams" had been sent to points along the route, "no fuel or food bases had been prepared." Whenever they got stuck along the route, which was often, the participants "fed" the mosqui- toes. Traveling beyond Khabarovsk, they were arrested and placed in "quarantine" for five days by a policeman who had received a telegram from regional authorities instructing him to stop them from proceeding due to the lack of preparations.39

Fortunately, we also have Zaborovskii's version of the rally, which, not

surprisingly, contested much of Zaikin's report. "To speak of roadlessness ... is an exaggeration," he told Avtodor's council. With the exception of the swampy places, the roads were "more or less decent." In any case, the rally should have been allowed to continue after the cars had been re-

paired in Khabarovsk, which is what the entire crew, excepting Zaikin, wanted. "I hope," he continued, "that in the near future we can make such a trip." Some of those who heard Zaborovskii's report agreed. One Vystrov insisted that "Automobilization requires that every corner of our country know the automobile." Krizhevitskii, a self-described "veteran automobilist" who had done military service in the Far East, expressed astonish- ment that "we Russian people, who produced the October revolution, are told we cannot do this."40 They were to be disappointed. Having given equivocal support to the rally in the first place, the majority ruled against repeating the event. Whenever in subsequent years the possibility of re-

viving the Vladivostok-Moscow (or, alternatively, Moscow-Vladivostok) rally came before Avtodor's central council, someone would refer to "the sad history of 1930" or the "mistake of the 1930 rally," and the proposal would be shelved.41

38. GARF, f. 4426, op. 1, d. 342 (Report of member of the organization commission, Engineer N. M. Zaborovskii, 19 May 1930), 11. 14-15; GARF, f. 4426, op. 1, d. 5 (Protocols of the central council's presidium, 1930), 1. 90.

39. GARF, f. 4426, op. 1, d. 342 (Protocols of the session of 9 October 1930), 11. 40- 43. Cf. the article in Rabochaia gazeta, 16 August 1930, which referred to committees having been organized along the route to assist in the supply of fuel and oil, medical assistance, repair bases, etc.

40. GARF, f. 4426, op. 1, d. 342, 11. 44-47, 52. 41. Such proposals came before Avtodor's central council in 1933, 1934, and 1935.

For discussion of the proposals see GARF, f. 4426, op. 1, d. 363, 1. 3; d. 23, 11. 82ob., 105; and d. 405,11. 14-71.

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Only by consulting Avtodor's papers in the archives could this story have been reconstructed. Contemporary newspapers-at least those that I have read-contained short accounts of the preparations for the rally but virtually nothing once it got underway. Nor did any articles appear after the rally was aborted. This meant that outside of the rally's organizers and participants, those who were supposed to assist it, and perhaps a tiny group of car aficionados, nobody was the wiser about its sorry fate. Anal- ogous to the tree falling in the forest, a rally that was neither recorded on film nor reported in writing for the public was no rally at all.

It was a close call, though. During the debate within Avtodor's central council about whether to approve the proposal and organize the rally, the council's president, A. M. Lezhava, "worried" about how it would be described. "Who will photograph it, who will describe it expertly [gramotno] ? This has great significance and definitive value.... If this side of things is guaranteed, then so is the success of the rally."42 Thus, in addition to a commander, mechanics, drivers, and a road worker, the complement of personnel (spisok otriada) assigned to the rally included a "representative of the press," N. N. Shpanov. Fortunately for all concerned, Shpanov, who was the most scathing of all participants and post hoc critics, did not publish a word about the rally.43

The lesson to be learned here was that trying to overcome roadlessness in one fell swoop was probably not such a good idea. Chastened by this near embarrassment, Avtodor's central council subsequently took more care in matching the innate theatricality of the rallies it organized to the technical means at its disposal. But Avtodor did not have a monop- oly over car rallies and their representation, especially not in the realm of satire.

"Improve the Roads"

On 11 June 1931 Moscow's newspapers reported that a column of Fords and two motorcycles had left the capital bound for Khar'kov, where they were going to "share the experience" of Moscow's Avtodor. Dedicated to agitating on behalf of the "motorization" of the border guards, the rally consisted of cars bearing the slogan "Remember the red border guards who defend our peaceful labor!"44 This was the real Soviet rally that Il'ia Il'f and Evgenii Petrov satirized in The Golden Calf, their immensely popular picaresque novel of 1931. In the novel, the authors' miscreant hero, Ostap Bender, takes to the road in "Antelope-Gnu," a bright green car he

42. GARF, f. 4426, op. 1, d. 5 (Stenographic report of 22June 1930 on the realization of the Moscow-Vladivostok rally), 1. 90. Lezhava (1870-1937), an ethnic Georgian, served from 1924 to 1930 as chairman of the RSFSR Gosplan and assistant chairman of the RSFSR Sovnarkom. In what undoubtedly was a demotion, he thereafter was chairman of the Soiuzryba trust and until 1937 head of the Main Administration for Subtropical Culti- vation. See Bol'shaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia 14:266.

43. GARF, f. 4426, op. 1, d. 342,11. 7, 40. Shpanov evidently was accustomed to more heroic and successful fare, having written about the rescue of the dirigible Italia by the So- viet icebreaker Krasin. See N. N. Shpanov, Podvig vo l'dakh (Moscow, 1930).

44. Rabochaia gazeta, 12June 1931.

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and his two side-kicks have commandeered along with its driver. Passing through the village of Novo-Zaits (New Rabbit), they are greeted by a crowd from which a man emerges to shout a series of slogans: "All to Avtodor! Let us install the uninterrupted production of Soviet autocars. The iron steed is coming to replace the puny peasant horse!" and "The automobile is not a luxury but a means of conveyance!" To which, as the car roars through the village, Bender replies ("with a proud wave of his head to the right and left") "Improve the roads! Merci for the

reception!"45 The car's other occupants are, of course, puzzled and not a little wor-

ried. But that is because, unlike Bender, they have not read Izvestiia in which a notice appeared about the Moscow-Khar'kov-Moscow rally ('Why don't you read newspapers?" Bender asks his traveling companions. "Very frequently they reveal that which is wise, good, eternal.") Evidently informed that the rally was passing through their village, the New Rab- biters mistook the Antelope-Gnu for the lead car, a confusion that de-

lights Bender. "We shall require all persons and organizations to give us the cooperation that is our due, emphasizing our status as the leading car [and] skimming the heavy cream ... that this highly cultured enterprise may yield." He thereupon affixes a banner to the car that reads "Auto rally against roadlessness and slovenliness!"46 In contrast to the aborted and

unreported Vladivostok-Moscow reconnaissance rally, the road journey on which Bender had embarked becomes eventful precisely because he inserts himself into a rally of which the press has made him aware.

The next village along the route was less well informed than New Rab- bit. They "had been told that someone would pass, but who, and for what

purpose, they didn't know." They therefore prepared for any eventuality by hauling out slogans that had been used in previous years: "We're not afraid of bourgeois threats; we'll answer Curzon's ultimatum"; "Greetings to the League of Time and its founder, dear Comrade Kerzhentsev" and so forth. In Udoev (Milking), a village thirty kilometers further on, the im-

posters are treated to a full tank of the highest quality gas, get their tires

changed, requisition a tire pump, and, for good measure, ajack, "thereby exhausting the basic and operational supplies of the Udoev branch of Avtodor."47 At this point, Bender's ruse is nearly found out by a young man who, having "read in the papers" about the rally, knew which models of cars were participating. But Bender escapes from exposure ("I tell him in plain Russian that a Lauren-Dietrich was substituted for the Studebaker at the last moment") because he has-or rather, pretends to have- inside knowledge.48

45. Il'ia Il'f and Evgenii Petrov, Dvenadtsat'stul'ev; Zolotoi telenok (Kiev, 1957), 376 -78. 46. Ibid., 378-82. The slogan on the banner attached to the Antelope-Gnu survives

in popular memory, having been cited spontaneously by several Russians whom I informed about my research.

47. Ibid., 384-86. 48. The game is up only when the chairman of the welcoming committee in Lu-

chansk ("Ray"; also perhaps a play on Lugansk) receives a telegram informing him of the imposters' real identities. They barely manage to flee, and, while hiding in the grass along

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Despite the obvious differences of genre, Il'f and Petrov's satirical treatment of a car rally presents certain similarities to Osinskii's earlier account. In both cases, rural folks' understanding of the event and behavior

appropriate to it was somewhat imperfect, their gullibility and confusion

serving as the basis for extended peasantjokes. Both noted the wretched- ness of the roads. But of course rural conditions and the peasants themselves were not the only, or even the main, objects of satire: another tar-

get was the knowledge-producing and social-mobilizing pretensions of Avtodor, and by implication, the Soviet state itself. Diane Koenker re-

cently has pointed out that "travel, touring, and prescribed leisure were

very much official projects in ... the Soviet Union" that involved "exhort-

ing and training citizens to become part of the knowledge-producing ef- fort."49 Rallies were a particular kind of travel with their own selected participants, rules, and objectives, but the point about "exhorting and

training citizens" is no less applicable. The task of rallyists was to perform as Bolsheviks, that is, with elan but

in a disciplined manner that meant following the lead of the "commander" who knew the signposts and gave the correct signals at the appropriate time. The task of the press was to narrate the rally so that readers could

experience it vicariously and thereby absorb lessons about the stuff of which Bolsheviks and their vehicles were made. Ostap Bender does not

merely bend but violates virtually all the rules, outdoing in fiction what the

over-eager drivers who departed from Vladivostok had "accomplished" in

reality. He uses the newspapers to deceive rather than enlighten. He does not invite questions about the drivers and their cars but rather scorns the

all-too-inquisitive young man, exclaiming in feigned exasperation that he "should be shot." But, as much literary criticism asserts, the object of the best satire is often complex and elusive.50 What makes this and other parts of The Golden Calf work as satire and yet did not prevent its publication in an otherwise intolerant and joyless period for literary production was precisely that it could appear both to subvert and ultimately reaffirm Soviet institutions.51 Arguably, Bender's exploits did more to raise public consciousness about the need to "improve the roads" than the real rally it appropriated for satirical purposes.52

the Griazhsk ("mud") highway, observe the cars in the real auto rally whizzing past "in a blaze of light." There is a cryptic reference in the protocols of the central council of Avtodor's 9 April 1933 meeting to a request for cooperation on a "screen version of Il'f and Petrov." GARF, f. 4426, op. 1, d. 14,1. 61. Incidentally, Lauren-Dietrichs did race in pre- revolutionary Russian road races such as the 1907 Moscow to Petersburg race.

49. Diane P. Koenker, "Travel to Work, Travel to Play: On Russian Tourism, Travel, and Leisure," Slavic Review 62, no. 4 (Winter 2003): 659, 663.

50. See especially Northrop Frye, "The Nature of Satire," University of Toronto Quarterly 14 (1944-45): 75-89; Edward Bloom and Lillian Bloom, Satire's Persuasive Voice (Ithaca, 1979), 19 ("The affirmative impulse ... is the seal of satire at its best."); and Fredric V. Bogel, The Difference Satire Makes (Ithaca, 2001), 32, 62.

51. For a recent social historical analysis of the con men of the Stalin era, see Sheila Fitzpatrick, "The World of Ostap Bender: Soviet Confidence Men in the Stalin Period," Slavic Review 61, no. 3 (Fall 2002): 535-57.

52. In 1936 l'f and Petrov would undertake a cross-country automobile trip of their own through the United States, their account of which was published in English as Little Golden America (New York, 1937).




As for Avtodor, the best was yet to come. The Moscow-Kara-Kum- Moscow auto rally of the summer of 1933, probably the most publicized automobile trip in Soviet history, brilliantly succeeded in both promoting the need to improve roads and depending on their poor condition (or complete absence) to produce heroes behind the wheel.53 The key to this success was to make different parts of the rally serve different purposes. Within the RSFSR the condition of roads was held to a high standard: Avtodor praised and materially rewarded provincial branches that had

prepared the route by installing clear markings, upgrading road surfaces, repairing bridges, and providing adequate service facilities; those that ne-

glected these tasks it subjected to withering criticism. The most striking contrast was between the contiguous Chuvash and Tatar Autonomous Re-

publics. The former already had distinguished itself by its peasants' over- fulfillment of their labor obligations.54 "A good road literally became a matter of honor for each kolkhoz," wrote Pravda's correspondent, without

exactly explaining how this came to be the case.55 Its roads earned high praise from the rally's drivers who, along with newspaper correspondents and other journalists, served as the state's eyes on wheels. "This republic could compete in its roads with the roads of Germany," A. M. Miretskii, the commander of the rally, commented. "With roads like this, I guarantee 80 (kilometers per hour)," declared the driver, Lunde. More to the

point was the "guarantee" (or expectation) of "on-time and regular deliv-

ery of grain from the depths" of the republic "to the main roads ... max- imal connections with other regions, [and] the continuation of the re-

public's cultural construction."56 Crossing into Tatariia, the columns of vehicles immediately encountered "deep ditches, unexpected pits and

bumps, loose planks, and ruts and potholes" that required a reduction of

speed to ten to fifteen kilometers an hour. Clearly, the Tatar authorities had something to learn from their Chuvash counterparts.57

But of the more than nine thousand kilometers traversed, only some 1600 were on designated "main roads" (shosseinye dorogi), more than six thousand were on dirt roads or paths, and about a thousand were on no roads at all. Most if not all of the main roads were in the Russian republic; most of the dirt roads and all of the "blank spots" were in Central Asia.

53. A. M. Lezhava, "Avtoprobeg v Kara-Kum, stimul dlia uluchsheniia dorog," Za rulem, no. 13 (1933): 3.

54. Chuvashiia's Avtodor won the All-Union Road Contest in 1931. GARF, f. 4426, op. 1, d. 10, 11. 78-78ob. See also d. 499,1. 197; and K. Kresin, "Pobeda sovetskikh mashin (itogi Kara-kumskogo probega)," Doroga i avtomobil' no. 3 (1934): 45.

55. Pravda, 23July 1933, 4. 56. I. Ustrinenko, "Paralleli," Za rulem, no. 20 (1933): 13; El-Registan and L. Bront-

man, Moskva-Kara-Kum-Moskva (Moscow, 1934), 26. See also "Sovkino zhurnal," no. 23 (1933); State Archive of Cinema and Photographic Documents, Krasnogorsk (GAKFD), 0-2436. The newsreel, shot as the rally passed through the Chuvash republic, contained titles such as "Thousands of kilometers without bumps"; "Everywhere new bridges"; and "You won't spill the milk!" the latter preceding a clip of a peasant woman carrying a pail in a truck. Pride in their roads and the praise received from the rally's participants lives on in post-Soviet Chuvashiia. See Dorogi Chuvashii: Ot bezdorozh'ia do sovremennykh avtodorog; doku- menty i materialy, vospominaniia i stat'i, fotografii o dorozhnom stroitel'stve v Chuvashii (1920- 1997) (Cheboksary, 1998), 5, 99-100.

57. Pravda, 13July 1933, 4; 23July 1934, 4.

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The essential purpose of the Central Asian portion of the rally and especially the crossing of the Kara-Kum (Black Sandy) desert was to demonstrate not so much the need for (better) roads as the durability of the new

Soviet-produced vehicles. One of the roles that Central Asia played was the Soviet Union's Sahara: the rougher the conditions, the better.

Socialism in the Desert or a Potemkin Rally?

This was by no means the first rally to cross the Kara-Kum. In Septem- ber 1929 and again in March 1930, Avtodor and the Turkmen Road Trans-

portation Board (Glavdortrans) sent caravans of cars from Ashkhabad northward across the desert to investigate the best route to a sulfate fac-

tory some 250 kilometers away.58 Later in 1930, in fact at the hottest time of the year, a larger and more ambitious expedition left the Turkmen capital for Tashauz, a town nearly 600 kilometers to the north on the Amu Daria river.59 A closer parallel with the 1933 Kara-Kum rally was the thirty- seven-dayjourney from the Pamir mountains to Moscow that five people undertook in late 1932: traveling in two Ford trucks, they went "where

only camels and donkeys had gone before," spent days in succession using a compass to guide them across terrain without roads or even paths, were choked by dust, and slept under the stars.60

The difference was that these journeys received little if any publicity, and the information that was published appeared only after their end.

Publicity was of the essence in the Kara-Kum rally, which is why eleven of the eighty-four participants were journalists, photographers, and film

personnel. Among them were Eduard Tisse, who already was the most famous cinematographer in the Soviet Union thanks to his work with Sergei Eizenshtein; Roman Karmen, who, not yet thirty, would go on to a long and brilliant career as a documentary filmmaker; and V. S. Kinekovskii, a

photographer on assignment from the USSR in Construction.6' Also along for the ride were Lazar Brontman and Gabriel El-Registan, Pravda's and Izvestiia's respective correspondents.62 Aside from filing daily dispatches,

58. Za rulem, no. 11 (1929): 16; N. Chetverikov, "Probeg Ashkhabad-sernyi zavod 'Kara-Kum,' 7-13 marta 1930 goda," Doroga i avtomobil' no. 8-9 (1930): 38-39; GARF, f. 4426, op. 1, d. 340 (Report of the Kara-Kum car rally named after the 16th party congress, 1930), 11. 2-6.

59. GARF, f. 4426, op. 1, d. 340, 11. 6-53. The author of this report boasted that "now we can look back and say that we performed a very difficult and very risky feat. Even the participants in the all-Union rally of 1925 did not experience such difficulties and dangers as we did" (1. 24).

60. A. Kaiurov, "Ot Pamira do Moskvy," Za rulem, no. 1 (1933): 16-20; GARF, f. 4426, op. 1, d. 351 (Data on participants in the Pamir-Moscow auto rally and expedition, Sokolov, 28 December 1932), 11. 3-3ob.

61. Roman Karmen (1906-1978) was awarded a Lenin Prize in 1961 for his documentary films on the Spanish Civil War, the Great Patriotic War, and the Nuremburg tri- als. In 1954 he published his "notes of a cameraman," of which the first part was devoted to the Moscow-Kara-Kum rally. See his Avtomobil' peresekaet pustyniu: Zapiski kinooperatora (Moscow, 1954). Newsreel footage of the rally shot by Karmen and Tisse can be viewed in GAKFD in Krasnogorsk.

62. Brontman later served as Pravda's correspondent for the North Pole expedition of 1937-38. He also wrote a book about the most famous flight by an all-female crew aboard the "Rodina." For details, see Karen Petrone, Life Has Become MoreJoyous, Comrades:




Brontman and El-Registan collaborated on two books on the rally-a "condensed laconic diary of [their] eighty-six days on the road," and a more fanciful account aimed at a younger audience.63

The Kara-Kum rally also differed from its predecessors in that it set out from and returned to Moscow, symbolically encompassing the terri-

tory it covered within the centripetal pull of the capital. No sooner did the cars cross the finish line on the Serpukhov highway than a "flying rally" (letuchii miting) was held under the arch built for the occasion, after which the participants drove to Gor'kii Park for another rally that was broadcast

by radio throughout the country.64 As it happened (or was it planned?), the motorists' triumphal return to Moscow coincided with another the- atrical event-the record-breaking ascent of three Soviet balloonists-

thereby giving Pravda the opportunity to equate the "subjugators of space above" with those who traversed new paths and "came to know new

regions."65 This "centralization of the national space" was characteristic of the

new Stalinist geography that, in contrast to the geographical discourse of the late 1920s, stressed the assimilation of the periphery.66 The map ac-

companying USSR in Construction's version of the rally shows the route as a ring. Superimposed at the bottom of the map, outside of the circle, is a

photograph of a column of the rally cars taken as they approach, banners

flapping in the wind. Above the map loom the spires of the Kremlin. It was as if the order had gone out from Moscow to build the cars in Nizhnii

Novgorod/Gor'kii and have them driven through Central Asia. There, Sleeping-Beauty-like, the long-slumbering peoples, touched by these "Bolshevik" emissaries, could be awakened to their productive tasks. "In

places where lay the lifeless sands of Kara-Kum," USSR in Construction

promised that "cotton fields will bloom, and in places where dead clay cities have been drifted over with sand for thousands of years, new cities, socialist cities, will arise.... Even now, the stones and sands of Kara-Kum contain sufficient vegetation to feed twenty-five million sheep."67

But we are getting ahead of ourselves. In a recently published article Francine Hirsch noted a "shift from an 'exoticizing' to a 'modernizing' discourse in Soviet travel literature and ethnographic exhibits" that was

Celebrations in the Time of Stalin (Bloomington, 2000), 66-67, 74, 80. El-Registan (born Gabriel A. Ureklian in 1899, died in 1945), began his journalistic career in 1924 in Tiflis. The author of numerous children's adventure stories, plays, movie scripts, and travelogues, he co-authored with S. Mikhalkov the words to "Gimn SSSR," the Soviet national anthem.

63. El-Registan and Brontman, Moskva-Kara-Kum-Moskva; El-Registan and Bront- man, Na zemle plemeni iomudov (Moscow, 1934).

64. GARF f. 4426, op. 1, d. 374 (Plan for organizing the finish line of the Moscow- Kara-Kum-Moscow car rally, 1933), 11. 2-10.

65. Pravda, 1 October 1933, 1. See also the Boris Efimov cartoon entitled "Bolshevik Roll-Call" in Pravda, 2 October 1933, 4.

66. For the application of this observation to film see Widdis, Visions of a New Land, 164 - 83; and to mass culture in general, van (sic) Geldern, "The Centre and the Periphery."

67. USSR in Construction, no. 2 (1934). Pravda's variation on this motif was to situate Moscow at the top of the page, with an arrow snaking down the right-hand side, three photographs of the Kara-Kum portion at the bottom, and then another arrow zigzagging up the left-hand side back to Moscow. 1 October 1933, 3.

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precipitated by "Stalin's declaration in November 1929 that the Soviet Union was 'advancing full steam ahead' toward socialism." The exhibits she discusses, mounted by the ethnographic department of Leningrad's Russian Museum between 1923 and 1934, exemplify this shift in their in- creasing emphasis on "an idealized narrative about the socialist transformation of the Soviet Union."68 The version of the Moscow-Kara-Kum rally presented in USSR in Construction, unlike Osinskii's narrative of the 1929 rally, can be considered a form of travel literature that largely con- forms to Hirsch's "modernizing" discourse. Thanks to the automobile caravan's "penetration" and "mastery" of the desert, socialist modernity was on the horizon if not "even now" happening. When we turn to the Brontman-El-Registan collaborative "diary," however, a considerably more complicated relationship between (exotic) past and (modernizing) present and future emerges.

Although crossing the Kara-Kum desert took up only ten of the rally's eighty-six days, it occupied a much larger proportion (approximately half) of the book and was represented otherwise as the rally's major ac- complishment. In the Kara-Kum, the intrepid motorists and their newly minted GAZ cars and trucks faced temperatures in excess of fifty degrees Celsius (and seventy-seven degrees inside the vehicles), alkali stretches where the automobiles became encased in mud, sandstorms that obliter- ated sight and fouled carburetors, dwindling water supplies, treacherous dunes that swallowed the vehicles, poisonous lizards and scorpions scam- pering around the night camps, and other dangers. There were, in other words, many fortresses to storm. The fact that the cars and trucks stood up to the test fullyjustified the state's enormous investment in giving the So- viet Union an automobile industry. (As Stalin put it rather laconically, "Formerly we had no Soviet automobiles, but we have them now.") 69 The motorists succeeded, our correspondents make clear, because they relied on those characteristically Bolshevik qualities of "rock-hardness" of conviction ("Soviet shock absorbers are strong, Soviet cars are strong, but stronger are their drivers."), "vigor" (bodrost'), and "wisdom" (mudrost') .7 The harshness of the conditions only seemed to intensify the participants' mutual dependence and camaraderie. And in A. M. Miretskii, the vice president of the Moscow Automobile Club and commander of the rally, the participants could not have asked for a more classically Bolshevik leader.71

68. Hirsch, "Getting to Know," 683, 687. 69. The issue of USSR in Construction that includes coverage of the Kara-Kum rally

(no. 2, 1934) opens with a page quoting Stalin's aphorism, "There are no fortresses which the Bolsheviks cannot capture." The diary includes an appendix consisting of the technical commission's report on the condition of each of the twenty-three vehicles in the "Kara- Kum column." El-Registan and Brontman, Moskva-Kara- Kum-Moskva, 219-22.

70. El-Registan and Brontman, Moskva-Kara-Kum-Moskva, 40, 94, 105, 167; Pravda, 30 August 1933, 4.

71. El-Registan and Brontman, Moskva-Kara-Kum-Moskva, 73. Described as a "simple and disciplined hereditary proletarian," Miretskii "never for a minute doubted the success" of the rally and "always spoke in a calm voice." In contrast to the rally in which Osin- skii participated, the majority of drivers were professionals.

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But the rallyists were not entirely alone. Even as they entered the desert they came across a "special plenipotentiary" of the Turkmen Sov- narkom who, "tirelessly boiling with energy," reported that he had been

traveling for forty-five days throughout the republic preparing supply bases and repairing bridges. "This is our rally, comrades!" he tells the

correspondents. "The introduction of automobiles into the desert car- ries with it the death of backward nomadism."72 In the desert, a caravan of camels dispatched by the Turkmen government supplied the motorists and their vehicles with water, and an airplane brought food and letters.73 All of this, with the notable exception of the camel caravan, is

suggestive of a modernizing discourse and consistent with the rally as rep- resenting progress along the road to socialism. So too was Brontman and

El-Registan's account of the mission of the rally's "scientific brigade," oc-

cupied by the scouting of underground sources of water for potential river diversion or irrigation canal projects. Essentially a parallel story of adventure that they wove into their narrative, it culminates in the discovery by Professor V V. Tsinzerling of an underground stream in a cave in the Ust- Urt foothills.74

But there also appear other-far more exotic-characters. Eleven of them were presented in a chapter called "Treated with Love and Pride."

They included a seven-year old Kazakh lad who offered the motorists ku- miss; an equestrian Tajik who, while astride his dancing horse, shouted out a traditional greeting to all twenty-three cars; the wife of the district committee (raikom) secretary in Samarkand who, with her two-week old son in her arms, permitted herself to greet the guests unveiled; and a Kazakh nomad who galloped up to the cars somewhere between Aktiu- binsk and Irgiz near the Aral Sea and demanded "Show me Stalin!" When it was explained to him that the rallyists were following the instructions of the party led by Stalin but that Stalin himself was in Moscow, the horse- man replied, "heatedly waving his arms, 'I don't believe it. It cannot be that there are cars and no Stalin!'"75

Inclusion of these encounters conceivably was intended to provide local color, an exotic counterpoint (or coda) to the otherwise moderniz-

ing Central Asia, "boiling with energy." The benighted Kazakh nomad in this sense would serve as a backward naif, the counterpart of the Russian

peasants who sounded the fire alarm upon seeing Osinskii's headlights or those who hoisted banners from bygone campaigns to greet Ostap

72. Ibid., 105. 73. Ibid., 155-58; Pravda, 29 August 1933, 4 74. El-Registan and Brontman, Moskva-Kara-Kum-Moskva, 88-90, 117-21. Tsinzer-

ling, author of a 1924 study of irrigation in the Amu-Daria basin, inspired in Roman Kar- men recollections of "stories of fearless Russian explorers, courageous travelers discover- ing new lands ... [and] subjugators of merciless Asiatic deserts." See Karmen, Avtomobil' peresekaet pustyniu, 10-11. A recent study of the environmental damage in the Aral Sea basin cites Tsinzerling's "scenarios of impacts based on increased amounts of water diversions" as "mimicked . . . by the decades of events that followed." Modernizing with a vengeance! See Michael H. Glantz, "Sustainable Development and Creeping Environ- mental Problems in the Aral Sea Region," in Michael H. Glantz, ed., Creeping Environmen- tal Problems and Sustainable Development in the Aral Sea Basin (Cambridge, 1999), 3.

75. El-Registan and Brontman, Moskva-Kara-Kum-Moskva, 200-218.

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Slavic Review

Bender and his companions. But while parallels between the Soviet treatment of Russian peasants and Central Asian nomads can be illuminating, we should not collapse differences into the all-too-convenient categories of the "colonial" or the "backward."76 In an alternative reading, these Central Asians' "simple" hospitality and firm conviction of the presence of Stalin might convey another meaning, namely, their innately (if primi- tive) communist spirit uncontaminated by bourgeois mores.77 Our dia- rists' portrayal of the guides who charted the motorists' path through the desert wilderness suggests not so much an opposition between exoticizing and modernizing discourses as their conflation and transcendence. Batyr- bek, a Kazakh, knew "the whole [Little Kara-Kum] desert... by traces of caravans from the eighteenth century." Possessed of an extraordinary sense of distance, he would "stand on a sand dune, smelling the air and looking at the ground" as if "guided by the most romantic traditions of Mayne Reid's heroes."78 Those who guided the caravan through the Kara- Kum were tellers of "wonderful" legends that dated from as long ago as four hundred years to as recently as the defeat of the counterrevolution- ary bandits (basmachi) in the mid-1920s.79

Like Batyrbek's nostrils and sense of distance, Kenim-Shikh's legend of the Amu Daria ("The Bravest of the Brave, Khodza-Nefes") was the source of reliably accurate local knowledge that the above-mentioned scientific expeditions merely confirmed. And when, upon completion of the journey across the desert, Sultan Murad is presented by Miretskii with a packet of money (that is, his wages), he rejects it in favor of a simple attestation (gramota).80 In Central Asia, it seemed, the motorists traveled through not only space but time, encountering both a well-preserved past and the radiant future, camel caravans and airplanes, "dead clay cities" but also newly unveiled-"emancipated"-women, the treacherousness of a landscape seemingly devoid of water and its anticipated abundance capable of sustaining twenty-five million head of cattle.81

76. Here I am in agreement with Yuri Slezkine, "Imperialism as the Highest Stage of Socialism," Russian Review 59, no. 2 (April 2000): 227-31.

77. Cf. Miretskii's version of the nomadic Kazakh's response: 'You are deceiving me. Your work is a great work. And on Soviet land there is no such work in which comrade Sta- lin himself does not take part." USSR in Construction, no. 2 (1934): back page; and Bront- man's encounter with a Young Pioneer in the Georgian mountains who, having read in Pio- nerskaia pravda about the engineer Levin, inventor of the super-balloon tires used by the vehicles in the desert, asked to meet him. Pravda, 7 September 1933, 4.

78. El-Registan and Brontman, Moskva-Kara-Kum-Moskva, 40. Captain Mayne Reid (1818-1883) was one of the most prolific and widely read authors of juvenile adventure novels, most of which were set in the American West. He himself was born and raised in northern Ireland. El-Registan would imitate Reid in such children's books as Sledopyty dalekogo severa (Moscow, 1937).

79. El-Registan and Brontman, Moskva-Kara-Kum-Moskva, 81-88, 114-16. The earlier legends figure prominently in El-Registan and Brontman, Na zemle plemeni iomudov.

80. El-Registan and Brontman, Na zemle plemeni iomudov, 42. Pointing to the money, Sultan-Murad is quoted as saying "I wouldn't exchange it [the attestation] for half a pud of such paper."

81. The reference to twenty-five million cattle comes from E. Iaroslavskii's speech at the rally's start as reported by El-Registan and Brontman, Moskva-Kara-Kum-Moskva, 20. One is reminded of the fusion and confusion of time in Chingiz Aitmatov's novel, I dol'she veka dlitsia den' (1981).

266



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Figure 3. A wall advertisement for the Moscow-Kara-Kum rally with a map of the rally's route on the g-rill of a car, Tashkent, August 1933. Photograph courtesy of RGAKFD.

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268 Slavic Review

That the road to socialism might actually pass through Central Asia was an idea that would seize hold of such Soviet intellectuals as the writer Petr Pavlenko and the film director Sergei Eizenshtein.82 It was not so much that socialism (or modernity) would be brought to Central Asia via the automobile as that, thanks to the automobiles and the vigorous "Bolsheviks" who drove them, socialism/communism had been discovered in that part of the Soviet Union. The seamlessness of the passage from past to future was all the more conceivable in Central Asia because the past seemed everywhere, making the hypothetical future relatively un- encumbered by present constraints. Like the tracks that the cars made

through the desert sands, Central Asia's socialist/communist future as

projected by Brontman, El-Registan, and their journalistic colleagues was written on a tabula rasa. The optimism of this "final leap into timeless- ness," so different from Osinskii's diffidence cited above, is as evident as the effacement of complicating factors such as religious observance or Central Asia's actual history.83

The version of the Kara Kum rally presented thus far, which was the one the Soviet public received, was considerably at variance with what was

reported to Avtodor's headquarters in Moscow. Most damning was a ten-

page report filed en route by N. A. Grustlivov, the political leader (politru- kovod) assigned by the party to the rally. Insisting that as a former soldier he always tried to support the authority of Miretskii, Grustlivov com-

plained that the rally's commander "rarely lent an ear to me and did not

support my authority as the individual responsible for the rally's political leadership." The lack of unanimity at the top was accompanied by a lack of discipline in the ranks. Drivers not only refused to carry out orders but on occasion met them with "a torrent of bad language." The correspondents and other passengers were no better. El-Registan's speeches were characterized as "politically empty" and full of "banquet puns" such as "We send you our automobile greetings!"84

Grustlivov got his just deserts, though, when he in turn was denounced for engaging in "party swaggering" (komchvanstvo). When the

rally reached Tashkent he was relieved of his assignment. It turned out that Grustlivov was not the only problem. Two weeks into the rally, Semen Utkin, "automobile champion of Ukraine," sent a letter to Moscow de-

nouncing the head of the technical commission, I. I. Osipov, for making (unspecified) political mistakes. He recommended Osipov's removal, and

82. Pavlenko and Eizenshtein collaborated on the script of a film, Fergana Canal, that began production in 1939 but was abandoned after several months, apparently owing to cost overruns. Pavlenko, who had been sent to Turkmenistan as part of a writers' brigade in 1930, used Central Asia as the backdrop for several works of fiction including his last, unfinished novel, Toilers of Peace. For more details, see my "Constructions of Construction: The Great Fergana Canal, 1939" (paper, AAASS Convention, St. Louis, Mo., Novem- ber 1999).

83. The phrase is Yuri Slezkine's. See his "The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism," Slavic Review 53, no. 2 (Summer 1994): 440.

84. GARF, f. 4426, op. 1, d. 373, 11. 23-32 (Report of Grustlivov to chairman of the committee Kuibyshev, 26 August 1933).




this too was done in Tashkent. Utkin also denounced Brontman in the same letter for sending a "thuggish [pogromnaia] telegram" to Pravda, but Brontman apparently suffered no adverse consequences.85

Things in Avtodor's Central Asian branches were not too swell either. Two months after the Kara-Kum rally's triumphal conclusion, a member of Avtodor's central council submitted a report based on his personal in- vestigation. It turned out that membership figures were highly inflated. The Uzbek Avtodor claimed a membership of 5,000 but the records showed that only 400 had paid dues, and the accountant was skeptical about the accuracy of that number. The same fiction was perpetrated in Turkmeniia and Tajikistan. Even among genuine members, many at least in Tashkent "hadn't any idea what Avtodor was," and Drobnis, the investi- gator, "had to explain its aims." Then there were the scandals that had rocked the Uzbek branch in 1931-32. The vice-president of the organization had been sent to the firing squad for using Avtodor as a cover for wrecking activities, and the Samarkand secretary had been given a ten- year sentence for illegally selling an Avtodor automobile and pocketing 10,000 rubles. Things had improved somewhat thereafter, but with the exception of the Margilan branch, Avtodor in Uzbekistan was dominated by Europeans whose attitude towards propaganda among indigenous Uzbeks was summed up as "it doesn't make any difference, because they can't work and don't want to."86

Thank goodness for the archives (and by implication, for the historian who "discovered" this material in them), it might be concluded, for otherwise we would not have known the extent to which the rally and the organization that sponsored it were engaged in Potemkinism.87 But this should no longer be a surprise. Scholars have been making the point for quite some time now that behind the facade of dedication, unanimity of purpose, and brilliant successes, voluntary (obshchestvennye) and even party organizations were quite fragile entities, functioning with a good deal of smoke and mirrors, not to mention internal backbiting and mutual denunciation.88 We also know that highly choreographed public celebrations could be sites of contestation and popular resistance, and that particularly in Central Asia the discourse of emancipation from supersti- tion and backwardness was fraught with internal contradictions.89

85. GARF, f. 4426, op. 1, d. 372, 11. 46 - 49 (Letter from S. Utkin to "Moisei Ionovich"). On Utkin see El-Registan, "Solov'i ne poiut," Izvestiia, 30 September 1933, 3; and El- Registan and Brontman, Moskva-Kara-Kum-Moskva, 97-98.

86. GARF, f. 4426, op. 1, d. 13 (Protocols of session of 27 November 1933), 11. 101- 104ob.

87. For Potemkinism see Sheila Fitzpatrick, Stalins Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village After Collectivization (Oxford, 1994), 262- 68.

88. See for example Daniel Peris, Storming the Heavens: The Soviet League of the Militant Godless (Ithaca, 1998); J. Arch Getty, Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933-1938 (Cambridge, 1985).

89. Petrone, Life Has Become More Joyous, Comrades; Douglas Northrop, "Nationalizing Backwardness: Gender, Empire, and Uzbek Identity," in Ronald Grigor Suny and Terry Martin, eds., A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin (Ox-



Slavic Review

So what, after all these excursions and diversions, is the point? First, cars are vehicles (an irresistible pun) for conveying a variety of messages. This is easy to demonstrate comparatively if we recall the Nazis' emphasis on Motorisierung in the 1930s and the "autopias" conjured up by automobile advertisements, music, film, and other media in the United States and now much of the rest of the world, including post-Soviet Russia.90 To be sure, the positive propagandistic use of motor cars was somewhat limited in the case of Soviet Russia, where until 1933 only a few hundred had been assembled. Even so, the mere fact that motor vehicles could travel in the two major rallies of 1923 and 1925 to remote parts of the country and return more or less intact served to illustrate not only that such sporting events could take place on Soviet territory, but that the territory through which the vehicles passed-varied both topographically and ethnically- was severely Soviet.

The founding of a society to promote automobile consciousness and the subsequent decision to produce "American" automobiles inspired the

adaptation of the competitive sport of rallying to Soviet conditions. Osin- skii's 1929 rally, the first of the nonsporting kind, was told as a story of for-

eign cars with ordinary Soviet drivers behind the wheel traversing alien and not so hospitable terrain with great difficulty. The main message was that just about everything except the cars-the roads, the sovkhozes' in- frastructure, the backward culture of the inhabitants-needed an over- haul. The messages that subsequent Avtodor-sponsored avtoprobegy con- veyed were themselves varied and evolved as Soviet cars replaced those of foreign origin and as political circumstances changed.

This is the second point, namely that these rallies were doing a lot of political work. Conquest, heroism, the importance of technical mastery, and adaptiveness were the most prominent themes in the journalistic coverage of the rallies, with sometimes one and sometimes another bearing more of the exhortatory burden, depending on the rally's explicit objectives. But clearly the theme that resonated most with Bolshevik rhetoric was the metaphor of the path-finding it, traversing it, and making it eas- ier for others to follow in the future. On those occasions when the path was not found or when the participants buckled under the strain, damage- control mechanisms ranging from outright secrecy to Potemkinism were

adopted.91 By the mid-1930s, the paths taken by rallies were increasingly bifur-

cated between those with explicitly scientific, experimental purposes-

ford, 2001), 191-220; MatthewJ. Payne, Stalin's Railroad: Turksib and the Building of Social- ism (Pittsburgh, 2001).

90. See Rudy Koshar, German Travel Cultures (Oxford, 2000), 117-25; R. J. Overy, "Cars, Roads, and Economic Recovery in Germany, 1932-8," The Economic History Review 28, no. 3 (1975): 466-83; Ruth Brandon, Automobile: How the Car Changed Life (London, 2002), 196-236. On "autopia," see Peter Wollen andJoe Kerr, eds., Autopia: Cars and Cul- ture (London, 2002).

91. See Pravda, 3 August 1937, 6, for the announcement of a 20,000-kilometer high- speed rally that, in honor of the twentieth anniversary of the October revolution, would traverse all eleven union republics. The rally received no subsequent coverage in the press and probably never happened.

270




such as the diesel engine rally of 1934, the "gas generator" (hard-fuel) rally of 1938, and the 1939 rally of cars operating on a mixture of butane and propane gases-and those which no less obviously were demonstra- tive (ly political) or recreational.92 In 1935, Avtodor was disbanded and the task of promoting automobilism was inherited by the All-Union Council of Physical Culture and Sport, and the Society for Collaboration on De- fense, Aviation, and Chemical Development (Osoaviakhim). Three highly publicized rallies held in the following year exemplify the new uses to which rallies were put. One was sponsored by the Dinamo Sporting Soci-

ety, and took seven vehicles (two GAZ-A sedans, two M-1 limousines, two one-and-a-half ton pickup trucks, and one three-axle truck) from Gor'kii

through the Kara-Kum to Ashkhabad, then east as far as the Pamir range, and back via a different route. The rally, which covered 12,300 kilometers in 58 days, "demonstrated that not only professional drivers but amateurs could complete long-distance drives." Its purpose was defined otherwise

by the rally's commander as "showing off new cars in remote regions," and

"testing them in the most varied conditions."93 If this was reminiscent of the Moscow-Kara-Kum avtoprobeg, another simultaneous rally covering much the same ground was novel in at least one respect: all forty-four participants, including drivers, mechanics, medical personnel, and reporters, were women. The "Great Women's Rally" was part of a continuum that extended back to Pasha Angelina's all-female tractor brigade and forward to the all-female crew aboard the "Rodina" airplane. Like these other

gender-role-inverting enterprises, the rally "proved," in the words of an editorial published the day after its conclusion, "that women can fulfill re-

sponsible auto-transport tasks no worse than men."94

Finally, a third rally held in the summer of 1936 augured both a return to the competitive sporting rallies of the pre-Osinskii era and the looming military threat. Consisting of nine vehicles owned and driven by out-

standing Stakhanovites from the Magnitogorsk metallurgical and Chelia- binsk tractor factories, it was intended "mainly for the popularization of automobile sport."95 Before the year was out, "avtomotosport" would become a regular feature of Za rulem (Behind the wheel), the "popular technical journal devoted to the automobile." The journal's coverage of mo-

torcycle-ski rallies, high-speed non-stop car rallies, automobile races

(gonki), motocrosses, and other sporting events with military implications

92. The diesel rally was a genuinely international competition with entries from fifteen foreign companies. According to the organizational committee's president, Sorokin, it was "not for sensational or recreational purposes." See Pravda, 25 July, 1934, 6; and Sergei D'iakonov, "Istoriia odnogo motora, k 70-letiiu mezhdunarodnogo dizel'nogo konkursa," Avtomobili i tseny, no. 38 (2004): 18-21. On the latter two rallies, see Za rulem, no. 18 (1938): 11-17; Pravda, 4July 1939, 6.

93. Pravda, 31 July 1936, 6; 30July 1936, 4. See also Za rulem, no. 17 (1936): 10. 94. Pravda, 30 September 1936, 6; Izvestiia, 9 September 1936, 4; Trud, 30 September

1936, 3; 1 October 1936, 1 (editorial); A. P. Volkova, Zhenshchina za rulem, zapiski komandora I-go zhenskogo avtoprobega imeni Stalinskoi konstitutsii (Moscow, 1937). On Angelina, see Pasha Angelina, O samom glavnom (Moscow, 1948); on the "Rodina," see L. Brontman and L. Khvat, Geroicheskii perelet "Rodiny" (Moscow, 1938).

95. I. Cheremovskii, "Sportivnyi avtoprobeg," Za rulem, no. 19 (1936): 24.

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Slavic Review

Figure 4. A driver and her trusted GAZ AA from the Women's Automobile Rally named after the Stalinist Constitution, summer 1936. Photograph courtesy of RGAKFD.

expanded thereafter. Gas mask wearing drivers were featured in quite a few of these events.96 With socialism declared to have been reached and both Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany embarking on extensive road-

building programs, it was no longer socialism but the very survival of the Soviet Union that was equated with adequate roads. Following a purge of the highway administration, a Main Highway Administration (Gushosdor) was created in March 1936 as a branch of the NKVD. In overseeing the construction of the Soviet Union's first asphalted interurban highways (magistrali) from Moscow to Minsk and Kiev, Gushosdor relied heavily on

Gulag labor.97 The final point this essay has tried to make is that because avtoprob-

egy often took participants to remote parts of the country and involved a

suspension of normal rules of the road and other constraints, they lent themselves to stories about traversing landscapes-literal and metaphorical, "natural" and inhabited. These stories, typically cast as adventures, featured both high jinx and heroism. In the case of the Kara-Kum rally, the most elaborately planned and reported of the auto expeditions, the exoticness of the land and people produced fantasies of time travel, back to dead civilizations and forward to socialism. It remains a source of con-

96. Za rulem, no. 5 (1937): 5, 6-7; no. 6 (1937): 3; no. 7 (1937): 2-3; no. 13 (1937): 8-11; no. 15 (1937): 9; no. 16 (1937): 11; no. 17 (1937): 17; no. 18 (1938): 11-17; no. 19- 20 (1938): 25; Pravda, I July 1938, 6.

97. Dorogi Rossii, 91-99; Pravda, 24 August 1938, 6.

272

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siderable debate how deeply or genuinely those who constructed these fantasies actually believed in them, or for that matter, how many of those who went along for the ride in their imaginations shared the belief that one day the car in which they were traveling or hoped to travel would take them to socialism.



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