Perhaps the most challenging project under Stalin's first five-year plan was the race to build Europe's largest automobile factory and an adjacent city in just eighteen months. The site chosen was Nizhny Novgorod, later named Gorky, near the Volga River, 500 miles east of Moscow. To design and construct both factory and city, Soviet officials approached the premier industrial builder in America, the Austin Company of Cleveland, Ohio.
The Austin Company was an innovative designer and builder, as well as a capitalist enterprise, with unusually rigorous ethical standards. Soviet...
Perhaps the most challenging project under Stalin's first five-year plan was the race to build Europe's largest automobile factory and an adjacent ...