On the roads around the AvtoVAZ car plant in Tolyatti, the meltwater potholes are so deep that no car gets through unscathed. The mud water splashing in greasy splashes coats cars, streets and passers-by with a thick brown layer. Pavel’s black workers’ shoes may be simple, but he doesn’t want to soil them. So he bends far over to open the door of his dusty blue Lada Niva, which is parked on a thin layer of ice next to the immense factory site. Behind him, high in the sky, towers a silver statue of a ljada† The old Slavic sailing ship gave the Lada its name and put the small city on the Volga, a thousand kilometers east of Moscow, on the international map in Soviet years.
Pavel, 25, is an apprentice metal founder at the legendary Volga Autofabriek (AvtoVAZ), the birthplace of the Lada, in which French automaker Renault bought a majority stake in 2012. Here Pavel learns to cast the red-hot metal into cylinders and brake discs. The heavy and unhealthy work has not yet affected his face and hands. Those are angular, battered Niva Legend a sharp contrast to the endless rows of brand-new cars lined up around the factory can’t hurt him. “Her name is Legend and she is a legend. There’s no newfangled bullshit in it and you never have to push her. You sit in it and you drive away.” He gently wipes the mud from the metal with a dirty blue cloth.
The young metal foundry is one of 45,000 Russian Renault employees who were sent home when the French automaker caved in at the end of March under international sanctions pressure and cut production at its factories. decided to strike† That decision followed a flaming reason by Ukrainian President Zelensky in front of the French parliament. In it, he accused French companies in Russia of sponsoring “the Russian war machine, infanticide, rape and looting by the Russian army.”
This threatens to lose the car manufacturer’s second largest sales market, after France. Possibly even bigger is the noose for tens of thousands of employees like Pavel, for whom the AvtoVAZ assembly line is the lifeline of the gray life in the provincial city. At closing, they are entitled to three months’ salary, the further future is uncertain.
debt
As the breadwinner of a family with four younger sisters, Pavel never had many illusions about his future. And from his salary at the factory – 300 euros per month converted – he can at most buy a few new car tires. So he saved up for a simple excavator, which he wanted to use to rent out to clients in the summer. “Life has always been hard here, everyone in Tolyatti is in debt. We don’t live here, we survive.” His words are reinforced by the countless advertisements that adorn the spartan bus shelters around the factory, in which clever lawyers offer debt relief.
At one time, Tolyatti – named after the Italian communist Palmiro Togliatti – was a beacon of progress. Here on the bank of the Volga, Leonid Brezhnev, together with Fiat, decided in 1966 to establish a car factory. Its purpose was to provide affordable cars for Soviet citizens craving comfort and to free them from the enormous amounts of savings that they hid under their mattresses for lack of quality goods.
In 1970, the first, which became famous, rolled Lada 1200 ‘Zhiguli’ of the band, followed in later years by the Kalina, the Granta, the XRAY and the Largus. With the monster factory – six hundred hectares in size, a hundred thousand employees strong – Tolyatti grew into the Detroit of Russia. According to tradition, in those years the conveyor belt was so long that it bent along with the curve of the earth. Soviet Russians embraced the simple, cheap Lada, but also mocked her. “How do you double the value of a Lada? Fill her with gas,” was a common joke. With the French takeover in 2012, the factory was modernized but also slimmed down: 65,000 employees lost their jobs.
Increasing repression
In a neglected-looking residential area not far from the factory site, another Pavel, last name Kaledin, shuffles through the slush snow. Under his feet the ice breaks on the puddles, from which a deep brown, icy mud wells up. The forty-something with light gray eyes and stubble is a journalist and spent years investigating abuses in the city. But with the increasingly repressive climate, in which any criticism of the ‘military operation’ in Ukraine is stifled, the journalist can hardly do his job. He has already received a warning and is not allowed to leave the city. Still, he doesn’t mince words. “Not everyone supports the war, but people are afraid. You can be prosecuted for a post on social media.”
“Casastrophic,” Kaledin calls the impending departure of the French from his city. He doesn’t believe the Russian authorities’ claims that the factory can resume production without Renault. “The authorities say that everything will be fine, but that seems very complicated to me. After the takeover by Renault, it took years to get the import of car parts on track. Now that whole process has to be reversed. But the Russian factories that used to make parts no longer exist. So you have to build new factories first. And for those factories you need specialists. Where do you get it from? Nobody is going to come from abroad anymore”, he laughs scornfully.
In one of the parking lots, Maria, in winter coat and headscarf, mans a white chapel with golden orbs. Every day from eight to three she sells candles and prayer cards. On Thursday, a priest arrives from the provincial capital of Samara to say mass early in the morning, before the working day begins. Prayers go out to the situation in Ukraine. “We pray for the fallen soldiers, we pray that it ends,” Maria says, with her eyes fixed on the icons. “If the West had not intervened, we would have put our house in order and liberated the Ukrainians long ago. But the West wants war, they want the Donbas. They’re setting up laboratories for biological weapons everywhere. Why?”
Thus, the fate of the workers in Tolyatti is suddenly linked to that of the Ukrainians. The future of the factory is a mystery. For Maria, but also for the French. It was announced this week that Renault is considering transferring its assets, worth more than two billion euros, to a Russian investor. With this, the company seems to want to prevent the nationalization, which the Kremlin threatened this month. †[Bedrijven] who want to stop their production here, we have to take a hard line. External management must be appointed, and then those companies will have to be handed over to those who want to work,” President Putin said. For the takeover, co-owner Rostec is the most obvious, but the Russian state-owned company cannot buy because of the sanctions, reported Bloomberg this week.
‘The Russians no longer believe’
Metal foundry Pavel thinks nationalization is an excellent solution. Not only from his own factory, but from all foreign factories in the country. “We just have to start producing our stuff ourselves, so that we are no longer dependent on anyone. Russia is a great country, anything is possible here. You just have to want it.” Pavel estimates that six months is enough to get things in order and get missing parts, especially electronics, from Asia.
But no matter how hard Pavel wants to believe in his country, he has his doubts about the Kremlin’s course. “If you turn on the radio, you will hear Putin saying that the situation will stabilize. Somehow that’s hard to imagine. Every year we wonder how we are going to get through this year. The Russian people have long since ceased to believe.”
A version of this article also appeared in NRC Handelsblad of 2 April 2022
A version of this article also appeared in NRC on the morning of April 2, 2022
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