The Last Paradise

Amtorg: Acronym for the Amerikanskoe Torgovlye (American Trading Corporation), the New York office responsible for Soviet trade relations in the United States. Established during the absence of diplomatic relations between the two countries under the auspices of the Soviet intelligence service, the OGPU, Amtorg combined its trade activities with espionage, gathering intelligence on corporations like the Ford Motor Company.

Avtozavod: Russian term meaning automobile factory widely used to denote the Gorkovsky Avtomobilny Zavod, or the Gorky Automobile Plant. As a result of a personal interest in Taylorist production methods, Joseph Stalin, through the Soviet state corporation Avtostroy, backed an agreement with the Ford Motor Company for the construction of a replica of the American factory in Nizhny Novgorod (renamed Gorky in late 1932). It was agreed that Ford, in addition to supplying the required materials, would send American technical personnel to set the factory in motion, along with a large number of discontinued Ford Model A cars from the company’s German facilities. Although the first stone was laid on May 2, 1930, the lack of training among Soviet staff, the standardization of inefficient bureaucratic processes, and the use of low-quality materials to cut costs led to delays in production, for which the secret police sought culprits. Sending 230 Soviet technicians to Dearborn for training proved fruitless. Sporadic sabotage and intermittent strikes were the excuses used by the Joint State Political Directorate (the OGPU) to accuse a large number of American operatives and technicians of negligence and espionage, arresting and executing them. The operation cost a total of 41 million dollars in gold. There were many disputes over the fulfillment of contracts.

Blat: Term used to refer to the use of informal agreements, personal connections, and exchanges of services and contacts within the bureaucratic structure of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) to obtain rationed products or goods unavailable to the general public on the black market.

Bolshevik: A member of a radicalized political group within the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party, led by Vladimir Lenin. The term is often used as a synonym for Communist.

Breadline: During North America’s Great Depression, this was the name given to the endless line of starving people who waited every day at the doors of the soup kitchens. Most of these centers were run by religious and philanthropic institutions, though there were some cases like the breadline in Detroit funded by the gangster Al Capone in an attempt to improve his public image.

Cheka: The first of the Soviet political and military intelligence organizations. Its mission was to “suppress and terminate,” with extremely wide-ranging powers and almost without legal limit, any “counterrevolutionary” or “deviationist” act. By extension, various secret police forces that later emerged in other countries were referred to as chekas. In February 1922, the Cheka was restructured and renamed the State Political Directorate (the GPU) under the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (the NKVD) of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. After the formation of the Soviet Union in 1922, the GPU became the OGPU, under the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR. The NKVD, in addition to other responsibilities, controlled the militsiya.

Dacha: Country house used seasonally. The dacha became fashionable among the Russian middle class from the late nineteenth century. In the former Soviet Union, the dacha was associated with the luxurious homes used by the high-ranking officials of the Communist Party.

Fordville or the American village: The “American village” was the term used to denote the complex of bunkhouses built some two miles from the Avtozavod to house the American immigrants working in the factory. The accommodations consisted of prefabricated buildings of one or two stories built from timber, plywood, and mud. Most of the workers had a single room, though families with children could opt to have an extra room. The bathrooms and kitchens were part of the communal facilities. In addition to the bunkhouses and the individual homes reserved for senior staff, the village had sports facilities, a social club, and its own store, where its inhabitants could buy food and other goods. In 1937, the village, which no longer housed any American residents, was demolished.

Great Depression: Also known as the Depression of 1929, it was a global economic crisis triggered in the United States by the Wall Street crash of 1929, which spread until it affected almost every country in the world, and lasted until the late 1930s. The Depression had devastating consequences. The most seriously affected sectors were agriculture, consumer goods production, and heavy industry. This meant that cities like Detroit and Chicago, which relied on heavy industry, suffered the effects of the crisis more intensely. Unemployment reached 25 percent of the population, and with no welfare for the unemployed at the time, all those affected were left destitute.

Great Purge: A series of campaigns of political repression and persecution undertaken by Stalin in the Soviet Union during the 1930s. Hundreds of thousands of members of the Soviet Communist Party, the army, socialists, anarchists, and opponents of the regime were hunted down, summarily tried, and sent to concentration camps. Hundreds of thousands more were executed. Other sectors of society that suffered persecution were the white-collar professionals, members of religious orders, kulaks (landed peasants), and certain discontented ethnic minorities. Most of these arrests were made by the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, also known as the NKVD.

Holodomor: The Soviet famine of 1932–33 affected the major grain-producing regions of the USSR, and in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (UkSSR), it was known as the Holodomor. It is estimated that it killed eight million people, 80 percent of them Ukrainians.

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