Togliatti, a “mono-industrial” city, is one with the gigantic Avtovaz car factory, Russia’s leading manufacturer. But because of international sanctions, this city and its workers risk being dragged into an abyss.
In a small apartment in Avtozavodsky raïon, a checkerboard district around the sprawling factory that produces the legendary Lada, workers are seated under the red flags of their Edinstvo (Unity) union.
“It’s a factory town. Everyone here works either for the factory or for the police,” sneers Alexandre Kalinin, 45, a freight elevator driver for fifteen years at Avtovaz, an automotive giant that the Renault-Nissan alliance controls at 68. %, alongside the Russian state.
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“For Togliatti, the factory is everything. The whole city was built around it” in Soviet times, says Irina Mialkina, 33, who has worked in a spare parts warehouse for eleven years. The construction of the factory began in 1966 with the help of Fiat in this city named following the Italian communist Palmiro Togliatti.
This city experienced glory during the Soviet era, the chaos of the 1990s, then a renaissance in the 2010s with Renault, of which Togliatti is the first factory.
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With the Russian offensive in Ukraine and the international economic sanctions that followed, Togliatti and his workers are preparing for new dark times.
“When I started, I was full of enthusiasm, I hoped for a good income. I still hope,” says Irina, sketching a sad smile.
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In the meantime, the salary goes down.
Due to the sanctions, components and spare parts no longer arrive. The workers are technically unemployed, paid two-thirds. Irina therefore receives 13,000 of her 20,000 monthly rubles, or less than 190 Canadian dollars.
“The rise in prices is enormous and people are nervous,” she breathes, inflation having started once more at a gallop.
In 2018, however, the future seemed bright. Renault took the press, including the AFP, to visit its new industrial jewel on the Volga, renovated at great expense.
The French group had brought the obsolete Soviet factory into modernity thanks to billions of euros of investment. But by also going through staff cuts, the staff – which was 120,000 people in Soviet times – being halved in ten years, going from 70,000 to 40,000 people (for a city of less than 700 000 inhabitants).
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“There were many issues related to employee departures, but there was nevertheless a clear positive trend. A great Russian automobile manufacturer was in the process of being born,” explains Andreï Yakovlev, of the High School of Economics in Moscow.
A dream stopped just like the assembly lines, in the wake of the assault on Ukraine.
Employees are forced to take their three weeks of summer vacation in April, while Renault is considering an exit from Avtovaz. The city and its employer are therefore desperate, no one at the Russian industrial giant wishing to speak.
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The doors of the factory remained closed for AFP, as did those of the Lada museum and many subcontractors.
When AFP was filming the surroundings of the factory, the Avtovaz security service called the police who questioned the journalists and took them to the station.
If for the time being, there have been no layoffs, many employees are already forced to take a second job.
Leonid Emchanov, 31, a mechanic for a salary he considers “unworthy”, combines with a job as a caretaker in order to feed his wife and two children.
The collapse of Avtovaz would also be that of an entire section of Russian industrial history.
In an underground garage, two men in period coveralls are bent over the entrails of a Lada Niva from the 80s, the legendary 4×4, whose freshly painted body shines red.
“Since childhood, my whole life has been linked to the factory. My uncle came to work there in the 1970s, then my father, then my mother and I joined them (…). All our relatives in Togliatti worked at the factory and I myself worked there. I had no other choice, everything is linked to the company”, says Sergei Diogrik.
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At 43, he takes care of the Lada History club, bringing together fans of the Soviet car from all over the world. Once a mechanic, he now devotes himself to restoring vintage Ladas.
“It was a powerful production. The record at the beginning of the 1980s was 720,000 cars per year, ”he says, once morest nearly 300,000 cars produced in 2021 in Togliatti, according to the Inovev firm.
“It was fashionable to come here. Now the fashion for young people is to go to Moscow or elsewhere”, regrets Sergei.
But he wants to keep hope, because Togliatti has managed to survive the chaos and banditry of the 1990s.
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Researcher Yakovlev predicts that Avtovaz “will focus on models that are produced entirely locally,” he predicts, and they “will contact the Chinese.”
But Avtovaz and its factory town might need two to three years to reinvent itself once more.
