Saturday, January 17, 2015

Avtozavod

I recently became the delighted owner of a collection of Avtozavod postmarks. Avtozavod, I hear you ask?
Ever heard of a Russian car make GAZ? It stands for Gorkovskii Avtomobil'nyi Zavod or Gorky Car Plant, an absolutely giant car manufacturing and assembly plant in the city of Gorky. When it was built (in 1930-1931) the city was still called Nizhnii-Novgorod and the factory complex (complete with housing for - eventually - 60,000 people) was built on the site of a village called Monastyrka.

Construction started on May Day 1930 and production in the plant started on New Year's Day 1932. While the plant was the result of an unprecedented contract between Autostroy (the Soviet government agency in charge of car manufacture) and the Ford Motor Company (who supplied plans, parts, tools and dies for manufacture of what were essentially Model A cars and Model AA trucks), actual construction was supervised by the Austin Company. A fair number of US engineers and managers were on-site to oversee the gigantic project but this was a true US-Soviet collaboration.

The earliest postmark in the collection is from January 1931:
Obviously sent by one of the Americans working on the project. It's interesting that an Avtozavod post office was already in operation, even though only a third of the project's construction time had passed. Here's a close-up of the postmark:
Note that prior to 1933 the province (and the city) were still called Nizhnii-Novgorod. Has anyone seen any earlier examples?

I can recommend a great book on the subject: "Building Utopia" by Richard Cartwright Austin which can be bought for a couple of bucks on amazon.com. I'll try to find time to write up this wonderful collection.