A look back at social and intimate history of the automotive industry in the 1960s and 1970s, between the USSR and Italy.
21 August 1964: Palmiro Togliatti passes away. 28 August 1964: the town of Stavropol-on-Volga, one thousand kilometres south-east of Moscow, is renamed “Tolyatti”. 22 April 1970: on the one hundredth of anniversary of Lenin’s birth, the first Zhigulì car rolls off the production line of the AvtoVAZ factory in Tolyatti; by 1976, three million vehicles would be produced, marking the great step forward in Soviet automobile production. In the middle, between 1966 and 1970, there was the Italian chapter: the construction of the enormous car-manufacturing plant of Tolyatti – a factory twice the size of Turin’s Mirafiori, in a city founded along with the factory, amid unthinkable difficulties and obstacles – was undertaken by the technicians and workers of the FIAT, then in the hands of Vittorio Valletta and Gianni Agnelli.
Fifty years later, Claudio Giunta and Giovanna Silva travelled from Turin to Tolyatti to tell that story, drawing on family memories, both comical and dramatic, and listening to the voices – both Italian and Russian – of those who, in their youth, took part in that undertaking.
Claudio Giunta (born 1971 in Turin) teaches Italian Literature at the University of Trento. He is the author of essays, school texts and a detective novel. He contributes regularly to the culture supplement of Sole 24 ore, to Internazionale and Il Foglio.
Giovanna Silva (born 1980 in Milan) is an Italian photographer, writer and publisher. Her photographic books have been published by Mousse, Hatje Cantz, and Nero among others. Her work has been shown at the 10th and 14th Venice architectural biennales, MACRO in Rome, Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa in Venice, the Triennale in Milan, the American Academy in Rome, FRAC Orléans, c/o Berlin, the Biennale de Rabat 2019, and the Italian Cultural Institute in New York. She is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of Humboldt Books and the co-founder of San Rocco magazine. She teaches Photography at NABA Milan, IUAV Venice's master in photography program, and ISIA Urbino.
