Togliatti

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 ʻTolyatti.ʼ 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.