The Potemkin Factory

When the Sivesk Tractor Engine Repair Plant on the outskirts of Leningrad was formally inaugurated last February, it was heralded by government economic planners as one of the Soviet Union's finest industrial achievements. N.V. Bosenko, chairman of the State Committee for Agricultural Technology of the Russian Republic, lavished praise on the executive responsible for the plant's construction. A year after the factory was officially in operation, Pravda called the plant "a thing of beauty, the largest in the industry, meeting the needs of all the collective and state farms of the Northwest." Raved the party newspaper: "Just look at the blueprints! You will see an industrial miracle."

Well, not quite. Pravda had sent Correspondent Ilya Shatunovsky to see the miracle in action. What he actually found was a dilapidated fence guarded by an elderly watchman armed with an antique rifle. Peering through holes in the fence, Shatunovsky glimpsed a wasteland: "Some bare scaffolding standing amid broken bricks and lumps of dry cement." Where was the factory? The answer: there wasn't any.

Pravda's cautionary tale, headlined "The Factory That Wasn't," was one of the newspaper's occasional exposes of individual wrongdoing designed to explain why Soviet central planners are unable to meet their goals. In the case of the factory that wasn't, Russians were inevitably reminded of the ruse employed by the 18th century courtier Grigori Potemkin, who erected false fronts on poverty-stricken villages in order to persuade Empress Catherine the Great that her realm was truly prosperous.

How had the cover-up been worked? According to Pravda, construction of the factory began in 1974, but the builders did a poor job, and by the time the scheduled date for completion came around, construction funds had run out. Rather than admit failure, A.V. Prokhorovich, the deputy chairman of the State Committee for Agricultural Technology, appointed a commission to certify that the plant had been duly completed, although, as Pravda pointed out, "joyful birdies were already building their nests in the unfinished buildings." Commission members who proved reluctant to sign a formal statement of completion were fired or bypassed. After officials in Moscow approved the statement--without conducting an on-site inspection--Prokhorovich and his cronies, according to Pravda, "continued to include the nonexistent plant in their statistical reports, signed false assignments and wrote off sizable losses."

After the fraud was exposed, by workers who tipped off state inspectors, some signers of the completion statement said that they had been pressured to do so. A Leningrad trade union official, N.S. Timoshin, said he knew construction had not been completed, "but the deputy chairman of the commission very much wanted me to sign the statement." Others claimed that their signatures had been forged. Fire Inspector A.V. Vakhi offered an impeccably logical explanation for why he signed the completion document: "Since there was no factory, there was nothing there that could catch fire."

As a result of the Pravda expose, Prokhorovich has been "severely reprimanded" and some of his colleagues have been fired. Meanwhile, the only real tractor repair plant in the Leningrad region had been closed down in anticipation of more efficient production by the new factory. As a result, all farms in the 33,200-sq.-mi. area will be without tractor repair facilities for the foreseeable future.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.