By the late summer of 1930, less than a year into the Five Year Plan, the fabric of the factory was in place – the walls, acres of glass roofs, chimneys, furnaces, roads, rails. A factory newspaper was set up, called Temp, or ‘pace’, to urge workers to greater productiveness, to up the pace. Bibikov was its editor-in-chief, writing regular articles and teaching courses for aspiring journalists from among the more literate workers. He also had some pieces published in Izvestiya, the great Moscow daily founded by Lenin himself. Lenina remembers him excitedly buying several copies at the newsstand on the morning that his pieces appeared. Sadly, most of the articles at the time were published with no by-line and much of the paper’s archives of the period were destroyed in the war, so what Bibikov wrote is a mystery.
Alexander Grigoryevich Kashtanyer, who worked as an intern at Temp in 1931, wrote to Lyudmila in 1963 of what he remembered of Bibikov. ‘At that time your father’s name rang around the factory. I heard the speeches of Comrade Bibikov on the factory floor, at meetings, at the building sites. I remember they were strong, pugnacious speeches. The time was turbulent, and the very name of the paper reflected the thoughts of the tractor factory workers: come on, there’s no time to waste, keep up the pace! You can be proud of your father; he was a true soldier of Lenin’s guard. Carry a bright memory of him in your hearts!’
Pravda, the Party’s newspaper, published a story on the KhTZ in February 1966 (after Bibikov’s official rehabilitation under Krushchev) which conjures the mood of its epic birth. ‘I spent Sunday at the home of [the worker] Chernoivanenko, full of chat about the present day work of the factory,’ writes the anonymous Pravda correspondent. ‘But memory kept returning us to the thirties. What a time it was! The beginning of the epoch of industrialization in the USSR! We recalled the people of the KhTZ, how they were at that time. The sternlooking but supremely fair-minded director, Svistun, the Party mass-agitator Bibikov – he was a jolly and soulful comrade, who could inspire our young people to storm difficulties, whether it was glazing a roof in record time, or tarring the floors, or installing new machinery – not by an order but simply by the passion of his convictions. “They weren’t just ordinary men,” said Chernoivanenko in a hollow voice full of suppressed passion. “They were giants!” ,
To keep the project on schedule, Bibikov championed the seemingly paradoxical system of ‘Socialist competition’ essentially, races between different shifts of workers over who could do the most work. He also gave the workers heroes chosen from among themselves: ‘Men, who by their example inspired the others to great deeds of labour and entered the history of the factory as real heroes. People of legends.’
The heroes created by Bibikov and the propaganda department of Temp were men like Dmitry Melnikov, who assembled an American ‘Marion’ fourteen-ton excavator in six days, not two weeks as the manufacturer’s guide said. These and other prodigious deeds were publicized on stengazety, hand-stencilled wall newspapers posted around the works. Those who slacked, conversely, were denounced by their colleagues: ‘I, concrete pourer of the Kuzmenko group, stood idle for three hours because of the incompetence of X,’ read one public notice displayed on a stengazeta in late 1930. ‘I demand that the hero-workers of our group are paid for these lost hours out of his pocket.’
But despite this cajoling, work had fallen behind as the thirteenth anniversary of the Revolution approached in October 1930 and the deadline for the factory’s completion loomed. At the instigation of Bibikov’s Party Committee, foremen organized ‘storm nights’ of labour, accompanied by a brass band, teams of workers racing each other.
The factory’s workers and management quickly became obsessed with these competitions, in line with a national newspaper campaign which reported these miraculous (and increasingly bizarre) feats exhaustively. One of the leitmotifs of the endless Pravda coverage became wowing foreigners and confounding their forecasts. Not to be outdone, the KhTZ soon produced its own records:
‘The [workers] also refuted the calculations of foreign experts of the productivity of the “Kaiser” cement mixer,’ the KhTZ’s history proudly records. ‘Professor Zailiger, for instance, claimed that the machine could not produce more than 240 portions of concrete in one eight-hour shift. But the Communists of the Tractor Factory decided to exceed the norm.’ Four hundred men come on the shift, heroically producing 250 mixtures. ‘Foreign specialists and their theories are not a law to us,’ foreman G.B. Marsunin boasted to the Temp correspondent.
The factory brass bands now played all night, every night, echoing in the machine hall and drowning the noise of the KhTZ’s six Kaiser concrete mixers. The foremen rushed back and forth, inciting their men to work. Over the next few months new records were set at 360 mixtures, then at 452. An all-Union rally of concrete pourers met in Kharkov to celebrate the KhTZ’s amazing records. The foreign concrete mixture specialist, the mysterious Professor Zailiger himself, came from Austria and watched in amazement – ‘Yes, you work, it’s a fact,’ Temp records him as saying.
There were prodigies of bricklaying, too. Arkady Mikunis, a young enthusiast from the Komsomol, would stay behind after work to watch old hands lay bricks and read specialist bricklaying journals in his spare time; he quickly matched his teachers with their norm of 800 bricks per shift. On a specially organized ‘storm night’ Mikunis laid 4,700 bricks in a single shift; ‘More,’ Temp records proudly, ‘than even America.’ On a factory sponsored holiday in Kiev, he was invited to show the local bricklayers his skills and laid 6,800. Word spread through the bricklaying world and a German champion came from Hamburg to see for himself – after half a shift against Mikunis he gave up the competition. And still Mikunis didn’t stop. His record rose to 11,780 bricks in one day, a somewhat improbable three times the previous world record. For his prodigious skills at speed bricklaying – apparently at the rate of a brick every four seconds for twelve straight hours Mikunis was awarded the Order of Lenin.
As if setting new records wasn’t enough, Bibikov also instigated evening classes to ‘raise the level of socialist consciousness’ of the factory’s workforce. By the spring of 1931 most of the workers, who a year before had been starving peasants digging clay, were taking voluntary evening classes to qualify as machinists and engineers. After the end of the shifts there was a crush to get to the canteen and wash before the classes began. A lucky 500 workers were even sent to Stalingrad and Leningrad to learn how to work new specialist machine tools installed in factories there. One of the many excuses Bibikov gave his long-suffering wife for his constant lateness was that he personally conducted classes in Marxist Leninism for an advanced group of foremen and managers, and mass meetings and lectures on political economy for the rank and file. One imagines lines of eager, and not-so-eager, listeners, looking up at the bald, animated figure at the lectern in his striped sailor’s shirt, soaking up information as indiscriminately as sponges, Marx and Lenin slowly displacing the no less jealous old God of the Russias with whom they had grown up.