GLOSSARY
Amtorg: Acronym for the Amerikanskoe Torgovlye (American Trading Corporation), the New York office responsible for Soviet trade relations in the United States. Established during the absence of diplomatic relations between the two countries under the auspices of the Soviet intelligence service, the OGPU, Amtorg combined its trade activities with espionage, gathering intelligence on corporations like the Ford Motor Company.
Avtozavod: Russian term meaning automobile factory widely used to denote the Gorkovsky Avtomobilny Zavod, or the Gorky Automobile Plant. As a result of a personal interest in Taylorist production methods, Joseph Stalin, through the Soviet state corporation Avtostroy, backed an agreement with the Ford Motor Company for the construction of a replica of the American factory in Nizhny Novgorod (renamed Gorky in late 1932). It was agreed that Ford, in addition to supplying the required materials, would send American technical personnel to set the factory in motion, along with a large number of discontinued Ford Model A cars from the company’s German facilities. Although the first stone was laid on May 2, 1930, the lack of training among Soviet staff, the standardization of inefficient bureaucratic processes, and the use of low-quality materials to cut costs led to delays in production, for which the secret police sought culprits. Sending 230 Soviet technicians to Dearborn for training proved fruitless. Sporadic sabotage and intermittent strikes were the excuses used by the Joint State Political Directorate (the OGPU) to accuse a large number of American operatives and technicians of negligence and espionage, arresting and executing them. The operation cost a total of 41 million dollars in gold. There were many disputes over the fulfillment of contracts.
Blat: Term used to refer to the use of informal agreements, personal connections, and exchanges of services and contacts within the bureaucratic structure of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) to obtain rationed products or goods unavailable to the general public on the black market.
Bolshevik: A member of a radicalized political group within the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party, led by Vladimir Lenin. The term is often used as a synonym for Communist.
Breadline: During North America’s Great Depression, this was the name given to the endless line of starving people who waited every day at the doors of the soup kitchens. Most of these centers were run by religious and philanthropic institutions, though there were some cases like the breadline in Detroit funded by the gangster Al Capone in an attempt to improve his public image.
Cheka: The first of the Soviet political and military intelligence organizations. Its mission was to “suppress and terminate,” with extremely wide-ranging powers and almost without legal limit, any “counterrevolutionary” or “deviationist” act. By extension, various secret police forces that later emerged in other countries were referred to as chekas. In February 1922, the Cheka was restructured and renamed the State Political Directorate (the GPU) under the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (the NKVD) of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. After the formation of the Soviet Union in 1922, the GPU became the OGPU, under the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR. The NKVD, in addition to other responsibilities, controlled the militsiya.
Dacha: Country house used seasonally. The dacha became fashionable among the Russian middle class from the late nineteenth century. In the former Soviet Union, the dacha was associated with the luxurious homes used by the high-ranking officials of the Communist Party.
Fordville or the American village: The “American village” was the term used to denote the complex of bunkhouses built some two miles from the Avtozavod to house the American immigrants working in the factory. The accommodations consisted of prefabricated buildings of one or two stories built from timber, plywood, and mud. Most of the workers had a single room, though families with children could opt to have an extra room. The bathrooms and kitchens were part of the communal facilities. In addition to the bunkhouses and the individual homes reserved for senior staff, the village had sports facilities, a social club, and its own store, where its inhabitants could buy food and other goods. In 1937, the village, which no longer housed any American residents, was demolished.
Great Depression: Also known as the Depression of 1929, it was a global economic crisis triggered in the United States by the Wall Street crash of 1929, which spread until it affected almost every country in the world, and lasted until the late 1930s. The Depression had devastating consequences. The most seriously affected sectors were agriculture, consumer goods production, and heavy industry. This meant that cities like Detroit and Chicago, which relied on heavy industry, suffered the effects of the crisis more intensely. Unemployment reached 25 percent of the population, and with no welfare for the unemployed at the time, all those affected were left destitute.
Great Purge: A series of campaigns of political repression and persecution undertaken by Stalin in the Soviet Union during the 1930s. Hundreds of thousands of members of the Soviet Communist Party, the army, socialists, anarchists, and opponents of the regime were hunted down, summarily tried, and sent to concentration camps. Hundreds of thousands more were executed. Other sectors of society that suffered persecution were the white-collar professionals, members of religious orders, kulaks (landed peasants), and certain discontented ethnic minorities. Most of these arrests were made by the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, also known as the NKVD.
Holodomor: The Soviet famine of 1932–33 affected the major grain-producing regions of the USSR, and in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (UkSSR), it was known as the Holodomor. It is estimated that it killed eight million people, 80 percent of them Ukrainians.
Intourist: The state travel agency of the Soviet Union. Founded in 1929 by Joseph Stalin and run by NKVD officials, its purpose was to control foreigners’ access to Soviet territory and travel within the state. In 1933, it merged with the Soviet state company Hotel, adding hotels, restaurants, and transportation to its services.
Ispravdom: Meaning “house of correction” in Russian, ispravdom referred to any of the correctional facilities, prisons, and labor camps that the Soviets set up in order to carry out penitentiary sentences. Although the Soviet Penal Code envisaged forced labor not as a punishment but as a means to reform the individual, in practice, the labor camps proved to be extermination facilities. The Gorky labor camp, built for eight hundred inmates, housed 3,461 prisoners in 1932. This increase was due first to the long preventative prison sentences meted out; second to the fact that sentences were determined according to the type of offense, rather than its magnitude, so that a sentence for the theft of hundreds of rubles was the same as for stealing five; and third to the mass influx of prisoners from other parts of the state. In time, the attempts to instill civic-mindedness among the inmates through education and labor policies (in 1932, in the Gorky ispravdom, the state provided 760 newspaper and 110 journal subscriptions, instruction to 350 illiterates, and vocational training to 263 inmates who requested it) gradually gave way to mass transfers by the OGPU of political prisoners to the forced labor camps, known as gulags. These were mostly located on the Siberian steppes, where the extreme weather, food shortages, disease, and hard labor decimated the prisoner population. The total number of documented deaths in the correctional labor camps and colonies from 1934 to 1953 stands at 1,053,829. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the historian and Nobel literature laureate, estimated that the Bolsheviks murdered some 70 million people, excluding those killed in war, a further 44 million—a total of 114 million people from the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 to Stalin’s death in 1953. Just in the year from 1937 to 1938, more than 1.3 million people were sentenced to death.
NEP: The New Economic Policy was proposed by Vladimir Lenin, who defined it as state capitalism. The state continued to control foreign trade, the banks, and heavy industry, but allowed some private enterprises and businesses to be established. The decree of 1921 required farmers to hand over a certain quantity of their produce to the government as a tax in kind. Ot
her decrees perfected the policy and expanded it to include some industrial enterprises. The New Economic Policy was abolished and replaced by Stalin’s first five-year plan in 1928.
Prohibition: The term commonly used to denote the ban on the manufacture, importation, and sale of alcoholic beverages, in force in the United States from January 17, 1920, to December 5, 1933. Since the law did not penalize consumption, people found ways to continue drinking alcohol, whether through the lucrative black market, or by collecting prescriptions authorizing the use of alcohol for medical purposes.
Sabotage: In 1928, the OGPU launched its first major anti-sabotage operation in the Donbass, implicating eleven operational managers and 20 percent of the engineers and technicians. Most of them were sentenced to death. Thereafter, the secret police centered its attention on the more than two thousand members of the Industrial Party (Prompartiia), trying its leaders in 1930. Most of its members were incarcerated. Foreign workers were a common target of these accusations. In 1934, Andrey Vyshinsky, the state prosecutor, was forced to issue an order to stop the local prosecutors from making scapegoats of the factories’ engineers and managers because production was being affected. The detained technicians were sent to sharashkas, laboratories staffed by prisoners under the strict control of the secret police within the Fourth Special Department of the NKVD. Previously termed Experimental Design Bureau, they received more than a thousand scientists, engineers, and technicians who worked in them, chained to drawing boards.
Torgsin: The Russian acronym of torgovlia s inostrantsami, meaning “trade with foreigners.” The term referred to the network of state-run stores where foreigners could buy goods that were banned or restricted for Soviet citizens. These products included food and other rationed essentials, as well as luxury items. Although the vast majority of the customers of these stores were foreigners, their products could also be sold to Soviets, provided that they paid in jewels, gold, or dollars, since the purpose of these establishments was to obtain hard currency for the state. This led to the development of a black market for currency as a means to gain access to restricted goods.
Working hours: From 1929 to 1931, in the Soviet Union the weeks were changed from seven to five days. Sunday, the traditional Christian day of rest, was eliminated, and instead, workers were organized into five groups, each assigned a roman numeral (I to V) or a color (yellow, pink, red, purple, and green), with each group allocated a different day of the week to rest. A year consisted of seventy-two five-day weeks plus an additional period of five public vacations, making a total of 365 days. The change was intended to improve productivity and working conditions. A working week consisted of four days on and one day off. In 1931, the week was changed to six days, a system later abandoned to return to the seven-day week in June 1940. The working day was eight hours, including a one-hour lunch break.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
A native of Spain, an educator, and an industrial engineer, Antonio Garrido was inspired by the stories of Jules Verne and Sir Walter Scott as a child. Although in his early career Garrido focused on technical writing, the discovery of a forgotten manuscript in 2001 led him to write his first novel, The Scribe, a finalist for the Fulbert Prize.
Since then, he has become known for novels that reflect deep study of the cultural, social, legal, and political facets of specific historical eras. The Corpse Reader, a fictionalized account of the Chinese founding father of forensic science, won the Zaragoza International Prize and the Griffe Noire prize. The Last Paradise, a historical thriller, is his third novel and a winner of the Premio Fernando Lara de Novela. His work has been translated into eighteen languages.
Garrido currently combines writing with teaching at the Polytechnic University and the Cardenal Herrera-CEU University in Valencia, Spain.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
Photo © 2013 Thomas Frogbrooke
Simon Bruni is the translator of more than a dozen fiction and nonfiction books from Spanish, including Paul Pen’s The Light of the Fireflies (AmazonCrossing, 2016) and Antonio Garrido’s The Scribe (AmazonCrossing, 2013). In a career that has seen him translate everything from video games to sixteenth-century Spanish Inquisition manuscripts, Bruni has found the pull toward literary translation irresistible. He has won two John Dryden Translation Prizes, in 2011 for Cell 211, Francisco Pérez Gandul’s cult prison thriller, and in 2015 for “The Porcelain Boy,” Paul Pen’s harrowing short story.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
CONTENTS
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