The man who opened the Soviet mass-automobile era: father of the Lada
On 16 August 1966 in Moscow, Tarasov and FIAT's Valletta signed the agreement — a photograph that ran on front pages worldwide. It was the single largest industrial project of the Brezhnev era.
As Minister of the Automotive Industry of the USSR (1965–1975), he engineered the historic partnership with FIAT that built the Volga Automobile Plant (VAZ) in Tolyatti. Born into a Saratov worker's family and trained at the Moscow Auto-Tractor Institute, he rose through the industrial ranks: engineer at the Kuibyshev carburettor plant, director of the Altai and Minsk tractor plants, and chairman of the Byelorussian Economic Council. On 4 May 1966 he signed the protocol on scientific and technical cooperation with FIAT chairman Vittorio Valletta, and the August general agreement followed, creating a passenger-car plant with a capacity of 660,000 vehicles a year. The Lada (Zhiguli) it produced gave millions of Soviet families their first private car and opened the era of mass automobility.
Career Timeline
- 1934–1948Kuibyshev Carburettor-Armature Plant: engineer → design bureau chief → workshop chief → chief engineer
- 1949–1951Director, Altai Tractor Plant
- 1951–1958Director, Minsk Tractor Plant — builds the Belarus tractor export base
- 1958–1963Chairman, Byelorussian Sovnarkhoz — leads industrial reorganisation, building motor, dump-truck, bearing, and tyre plants
- 1963–1965Deputy Chairman of VSNKh USSR — Minister of the USSR
- 1965–1975Minister of the Automotive Industry of the USSR — drives the VAZ/Lada project and the KAMAZ concept