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.
Activities and affiliations
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
FIAT partnership and construction of the Volga Automobile Plant
After becoming minister of the automotive industry in 1965, Tarasov advanced cooperation with Italy's FIAT. On 4 May 1966 he signed a scientific and technical cooperation protocol with FIAT president Vittorio Valletta; in August, the parties concluded a contract for FIAT to build a new passenger-car plant in Tolyatti on a complete-production basis. Construction began in 1967. The project combined foreign design and technical expertise with Soviet large-scale plant construction and production organization. The state goal of expanding automotive output intersected with the aim of making private passenger cars more widely available, but shortages of cars and of the services and supplies needed to maintain them persisted. Building the plant and ensuring that vehicles reached consumers were therefore distinct problems.