Father of the Soviet auto industry, the 'red director' who told Henry Ford he was a servant of the people
At lunch with Henry Ford in 1930: "I am not an industrialist — I am a servant of the people. My director's post was not inherited; I hold it by the will of my party."
A Tula peasant's son who rose from Putilov apprentice to architect of Soviet mass automobile production. As director of the Moscow Auto Plant (AMO/ZIS) from 1926, he turned a small backward factory into Europe's largest automotive works and introduced the USSR's first assembly line. During WWII he evacuated the plant eastward, building new factories in four cities while keeping trucks and weapons flowing to the front. He won the 1949 Stalin Prize for a method of switching assembly lines to a new model without halting production. The plant was renamed ZIL in his honour.
Career Timeline
- 1917Joined RSDLP(b), organized Red Guard in Helsingfors
- 1917–1921Red Army commander and Cheka service
- 1926–1939Director, Moscow Auto Plant (AMO/ZIS)
- 1939–1940People's Commissar of Medium Machine-Building, USSR
- 1940–1950Returned as ZIS director, oversaw wartime production and evacuation plants
- 1950–1953Director, Aircraft Plant No. 41 (later Avangard)
- 1953–1956Minister of Automobile Transport and Highways, USSR
Related historical events
- 1918–1922The Civil War and Foreign InterventionRed Army commander
- 1928–1937The Five-Year Plans and the Soviet TransformationZIS director, introduced the first Soviet assembly lineAs director of AMO (later ZIS) from 1926, he built the Soviet automobile mass-production system throughout the first two Five-Year Plans. He started the USSR's first assembly line in 1931 and turned the plant into Europe's largest automotive works.
From AMO to ZIS: The Birth of Soviet Mass Production
When Likhachev arrived at AMO as director on 31 December 1926, the plant was in a dire state. The previous year it had produced just 113 units of the Fiat-licensed AMO-F-15 truck; sheet metal and coal were chronically short, and assembly was essentially manual. The 30-year-old director told his party interviewers, 'My education is a village school, but I love the automobile,' and was approved unanimously.
A first reconstruction from 1927 lifted output to 1,000 vehicles per year, but the crash industrialization targets demanded 25,000. Likhachev toured German plants (Daimler-Benz, Opel) and then the United States, where at Henry Ford's invitation he visited the Dearborn works, and spent a week working on the assembly line himself. Armed with this experience, he launched the USSR's first automotive assembly conveyor at AMO in 1931. An American Autocar-5S was brought in under licence as the AMO-2; heavily re-engineered for Soviet roads and climate, it evolved through the AMO-3 into the legendary ZIS-5 three-tonner in 1933.
Likhachev rebuilt the plant from the ground up three times in his career, devoured technical journals, and forced shop-floor supervisors into evening classes with assigned tutors. He walked the factory every day in work clothes, addressed workers by name, and personally carried a discarded component to quality control to make a point about waste. By 1934 the plant was turning out 65 trucks a day, the largest automotive works in Europe. Through it all, Likhachev cultivated the identity of a Soviet 'red director': a servant of the people, not an industrialist.