The "Russian Ford"—Great War Industrialist A.P. Meshcherskii

by Assistant Editor Kimball Worcester

  

Russian Locomotive Under Construction at the Sormovo Plant

The industrialist Aleksei Pavlovich Meshcherskii (1867–1938) had the reputation of being the “Russian Ford.” He was a self-made industrialist—a nobleman from an illustrious but impoverished family—whose daughter wrote a detailed memoir following their family through the last years of the tsars, the Great War, the revolution, civil war, and emigration to the West. Four Thirds of Our Life has been published in Russian, translated into French, and will be published this fall in English (translated by Kimball Worcester). Meshcherskii studied engineering and became the director of several important factories producing steam ships, locomotives, and railway components, including the Sormovo and Kolomna factories, which his daughter describes at length. Her childhood on the Volga at these factories was an idyll before the storm, but she later learned her father had a serious concern about the rolling stock he was manufacturing:

 

“. . . As the head of so many factories, he gradually came to understand that there was something wrong; he thought with horror about what would happen in the event of . . . war. The thought haunted him.

            He was one of the first people, while producing the majority of freight cars in the country, to anticipate that the slow pace of the freight trains would at some point turn fatal. He felt it was technically easy to correct if they could change out the braking systems.  He presented this several times to the minister of transport, [Sergei Vasilievich Rukhlov (1858–1918), railways minister 1909–1915], but the fellow didn’t want to accept the extraordinary importance of this matter, and the braking system on freight trains stayed as it was. In the 1930s in Paris, when my father reminisced quite a bit with me, he would say that he considered the honorable Rukhlov as one of the major culprits of the military catastrophe of 1914–17, since precisely because of the absence of a new braking system, military equipment got to the front so slowly and was less effective than it should have been.

            A few years before the war, my father started coming up with a plan to transfer heavy industry beyond the Urals and even farther east. This plan was little understood by the government of the day. At the same time, he formed a plan for combining heavy industry into some kind of “trust,” a chain of factories supplying each other and streamlining the fulfillment of orders.”

 

Forthcoming—We Will Announce Its
Availability in a Future Posting

Meshcherskii and his wife escaped to Finland in 1918. His daughter, Nina, the author of this memoir, also fled to Finland, at the end of the year. Her moving and detailed memoir was first published in Russian as part of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s All-Russian Memoir Library, which he established in the late 1970s upon his expulsion from the Soviet Union.