Hornlessness

While U. S. newsorgans were churning out reams last week about the General Motors strike, Russian newsorgans were up in arms over troubles in the famed Gorky automobile plant. No strike was afoot in Moscow, for Russians know it is useless to strike. There were no fistfights, as in the U. S. There was just deliberate dawdling.

What aroused official wailing about the Gorky plant was its dismal slowness of production. Declared the Communist newsorgan Pravda: "In general the conveyor belt is paralyzed five to six hours daily because of defective parts or supply of accessories." To the Gorky plant went a Pravda correspondent to investigate. For some minutes he watched the line of half-finished cars gliding serenely past. Suddenly the line stopped. "What is wrong?" he asked. Replied the foreman, "We have no horn to equip the next machine on the conveyor." After a half-hearted search lasting 30 minutes a worker dawdled up with three horns in his apron, and the line began to move once more. Said the foreman, "This sort of thing is constantly happening."

During 1936, revealed Pravda, the Gorky plant set itself the task of turning out 12,000 cars. The actual output was 2,500. In one day 24 of 47 cars turned out were tagged "unserviceable." In view of such conditions Soviet automobile authorities were agitating last week for the recall of the hundreds of foreign engineers who launched industrialism in the Soviet State but were dismissed "at the successful end of the first Five-Year Plan."

Until ten months ago the Gorky plant was turning out the Model T Ford, which has not been produced in the U. S. since 1927. Russia's latest Ford no longer has a planetary-type transmission, is a comparatively up-to-the-minute Soviet article combining a 1932 Ford model engine with a 1934 Ford type body.

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