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was a miracle which was being repeated all over the Soviet Union. The giant steel cities of Magnitogorsk in the Urals and Tomsk in Siberia were ordered built on bare steppe; in Sverdlovsk there was the giant heavy machinery plant, Uralmash; the other great tractor factory in Chelyabinsk, known as the ChTZ, and a factory for combine harvesters, the 'ships of the steppe'. Across the Ukraine new metal works were going up in Krivy Rog and Zaporozhiye, new anthracite mines were being sunk in the Donetsk basin. Each day of the first Five Year Plan one new factory was founded and 115 new collective farms opened. all over the country the apparently fantastical projects handed down by the politburo in Moscow were being made a reality. Certainly, the state had proved its ruthlessness in punishing the Revolution's enemies, and the cost of failure would doubtless be severe. But it is hard to believe that these prodigies of industrialization were created by fear alone. Behind the deluge of propaganda photographs of happy, smiling workers, I believe there lay a spark of truth. For a brief but intense moment, a genuine and fierce pride in what they were creating flowered in the men and women involved in the great project.
    By the late summer of 1930, less than a year into the Five Year Plan, the fabric of the factory was in place - the walls, acres of glass roofs, chimneys, furnaces, roads, rails. A factory newspaper was set up, called Temp, or 'pace', to urge workers to greater productiveness, to up the pace. Bibikov was its editor-in-chief, writing regular articles and teaching courses for aspiring journalists from among the more literate workers. He also had some pieces published in Izvestiya, the great Moscow daily founded by Lenin himself. Lenina remembers him excitedly buying several copies at the newsstand on the morning that his pieces appeared. Sadly, most of the articles at the time were published with no by-line and much of the paper's archives of the period were destroyed in the war, so what Bibikov wrote is a mystery.
    Alexander Grigoryevich Kashtanyer, who worked as an intern at Temp in 1931, wrote to Lyudmila in 1963 of what he remembered of Bibikov. 'At that time your father's name rang around the factory. I heard the speeches of Comrade Bibikov on the factory floor, at meetings, at the building sites. I remember they were strong, pugnacious speeches. The time was turbulent, and the very name of the paper reflected the thoughts of the tractor factory workers: come on, there's no time to waste, keep up the pace! You can be proud of your father; he was a true soldier of Lenin's guard. Carry a bright memory of him in your hearts!'
    Pravda, the Party's newspaper, published a story on the KhTZ in February 1966 (after Bibikov's official rehabilitation under Krushchev) which conjures the mood of its epic birth. 'I spent Sunday at the home of [the worker] Chernoivanenko, full of chat about the present day work of the factory,' writes the anonymous Pravda correspondent. 'But memory kept returning us to the thirties. What a time it was! The beginning of the epoch of industrialization in the USSR! We recalled the people of the KhTZ, how they were at that time. The sternlooking but supremely fair-minded director, Svistun, the Party mass-agitator Bibikov - he was a jolly and soulful comrade, who could inspire our young people to storm difficulties, whether it was glazing a roof in record time, or tarring the floors, or installing new machinery - not by an order but simply by the passion of his convictions. "They weren't just ordinary men," said Chernoivanenko in a hollow voice full of suppressed passion. "They were giants!" ,
    To keep the project on schedule, Bibikov championed the seemingly paradoxical system of 'Socialist competition' essentially, races between different shifts of workers over who could do the most work. He also gave the workers heroes chosen from among themselves: 'Men, who by their example inspired the others to great