In summer 1966, the Soviet state signed an agreement with management at leading Italian auto firm FIAT. Their plan was to build a new car factory in the USSR, with the Turin-based company responsible for the technological installations and the training of specialists. The factory was meant to be the heart of a new urban settlement hosting factory workers, technicians, and managers, including — for a few years — the specialized Italian workers and engineers.

The chosen location was a young city in the Kuybyshev (today, Samara) region of western Russia, in 1964 renamed after the recently deceased Italian Communist leader, Palmiro Togliatti. On the Italian side, the symbolic implications were obvious. Togliatti’s successor Luigi Longo visited the city in August 1966; Pravda quoted him stressing the significance of Torinese workers and technicians coming to a city named after Togliatti — and expressing hopes that in a few months the city might turn into a sort of Soviet Turin.

The story of the factory and the new urban settlement is often framed as a highly uncommon occurrence, during the Cold War, of Western technological support to Soviet modernization. Yet this episode is emblematic of late Soviet history, with regard to two key aspects of the post-Stalinist USSR. It speaks to both the transformative ambitions of urban planning, and the professional — and, to an extent, political — elites’ technocratic mindset, informing their pragmatic attitude toward drawing lessons from international, and Western, architectural and technological trends.