Richard S. Mandel
Richard S. Mandel
Having the arc of my formative years traverse the late 50s to the early 70s meant that I had many perceptions about Russia based on hearsay, speculation, and movies like 1960’s “Man on a String.” I could have told you, by the time I was a teenager, that the Russian people were mostly unsophisticated and crude peasant types led by brutal leaders and cruel military men with their collective fingers on the button that would send missiles towards Our Purple Mountains Majesties. There were no corporations, just plants with names like “People’s Tractor Factory Number 7,” and I think everything — the buildings, the people, even the plant life — was supposed to be a neutral shade of concrete gray. The accomplishments of Russian scientists and doctors were only in support of the government’s evil Commie plan to dominate our world, and Russian music stopped evolving with Tchaikovsky. And all Russians hated our bourgeois capitalism.
Despite the fall of the Iron Curtain, and assorted new friendships struck over the last decade with emigres from the former Soviet Union, the old propaganda ghosts arose in unison when I received an invitation to attend MASHEX 2007, a four-day industrial machine tool show that opened on the 29th of May, 2007, in the Crocus Exhibition Center in Moscow. A big, splashy trade show is an excellent place to study the struggle for success among free-marketers. But would a show in Moscow — the longtime headquarters of Stalin’s unimaginative planned production and the capital of The Workman’s Paradise — possibly commit to the same trappings in 2007? And just how would the equipment being displayed compare to the sophisticated machines produced by the US, Japan and Germany?
To suggest that a trade show is merely a marketplace for products is an understatement, like calling New York’s Fifth Avenue a street with shops. Trade shows introduce the latest items to clients in a particular market, and the diversity of markets have, in turn, created a broad spectrum of shows.
Additionally, a trade show is a battle-zone of competitors cheek-by-jowl with one other, with 5 to 10 seconds to attract the attention of hundreds and thousands of show visitors as they walk by. Like scenes from a nature show about mating rituals, exhibiting companies employ demonstrations, music, movement, bright colors, or combinations of these. Trade shows are often held in halls with ceilings two to three stories high, so a company can enhance their visual presence through the use of tall structures, even if the company’s product is only several inches tall. At the largest shows in a given market, the fierce competitions become an exercise in brinksmanship, in that the marketing dollars spent can push a company to the verge of fiscal disaster in order to achieve the most advantageous outcome. The dangers lie in spending far more money on your exhibit than are returned as contracts. On the other hand, if what you display doesn’t pull in potential clients, then money invested in entry fees, exhibition materials and any travel expenses will have gone for naught.
It will surprise those who work outside the manufacturing world that a machine tool trade show can be as vibrant as a tour of Disney World. Manufacturers exhibiting at industrial shows will have the latest machines operating in their booths, presenting an interesting opportunity to see sophisticated automation. At a plastics show, injection-molding machines as large as a city bus will be taking plastic beads vacuumed from a nearby container, and turning out anything from resin lawn chairs to fender assemblies for a child’s toy ride-em car. A medical packaging show will include an exhibit of high-speed cameras tracking containers speeding by on a mock conveyor line, sounding an alert each time a flawed container goes by. Design engineers will see demonstrations of the latest in software packages that will allow them to create, in three dimensions, an article that can be rotated, sectioned, and even tested for durability and strength, long before that product is built.
Nearly every man-made product has involved machining in some form ever since metal tools replaced stone and flint. Over the past 30 years, computers and new motor technologies have evolved machine tools into sophisticated metal-working systems with high-speed tool heads and material support beds that move and function in more than three directions (axes) of direction. Such capabilities, coupled with new materials and new methods for making cutting tool bits, have multiplied many times the speed of production while improving repeatability and increasing accuracy of the machining processes. Today, a machine operator can load a block of high-strength aluminum or stainless steel into a machine and, after less than an hour, take out a completely finished turbine impeller, with thin vanes curving upward and outward like some metal flower, ready for installation in an engine or a hydraulic system. The same machine could be making steel brake discs the following day, or rendering a titanium hip joint designed from a waiting patient’s digital CAT scans. Perhaps next week, a computer rendering from another engineer will direct that machine into machining a ready-to-use mold that, in turn, will be used to produce plastic cell phone cases, kitchen appliance parts, automobile taillight lenses or toy blocks.
All of these capabilities will be found at machining trade shows, alongside metal-cutting systems that use lasers, heated gases (“plasma-cutting”), or water-jet (a high-speed stream of water combined with a fine grit); metal bending, metal-boring; and other metal-forming esoterica. There will be welding robots, and elaborate systems for loading materials in and out of machines. Other booths will have safety equipment, ventilation systems, automated measuring devices, and a broad array of other esoteric items necessary to compete in the manufacturing world.
Before leaving for Moscow, I looked up the transcript of the famous “Kitchen Debate” of July 1959. The setting was at the American National Exhibition in Moscow, an attempt to show how much better our life was in the US than that of the people in the USSR. For display at the event, an entire house was built that the American exhibitors claimed anyone in America could afford. The house was filled with assorted labor-saving and recreational devices meant to represent the fruits of the capitalist American consumer market. Then-U.S. Vice President Richard Nixon traveled to the show for the opening day to personally carry the good word to the Russian people, and became engaged in a discussion with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev over the merits of each of their economic systems, capitalism vs. communism.
As they entered the model home’s kitchen, Nixon pointed to the dishwasher and began to suggest that most modern American homes had such conveniences. Khrushchev retorted that Russian homes had the same appliances. Nixon then explained that, with the modest cost of such a house in the US, an American steelworker could readily afford its ownership. Khrushchev replied that a Russian steelworker or peasant also could afford a house at that price, but that Russian houses were built to last longer. As Nixon tried to find another angle to promote the American way of life, Khrushchev made this observation: “The Americans have created their own image of the Soviet man. But he is not as you think. You think the Russian people will be dumbfounded to see these things, but the fact is that newly built Russian houses have all this equipment right now.”
Cold War era propaganda suggested that Russian manufacturing was clunky and old fashioned, capable of producing only primitive goods. Of course, it was a fluke (probably those darned Liberals in Congress at the time) that Russia succeeded in orbiting Sputnik, and put a man in space before us. During the Soviet era, production of machine tools was low because distribution was limited — few shops can afford to casually buy new machines, even today — so machines were manufactured for longevity and were rigorously maintained by shop owners. Advanced machining systems, as developed in the Western countries, would have been an extravagance for Russian machine shops. Moreover, before détente, buying and selling equipment and technology to the Soviet Union was considered to be an undesirable show of support for Communism, a stance heightened by President Carter’s 1980 embargo on Soviet goods.
John Byrd III, with interpreter, addresses Mashex meeting
The post-détente changes within Russian politics and economics were expected to bog down the progress of new manufacturing. John Byrd III, president of The Association for Manufacturing Technology, points out that Russian manufacturing only recently began producing goods that have the potential to compete in the world marketplace. The difficulty will be convincing buyers in a market already flooded with Chinese-made products.
MASHEX 2007 is Russia’s shout that the country has committed to the business of manufacturing. The show was part of the first Russian National Industrial forum, a collection of 14 specialized exhibitions representing all branches of industry, including oil and gas, power, mining, chemicals, foundries, and even ecological products. The forum was held with the official support of the Ministry of the Industry and Power of the Russian Federation, Federal Subsoil Resources Management Agency, the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of the Russian Federation, the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs and the Association of German Machine-tool manufacturers.
The well-attended MASHEX show resembled any other trade show I’ve attended, with familiar aisles of exhibit booths packed with humming, hissing and thumping machines and equipment, cycling through operations to demonstrate their agility, speed and capability. There was the press of attendees, and the smells of new carpeting mingled with the tang of cutting oil, heated metal, and ozone from electrical systems.
The other US journalist invited to attend the show, besides myself, was Mark Albert, editor-in-chief of the trade journal Modern Machine Shop. Albert has been writing about machining for 27 years, and has attended machining shows in Taiwan, Japan, Milan and Germany, amongst other locations. Said Albert, “I had no expectations in place before attending MASHEX. I didn’t have any idea if the show would be highly advanced, very primitive, if the technology would be not of interest to US buyers, or if the venue would not be a good context for US suppliers. I was impressed with how modern and attractive the exhibit halls were at MASHEX, by the level of technology being shown by Russian machine tool builders, as well as the advanced level of technology from international suppliers.” Albert noted that machine tool builders from Japan, Germany and the United States were exhibiting “the most advanced equipment that I would have seen at other shows. I was pleased at the level of technology that was being displayed by all exhibitors. I was impressed, too, by the level of interest shown by attendees from the local Russian market.”
There were machine tool distribution companies exhibiting more products from companies known to Western machinists than was mentioned in the preview information provided by the hosts of MASHEX. One such company was Haas, a large machine manufacturer from Southern California, whose wares were prominently displayed in a “shared” booth just inside one hall’s entrance. Mori Seiki, a highly regarded Japanese manufacturer of machining systems, was also part of a distributorship booth.
There were also “foreign” companies with their own booths that I had not anticipated would be at the show, including Iscar, an Israeli manufacturer of machining tools that was acquired last year by Warren Buffet. Another company was J. Walter Inc., a Windsor, Conn., manufacturer of abrasives and fluids used in machining processes. There were not many U.S. manufacturers present, overall, but this is the first year MASHEX was being held at the Crocus facility, and there was much talk by the show’s managers of expansion in future. Previously, the show used a smaller venue that also hosts state fairs. (Not an unusual arrangement — there is an annual show called EASTEC that takes place at a fairgrounds in Connecticut. One experiences an keen sense of displacement and cultural collision when viewing a complex machine, worth tens of thousands of dollars, running a complex machining program on a block of metal below a sign indicating a sheep exhibition area.)
Many other companies were from Germany and other parts of Europe, but I was keenly interested in three manufacturers from within Russia — Ivanovo Heavy Machine Tool Building Works, the Ryazan Machine Tool Plant and the Savelovsky Machine Building Factory. None of these companies, whose names indicate the towns where they are based, have exhibited in a U.S. trade show, yet Ivanovo has been in business for 50 years. Savelovsky is older still — the company was founded in 1918 originally to serve the Soviet Air Ministry. All three companies presented machines that were on par structurally and technologically with anything that would have been seen at a Western machine tool show. Most of the control panels on the computer-controlled machines were off-the-shelf products made by Fanuc, an automation controls company owned by GE, with its world headquarters in Charlottesville, VA. Intriguingly, while the machine measures in standard metric units, nearly all of the control buttons, along with the data displayed on the control panel screen, used English rather than Cyrillic words.
Spokespersons at the three companies were unrestrained in talking about their products. “The Russian machine tool builders that we saw were very eager to make the level of their technology known to the international buying community,” noted Albert. “All of the exhibitors seemed to consider MASHEX the place to showcase their technology.”
None of the products shown by Ivanovo, Ryazan or Savelovsky suggested that they were carbon-copies of Western machines. In fact, the companies have been exploring technologies not yet implemented elsewhere — for example, Ivanovo has been experimenting with unique methods of temperature control during metal processing, which impacts both the finished products and the longevity of the machine’s interchangeable tool bits. Ryazan builds immense computer-controlled lathes that can turn such “new technology” items as axle shafts that will be used in wind-power generators, which require accurately made components to ensure long service life.
Two things impressed Albert in particular at MASHEX. “The appearance of the machine tools was very professional and polished,” said Albert. “The brochures and sales catalogs also presented the products and companies very well. I went to a show in Taiwan 15 years ago, and the machines just did not have the kind of finish one would see in products from other suppliers at the same time. The literature was also very ‘junky.’ The Russian machines and the collateral marketing that were on display at MASHEX were all really first-rate.”
The Manifesto of Karl Marx bespoke a vision where all workers would unite and where everyone would have a job that would contribute to a future Mother Russia that would have no classes of aristocracy, poor or anything in-between. There are still remnants of the ideal in Moscow — in the parks, rather than a single worker riding a tractor-mower, I found crews cutting the grass with gas-powered string trimmers.
Industrial robots are counter to the workman’s paradise, by replacing people at various tasks. Yet Motoman Robotics had a large booth at MASHEX, displaying industrial robots to an attentive crowd.
“Projects are coming up in Russia,” said Jan Lindmark, president and CEO of Motoman Robotics Europe AB, “that are incurring interest in welding robots.” Lindmark sited growth in the manufacturing of equipment for road construction, mining and oil drilling and production that require heavy welding, then noted that auto manufacturers are coming to Russia and opening factories. Companies like Caterpillar, Toyota, Ford and GM are all accustomed to production lines that employ robots to increase speed and consistency in quality, and these companies are expecting to install the same robotics in their Russian factories as are employed anywhere else, observed Lindmark. As in factories elsewhere, some workers will be trained to support the machinery, but inevitably there be less humans on the production lines than 10 and 20 years ago.
Technology, ultimately, has driven the last nail into Marx’s coffin.
The Crocus Expo International Exposition Center opened in 2004 forty-one miles west (and a half-hour drive on a good day) of central Moscow on the banks of the Moscow River. The facility has two buildings, divided into halls of varying size, joined by an enclosed aerial bridge. A third exhibition hall, currently slated to open in late 2007, will increase the facility’s total floor space to 2.26 million square feet, which will rival the 2.2 million sq. ft. of Chicago’s McCormick Place.
Crocus Expo is just part of a larger plan referred to as “Crocus City,” which presently includes “Tvoy Dom,” one of the largest hypermarkets in Russia; the Crocus City Mall; and the Shore House yacht club. The Crocus Mall offers high-end boutiques such as Fendi, Baccarat and Bulgari in a great enclosure of marble and light; however, the afternoon I visited the mall, I did not observe anyone actually shopping, or even browsing, there. Perhaps it was the hour of the day, I thought, but I was later informed that there are days when no money exchanges hands in the mall’s storefronts. The yacht club was better populated, and parked in front were Mercedes roadsters, a Maserati Quattroporte and a Cadillac Escalade, amongst others. Nearby is a special track for kids and their parents to drive off-road vehicles, quads and snowmobiles. Future plans for Crocus City include a luxurious twenty-two story hotel, to be called “Veneto,” which will have on its ground floors more boutiques, a gambling house, recreation areas, a multiplex cinema theatre with eight screens, a 7,000 seat concert hall and underground parking. There are also plans for the “Manhattan” business center, described as “an ultra modern architectural ensemble from glass and metal, comprising 14 skyscrapers, that will become an integral part of ‘Crocus City’.” Looking at the private boats in the yacht club, as well as the people docked on lounge chairs around the club’s swimming pool, suggests the days that immediately followed the end of Prohibition in the US — when people who had to hide their fondness for alcoholic beverages threw themselves swiftly back to openly drinking in taverns, bars and parties. The bourgeois Russian wealthy, reviled for decades under Communism, have returned to the sunlight, replete with the requisite displays of property, privilege and status. (The rest of the proletariat, on the other hand, were parking their Ladas along highways and hiking over dirt trails to the shores of the Moscow River, in their quest to escape the heat wave that blanketed the city all week.)
Back at the Crocus Expo, there are other reminders of how Russia is settling into the global market. In one hall was a snack stand that had, on the back counter, a box with a glass door, designed for keeping contents cold. Above the door was a strip several inches tall, the width of the box, with the number “31” in the center and Cyrillic letters on either side spelling out “Baskin Robbins.” And, so far from home, I found a curious comfort in finding hand dryers manufactured by the World Dryer Corporation of Berkeley, Illinois, in every public restroom. McDonalds and other American junk foods moved quickly into Moscow once the Iron Curtain fell, but something so ubiquitous to American public spaces, mounted on the walls of an exposition hall in the former Soviet city of Moscow, infers that Russia is no longer The Big Them. Today’s international market has made Russia just another player in The Big We.
Pictures of John Byrd III and Solver show booth courtesy of Mark Albert