Innovation in the USSR: The Case of Synthetic Rubber

Abstract

On a midwinter day in Moscow at the very end of 1927, a package containing two kilograms of a substance, similar in color to “lime-flower honey,”1 which had been christened “Diolefin” by its makers was deposited with the scientific and technical council for the chemical industry of VSNKh. Just over four and a half years later, on a summer day in 1932 in laroslavl’ five hundred kilograms of this same material were removed from an autoclave in a newly built factory. These two events are seen as marking the beginning and end of the development and innovation of synthetic rubber, one of the success stories of the First Five- Year Plan; for the laroslavl’ plant, SK-1 (Sinteticheskii Kanchuk-l), with a design capacity of ten thousand metric tons, was the first large-scale plant to be built anywhere in the world.