How one Soviet enterprise uses barter, stock offerings and joint ventures to keep its assembly lines running

Moving at a snail's pace past webs of black cables and dangling automatic wrenches, the bumper-to-bumper column of olive green military trucks crawls down an assembly line that stretches for more than half a mile. As the vehicles move along, workers clamber aboard to tighten bolts, check wiring, start engines. On a parallel belt a few yards away, other men and women are putting the finishing touches on similar civilian models, painted in red, orange and gray. The two production lines at the Kama automotive factory (KAMAZ) in Naberezhnye Chelny, 600 miles east of Moscow, used to turn out close to 150,000 heavy-duty trucks a year, monopolizing the Soviet market and equaling the annual production in the U.S.

All too often these days, however, the lumbering columns grind to a halt. The problem: lack of parts. The workers, who are paid according to how many trucks they can build, complain about the delays and often have to work on weekends to keep up production quotas--and income.

That pattern is repeated in thousands of factories struggling to break free from the grip of a centralized system. As the republics and regions attempt to assert control over their natural resources and manufacturing facilities, a chaotic, dog-eat-dog economy has developed in which enterprises must fend for themselves, scouring the entire country for parts and supplies.

Because of its size, KAMAZ would seem to be particularly vulnerable. The complex was designed in the 1970s to be the largest heavy-duty-truck manufacturer in the world, with 18 separate plants, including foundries and metal-pressing works--all to be serviced by partners in the 15 former Soviet republics on which KAMAZ depends for 40% of its components.

But Naberezhnye Chelny, a factory city of half a million people, of whom more than one-third labor for KAMAZ, appears to be weathering the economic storm fairly well. Keeping the workers supplied with food and consumer goods is as much a priority as securing parts for the plant. A chain of factory-owned stores sells refrigerators and television sets, winter clothes, lingerie, lipstick and shampoo--all long absent from Moscow stores--at controlled prices. KAMAZ has developed its own strategy for survival, using the barter tactics of the bazaar and the hustle of Wall Street. Thus the factory swaps new trucks in direct exchange for rubber tubing or electrical parts or sheet metal; the vehicles also figure in second- and third-hand exchanges, being traded for copper wiring, for example, which is bartered for bread, which in turn is exchanged for meat.

The company is creating its own kind of capitalism. Under the leadership of president Nikolai Bekh, 45, it became the first Soviet firm to offer shares to private domestic and foreign investors and has shrewdly reimbursed many suppliers throughout the country with blocks of stock. KAMAZ also makes loans to key suppliers struggling to stay afloat.

What KAMAZ desperately needs is to break into international markets, where, as Bekh puts it, "we are not wanted." In October the company signed a fifty-fifty joint venture with the American diesel manufacturer Cummins Engine Co. to produce, for hard-currency sale, a low-priced truck with a state-of-the-art Cumengine built at Naberezhnye Chelny.

Such enterprise has made Bekh a force to be reckoned with in Moscow: he has warned the Kremlin as well as the leadership of the Russian Federation against meddling with the budding sector of private entrepreneurs. Since KAMAZ is keeping its assembly lines moving, even in today's troubled times, Bekh's words ought to carry considerable weight.

By John Kohan/Naberezhnye Chelny.