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The name of journalist Andrey Nagel is identified with early successes of the Russian automobile industry

Andrey Nagel, editor-in-chief of the Avtomobil magazine and a pioneer of Russian motor sport, by right holds a pride of place in the national history. It was largely thanks to his vigorous efforts that the Russian automobile industry was born and got off to a good start.

The early beginnings

In Russia, like in the West, motor vehicles were preceded by horse-drawn ones. In the late 19th century, their most popular producers in this country were Freze, Ilyin, Breitigan, Rental, Yevseyev and Krylov.

In the last quarter of the 19th century, attempts were made in Russia and elsewhere to change over to steam traction. During the Russian-Turkish war of 1877-1878, self-propelled steam tractors were used for the haulage of huge canon. Some of them were ordered from Britain and some built at the Lyudinovo plant owned by Major-General Maltsev (Ret.).

Also worth mentioning here is a steam-powered caterpillar tractor constructed by Fyodor Blinov in the village of Balakovo, Samara Guberniya, in 1889.

As to automobiles, it was only in the 1890s that Russia started making them - much later than the West did. The fathership of the Russian car is attributed to Yevgeny Yakovlev, a retired naval lieutenant (1857-1898) and mining engineer Pyotr Freze (1844-1918): at the July 1896 Industrial and Art Exhibition in Nizhny Novgorod, they displayed the first Russian gasoline-powered internal combustion vehicle which, incidentally, attracted the attention of Emperor Nicholas II.

In the early 20th century, the stage was set in Russia for an accelerated development of motor transport. The Russo-Japanese war of 1905 revealed the weaknesses of the Russian army which included a lack of modern transport and communications. The country started importing automobiles in ever larger numbers (1,030 in 1909 as against a mere 245 in 1906). Time was ripe for Russia to start making automobiles of its own.

Some talented Russian entrepreneurs and engineers tried to get things off the ground but ended up making a few experimental models and never got further than that.

Government support was needed, and Andrey Nagel, editor-in-chief of the Avtomobil magazine, managed to obtain it. His energy, boundless dedication to motor sport, his faith in the Russian people's creative genius went a long way toward success of the mission he had undertaken.

A profile of the pioneer

Andrey Nagel lived out a life fit for a high-adventure novel. His restless soul had an urge for wanderings and exotic contests (like the storming of Mt. Vesuvius behind the steering wheel of a Russo-Balt car in 1912).

Andrey Nagel was born in 1877 in Okhta, St. Petersburg, into a civil servant's family. Upon finishing high school, "graduated from St. Petersburg University in law. Worked in the Ministry of Railways" (Motoring Almanac, 1910). The young man did not care much for sedate office work. His overpowering passion for sport gradually prepossessed him to the exclusion of all other pursuits. Nagel never missed a chess tournament and ranked among St. Petersburg's most talented speed- and figure-skaters. On September 11, 1898, he happened to see a motor race, one of Russia's first. The sight impressed Andrey Nagel so much that back home he wrote a report on it for the Samokat magazine of St. Petersburg.

That was how his journalistic career had its start. Wielding a formidable pen, he later turned out thousands of articles, newspaper reports, comments, essays most of them devoted to motor sport. Besides, he founded and assumed the editorship of the Sport, Avtomobil, Dvigatel, Aero i avtomobilnaya zhizn magazines.

In 1904, Andrey Nagel was elected Fellow of the Imperial Russian Engineering Society and, in the same year, Member of the Board of the Imperial Russian Automobile Club where he managed the department concerned with international motor rallies and races.

He made a name for himself as a test driver of extraordinary courage and the winner of numerous motor-tricycle, motorbike and car races.

Andrey Nagel's record of achievement features participation in events of signal importance in the history of world motoring: the all-Russia rallies of 1910 and 1911; the Monte-Carlo and San-Sebastian rallies of 1912; rallies across Europe, Africa and Central Russia.

Before the outbreak of World War I Andrey Nagel's career went smoothly. He represented the RBWP at all national and international exhibitions, races and rallies. His magazines were very popular in Russia, and his book A Russo-Balt Ride Across Africa was a great success.

Russo-Balt's triumphs

A fine connoisseur of motor cars and a true patriot, Andrey Nagel dedicated much of his life to holding up the merits and potentialities of the RBWP cars for all to see. In 1910, his magazine started a regular column entitled Russo-Balt: Russian cars expressly designed for Russian roads.

One of Russia's first proud owners of a Russo-Balt, which he purchased in 1909, Andrey Nagel entered it in the St. Petersburg-Kiev-Moscow-St. Petersburg Imperial Prize Rally which started on June 16, 1910. His colleagues in the Imperial Automobile Club wished him a happy ride with ill-concealed ironical smiles. No one believed in the Russian car. Nevertheless, the Nagel-driven Russo-Balt received a special prize of the Imperial Russian Automotive Society. The Birzheviye Novosti newspaper carried a report on the rally which said, in particular, that "the Russian car attracts considerable interest; no one has suspected that a 'barbarous country' like ours manufactures its own automobiles."

After Andrey Nagel had set out on a rally to Rome, the German paper Dresdner Einzeiger burst into a complimentary article on September 7, 1910, saying: "An RBWP automobile powered by a 24-hp engine rolled through our city on its way from St. Petersburg to Rome having covered the St. Petersburg-Dresden leg of the route without a single breakdown. The driver, Herr Nagel, merits special praise as one of Russia's best motorists."

In 1911, Andrey Nagel was awarded an encouragement prize for his performance in the St. Petersburg-Tver-Moscow-Orel-Belgorod-Kharkov-Yekaterinoslav-Melitopol-Simferopol-Sevastopol rally.

The 1912 Monte-Carlo rally culminated in a real triumph for Andrey Nagel, who placed second, and for his Russo-Balt. The event drew an enthusiastic comment from Charles Farou, editor of a French motoring journal: "Beside a silver medal," he wrote, "a special prize went to Andrey Nagel whose Russo-Balt covered the longest distance - from Moscow to St. Sebastian."

It was then that the Russo-Balt cars made a dramatic breakthrough into the Russian and European markets. Their successes in international rallies made the Russo-Balt automobiles popular not only with motoring fans but also with car dealers who sold more than 600 Russo-Balts in 1909-1915.

Riding the crest of popularity

Andrey Nagel helped the RBWP gain a foothold in the Russian market. Incidentally, in the 1910s the RBWP already was in a class with Russia's leading engineering works such as Putilov, Sormovo and Kolomenskoye. A modest branch of the German wagon works Van den Sienen und Scharlier, established in 1869, the RBWP grew into an engineering giant with the worth of its annual output estimated at 11 million rubles. At two National Industrial and Art Exhibitions (Moscow, 1882, and Nizhny Novgorod, 1896) the RBWP was granted the right to display the National Emblem on its products as a hallmark of their superior quality. In 1906, the plant was awarded the Grand Prix at the Milan World Exhibition.

Engineer Ivan Fryazinovsky, the manager of the RBWP's Automobiles Department and a good friend of Nagel's, kept him up-to-date with the plant's latest product lines. Nagel's articles about Russo-Balt automobiles were actually advertisements. At international autoshows, Andrey Nagel acted as a guide presenting the RBWP display stands to visitors who were intrigued to see not only Russian cars but also the famous car racer whose face became the Russo-Balt's trademark.

The RBWP automobiles had their debut at the Third International AutoShow in St. Petersburg (May, 1910) where they were singled out from among 100 famous foreign makes and awarded the War Ministry's Grand Gold Medal "For Promoting Automobile Production in Russia". Worth mentioning here are also the high distinctions the RBWP cars won at the Aeronautic and Tsarskoye Selo Exhibitions in St. Petersburg in 1911.

The Fourth International AutoShow, held in Mikhaylolvsky Palace in 1913, featured a large display of RBWP's cars, trucks, fire-engines and convertible snowcats. After the show, the War Ministry ordered 23 automobiles from the RBWP.

During World War I, the RBWP supplied over 300 motor vehicles to the army.

Andrey Nagel had thrown in his lot with the Russo-Balt. He dedicated himself to the cause of making Russia a motoring nation and was largely responsible for the RBWP cars' immense popularity. He was among the first to pay heed to a report Prof. Nikolay Slavin delivered at the Imperial Russian Engineering Society about the state of and prospects for Russia's engineering industry. Slavin complained about automobiles being few and far between in Russia which words drew a bitter reaction from Nagel: "Indeed, it is difficult to be a patriot of Russia". After 1917, the RBWP crumbled to pieces. Left without the cause he had made his lifework, Andrey Nagel found himself a stranger in Soviet Russia.

Despite all the obstacles, however, the magazine editor and motor racer had succeeded in fostering many of his compatriots' interest in motoring - and, of course, in Russo-Balt cars.

After the October 1917 coup in Petrograd and the Bolshevik takeover, there unfortunately remained nothing for Andrey Nagel to do but leave Russia. He settled in Paris and, reportedly, earned his livelihood cabbing and occasionally contributing to French papers' motoring columns. Andrey Nagel passed away in 1940 during the Nazi occupation of France.

The year 2007 marks Andrey Nagel's 130th birth anniversary, and this article is a tribute to the memory of that remarkable personality, a sportsman, and a journalist who had made a substantial contribution to the progress of Russian motor sport and of the Russian automobile industry.