One of Georgia’s most respected businessmen, George Gogoladze has worked in chemistry all his life and is General Director of the huge AZOT Chemical Factory at Rustavi, a suburb of Tbilisi.

Soviet Communist Party First Secretary Stalin made the wartime decision to build the huge chemical plant that opened in 1952 at Rustavi, a planned worker’s community 20 miles from Tbilisi. Twenty years later Georgian Communist Party First Secretary Eduard Shevardnadze decided to spend the huge sum of $500 million for modernization.

But clearly the brains behind Azot Chemical, employing 3,200, belong to its General Director, George Gogoladze, who says, “correct management, correct economy, correct marketing lead to success. You’ve been studying this in the West for 100 years, and we have had to do it in 10 years.”

In the modest manner of an old school industrial boss, Mr. Gogoladze gives credit to the political leadership, citing history, “To our mind Stalin was a very clever person. In 1943, in the middle of the war he was thinking about the development of the region.”

Then, asked why this old plant is one of the few survivors into free-market Georgia, “When we were reconstructing in 1972, we installed the technologies that were advanced for that time at the international level. That’s why our products are globally competitive. President Shevardnadze, who at that time he was the First Secretary, supervised the construction works.”

Azot is the Georgian word for “nitrogen. When the wartime Soviet leadership decided to build a steel and pipe factory to service the near-by Azerbaijan oil fields, a flat plain, on a railroad main line and near the largest city in the region seemed like a good place. Engineers pointed out to Stalin that the hydrogen by-product of the steel mill, when mixed with nitrogen from the air, would produce the components of ammonium nitrate, critical for production of fertilizer, so the concept of the multi-factory worker’s town of Rustavi was born.

Even today, more than 125,000 people live in many dozens of Soviet bloc buildings, although only the chemical plant is still profitable. In addition to ammonium nitrate, which is half of the output, Azot sells components for textile production, cosmetic pencils and numerous other bulk chemical products to neighboring customers in the Caucasus, as well as to European buyers in Greece, Italy, Spain, France, Great Britain, Turkey and to Middle East industries in Syria and elsewhere.

As for the town of Rustavi, today many of its residents work in Tbilisi but find that these old apartment units are about the only really affordable suburban living. When a family of four is fortunate to earn $1000 a year the price of $2000 to $5000 for a one or two bedroom apartment seems like a deal to take. Commuter vans make the half-hour trip into town about every 15 minutes from early in the morning until late at night.

But some of the lucky Rustavi citizens make a pretty good salary working for George Gogoladze, whose whole life has been in chemistry. As he tells an interviewer, “My biography was built in this plant. I came here as a worker, became a mechanic, then as a foreman, a deputy head of the shop, the head of the shop, the chief engineer and then the Director. I was the youngest chief engineer in the Soviet Union.”

Today Gogoladze is one of Georgia’s pre-eminent business leaders and he looks forward to Azot privatization in the near-future, a dream even Stalin didn’t envision.