Tankograd: The Formation of a Soviet Company Town: Cheliabinsk, 1900s-1950s

Tankograd

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Also by Lennart Samuelson PLANS FOR STALIN’S WAR-MACHINE: Tukhachevskii and Military-Economic Planning, 1925–1941

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Tankograd The Formation of a Soviet Company Town: Cheliabinsk, 1900s–1950s Lennart Samuelson Associate Professor, Stockholm School of Economics, Sweden

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© Lennart Samuelson 2011 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978–0–230–20887–2 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

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To Elza

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Contents Preface

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1 Cheliabinsk As a Mirror of Russia in the 20th Century

1

2 From the Civil War to the Five-year Plans The Civil War in the Southern Urals The Battle of Cheliabinsk, July–August 1919 Militarisation of labour and force against the peasantry Recovery under the New Economic Policy A new industrial landscape emerges Transformation of the countryside: collectivisation and dekulakisation

13 20 28 33 39 40

3 The Industrial City As a Socialist Vision and Soviet Reality The changing character of Cheliabinsk city in the 1930s Sotsgorodók – a socialist ideal for the tractor factory city district Barracks for industrial workers in ‘shanty towns’ Health care and education Sport

69 78

4 The Tractor Factory’s Civilian Production and Military Potential Foreign specialists The significance of the tractor factory for the Red Army Evolution of the military doctrine Military-economic preparedness: The ChTZ enterprise in the 1930s 5 Stagnation and Streamlining in the Whirlwinds of Terror, 1936–1939 Purges of party members in 1937–1938 Repression against technicians, engineers and leading cadres in the economy Mass repression campaigns Lavrentii Beria and the streamlining of NKVD internal affairs

48

84 90 94 99 103 112 118 123 128 134 138 143 150 154

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Contents

Industrial Preparedness in Cheliabinsk, 1939–1940 The USSR’s preparations for war in 1941 The start of tank production at the Cheliabinsk Tractor Factory

163 174

7

Production Conditions for Heavy Tanks in the Urals The establishment of ‘Tankograd’ The final battle for Berlin

183 191 213

8

1418 Long Days on the Home Front in the Southern Urals Evacuation and conversion of industry Working conditions in Tankograd Soviet Germans build the new iron and steel works in Cheliabinsk Prisoners of war in Cheliabinsk The countryside The political information sphere in the Urals Victory Day 1945 in the Southern Urals

217 220 226

9

The New Military-Industrial Complex in Cheliabinsk during the Cold War The reconversion of the tractor factory after the war The labour force Housing conditions The end of the career of the ‘Kings of Tanks’ Youth protests in post-war Cheliabinsk The closed atomic cities in the Cheliabinsk region

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237 241 241 249 252 255 258 261 264 267 268 272

10 Historical Memory and Research in Today’s Cheliabinsk

278

Notes

290

Bibliography

327

Index

345

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Preface For more than 15 years, the conditions for conducting research on Russia’s 20th-century history in the archives have exceeded the expectations that most scholars would have had prior to 1991. Through a series of happy coincidences over a number of years, I have been fortunate enough to study a theme that has fascinated me for many years: the significance of the Urals in the history of Soviet Russia. My research in the archives in Moscow and Cheliabinsk was supported considerably by grants, initially from the Jan Wallander and Tore Browald Foundation of Handelsbanken, Stockholm, and after 2001 by the Swedish Research Council. I was also encouraged by discussions with Håkan Lindgren, the director of the Institute for Research in Economic History at the Stockholm School of Economics. At a workshop in August 2004 at the Centre for Russian and East European Studies of the University of Birmingham, Robert W. Davies and his colleagues offered pertinent commentaries on my paper regarding the wave of repressions in Cheliabinsk’s industry in the late 1930s. However, a study of this nature, on a city that was closed to foreigners from the mid-1930s until 1992, would not have been possible without the enthusiastic support I received from the archivists at the Regional State Archives (OGAChO) in Cheliabinsk. By the summer of 1996, I had started my research there on a few themes from my doctoral dissertation, in particular concerning rearmament and preparations in the late 1930s to convert civilian factories to military production centres. The director of the archive, Aleksandr Finodeev (now the chairman of the Committee of Archives of the Cheliabinsk region), and the archivists Galina Kibitkina (now deputy chairman of the said Committee), Igor Vishev (now director of OGAChO), Irina Iangirova, Elena Kalinkina, Elena Turova and the late Rafkat Valeiev have always been willing to help me to locate documents that could shed light on my research or to discuss questions arising from the documents. Among the first sights I discovered in May 1994 was the museum of the Cheliabinsk Tractor Factory. Since that time, I have had regular opportunities to discuss the history of the factory with Iurii Pivanov and Tatiana Pushkariova. The Cheliabinsk Quality Steel Works (MEChEL), built during World War II, also has a museum and I was

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fortunate enough to have Larisa Iarosh guide me through its memorabilia, models and documents. At the Urals Wagons Factory in Nizhnii Tagil, I had the opportunity to visit its museum and expo of old tanks in 2000 and, in 2003, to discuss the wartime history of the factory with Alla Pislegina and Sergei Ustiantsev. The librarians at the department of regional history at the Cheliabinsk Public Scientific Library have been very helpful in locating rare journals and publications. Many historians in Cheliabinsk have inspired me and shared their research results; in particular, would like to thank Aleksandr Abramovskii, Vladimir Bozhe, Vladimir Kobzov, Iurii Maksimov, Igor Narskii, Vladimir Novosiolov, Nadezhda Paletskikh, Andrei Pass, Nina Shmakova and Vitalii Tolstikov. I have had interesting discussions with Veniamin Alekseev, Mikhail Glavatskii, Gennadii Kornilov, Boris Lichman and Andrei Speranskii at the Institute of History and Archeology at the Urals Section of the Russian Academy of Sciences and at the Urals State University in Ekaterinburg. Viktor Kirillov and Olga Porshneva of the Nizhnii Tagil Pedagogical Institute told me about their research projects, particularly the history of repression in the Soviet period and the revolutionary situation in 1917. In addition, it has been especially stimulating to learn more on the basic education programmes of contemporary Russian history, thanks to my regular visits to Marina Salmina, her colleagues and pupils (some of whom are history teachers already) at School No. 59 in the tractor factory district. For any mistakes and deficiencies that remain in the book, despite all this support, the author alone bears the responsibility. Last but not least, I would express my sincere gratitude to Elza Shakhrinova, to whom this book is dedicated, because more than anyone else she has made it so fascinating to learn ever more about the recent past of her country.

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Figure 1 ‘Soviet Russia is a beleaguered fortress! All for the defence!’ is the main text on this poster from 1919 (printed in 20,000 copies) by D.S. Moor, the style of which is reminiscent of lubok, the Russian popular art form. ‘The Workers’ and Peasants’ defence. The communist points at the enemy and leads the battle. The worker forges the weapons. The peasant brings grain. The woman takes the place of the men in production. The youth learns military tasks.’

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1 Cheliabinsk As a Mirror of Russia in the 20th Century

‘What do they tell of the war?’ ‘They are not prepared. Particularly not the factory in Cheliabinsk. The army is ready, but the peasant country is not.’ This conversation took place in a Paris café on 21 October 1932 between the Soviet author Isaak Babel1 and the Russian-born French socialist Boris Souvarine.2 With his novel, Red Cavalry, about the legendary cavalier Budennyi’s army during the Civil War, Babel had acquired a position at the apex of Soviet cultural society. Although Souvarine was among the founders of the French Communist Party, he had been excluded in July 1924 for his oppositional views. They both had a sound grip on Stalin’s changing policies and the Communist Party leadership after 1929. The key words in the conversation – the war, the army, the factory and the peasant countryside – also form the central elements of this book. The Soviet Union experienced the threat of war on several occasions. In 1927 it was threatened by the United Kingdom and in 1929 from Chinese warlords who had taken control of the Russian-owned Chinese Eastern Railway that passed through Manchuria on its way from Siberia to the Pacific Ocean. There was also a more continuous threat from Japan, which had occupied Manchuria in 1931–1932 and then from Nazi Germany after Hitler ascended to power in 1933. During the same years, a dramatic transformation started in the Soviet Union, with forced industrialisation and collectivisation of the countryside becoming the foremost priorities. So how did the Soviets prepare for these wars? How was this backward and predominantly agrarian country industrialised, how was the Red Workers’ and Peasants’ Army built and how did life change for those who experienced the transformation of society? These are some of the questions that this book will seek to answer. 1

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The Soviet Union emerged victorious from World War II, which was the opposite of what many in the West had foreseen in the summer of 1941, at the start of Germany’s Operation Barbarossa. An explanation of this paradoxical development starts with a description of how the new Soviet state was established during both the revolution and the Civil War. It will examine the changes in society, how the specific militarisation of the economy was introduced and how the education system was modernised. This book is about Cheliabinsk during the 1920s and 1930s, during World War II and during the first phase of the Cold War. It describes the specific militarisation of the economy, the modernisation of the education system and cultural life in Cheliabinsk. On 13 (the 4th in the Julian calendar) of September 1736 Colonel A.I. Tekelev and his 600 soldiers founded a fortress on the Miass River, which they named Cheliabinsk. In the 1740s, a road was established between Brodokalmak and the Cheliabinsk fortress; at the time, these fortresses were on Russia’s easternmost borders. By 1800, approximately 2500 people lived around the fortress, mostly Cossacks, tradesmen and artisans. The main economic sector was agriculture, but there was also a grain mill, leather tanning, a blacksmith and soap manufacturing. Throughout the 19th century, Cheliabinsk remained a small, trade-oriented town in the Russian Empire, while small-scale gold panning started elsewhere in the southern Urals region in the 1840s. Iron manufacturing soon started in the nearby towns of Zlatoust, Kasli and Miass. During the latter part of the 19th century, Cheliabinsk changed profoundly when the Trans-Siberian Railway was completed. Its western extension, from Cheliabinsk to Kurgan and Omsk, was completed in 1894 and led to Cheliabinsk becoming a doorway to Siberia for those hundreds of thousands of peasants wishing to move to new farmlands there. The Tsarist state not only organised the migration facilities, such as loans with favourable conditions, but also provided extensive information about the various regions in Siberia. This was one element of Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin’s efforts to create a wealthy peasantry. An administrative ‘settlers’ point’ (pereselencheskij punkt) was established near Cheliabinsk railway station. More than 30,000 people could live in the village that had been built there especially for settlers. The village comprised an administration that established a land register and ownership claims for all settlers. Between 1894 and 1909, more than four million people passed through Cheliabinsk on their way to new homes.3

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Cheliabinsk As a Mirror of Russia in 20th Century

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These new transport facilities transformed Cheliabinsk from a slumbering small town of fewer than 10,000 inhabitants to a fast-growing city with commercial and industrial enterprises. In many respects, Cheliabinsk and the surrounding province (oblast) are representative of the entire Soviet Union.4 The first Russian Revolution of 1905 saw the emergence of political parties for the first time and workers formed councils (sovety) in the industrial towns in the Urals. However, during the reactionary period that followed, all political activities were forced into the framework dictated by the autocratic regime. The 1917 revolution released popular, democratic movements and the Soviet power that was established in the winter of 1917–1918 represented democracy. However, the refusal of the Bolsheviks to accept the results of the elections to the Constituent Assembly was the start of a long period of dictatorship. While the Bolsheviks could certainly count on varying degrees of support among the broad popular masses and among industrial workers, they had much less of a following among

Figure 2 Saturday market in the 1920s in the village of Brodokalmak, one of the oldest settlements in Cheliabinsk province. A ‘sloboda’, a town with a non-serf population, was established in the early 18th century near the River Techa in order to protect the Kalmatsky ford. The task of the villagers was to enforce the Tsarist defence line through the Urals. By 1816, Brodokalmak had 150 farms and 907 inhabitants, two churches, one school and a market place. In 1924, Brodokalmak became a regional centre and by 2000 its population had increased to approximately 4000 people.

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the peasantry, who formed the majority of Russia’s population at that time. The one-party state that emerged in 1917–18 was consolidated during the violent Civil War of 1918–1921, which was fought not only between Red and White Armies but also against spontaneously formed peasant armies. The changes introduced in 1921 in the form of the New Economic Policy (NEP) constituted a compromise between the Bolsheviks and the majority of the population, peasants and small-scale entrepreneurs and tradesmen. From the end of the 1920s, the Soviet Communist Party forcibly introduced changes in all spheres of life. Their intention was to make the country as independent as possible from the rest of the world. The collectivisation of the countryside was designed to convince people to move from their unproductive family farms to building sites and industrial factories in the cities. An important element of the official Soviet ideology was that personal consumption would be much higher in the future. They did not foresee that the manner in which collectivisation was implemented would actually lead to famine and harsher conditions on the collective farms than had existed on family farms. This book is about the people who lived in the city of Cheliabinsk in the Southern Urals, who in the early 1930s built and then worked at the

Figure 3 Cheliabinsk. Panoramic view of the centre in the early 20th century

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Cheliabinsk As a Mirror of Russia in 20th Century

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tractor factory – Cheliabinskii Traktornyi zavod, or ChTZ for short (the name was changed to Uraltrak after 1992). The book describes how the city changed during industrialisation and what everyday life was like in ‘Tankograd’ during the war years, 1941–1945. The essential purpose is to offer a concrete reconstruction of how Stalin’s ‘revolution from above’ was implemented. World War II changed all of the earlier visions that had existed for the development of Cheliabinsk. The history of the Soviet military-industrial complex takes a concrete form with the example of a few factories in Cheliabinsk and the surrounding region that represented the Soviet model of economic preparedness. Each chapter in the book explains the extent to which and the reasons why the industrial city of Cheliabinsk was militarised. Findings in the recently opened archives have led to the discovery of many other interesting documents on social, political and cultural conditions that have been used to shed some light on the modernisation of Soviet society overall, in a wider sense. These new insights into both everyday life and industrial activities in the Soviet Union offer a multifaceted picture of the dynamics during this phase of Russia’s history. Most cities in the Soviet Union were, to all practical intents and purposes, closed to foreigners, even in the 1970s and 1980s. The French specialist on the history of Soviet architecture, Anatole Kopp, noted in 1978 that it had not been possible to travel to the great industrial cities built in Stalin’s time: ‘How do they look like today, and how did they look at the end of the Stalin period, these cities that we know only by their names: Magnitogorsk, Cheliabinsk, Komsomolsk-upon-Amur and others?’ Kopp was forced to use his imagination and postcards to envision how these cities actually looked.5 I experienced some of the same mystique around the legendary iron and steel works in Magnitogorsk, Nizhnii Tagil and the armoury in the Urals in 1970. As an exchange student at Moscow University, I was asked by the rector what I would also like to see during my year-long visit and I responded immediately that I wished to travel to the Urals. The rector’s answer was just as succinct, that such travels were out of the question. For many more years, I had to use my imagination in order to understand the heavy industry beyond the Volga, with little to flesh out the statistics, literature and scarce photographs. In the 1980s, under glasnost, American historian Stephen Kotkin became the first Western scholar to have an opportunity to conduct research in Magnitogorsk. In his grand oeuvre, Magnetic Mountain, Kotkin showed how the city was

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founded on the steppes of the Southern Urals during the 1930s. In a similar manner, I hope that this book can offer some new insights into life in the region’s central town of Cheliabinsk between the early 1900s and the end of World War II.6 As early as the 1940s, American correspondent and author William Henry Chamberlin (1897–1969) introduced the term ‘Tankograd’ to the Western public in his book The Russian Enigma.7 However, it only became possible for foreigners to visit this city in the 1990s. Although Cheliabinsk was not one of them, there were cities in the USSR that not even Soviet citizens were free to visit and whose inhabitants had extremely restricted travel opportunities. Among these were the so-called ‘atomic cities’ for the production of components of nuclear weapons. Several atomic cities were situated in the Cheliabinsk region, including Ozërsk and Snezhinsk, which were also known as Cheliabinsk-40 and Cheliabinsk-70. Relatively little has been written about the recent history of the industrial city of Cheliabinsk itself or the role of its industry during WWII and the Cold War. This book will provide a clearer image of the evolution of one specific but, in most respects, very typical Soviet company town. It is important that we have as much knowledge as possible regarding the Soviet heritage and legacy for today’s Russia, not least in order to understand the reforms and development strategies chosen by post-Soviet leaders. This book describes Soviet industrialisation in the 1930s through the example of one particular factory which was typical of how the Russians thought they could prepare their economy in case of a new war. The Cheliabinsk Tractor Factory was one of several hundred great factories that were built at a rapid pace during the first five-year plan. This example serves also to illustrate the harsh realities that emerged when American technology for tractor production, using production lines, was introduced to a country with a great shortage of qualified industrial workers. The spirit of those times is reflected in the propaganda of the early 1930s. For example, We are steaming ahead at full speed on the road from industrialisation to socialism and are leaving centuries of Russian backwardness behind us. We shall become a metallic country, a land of automobilisation and tractorisation. When we put the USSR in a car and the peasant on a tractor, then the respected capitalists can only try to catch up with us; they who speak loudly of their civilisation. Then we shall see which country is civilised and which is advanced!8

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In the 1930s, the capitalist system was struck by the Great Depression. Certain economists in the West advanced ideas about state regulation or even certain measures for planning within the free market economy. Sidney and Beatrice Webb, who in 1930 had visited the exiled Leon Trotsky in Turkey to discuss the fate of the Russian Revolution, made extended trips to the USSR. In their immense study, Soviet Communism: A New Civilization?, the Webbs described the Soviet state system, the economic planning organisation and almost all aspects of Soviet society in great detail. Most of their book was based on official Soviet sources and, to a certain extent, overlooked the fundamentally repressive structure in the one-party state. For this reason, the book has stood out as a prime example of how Westerners were fooled into believing official Soviet myths. Their book has been denounced more often than it has actually been scrutinised and does indeed contain many passages about the role of the secret police, named OGPU for United State Political Directorate in the 1920s and early 1930s. For several decades, the concept of planning had positive connotations within the Labour Party and among socialists on the European continent as a model for a mixed economy in the welfare state. Many observers assumed that a market economy could be successfully combined with a directing role for the state in certain areas. Even considering the high growth rates of the Soviet economy, at least until the early 1960s, the above quotation offers food for thought. For many years it was taken as a given that a Stalinist planned economy could achieve higher growth rates and direct the investments that were necessary for long-term development in accordance with general goals. In other words, the Soviet economy was, paradoxically, superior in terms of obtaining high growth rates, although it evidently lacked the possibility to satisfy consumer requirements. The ‘convergence’ that many economists and sociologists envisioned between the two systems in the 1960s was just one expression of this mode of thinking. In only a few decades, the Soviet Union experienced urbanisation on a scale that cannot be expressed merely with statistics. Chapter 3 describes how the city of Cheliabinsk was completely transformed in the 1930s through an enormous influx of people and the resulting problems with which the city’s authorities had to cope. In 1930, the first earth was moved in what was to become an enormous factory for the production of crawler tractors. As with the rest of the Soviet Union, the factories were built at the same time as infrastructure was established. Houses, daycare centres, schools, hospitals and leisure activity

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facilities were all built simultaneously. Entire city regions grew up in cooperation between enterprises and town authorities. At the same time as tractor production started, the construction of the surrounding area for the factory’s workers was accelerated. The ideals of the 1930s envisioned a socialist town with radical solutions to alleviate the situation for housewives, children and the elderly. In reality, however, the meagre resources were only enough for a small number of houses. Barracks for industrial workers and their families remained a reality for decades after the start of the factory. Still, the harsh realities and the hopes for the future among ordinary people is one explanation of what they wanted to defend as their new homeland. The Soviet leaders emphasised that industrialisation was the decisive factor for the country’s defence capabilities. Accordingly, mining, heavy machinery and the machine-building industry were the top priorities. An industrial basis and infrastructure should also have a civilian component in peacetime, for the production of consumer goods and durables in particular. From a wider perspective, this Soviet model was intended to achieve a higher growth rate over time than a balanced growth for both capital and consumer industries. Consumption was held at a lower level for some time in order to reap the fruits from a higher technological level. The 1930s marked the start of an intensive period of exploitation of the rich natural resources in the Urals and Siberia that, prior to this, had not even been entirely prospected. The leadership chose to develop several major industrial regions in this interior part of the country. This was, of course, an essential defence factor for the long-term plans. Chapter 4 describes how the tractor factory became part of this industrialisation effort. Chapter 5 shows how repression, purges and mass terror interrupted seemingly successful development under Stalin’s leadership. In the second half of the 1930s, widespread purges took place in the Communist Party, industry and state administration against anyone who was considered to be an actual or potential enemy of the state. The terror reached its peak in 1937–1938. Another change occurred in the secret police in 1939 and many of the illegalities and misdeeds of the preceding years were punished. The tractor factory in Cheliabinsk was intended to produce a certain type of tractor and, in case of war, supply the army with tanks and artillery haulers. Chapter 6 analyses how the planning for this industrial mobilisation changed throughout the 1930s. The original

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design was that it would be possible to convert the entire factory easily from the serial production of crawler tractors to light tanks, with most of the equipment on the conveyor belt having the same dimensions. The mobilisation plans for the factory also included such items as ammunition, grenades and spare parts for tanks and aeroplanes. Other items for wartime production were spread out to a large number of enterprises that were not part of the military-industrial complex. During the war years, production of tractors stopped in Cheliabinsk. Instead, the factory started to mass produce heavy tanks after incorporating equipment that had been evacuated from Leningrad, Kharkov and other cities in the European parts of the USSR. Cooperation with other enterprises in Cheliabinsk, Sverdlovsk (now Ekaterinburg) and Nizhnii Tagil was essential for the mass production of medium and heavy tanks. During the autumn of 1941, most of the equipment from the Kirov Works in Leningrad and the diesel engine factory in Kharkov was evacuated to Cheliabinsk. Tens of thousands of engineers and workers, along with their families, followed. At that time, the tractor factory changed its name to ‘The Kirov Works in Cheliabinsk’ and, in the jargon of the day, the city started to be called ‘Tankograd’. However, Soviet newspapers and radio never mentioned where their arms were produced and photographs in the newspapers merely referred to ‘a factory in the N city’ or ‘produced deep in the home front’. In only a few decades, the Soviet leadership had transformed its Tsarist military system into a defence capability that could withstand and win the most withering assault in the history of the world. The most striking events in the early phase of World War II were Nazi Germany’s swift victories over Poland and France. The concept of ‘Blitzkrieg’ referred to deep armoured breakthroughs supported by long-distance air strikes in the rear of enemy territory. Even the most cunning of the German generals behind this new doctrine, such as Heinz Guderian – who had personal experience with Soviet Russia – underestimated the Red Army’s capacities in the early 1940s. ‘Operation Barbarossa’ has almost unanimously been deemed a failure because the resources of Germany and its fascist allies were insufficient to maintain the logistics of occupying Russia. Chapter 7 describes the changes in tank production during World War II. After the evacuation of equipment from Leningrad, Kharkov and Moscow to Cheliabinsk, Sverdlovsk and Nizhnii Tagil, the Soviet Union mass produced robust and highly efficient tanks on a scale that

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far surpassed that of German industry. The wartime effectiveness of Soviet industry was a continuous feature of its planning system. During the war years, the loss of millions of people and the evacuation from occupied territories of the main providers of food for the entire country led to heavy strains on society in the Urals. Chapter 8 provides some glimpses from the Russian home front in 1941–1945. Tens of thousands of evacuated persons, refugees and wounded soldiers were sent to the Cheliabinsk region from European Russia. The housing situation was barely resolved by packing families together in small rooms and flats that were already too small, in barracks or dugouts on the outskirts of the city. There were numerous problems in terms of how to feed the expanded population. However, the intensive production rate at the converted tractor factory made it possible to have such a surge in weapons output that the Red Army could use this as a comparative advantage, even after its disastrous losses in the initial phase of the war. During the Cold War, Cheliabinsk achieved a greater role in the Soviet military-industrial complex. Under extreme secrecy, the important plutonium works were located not far from the city. In Miass, another town where industries had been converted to wartime requirements on a huge scale, production of ballistic missiles for submarines started. Higher education in Cheliabinsk, at the Polytechnic Institute (ChPI, today Southern Urals State University), had several faculties with a definite military-industrial orientation. Chapter 9 shows this development from the late 1940s and the first phase of the Cold War. The final chapters in the book are devoted to how historians and archivists in the Urals have written their region’s history in recent years. The first detailed description of the tractor factory was written in the 1970s by Leonid Komarov and others who had access to archival material and were able to interview many veterans. Soviet historiography on the Great Patriotic War of 1941–1945 i.e. the German–Russian War as part of World War II, was enormous in quantity and detail. However, because many aspects of the war years were either taboo or secret, any official historiography was considered by many during the glasnost years in the late 1980s to border on falsification. Since that time, military, social, economic and political historians in the Urals and in Russia in general have been able to draw a much richer, more detailed and truthful picture of these years. Chapter 10 reveals some parts of this multifaceted development in Cheliabinsk and also discusses the role of archivists in the region in opening up and publishing documents from what had previously been closed,

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secret holdings. Among the most promising aspects in Russia today for historians is the vivid interest among the younger generation. Nationwide history competitions are organised regularly for the higher classes in general schools, and the topics these teenagers have chosen bear witness to changes that are still to come.

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Figure 4 Poster by A. Apsit for the first anniversary of the Bolshevik takeover of power. ‘The Year of the Proletarian Dictatorship. October 1917 – October 1918’ and ‘Proletarians in all countries, unite!’

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2 From the Civil War to the Five-year Plans

The Russian Revolution in 1917 and the Civil War that followed between 1918 and 1921 are usually described from the centre of events – Petrograd and Moscow. This book, however, focuses on how the city of Cheliabinsk and its surroundings changed before World War I and on the conditions in which the new Soviet power was established in the Southern Urals. The takeover of power in November 1917 by the Red Guards and Workers’ soviets created an unstable situation. There were profound conflicts with other groups in society – merchants, peasants and, most of all, the Cossacks in Orenburg. Many decisive moments in the Civil War took place in the Southern Urals. The New Economic Policy (NEP) in the 1920s seemed for a short time to have created a model for the recovery of the country and the evolution of a ‘mixed economy’. Ambitious investment targets in the five-year plans set in 1928–1929 changed the situation. Stalin and the leaders of the Bolshevik Party opted for the swift collectivisation of agriculture, which changed the Ural countryside profoundly. The ‘flight from the countryside’ to the cities was a major factor in determining the character of the new industrial sites in the 1930s. In less than ten years, as a result of great effort and much suffering for the population, a new heavy industry was created in the Urals that exploited the rich natural resources in the region. The Russian personalities described in this chapter belonged to political parties and groups that can be called ‘history’s victors’. In Russia, a complex party system started to emerge in the early 1900s. However, the ‘alternatives’ of the liberal and conservative political parties were never to be actualised by history.1 Ultimately, the most radical social democrats, the Bolsheviks, were the only real victors in the Civil War. Social democratic societies were founded in Cheliabinsk in the late 1890s. Russia’s social democracy split after its second congress in 1902 13

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between Lenin’s Bolsheviks and Iulii Martov’s Mensheviks and, piece by piece, the differences widened between the two sides on all of the important political questions. However, there was no such deep split in the Ural’s social democrats, who eagerly joined forces in political actions with the Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) and the liberal Constitutional Democrats (Kadets). Local organisations in the Urals were even allowed to contain members of both Russian Social Democratic Party (RSDAP) and the SR Party. At its apex, during the first Russian Revolution in 1905, the Social Democratic party counted 14,300 members in the Urals. The counter-revolution of 1906–07, with its mass arrests and exiles, almost extinguished the party. With great difficulty, party members managed to print leaflets and, in 1908, three issues of their illegal newspaper, The Worker’s Voice. The membership in the Urals declined to 2300 in 1908–1911 and to around 1200 in 1912–1916. In Cheliabinsk, Orenburg and other cities in the Southern Urals, the party had fewer than 500 members in 1912. Some life stories may illustrate this early history of the social democratic movement in the Urals. Samuil Moiseevich Tsvilling (1891–2 April 1918) joined the RSDAP in 1905. He took part in the revolutionary events in Tobolsk in Western Siberia during the first Russian Revolution. He was arrested and sentenced to death but the verdict was later reduced to five years in prison. After serving his sentence, Tsvilling became a socialist agitator in the cities of Tobolsk, Ekaterinburg and Cheliabinsk. He was drafted into the army in 1914 but soon started to spread Bolshevik agitation against the war among soldiers. Sofia Krivaia (1894–1919) moved to Cheliabinsk in 1902. While she was still at school she joined radical groups that helped political prisoners who were held in the transfer prisons in Cheliabinsk after being sentenced to exile in Siberia. She was arrested for the first time at the age of 14 for having contacts with the RSDAP, although she was soon released because of her age. She was excluded from school, however, and worked as a teacher and a pharmacist and organised the nurses’ trade union. In 1915, she became a member of the RSDAP and joined the Bolshevik wing of the party. After a few years at a parish school, Dmitrii Koliushchenko (1881–3 June, 1918) worked as an apprentice blacksmith at a winery in Voronezh. He joined the RSDAP in 1903 and moved to Cheliabinsk, where he worked as mechanic. In 1910, he started work at ‘Stoll V.G. & K.’ as a blacksmith and later as a turner. He organised a social democratic workers’ group that organised the inaugural First of May parade in Cheliabinsk in 1912, as a protest against the massacres of workers at

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the Lena gold fields in Siberia. Unrest and strikes were widespread in the Russian labour market during the years leading up to World War I. In 1914, Koliushchenko was arrested as a strike leader but was released after vehement protests from the workers at the factory. Evdokim Vasenko (1882–1 June, 1918) was another personality in the city’s labour movement. He had a diploma from the Ekaterinburg mining college and worked as a clerk in the post and telegraph office. He was active during the first Russian Revolution in 1905 and sentenced to four years in prison in Novorossiisk. At the outbreak of World War I, Vasenko was again arrested and exiled to Tobolsk in Siberia. These were typical lives among those who tried to engage in radical political activities in Tsarist Russia. Strong social-democratic group and trade unions were also organised in the old industrial towns of Zlatoust, Miass and Verkhne-Uralsk. The outbreak of war in 1914 created a patriotic atmosphere in Cheliabinsk, as it did throughout the country. Most political parties supported the Tsar’s proclamation of war against the Kaiser’s Germany. The only party that agitated against the war from the start was the Bolshevik social democrats. As the war became more troublesome for the Tsarist government and no decisive victory had been obtained by 1916, the atmosphere changed profoundly. The general dissatisfaction intensified towards the end of that year as feeding the workers in the major cities became more and more difficult.2 The historically crucial events for Russia took place in Petrograd, where Russian elite groups forced Tsar Nikolai II to resign in February 1917. Some weeks later, a provisional government was formed. The Russian Revolution was characterised by the twin power structure that had the provisional government on one side and the worker, peasant and soldier deputies’ councils (soviets) on the other. Such a structure emerged in Cheliabinsk in early March 1917, as power passed from the governor and the Tsarist administration to the leaders of the local council (zemstvo) and the chairman of the city duma, who were appointed as emissaries of the provisional government. The workers’ and soldiers’ soviet re-emerged in the same form as it had had in 1905, with representatives of the Social Democrats and Socialist Revolutionaries. Samuil Tsvilling was elected chairman of the workers’ and soldiers’ soviet in the city. The situation in Cheliabinsk was still unclear and full of unrest, with several of the new organs actually being quite powerless. Because the revolutionary changes had undermined the police and the courts, a committee for the security of the society was formed with representatives from industry, trade and the free professions, as well as from the trade unions

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and labour parties. In Cheliabinsk, this committee grew into a parallel power organ until the provisional government took control throughout the entire country. In other cities in the Urals, which had similar situations, the primary task of such committees was to maintain the production of necessary supplies to the fighting army.3 In 1917 a wide variety of unions and associations grew up spontaneously. In Cheliabinsk, a number of new organs, unions, clubs and commissions were formed, with broad popular support. According to various sources, the RSDAP had between 550 and 900 members in the southern part of the Urals prior to the February 1917 revolution. A few months later, the consolidated Bolshevik and Menshevik social democrats in Cheliabinsk had 600 members; the party was then allowed to act legally. After Vladimir Lenin’s return from exile in Switzerland in April 1917, the Bolsheviks opted openly for Russia’s withdrawal from World War I. This appealed to the masses and the number of members from among the soldiers, peasants and workers increased. By late April, the Bolshevik organisations in the Urals had over 10,000 members, in addition to support from another 1,560 persons who were members of party organisations with both Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. However, the fact that the population in 1917 was dominated by peasants, Cossacks and tradesmen meant that the Bolshevik group in Cheliabinsk did not really have a broad popular support. The Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) enjoyed by far the most support from the peasants, but were split on the question of whether the party should support the peasants’ spontaneous takeover or confiscation of landlords’ property or whether the party should wait for new agrarian laws from a parliamentary assembly. The most powerful Cossack organisations were in the Orenburg region in the southern part of the Urals. Dmitrii Koliushchenko, who organised the first Red Guards, was one of the leading personalities in the city’s workers’ and soldiers’ soviet after the February revolution. Another leader of the armed workers’ group was Vladimir Mogilnikov (1895–1918), who only had a few years of schooling in Brodokalmak and then received education at the Cheliabinsk pedagogical seminary. He was mobilised into the army in 1914 and received training at the cadet school in Kazan, after which he was sent to the 169th infantry regiment in Cheliabinsk. In 1917 he joined the RSDAP and organised the Red Guards in the city. Sofia Krivaia was another member of the first Red Guards in Cheliabinsk. Tsvilling had earlier been arrested for spreading anti-war propaganda among the soldiers in the city but was later elected to the leadership of the Ural section of the RSDAP (Bolsheviks) and participated in the

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sixth party congress. The elections to the soviet in August 1917 saw the Bolsheviks gain the majority of the votes, as they had done in other parts of the Urals. Under the action led by General Kornilov to establish a military dictatorship in August 1917, which was eagerly supported by officers in the Urals, the Red Guards were mobilised to fight against the threat of the counter-revolution. Tsvilling led the ‘Committee for the Salvation of the Revolution’. As the Red Guards had been completely legalised in connection with Kornilov’s action, the Bolsheviks attempted to take power on several occasions shortly afterwards. The number of organised Bolsheviks in the Urals had grown to 27,000 by July and to 35,000 by autumn as they took power in Petrograd and other cities. In Cheliabinsk, there were still only 2100 Bolsheviks in September 1917, yet the party’s core still tried to launch an armed takeover of power in the city. Evdokim Vasenko was the leading Bolshevik in most events in Cheliabinsk during 1917 and 1918. He took part in the Second AllRussian Congress of Soviets in Petrograd that proclaimed the takeover of power on 25 October (7 November according to the Gregorian calendar). On his return to Cheliabinsk, Vasenko was elected chairman of the workers’ and soldiers’ soviet. When the news of successful Soviet takeover of power in Petrograd reached Cheliabinsk, the Bolsheviks proclaimed that all power in the city should be handed to the soviet. Vasenko led the new military-revolutionary committee in the city and was appointed commissar for internal affairs. Under his leadership, a peasant and Cossack congress was organised to approve the revolutionary changes, although these new organs could hold on to power only until 30 October. Following a request from the Mensheviks, the Constitutional Democrats (Kadets), the Popular Socialists, the Socialist Revolutionaries and the Cossacks, a military unit of 526 soldiers and officers under the command of N.N. Titov arrived in Cheliabinsk to dissolve the workers’ soviet. The soviet was given an ultimatum to return power to the city duma and dissolve the soviet and the Red Guard. The Bolsheviks accepted these demands and made a resolution that the Red Guards should be dissolved. At the same time, however, they appealed to other cities for military support to Cheliabinsk as the city had been surrounded by Cossack units. The Socialist Revolutionaries, for their part, appealed to the Cossack leaders not to engage more troops and military pressure in the city as this would probably lead to widespread fighting with the workers’ guards. Vasenko led the negotiations with Titov’s Cossacks and a formula was found for handing power back to the city duma. The revolutionary situation changed again a few weeks later. Vasilii Bliukher (1890–1938) had participated in World War I but joined

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the RSDAP in 1916 and took the Bolsheviks’ side in 1917. He was a member of the military-revolutionary committee that organised the armed takeover of power in Petrograd. From there, he was sent to Cheliabinsk and brought strong Red Guard units from the Volga region to firmly establish Soviet power there. After some minor fighting, Bliukher managed to consolidate Soviet power in Cheliabinsk and from 2 December 1917, Bliukher chaired the military-revolutionary committee in the city. After these events in October-November, Vladimir Mogilnikov became the deputy chief of the newly organised secret police in Cheliabinsk. The most notable armed resistance to the Bolsheviks was organised by Aleksandr Dutov (1879–1921), the Cossack leader and ataman (leader). He was an aristocrat, the son of Major-General Ilia Dutov,

Figure 5 Vasilii Bliukher fought in World War I, joined the Russian Social Democratic Party (RSDAP) in 1916 and joined the Bolsheviks in 1917. He was a member of the military-revolutionary committee that carried out the Bolshevik takeover of power in Petrograd in November 1917. He was then sent to help the Red Guards establish Soviet power in Cheliabinsk. From 2 December, 1917 he was the chairman of the Cheliabinsk military-revolutionary committee.

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and had received his military training at Nepluev Cadet College and Nikolai Cavalry Military College. Thereafter, he gained a degree at the Electrotechnical Institute in Kharkov. He participated in the RussoJapanese War of 1904–1905 and graduated from the General Staff Academy in 1908. During World War I, Dutov commanded the 1st Cavalry Division of the Orenburg Cossacks and by 1918 had advanced to the rank of lieutenant-general. In 1917, Dutov was appointed chairman of the Orenburg Cossacks and was given responsibility by the provisional government for the food supply in the Urals. Dutov did not recognise the Soviet takeover of power in Petrograd or elsewhere. In November 1917, he led an armed uprising in Orenburg to establish military power and started by arresting dozens of local Bolsheviks. Dutov attempted to organise a wide anti-Bolshevik movement in support of the fallen provisional government. He proclaimed state of emergency throughout the Cheliabinsk and Orenburg provinces (gubernii). Power was transferred to the Cossack’s military council, which still accepted the legitimacy of the provisional government. On 15 (28) November, all Bolsheviks in Orenburg were arrested but soon managed to escape from the prison. Dutov was supported by Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries and established a ‘Committee for the Salvation of the Fatherland and the Revolution’. The name alluded to similar committees that had been formed in Cheliabinsk in August 1917 with extraordinary power to fight against General Kornilov and the threat of a military dictatorship. Dutov’s primary support came in the form of hundreds of Cossack officers, who managed to gather 7000 soldiers and take power in Orenburg, Troitsk and Verkhne-Uralsk. However, the majority of Orenburg Cossacks were hesitant to support Dutov’s action. They were not united against the Bolshevik takeover of power and some Cossacks even expressed their sympathy for the Red side. Among these Cossacks were the brothers Ivan (1890–1938) and Dmitrii Kashirin (1888–1938), who grew up in a large Cossack family and studied at Orenburg Junker School until 1909. In 1917, Ivan became a member of the RSDAP. After the February revolution, he chaired a military division’s party commission and then the Orenburg workers’ and soldiers’ soviet. During the summer of 1918, Ivan’s units fought against the units of General Dutov and the Czech Legion. He led a new partisan army in the Urals and after joining the regular Red Army units he was promoted to brigade commander of the Third Army on the Red side.4 A third brother, Nikolai, had also fought in World War I. After the February 1917 revolution, he became chairman of a regimental

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committee and later formed the voluntary Verkhne-Uralsk Cossack units. From 16 July until October 1918, he was commander of the Urals partisan army and from January 1919 commanded the 30th infantry division of the Eastern Red Army. In 1920, Nikolai was appointed corps commander of the Southern Red Army.5 The Bolsheviks mobilised workers’ and Red Guard units from Petrograd, Moscow and Ufa, Samara and Motovilikhi. When these superior troops approached Orenburg, Dutov’s army was forced to fight hopeless battles of retreat along the railway from Cheliabinsk to Troitsk and in the town of Verkhne-Uralsk. The regular units were then dissolved and dispersed into smaller armed units for self-defence in the Cossack villages on the steppe in the Turgai region. Samuil Tsvilling was killed in one of these battles with Cossack units. The situation in the Southern Urals was characterised by sharp divisions between the radical soviets in Cheliabinsk and the industrial towns of Zlatoust and Miass, on the one hand, and the countryside, on the other, where the Cossacks were the fiercest and best organised opponents of the soviets and the Bolsheviks. During the elections to the Constituent Assembly in December 1918, the Socialist Revolutionaries gained overwhelming majorities in most peasant districts.

The Civil War in the Southern Urals Soviet power was established throughout Russia following the successful coup of November 1917 in Petrograd. Cheliabinsk was also the first major city in which Soviet power was overturned in 1918 but this was little more than a minor historical incident. Czech prisoners of war from the Austro-Hungarian army were released in order to travel back to Europe and fight for an independent Czechoslovakia. The POWs had been formed into a well equipped and well armed corps of 40,000 men. They were to travel on the Trans-Siberian Railway to the Far East, from where they would head back to Europe by sea. This Czech Corps was divided among dozens of train echelons across the entire railway but many Czechs feared that the Red rulers were slowing their journey through Russia. Several train echelons were held up at the railway station in Cheliabinsk. This unit had approximately 12,000 soldiers and was under the command of General Sergei Voitsekhovskii (1883–1951), who had graduated from the General Staff Academy in 1912 and been promoted to lieutenant-general in the Tsarist army. From the summer of 1917 he directed the staff of the Czech corps and he was also to be a key figure in the resistance to the Bolsheviks.

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The trains with Czech officers and soldiers had been delayed at Cheliabinsk’s railway station and many conflicts occurred with the local soviet. Rumours spread among the commanders that the soldiers were to be sent back to German captivity. During a skirmish on 14 May, a Hungarian prisoner of war from another train heading westwards was killed – this event had drastic consequences. The people’s commissar of defence, Leon Trotsky, sent a swift order to the soviet in Cheliabinsk to disarm the corps but the strong Czech soldiers refused to allow them to do so. The local soviet then arrested ten suspected Czech soldiers. The commander of the corps considered this an illegal act and, on 17 May, sent a group of soldiers into the city centre. Regular Red Army soldiers had started to receive training in the spring of 1918 but their numbers in Cheliabinsk totalled no more than 1500 soldiers and 120 officers. Even when they were joined by the Red Guards in the city, these weak forces could not cope with the battle-hardened and well equipped Czech troops. As a result, the Czech Legion took over the central parts of the city, surrounded its garrison and dissolved the Red Guard. In less than one day, the city had fallen into the hands of the Czech troops – this uprising was to be the start of the Russian Civil War.6 On 27 May 1918 Vladimir Mogilnikov was arrested by the Czechs and he was executed on 3 June.7 Immediately after the Czech rebellion, Koliushchenko was arrested and on the same day as Mogilnikov he was executed by Cossacks with sabres. Other leading revolutionaries, including M.A. Boleiko, P.Ia. Triashkin and Sh.I. Goziosskii, were also executed.8 The White Armies soon had total control of the Southern Urals and large parts of Siberia. On 1 June power was formally transferred to the head of the city’s garrison and the Committee for People’s Power was formed a few days later. This constituent assembly contained representatives from political parties, religious associations and the Cossacks. The parties that had opposed the Bolsheviks were free to act in the city. Among these were the Socialist Revolutionaries, who had received the most votes in the elections to the All-Russian Constituent Assembly in December 1917. Other active political parties in Cheliabinsk were the Menshevik Social Democrats, the Popular Socialists and the Union for Russia’s Rebirth party. In August 1918, a conference was organised to debate the future political system in the country. For a couple of months, Cheliabinsk had self-governance and there were elections to various assemblies and organs. Many people sympathised with the aim to convene a constituent assembly, as expressed in the so-called Ufa Declaration. The Directorate in Ufa was initially supported by General Denikin, whose

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Voluntary Army constituted its main military force. However, given the tense situation in the country, Cossack leaders in Orenburg, along with other personalities in the armed forces, instead supported the establishment of a direct military dictatorship. The dictatorship option had been widely discussed as the only means to combat Bolshevik power in the country’s centre and in the industrial towns in the Urals.

Figure 6 The Cossack leader, ‘ataman’ Aleksandr Dutov (1870–1921) was a nobleman and the son of Major-General Ilja Dutov. He received his education at Nepluev Cadet School and Nikolai Cavalry Military College, after which he received his degree from Kharkov’s Electro-technical College. He participated in the 1904–1905 Russo-Japanese War and then graduated from the General Staff Academy in 1908. During World War I, Dutov commanded the 1st Orenburg Cossacks’ Cavalry Division and by 1918 had been promoted to the rank of lieutenant-general.

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The rebellion of the Czech troops in Cheliabinsk had therefore been successful and, at the same time, had taken control over several cities along the Trans-Siberian Railway. At the time, General Dutov, who had been appointed field ataman of all Russia’s Cossacks in April 1918, set up an anti-Bolshevik Cossack army in the Southern Urals. General Sergei Voitsekhovskii was commander of the Czech troops in the Cheliabinsk-Ekaterinburg regions and also, later in 1918, of the Czech forces in Samara. The Bolsheviks responded swiftly to the revolt of the Czech Legion and takeover of the Trans-Siberian Railway. In May 1918, the workers’ soviet was evacuated to Ekaterinburg. Vasenko did not escape and was arrested in the nearby village of Argaiash and strangled to death by White officers as he was being brought back to Cheliabinsk. In order to combat the Czech troops, which controlled virtually the entire TransSiberian Railway from Samara to Vladivostok, the Red Army leaders formed the Eastern Army Group under the command of Mikhail Frunze (1885–1925).9 When the Czech troops took control of Cheliabinsk in June 1918, Bliukher formed a partisan army, which, after heavy fighting, managed to join the Red Army units. The units of Ivan Kashirin were fighting in the southern mountains and managed to reach the regular Third Army in the Eastern Army Group in the city of Kungur. Those Red Army soldiers who did not manage to flee from the Czech Legion units, together with Bliukher, dissolved their units and even joined the opponents of the Bolsheviks on the White side. The 5th All-Russian Congress of Soviets proclaimed ‘mass terror against the bourgeoisie’. The Ural Chekists arrested hundreds of intellectuals and persons in the free professions in Ekaterinburg, Perm and Cheliabinsk. This ‘Red Terror’ was intensified all over the country after the August assassination attempts on Lenin and Semën Uritskii, the leader of the Petrograd Cheka.10 Aleksandr Kolchak (1874–1920) was the son of a navy officer and received his education at St Petersburg Classical Lyceum and the Navy Cadet Corps. He took part in polar expeditions, fought in the RussoJapanese war in 1904–1905 and World War I, then served as vice-admiral and supreme commander of the Pacific Ocean Fleet. He resigned in 1917 and travelled to the United States on a study trip. He accepted an offer to join the British navy and was sent to control the Chinese-Eastern Railway (from Siberia to Vladivostok through Manchuria). The British and French governments supported the anti-Bolshevik armies in Russia and had made several attempts to unite the various armies that were fighting against the Red Army in the summer and autumn of 1918.

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Figure 7 Ivan Dmitrievich Kashirin (1890–1937) was the son of a Cossack family and, like his brother Nikolai (1888–1938), received his basic education in Orenburg’s Junker School. From 1917, Ivan was a member of the RSDAP and, after the February revolution, was chairman in an army division committee and then chairman of Orenburg’s district soviet. In the summer of 1918, Ivan Kashirin fought against the troops of Dutov and the Czech Legion. He led an army unit in the Urals partisan army and then became brigade commander in the Third Army on the Red side in the Civil War. From 1920 onwards, he was active in the VChK-OGPU secret police. During the collectivisation of the countryside, he led repressive operations against peasants in the Volga region. He was arrested and then executed in 1937 during the Great Terror.

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Figure 8 Admiral Aleksandr Vasilevich Kolchak (1874–1920), the son of a naval officer, received his education at the Saint Petersburg Classical Lyceum and the Naval Cadet Corps. He participated in Polar expeditions, the Russo-Japanese War and World War I, in which he commanded the Black Sea Navy as a vice-admiral. He resigned in 1917 and started a study visit to the United States of America. He then accepted an invitation to enrol in the British navy and took over the command of the Chinese-Russian Far Eastern Railways. One way in which Great Britain and France attempted to establish a broad anti-Bolshevik coalition was by betting on Admiral Kolchak. In 1918, he travelled through China to Siberia together with his British and French military advisors. In November of that year, Kolchak declared a military dictatorship in Russia.

One of their moves was to support Admiral Kolchak as the supreme leader of the anti-Bolshevik forces. Kolchak travelled from China to Siberia and was appointed war and naval minister in the Directorate in Omsk in October 1918. The following month, with the support of British and French advisors, Kolchak proclaimed a military dictatorship over all of Russia. This caused legal and organised political life to disappear in the parts of Russia that were under Kolchak’s regime. A White Terror was unleashed in the Urals and Siberia, directed against anyone

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who had supported Soviet power. The White side soon abandoned all the principles of the state of law and democracy, directing their attention not only against Bolshevik and active socialists but also against others in the civil population who had neither accepted nor supported the Soviets. The White Armies also enforced harsh grain requisition policies on the peasantry.11 In June 1918, Cheliabinsk’s new rulers outlawed the Bolshevik party. The communists responded by forming an underground committee that had a few hundred activists by the winter of 1918–1919 and distributed leaflets that were printed at an underground printing house. However, the underground Bolshevik organisation was too weak to shake the new military order. An attempt to organise an armed workers’ uprising failed after a provocateur had disclosed its plans. In March 1919, 60 Bolsheviks were executed. Sofia Krivaia was one of the activists of the underground Bolshevik organisation in Cheliabinsk. She was arrested on 29 March 1919 and tortured and interrogated at Ufa prison, where she died on the night of 17–18 May.12

Figure 9 Young railway workers who took part in the battles against Kolchak’s army in the Southern Urals. Photograph from 22 April 1920.

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Many people who had been active in politics before 1917 died during the Civil War. Those who joined the Bolshevik Party in the 1920s had a different, and often more diffuse image of the social transformation that the party leaders such as Lenin and Trotsky had envisioned. The further one went from the Soviet centre, the more importance was given to the Soviet government’s policy on taxes, wages and prices, as well as the perspectives of the local leaders on the region in question. In the winter and spring of 1918–1919, the White Army, under Admiral Kolchak, achieved its most far-reaching control of territory in Siberia and the Urals. Along with the Czech Legion, they controlled practically the entire stretch along the Trans-Siberian Railway from Ekaterinburg and Cheliabinsk in the west to Vladivostok in the east. They also controlled the area from Ufa in Bashkiria across the whole mountainous region of the Southern Urals. In February 1919, Admiral Kolchak held

Figure 10 Nurses Evdokia Davydova (left) and Taisia Kuznetsova (right) in the Red partisan units during the Civil War. The photograph is from 1919.

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Figure 11 The Diadins’ house on the Kommuna and Elkin streets was considered the most comfortable hotel among the many that flourished in the boom years after the Trans-Siberian Railway was built. It was established in 1908 by Mikhail Diadin, a merchant. During the Civil War, the house was first used by the White Army and thereafter for the staff of Tukhachevskii’s Red Army in 1919. The photo is from the mid-1920s.

a military council in Cheliabinsk at which it was decided to initiate a great offensive westwards. At the same time, the Red Army was planning a counter-offensive in order to force Kolchak’s troops away from the Urals. The advance of the Red Army through the Urals in 1919 was very successful. In spring and summer, the Fifth Army, under the command of the young Mikhail Tukhachevskii (1893–1937) led victorious operations through the passes in the mountains of the Southern Urals. The Reds were also able to mount subversive operations behind the front lines of Kolchak’s troops.

The Battle of Cheliabinsk, July–August 1919 Having given up and retreated from Ufa, Zlatoust and Troitsk, the White Armies’ commanders expected to force a decisive battle at Cheliabinsk in August 1919. These operations had started with the battle of Zlatoust, over 200 kilometres west of Cheliabinsk. Tukhachevskii’s Fifth Army had 32,000 soldiers, 100 guns and 713 machine guns, while the White

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Siberian army, under the command of Sergei Voitzekhovski (1883–1951), was almost as strong and well equipped. The Red side started a frontal attack in the direction of Cheliabinsk and a smaller attack south-west towards Troitsk at the same time. Having broken through the defensive line of the White 35th Army, Tukhachevskii’s army advanced towards Cheliabinsk. General Voitzkhovskii then changed his tactics and ordered a fast retreat. The divisions of the Siberian Army regrouped and reinforced in order to be able to attack the Red Army units inside the limits of Cheliabinsk city and ‘take them as in a sack’. The plan was that the White Armies would then start a counter-offensive to press the Red Army back beyond the Urals.

Figure 12

Map of the battle of Cheliabinsk, July–August 1919.

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After heavy fighting the Red Army conquered Cheliabinsk on 24 July but the next day the White Army initiated two counterstrikes, from the north and the south. The Red Army withstood the advance in the south but the Whites were successful in the north. They forced a wedge between two Red divisions and cut off the railway from Cheliabinsk to Ekaterinburg, a move which threatened the support and rear of the Red Armies. Eight thousand workers were mobilised to strengthen the White Army units and another 4500 men were formed into workers’ guards. With this concentration of forces, Tukachevskii started his counter-attack and between 29 July and 1 August they eliminated General Voitzekhovskii’s foremost divisions. This allowed the Fifth Army to continue its operations and consolidate its hold over the city. The Battle of Cheliabinsk was extremely bloody and an estimated 40,000 men died

Figure 13 The 26-year-old Tukhachevskii in a typical top cap, or ‘budionovka’, named after the legendary Red Cavalry commander Semion Budionnyi. Tukhachevskii commanded the Fifth Eastern Army that fought its way through the Ural Mountains in the early summer of 1919 and won a victory over General Voizekhovskii’s White units in the battle of Cheliabinsk in July–August 1919.

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in battle on each side. The battle continued for an entire week, with skirmishes inside the city and major encounters around its boundaries. The Battle of Cheliabinsk was one of the key encounters of the Russian Civil War and the most bloody at the eastern front lines. However, the loss of life during these battles, even including the partisan or peasant armies, made up only a small percentage of the total number of soldiers who died in these years. Diseases such as typhus, fever and malaria took many more lives. Likewise, the number of victims of the Red and White Terrors was far lower than the number of civilians who died from under-nourishment or poor immune defence against epidemics, in particular the influenza pandemic (‘the Spanish flu’).13 Tukhachevskii was awarded the Order of the Red Star for his successful planning and implementation of the decisive operations of the Fifth Red Army in the Southern Urals. He remained in Cheliabinsk for a couple more weeks in order to plan the next operations of the Fifth Army, in Siberia.14 Throughout the autumn of 1919, minor cleansing operations continued in the region around Cheliabinsk against scattered Cossack units and remnants of Kolchak’s divisions. The Southern Urals had been reconquered by the Red side and a state of emergency was introduced that lasted until 1920. Mikhail Tukhachevskii was one of many commanders in the Red Army with a background in the Tsarist army. In only a few years he advanced to the rank of komandarm – general or commander of an army. In 1917, he returned from captivity in Germany and in the spring of 1918 he volunteered for the Red Army and was soon adopted as a member of the Communist Party. He expressed radical ideas about how communism should be spread internationally in order to consolidate the revolution. Tukhachevskii was given responsibility for ever larger military units. In 1920, he commanded the Western Army in a counter-attack against Jósef Pilsudski’s army into Poland. During the Russian Civil War and the Russo-Polish War of 1920, the basis was laid for Tukhachevskii to rethink the conditions of modern warfare. His desire to find the causes of the Red Army’s defeat outside Warsaw in August 1920 (‘the miracle at Wisla’) spurred Tukhachevskii to formulate new ideas on mobile warfare with the latest weapons technology. A few years later, he combined these insights with a vision of the possibilities of a mechanised war using fast-moving armour units and the airforce.15 Admiral Kolchak’s troops had lost an important battle in Cheliabinsk and his last strategic reserves were weakened. The White Armies had been split into northern and southern wings and they were unable to cooperate since the Red Army had captured both Cheliabinsk and

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Troitsk. The wealthier peasants in Western Siberia had initially supported Kolchak’s regime but the harsh repression of his military dictatorship led to a peasants’ rebellion against the White Armies. This further weakened the White Armies in Siberia, which allowed the Red Army to advance swiftly along the Trans-Siberian Railway. Kolchak resigned as supreme commander in January 1920 and travelled eastwards. At Irkutsk, on Lake Baikal, the Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks arrested Kolchak and handed him over to the Bolsheviks for interrogation. Their original idea was to stage a trial against him but the Bolshevik leaders instead decided to execute him under the pretence that the strained situation did not allow for an open trial. Kolchak was executed on 7 February 1920. After the Battle of Cheliabinsk, General Dutov’s Cossack troops also retreated through Siberia and managed to reach China. Dutov himself was murdered in March 1921 by Cheka soldiers. Together with Kolchak’s troops, many engineers and intellectuals from Cheliabinsk decided to flee, even if they had not been active opponents of Soviet power. Power had thus changed several times in the Urals and Western Siberia, from the Reds to the Bolsheviks and Soviet power, then to the anti-Bolshevik regimes that had demanded the Constituent Assembly regather according to the election results of December 1917, and finally Kolchak’s military dictatorship. At times, some areas in the Southern Urals were controlled by so-called Free Cossacks. When the White Armies took control of an area, they enforced an anti-peasant policy of not letting the revolutionary change of landed property remain, which led to peasant rebellions in the rear of the White Army. These constant regime changes meant ever less for the ordinary citizens when the sheer material conditions of life deteriorated each month. The White troops had evacuated much industrial equipment and production from Cheliabinsk and Zlatoust. In total, 43 trainloads with over 4000 railcars were sent away with such equipment. The leaders of the White Army knew that they would not have time to evacuate these goods fully so they set the trains on fire instead. The Red Army’s victory in the Civil War of 1919–20 led to the consolidation of Soviet power in the Urals. Through the workers’ and peasants’ councils, the soviets were re-established and became the basis of the new power system.16 However, the triumphant Bolsheviks encountered opposition from other peasants, who protested against the forced grain requisition, to which they had already been subject at the hands of the Red and White sides during the war. Peasant households were frequently plundered. Other groups in the population protested against

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the forced labour system, rationing and the abolition of the monetary system. On 29 August 1919 the provincial revolutionary committee (gubrevkom) became the leading organ in Cheliabinsk. On 3 September the All-Russian Executive Committee (VTsIK) defined the borders of the newly established Cheliabinsk province (guberniia), which was to incorporate the former districts (uezd) of Cheliabinsk, Kurgan, Kustanai and Troitsk. Revolutionary order in the Southern Urals was retained through the winter of 1919–1920 by the Bolshevik party, with the provincial directorate of the Extraordinary Commission established to combat the counter-revolution (VChK). The first local ChK leader in Cheliabinsk was Andrei Korosin, who had extensive experience with the secret police. He was sent to Cheliabinsk on the orders of Feliks Dzerzhinskii with the task of eliminating the remaining units of Kolchak’s armies and controlling the requisition of food from the peasants. The food situation was better in the Southern Urals than it was in many cities that had been depopulated during the Civil War. In May 1920 a train loaded with over 400 tons of grain was sent from Cheliabinsk to Moscow to be distributed to starving people in other regions.

Militarisation of labour and force against the peasantry Towards the end of the Civil War, Leon Trotsky, People’s commissar of the army and navy, advanced the idea that, instead of merely demobilising the Red Army units, the soldiers should be retained and should form so-called labour armies.17 Similarly, on 10 January, General Mikhail Matiasevich, the commander of the Third Red Army, proposed to the highest military leadership that his units should be transformed into ‘The First Revolutionary Labour Army of the Republic’. A few days later, the Council of the People’s Commissars adopted a resolution to form ‘The Labour Army of the Urals’, which would be regrouped for the recovery tasks for the economy in general and the reconstruction of the railway network in particular. Several other labour armies were formed in other parts of the country and a set of rules was written up for these armies. The Labour Army of the Urals was engaged in public works in Cheliabinsk. From 15 April to 1 July, 1920, more than 2.5 million Red Army soldiers took part in these economic activities. Initially, the Labour Army of the Urals was led by Trotsky, who visited Cheliabinsk in March 1920, and it was later commanded by Georgii Piatakov. The First Labour Army of the Urals can be credited with rebuilding railway lines and organising supplies of food, fodder for the farms and lumber for heating factories. The labour army continued tasks of this nature for

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Figure 14 A military parade in Troitsk on 20 July 1920 celebrates the first anniversary of the victory over Kolchak’s troops in the Urals. The fight for the Urals started in June 1919 when the Eastern Army Group, under the command of Leon Trotsky and Mikhail Tukhachveskii, first conquered the old industrial cities of Zlatoust and Miass in the mountains. Following this, the Battle of Cheliabinsk started on 24 July, involved heavy, bloody fighting, and ended on 4 August with the Red Army emerging victorious.

more than two years and then also took part in building houses and repairing factories. The army was dissolved in 1921 with the introduction of the New Economic Policy. The fact that these labour armies were led by the most prominent Bolshevik leaders – Joseph Stalin in the Ukraine and Grigorii Zinoviev in Petrograd, for example – shows that the communists paid great attention the use of militarised labour forms in the transition phase after the revolution.18 In the last year of the so-called war communism, purely militarised work conditions were not presented merely as solutions in a desperate situation or as a way to avoid anarchic conditions for the workers when the Red Army demobilised. Trotsky was among those who depicted ‘labour armies’ as forerunners of things to come, an embryonic form of labour in a socialist society. In response to Karl Kautsky, the grand old man of German social democracy, who had harshly criticised the Russian Revolution for its terror and undemocratic methods, Trotsky raised a number of arguments in favour of militarised labour. Although Trotsky’s pamphlet entitled Communism and Terror (1920) is

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mainly polemic against German social democracy for its support of the bourgeois governments, it also contains a number of theses advocating forced labour. In the same vein, Lenin had also criticised Kautsky for his 1914 betrayal of the cause of the Second International’s anti-war programme.19 Nikolai Bukharin, who belonged to the Left in the Bolshevik Party at the time, wrote enthusiastically about the role of violence and force during the transition to socialism. Lenin eagerly and positively commented on these specific passages of Bukharin’s book.20 In actual fact, forced requisition without immediate payments to the peasants had already been introduced in 1916 by the Tsarist government. The provisional government continued this policy in 1917. In 1918, the Bolshevik government tried for a short time to make requisitions seem like an extension of the class struggle, a way to force the wealthier peasants to give up their grain to the Poor Peasants committees that were sent out into the countryside. The Bolsheviks’ economic policy during ‘war communism’ attempted to establish a fair and direct exchange of products between the city and the countryside. From September 1919 to April 1920, 800,000 tons of

Figure 15 Forced requisition (prodrazverstka) in Shchadrinsk in the Cheliabinsk region in 1919. These exceptional measures to force the peasants to deliver crops and other products without monetary compensation continued in 1920 and then provoked several peasant uprisings in various parts of Russia. In the Southern Urals, peasants forced the so-called Blue Army to stop Bolshevik requisitions of grain.

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grain and 32,000 tons of meat were to be exchanged for family quotas of textiles, sugar, matches and soup. Because of the shrinking amounts of products from industry, the collections became characterised as confiscation without compensation; this led to widespread protests in the regions that the Reds controlled. In the Southern Urals, organised peasant revolts occurred in 1920–1921. In the Kurgan district, peasants formed the so-called Blue Army, which the Red Army was able to crush only after extremely harsh measures. The most organised opposition to Soviet power came from soldiers who had deserted from the Red Army and formed their own military units to fight the new Cheliabinsk authorities. The local press reported that 30,230 deserters had been captured between November 1919 and November 1920; the real number of armed peasant rebels was probably much higher. These loosely organised groups were united by slogans such as ‘Down with the communists!’ ‘Abolish forced requisitions!’ and ‘Reinstate free trade!’ The largest peasant army in the Cheliabinsk guberniia called itself the Blue Army and had approximately 50,000 soldiers, mainly from Cossack villages in the south. However, they did not present well-organised military formations and the Red Army and Cheka units were easily able to pacify the region. The Cheka sentenced 143 rebellious peasants, 60 of whom were to be executed and the rest sent to prisons. Cheliabinsk’s prisons, referred to as ‘correction houses’ after the revolution, accommodated 10,097 prisoners in 1920. Troitsk, Kurgan and Verkhneuralsk also housed hundreds of prisoners after the Civil War. Concentration camps were established during the Civil War in places like Miass, Verkhneuralsk, Troitsk and Kurgan as detention places for defeated Cossacks and other political prisoners from the peasant armies.21 In March 1921 several hundred nuns from the convent in Cheliabinsk received long-term sentences. Because Soviet historians have not studied these early camps for political prisoners, very little is known about their character. The camps had been used at times for German and other prisoners of war from 1914–1917.22 Most of the camps were considered to be temporary solutions and most of the peasants detained were allowed to go home after short periods. The Urals camps for imprisoned Cossack families were quickly dissolved. The more elaborate opponents of Soviet power, such as former White officers or Cossack leaders, were under constant surveillance by the Cheka and special registers were kept of political opponents. During the collectivisation drive from 1930 to 1932 and the Great Terror in 1937, these lists of names were often used to determine which categories of the

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population should be targeted by various ‘mass operations’ of repression and terror.23 In the spring of 1921, Lenin became the first member of the Communist Party to publicly admit that the earlier economic system had been a failure. A New Economic Policy (NEP) was introduced that gave the peasants the right to trade their surplus freely on the market, after having paid a tax in kind (in the form of grain or other products). These changes came too late, however, to avoid a disastrous famine, which had several causes. The immediate cause was a severe drought in many parts of southern Russia.24 At the same time, a number of small enterprises were given back to their former owners and private ownership was allowed in certain categories of trade and industry. Foreign owners were offered concessions to their enterprises in Russia. Before the NEP produced any benefits, the consequences of the Civil War and the earlier Bolshevik economic policy took a high toll. There was a disastrous scarcity of foodstuffs and mortality rose sharply in the cities. In the Cheliabinsk guberniia, over 30,000 people died as a direct effect of the famine and reduced immunity to illnesses. The city’s population dropped from 62,654 in 1920 to 55,735 in 1923.25 The suffering people received help from two Russian and several foreign organisations that sent food and medicine and built shelters and restaurants in the Volga region as well as in other regions. The leading relief organisation was the American Relief Administration (ARA), which distributed food to over 80,000 people in the guberniia and to more than 7000 people in the city of Cheliabinsk, where food was distributed from seven canteens. American doctors who accompanied the ARA were alarmed by the lack of competent personnel in local hospitals. In Cheliabinsk, for example, a barber was responsible for the polyclinic, an ordinary industrial worker performed the role in Ekaterinburg and a veterinarian assumed the same duties in Ufa. None of these people had reliable information about the most frequent illnesses or epidemics in the region. The Americans distributed medicine in the hope that it would be of at least some use.26 At the same time, ARA personnel, particularly those who were officers in the US Army, were under surveillance from the Soviet secret police, who suspected that these Americans were carrying intelligence work as well as philanthropy. A great social problem in Cheliabinsk in the 1920s, as in the other parts of Soviet Russia after seven years of wars, was the great number of orphans and homeless children, known as bezprizorniki. Authorities estimated there were over 125,000 bezprizorniki in the Russian republic in 1920. Following the massive famine of 1921–22, this number increased

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Figure 16 Registration of people waiting for a place in the night shelters in Cheliabinsk. In 1921, 40 per cent of Russia’s territory was struck by a disastrous famine that left more than 20 million people starving. Many fled to more prosperous, less badly hit areas in Siberia and desperate people gathered in the waiting halls at the Cheliabinsk railway station. More than 100,000 persons were registered at the Cheliabinsk evacuation centres in 1921. In that year, more than 600 children were evacuated from the famine-stricken districts in Cheliabinsk to the grain-rich areas in Siberia, a measure that only marginally relieved the procurement situation in the city.

to over half a million children. By the end of the 1920s, there were still 130,000 orphans in approximately 2000 orphanages. The fate of these children depended on whether they had relatives who could take care of them. Some children were sent to foster homes, others were put to work in factories, artisan shops or peasant households. The Soviet state strove to give these children a fair chance of elementary education and basic professional training. Many radical pedagogical methods were tested in the 1920s, particularly regarding the criminalised gangs of youths that hung around in the big cities. The pedagogy of Anton Makarenko is one example of how the Soviets tried to form new citizens out of this lost generation. Other children’s colonies were founded by the secret police.27 This section has covered the first dimension in the Soviet drama: how the wars changed Russian society and what the consequences were of the militarisation of society. As the well known Hungarian-Soviet economist Evgenii Varga did in a booklet that was not published in the USSR until the 1960s, many historians have emphasised the severe

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Figure 17 Workshops for shoemaking, binding, weaving and tailoring were the first labour schools for hundreds of young people.

impact that the brutalisation, terror and reprisals during the Civil War had on the people and their new leadership. The next dimension concerns what Babel and Souvarine discussed in Paris; how industry and the economy at large prepared for the expected next great war.

Recovery under the New Economic Policy The New Economic Policy (NEP) that was introduced in 1921 gave the peasants freedom to trade their grain surplus after paying a tax in kind. Small enterprises could be taken back by their former owners and the large industries remained state property. This mixed economy did, in fact, reinvigorate the economy within a few years and trade boomed after the disastrous period of 1918–1921. In the mid-1920s, Cheliabinsk was again a flourishing trade centre for the peasants in the surrounding villages. The population increased greatly from 1923 onwards. This reflected the well known phenomenon that, following many years of suffering, population tends to experience a compensatory high natality. Livestock in Cheliabinsk was also reconstituted after the war years. In 1920 there were 210,000 horses and 249,000 cows but this number dropped in 1922 to 82,000 horses and 89,000 cows. The stock of horses

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had not recovered by 1927, when there were only 190,000 horses, but there were 315,000 cows in the smaller Cheliabinsk district (okrug) that was merely a part of the guberniia. The NEP was a success until 1926. However, as the situation of the peasants changed at a faster pace than that of the industrial workers and as unemployment surged in the cities, a Leftist opposition within the Communist Party warned that growing income differences and the emergence of new social classes were undermining Soviet power. Nouveau riche personalities, so-called NEP-men with a pattern of conspicuous consumption, were considered to have become the new exploiting category. Similarly, the wealthier peasants, pejoratively called ‘kulaks’, were considered to be the exploiting class in the countryside. However, trade was also sensitive to all movements on the market. A price structure that was unfavourable for the peasants led to less grain being sold at the market. International conflicts and the war scare led to speculative price increases in autumn 1927. The state refrained from raising its fixed purchase prices despite changes in the size of the harvest or the movements on the market. The general opinion in the party leadership was that since the main industrial enterprises were state owned, there was no risk of capitalist restoration and the demands of the workers must be given higher priority. The Soviet state could not yet cope with the geopolitical challenges that had emerged after World War I. After the mid-1920s, the Soviet leadership considered that the mixed model of the NEP economy had exhausted its potential. The fact that Soviet agriculture was, to a large extent, still considered self-sufficient for domestic consumption, hampered the development of industry. The internal market was too small for the consumer industry to receive enough demand for longterm growth.

A new industrial landscape emerges The natural resources of the Urals have been utilised ever since the reign of Peter the Great in the 18th century, when iron works were established. William Chamberlin wrote: An old Russian joke goes that the schoolboy who hesitates where a precious metal is found can assuredly answer that it exists in the Urals. These mountains are poor in carbon coal, but rich in almost all minerals: iron, copper, gold, platina, nickel, asbest, lead, zinc, cobalt, wanadin and kali – to mention only some of the more important ones.28

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Many industrial projects were envisioned in the Urals after the end of the 19th century, but economic calculations predicted they would be unprofitable. In the latter half of the 19th century, industries in southern Russia and the Ukraine were vastly more expansive than those in the Urals. Geopolitics had made it important to spread important industries to the interior of the country, and farther from the parts of the Ukraine that might come within range of foreign bomber planes in possible future war zones. The Bolshevik industrialisation drive was heavily influenced by the global economic crisis that started in 1929. From the end of the 1920s, the strategic considerations of the army, which assumed that the most probable threat would come from a coalition of hostile powers, had a decisive influence on the debate of tempos and growth rates.29 Geopolitical considerations determined that industries that were vital in wartime should be spread across the interior of the country rather than concentrated in vulnerable areas of the Ukraine. Accordingly, old industrial factories in the Urals were reconstructed during the 1930s, while new workshops were added and modern equipment was bought from the West. In many respects, the accomplishments in this dimension merely continued what scientists and capitalists had wanted to do in Tsarist times. Those projects remained unfulfilled, however, because they were seldom found to be commercially motivated. The Bolsheviks believed that their strategic advantage was that the USSR would achieve a second metallurgical basis with which to compensate for the higher investment costs compared to the existing iron and steel works in southern Russia and the Ukraine. Charcoal iron was still in high demand in the 1930s and during World War II, particularly for the production of high-quality steel. However, charcoal was also the main deficient product in the 1920s that hindered metallurgy in the Urals from growing and competing with the Ukraine.30 The Soviet elite, party functionaries, engineers and technicians prepared an impressive reconstruction programme that involved building hundreds of new industrial plants. However, many problems were encountered before the buildings were ready for production. Raw materials were extremely scarce and there were few qualified workers and specialists. The most important task was to overcome backwardness and reach the same levels of production as Western countries. During one ten-year period, the Soviet Union accomplished what the British historian Edward Carr at the time described as ‘a monumental accomplishment at a monstrous price’. Carr was referring to the more than

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Figure 18 Timber floating on the Ai and Tesma Rivers. The ironworks in Cheliabinsk continued to use charcoal in the 1930s. Approximately 10,000 cubic metres of forest was felled daily for the making of charcoal.

9000 industrial enterprises that were created in the 1930s and were a decisive factor in the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany.31 Iron and steel works and aluminium and nickel factories, as well as machine-building plants, were located east of the Volga and in the Urals, which constituted a future economic basis for weapons production.32 The 15th Communist Party Congress in December 1927 adopted a draft for a five-year plan for the economic development of the country. The spokesmen for the Supreme Economic Council (VSNKh) Valerin Kuibyshev, defence commissar Kliment Voroshilov and the chairman of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate (Rabkrin) V.N. Andronnikov, all argued that the further industrialisation of the Urals was of great importance from a defence perspective.33 The only opposition came from those party leaders who preferred to continue investing in the coal mines and existing industrial structures in the Ukraine. An American named Hubert Knickerbocker, a contemporary observer of the Soviet Union at the time, noted how carefully the Bolsheviks debated the new, industrial country with clear geostrategic perspectives in 1930.34 In the early 1930s, the Soviet military leadership feared that the next great war could involve the USSR, both in the east against Japan and in the west against a coalition of great powers. For this reason, a new

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military-industrial basis should be built at secure distances from both these potential war zones. At the 17th Communist Party Congress in 1934, the former chairman of the State Planning Commission (Gosplan), Gleb Krzhizhanovskii, argued that the arms industry should be located as far from the borders as necessary, and referred to such an industrial site in the Urals as ‘the backbone of our defence’. The frequent and solemn declarations of the 1930s did not correspond to the actual achievements. First, an industrial basis had to be established to secure the needs of the defence industry in terms of raw materials, semifinished products and machinery. Second, the industrialisation itself required ever-increasing amounts of natural resources. Instead, the first five-year plans planned to maximise the existing mines and natural resources. Finally, the lack of investment capital for the Urals led to a significant expansion of the existing factories in the European parts of Russia and the Ukraine, a move that was motivated by a wish for a higher return on investment. On the one hand, therefore, the state planning organs had a strategy of locating the new defence industry in the country’s interior. On the other hand, military propaganda would have it that Soviet territory would witness only short-term skirmishes, after which any potential aggressor would be driven back and defeated on its own territory. Consequently, new factories for the production of shells and other ammunition were built in Zaparozh’ie, Dnepropetrovsk, Dneproderzhinsk, Kharkov and Leningrad during the second half of the 1930s. Prior to 1939, few members of the military dared to express any other view than the official position, that an enemy could advance no more than a hundred or so kilometres beyond the well armed western defence lines, the so-called Stalin Line. To some extent, army intelligence in the 1920s had been more realistic about how swiftly a foreign invasion might come and how far it might reach into Soviet territory. In the 1930s, the supreme command had a greater degree of self-confidence. This misplaced confidence regarding the strength of the Soviet armed forces nearly proved fatal.35 The transfer and further development of technology from the West to the USSR was an important feature of the country’s economic policy. Education of technicians and engineers was started on a massive scale and after their examinations engineers were moved to the new industrial cities. Their social position was uncertain, however, depending on whether they had received their training in Tsarist times or if they were among the new engineers who had been trained in the more politicised Soviet spirit. Between 1928 and 1932, specialists were repressed and sentenced to labour camps or execution, as they were often depicted

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in show trials as scapegoats for the numerous mistakes that hampered industrialisation; mistakes that were often worsened by political decisions. With the benefit of hindsight, this can be interpreted as a forced generational change within the engineering corpus. The original five-year plan was based on directives from Gosplan and the party congress in December 1927. However, these guidelines were soon changed in favour of higher targets, which were often incompatible. Initially, realistic targets were set for the whole Urals area. In the summer of 1929, the central authorities in Moscow and the local elite started to promote even higher targets based on an already strained investment plan. This plan was then ‘adjusted’ later that year to account for the ‘encounter proposals’ that were supposedly promoted by the workers themselves at mass meetings. One all-encompassing plan was called ‘The Greater Urals’ (Bolshoi Ural) and was designed to incorporate many of the proposals from earlier business ventures, electrification plans and the latest draft of the five-year plan for the region. It was discussed in September 1929 and approved in April 1930. ‘On the tasks for Uralmet’, a decision by the Communist Party’s Central Committee on 15 May 1930, refers to this decision and the ‘Greater Urals’ plan was finally approved by the 16th All-union Communist Congress in 1930. As events would soon show, this was an especially daring planning document. It soon became evident that it would be impossible even to approach the levels of production that the plan demands. Accordingly, the second five-year plan, of 1933–1937, contained ambitions that were more balanced and in line with real capabilities. After several years of debates and with the area in competition with the traditional industrial regions of southern Russia, a decision was made that a new iron and steel works would be built close to the iron ore deposits at Magnitka mountain in the Southern Urals. Coal was to be sent from the Karaganda basin in the Kuznetsk region of Siberia. This vision of the Urals further developed plans that had already been approved in Moscow. The Ural leaders lobbied for their project, which was referred to as the Ural-Kuznetsk-Kombinat (UKK).36 This was one of several similar attempts in the first five-year plan to create new centres of growth in a region that would have otherwise remained underused. Another long-term vision that did not progress beyond the drawing boards and debates concerned the industrial use of the resources in the Northern Urals – the expansion of the railway network to allow for expanded exports of forestry products.37 One of the most widely publicised achievements of the five-year plans was, as mentioned,the Magnitogorsk iron and steel works, which

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were built in record time. In the second half of the 1930s, the plant approached its projected maximum capacity with 5.83 million tons of iron ore, 1.55 million tons of cast iron, 1.49 tons of steel and 1.18 million tons of rolled iron. Cheliabinsk oblast (region) had two iron and steel works that had greater significance for the arms industry because they were based on the purer iron ore at Bakal and used charcoal for processing. The Asha quality steel works was completed first. In 1938, the Satka and Asha factories together produced 143,000 tons of cast iron, while the Asha works delivered a further 57,000 tons of highquality steel. A few years later, the quality steel works in Bakal started production based on local ore resources. For a couple of years, the building site evolved as planned to complement the Magnitogorsk iron and steel works. Between 1932 and 1934, a new road and railway bridge over river Miass, a mechanical workshop, a sawmill and several garages were completed. However, due to a lack of resources, construction was stopped in 1935. It was only in early 1941, when war with Germany seemed imminent and demand for steel from the armaments industry increased, that work restarted. It should be emphasised that many other minerals, apart from iron ore, are vital for the modern machine-building and armaments industry. Special steel and many other alloys, which are easier to handle and forge than iron, cast iron and steel, would be impossible to produce without copper, zinc, aluminium, nickel, cobalt, tungsten, molybdenum and other metals. Nickel, chrome, tungsten and titanium are harder than iron and can help to produce alloys that are extremely steadfast. The mass production of aluminium made a modern airplane industry possible in the 1930s, a time when all the above-mentioned metals were developed in the Urals.38 The Cheliabinsk zinc factory was an important part of the five-year plan. One reason for locating the factory in Cheliabinsk was the simultaneous decision to build a regional coal-fired power station because of the fact that electrolytic refining of zinc is very energy consuming. Construction of the power plant started in 1930 but its completion was constantly delayed by a lack of resources, such as reinforcement bars of low-quality steel, which was not delivered in sufficient quantities. By 1932, the zinc factory was supposed to have been ready and to have reached half of its projected capacity (10,000 tons of zinc per year). In reality, not even the building itself was ready. The zinc works were only completed after people’s commissar Ordzhonikidze had set different priorities for the second five-year plan (1933–1937).39

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An important precondition for the energy-demanding zinc and other non-ferrous works in Cheliabinsk was the new ChGRES regional power station, which had a capacity of 99,000 kWh. The power stations in Cheliabinsk, Magnitogorsk and Krasnogorsk only partly satisfied the rising energy requirements in the 1930s. The new coal-fired electric power plants in Cheliabinsk, Magnitogorsk and Krasnogorsk only partially satisfied the increasing energy requirements of the 1930s. At the same time, lignite (brown coal) was excavated in the Kopeisk region east of Cheliabinsk, in Korkino and other places in the region. The new industry had enormous transport requirements; most railway tracks needed to be renovated, especially along the Trans-Siberian Railway, while other existing lines and a number of completely new rail connections needed to be double-tracked. The southern part of the Trans-Siberian Railway (Samara-Ufa-Cheliabinsk) was repaired and modernised up to Tomsk, where it joined the northern part (Iaroslavl-Vjatka-Sverdlovsk). The regional South Urals Railways grew in importance when the industries in Magntiogorsk, Zlatoust and other industrial centres expanded.

Figure 19 The Mechanical Works in the old metal industrial city of Zlatoust in 1926. Most of the enterprise’s machinery had been returned from Tomsk in Siberia, where the White forces had sent it during the Civil War. Production restarted at a low level in 1919.

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The Ferro Alloys works (Ferrosplav), later called Cheliabinsk ElectroMetallurgical Kombinat (ChEMK), was of key importance to the defence industry in the 1930s. The first furnaces started firing on 7 November 1930 and the factory itself was inaugurated in August 1931. By 1933, production included 12,710 tons of iron alloys, which included 3451 tons of high-quality alloys. Overall, the factory’s plans were often fulfilled, except for the quality alloys. The initial period using the new machinery saw many interruptions in production, often due to an insufficient electricity supply or electrodes that had worn out and not been replaced. Repairs accounted for approximately 30 per cent of production stoppages and in 1933 the furnaces were unusable for 12,000 hours.40 In 1938, 15.7 tons of ferro-chromium were produced, along with 12.8 tons of ferro-silicon, 2.5 tons of ferro-tungsten and 1,160 kilograms of ferromolybdenum.41 Ferrosplav’s products were in demand from factories in Moscow, Leningrad, the Ukraine and Western Siberia, for use in armour plating, construction iron and other items that need reinforcement. An internal report from Ferrosplav provides a vivid picture of the new industries: Just as in many other enterprises, the turnover of labourers and clerks was great. In 1932, 1416 workers and 308 servants were hired, while 1253 workers and 284 servants left Ferrosplav. The ventilation system did not function in the workshops, where the heat in summertime was unbearable. There was a cross-draught because many windows were broken and because the doors between the shops were almost always open. Another reason why many left the factory was that the promised dwellings had not been built. The canteen at the factory did not have its own kitchen so food was brought there in thermoses. There are reports of thin soups, porridge and other meals that give no satisfaction. Sometimes the workers quite simply refused to eat the food. There was no well-organised wage system with differentiations to encourage workers to stay at the factory. Except for A. Walter, who was the technical leader at the factory, all of the management are recently graduated engineers and technicians who finished their studies in 1931–1932 and who were in their first workplace.42 An entire chapter would not be enough to paint a complete picture of the problems and the progress of forced industrialisation. However, a brief list of the factories that were built in the region hints at the basis for an industrial mobilisation and, therefore, for the Soviet war efforts from 1941 to 1945.

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The Nickel Works at Ufaleisk were completed in 1933.43 At the same time, the Cheliabinsk Abrasive Tools Works (Abrazivnyi kombinat) had received a completely new machine park. In 1933, the machine-building industry received 42 tons of cutting and grinding discs and 1610 tons of alum in pellet form. The following year saw the completion of a new rolled steel works in Kamensk-Sinarsk and an electrode factory in Cheliabinsk. Factories were set up in Kyshtym and Karabash to refine and roll copper.44 In May 1935, the modern Ordzhonikidze Machinebuilding Works (Stankostroitel’nyi zavod im. Ordzhonikidze or ‘Stankomash’) was inaugurated in Cheliabinsk. While its basic production line was for heavy machinery, the enterprise also had an industrial mobilisation plan for the production of shells and other ammunition.45 The emphasis in the second five-year plan, from 1933–1937 shifted from achieving the highest possible growth rates to assimilating and mastering new technology. There were numerous problems related to raising labour productivity.46 There were frequent conflicts between the modernisation of agriculture and the desire to strengthen the country’s defence potential. Did this mean that the Soviet planned economy had coordinated enterprises in different sectors better than a market economy could have? The links between the different industrial plants and a sectorial division between mutually dependant enterprises in the metals and machine-building sector were planned. The goal was to achieve rational growth of heavy industry and to create growth pools in the Urals and in Kazakhstan. From a long-term perspective, however, the industrial structure of the Urals became overly one-sided and this imbalance had to be corrected after World War II in favour of producing more consumer goods. There was a lack of planning for the vast Urals region that stretched across regional (oblast) borders. Every decision at the ministry level (people’s commissariat before 1946) prescribed actions for dozens of other ministries (people’s commissariats) and the same was true for decisions at the regional level.

Transformation of the countryside: collectivisation and dekulakisation During the intensive debates that took place regarding the industrialisation of the country, various commissions proposed drafts for the fiveyear plan for the entire economy. This plan was then revised under pressure from the central powers and from local interest groups. The Urals were to become a new industrial centre.

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At the same time, in the late 1920s, the party leaders debated how the transformation of the countryside should take place. The crucial question was how it would be possible to achieve a higher marketed surplus of grain in order to feed a rapidly growing urban population, while at the same time being able to export agricultural products. Apart from timber and grain, the Soviet Union had few commodities that could generate substantial export income. The five-year plan presumed that imports of industrial machinery would be financed by such exports because the Soviet Union could not expect to receive foreign loans on good terms. One crucial historical question is why Stalin’s circle could no longer accept the idea of a wealthy middle class in the countryside, on one hand, and state owned, cooperative and private agriculture, on the other, within the framework of the New Economic Policy. According to their interpretation, the NEP had extinguished its expansion possibilities by the mid-1920s. Agriculture was dominated by self-sufficient farming and was therefore seen as a drag on industrial growth. The relative share of marketed agricultural products was indeed lower than it had been before World War I. This was due to ownership changes, as more households were now independent, self-sufficient units that had little motivation to expand their production for market sale. In other words, the state could not count on this agricultural system to achieve the communist party’s geopolitical aims. Until 1929, the collectivisation of agriculture was expected to evolve in parallel with the delivery of new technology that allowed for largescale production. However, the conflicts between the peasantry and the state’s pricing policy created a sale crisis in 1927–1928 that was temporarily solved by harsh, repressive measures against those peasants who did not agree to deliver grain at the low fixed prices. Stalin and other party leaders led expeditions to various parts of the country and forced peasants to sell more grain or face being accused of ‘speculation’, a crime under the Soviet penal code. This so-called Urals-Siberian method of forced grain deliveries in the winter of 1928 recreated the situation that had prevailed under ‘war communism’ during the Civil War. During this period, Nikolai Bukharin and others in the party leadership continued in to argue for a softer, market-oriented link with the peasantry. The foundation of the New Economic Policy was that the peasantry, after paying a fixed tax either in kind or in money, were free to trade their grain surplus and other products. Trade expanded rapidly after the initial difficult period but it was very sensitive to price changes.

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Relative price changes to the disadvantage of agriculture led to reduced quantities of grain being offered on the markets. International conflicts and the war scare of 1927 led to sharp price rises that year. Regardless of the various crop sizes and movements in the markets, however, the state refused to change its pricing policy. There were acute problems in supplying enough food in the cities in the autumn of 1927. This was the immediate background for Stalin’s decision to use repressive measures against peasants accused of hoarding grain for speculative purposes. Supported by the secret police, then named the United State Political administration (OGPU), campaigns took place in the winter of 1928 to confiscate grain in Western Siberia and the Urals. These measures helped to prevent famines from striking the cities in 1928 and were approved as temporary and extraordinary measures. However, a similar situation occurred the following autumn and the use of force had to be applied widely. The upper strata of the peasantry was depicted as a social force that was opposed to the modernisation and collectivisation of agriculture. Step by step, the Stalinist group of the Communist Party urged a faster rate of collectivisation than had been approved in the first five-year plan, in which various forms of cooperation in the countryside would grow only to a small extent between 1928 and 1932. In the late 1920s, the cooperative movement among the peasantry in the Urals comprised only one-third of all households, organised as consumer and artisan cooperatives. When the plan for grain delivery was not fulfilled, the break with NEP orientation took place. The country-wide situation regarding grain supplies in the winter and spring of 1927–1928 was alarming. There were reports of bread shortages in the mining city of Kopeisk and people were lining up at midnight in order to have the opportunity to buy bread when the shops opened in the morning. In the mines workers were already discussing whether to strike if the bread shortage was not addressed. On 26 April 1928, 434 miners went on strike.47 In January-February 1928, a series of purges took place in the rural areas in the Urals, with 1157 functionaries dismissed from their jobs and often arrested on various charges. The peasants were forced to deliver their grain and the penalties for failing to do so ranged from monetary fines and restricted access to water and stoves to the exclusion of their children from schools and reduced health care. These measures led to a huge stream of protest letters to the authorities. Still, the plans had only been 83 per cent met by May 1928.48Grain deliveries in November 1928 were only 58 per cent of the previous year’s amount. The peasants refused to sell more grain at the prices set by the government, which were still very low. The New Economic Policy had entered

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a blind alley because industry had not grown to the extent to which it could produce enough commodities to stimulate the peasants to sell more grain and, in turn, buy industrial products. The state had to either to use repression and forced requisitions, or to make concessions to the peasantry, i.e. to change its pricing policy in order to get grain to the market; this would probably have meant that less grain could be set aside for exports and, consequently, less resources acquired for financial investments. In 1928, a new form of forced deliveries to the state through the method of ‘self-taxation’ was introduced. This to be no more than 25 per cent of the total agrarian tax and was to be established by the peasants themselves at public meetings. In January 1929, a new directive allowed self-taxation to be set as high as 50 per cent of the agrarian tax, which amounted to almost the total confiscation of peasants’ property.49 In the first nine months of 1929, the OGPU arrested approximately 1000 individuals throughout the Urals. Of these, 380 were sentenced according to the infamous Article 58 for ‘counter-revolutionary activity’, while many others were charged in regular courts and sentenced for other crimes and misdemeanours. All these measures were part of the intensified struggle to speed up collectivisation. The forced requisitions in 1929 were on a greater scale than ever and, in addition to grain, also included dairy and meat products.50 Stalin’s ‘revolution from above’ started with the collectivisation of the countryside through the intensive use of force and at a much faster tempo than previously planned. There was no longer room for development that had preconditions for a mechanised and technically advanced agriculture with cooperative and collectives in several different formats, where tractors and machines would gradually supplant horses and other draught animals. Instead, the local party leaders were ordered to ensure the rapid establishment of collective farms, or kolkhozy, very few of which had modern equipment from the start. Stalin had support for his aims within the core leadership, who saw industrialisation as a way to consolidate what they regarded as the basic preconditions of socialism. Stalin’s personal role in these events should not hide the fact that he was surrounded by a large group of like-minded communists. These party cadres held the same views as Stalin and were sometimes even more eager than he was to take drastic measures against the wealthier groups in the countryside. The meetings of the party’s central committee and its politburo were dominated by economic questions regarding the factories, power stations and mines that could be built in the fastest possible time. Many political meetings

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Figure 20 A tractor on its way to the fields in 1927 in the Troitsk district. In 1926, there were only 555 tractors in the whole Urals, most of which were owned by machinery cooperatives and sovkhozy (state farms). In the Cheliabinsk region, there was a plan to establish 6000 new settlements where the peasants would receive loans, social benefits and fodder for the animals, so that new villages could be created.

discussed the prognoses for sowing and harvesting, as well as the requisition of grain. In the early 1930s, the supreme party organs made a number of decisions regarding collectivisation. Most of the first collective farms were set up by poor peasants and were indeed based on voluntary agreements. From the summer of 1929 onwards, however, a more repressive and forceful approach was implemented. In January 1930, the politburo decided that all regions with a grain surplus should establish collective farms. For a few chaotic months, rural authorities forced peasants to give up their horses and their machinery to the newly formed collectives. A target was set to establish collective farms fully before the spring sowing season of 1930. Within a couple of weeks, many villages had been totally collectivised. However, many peasants protested strongly against the collectives. One protest method was the mass slaughter of livestock; the peasants preferred to slaughter their own animals rather than give them up to the new collectives. Horses, cows and goats were slaughtered on a mass scale. From 1929 to 1934, the number of horses was reduced from 1.34 million to 315,000, cows from 2.07 million to 1.22 million and sheep and goats from 3.3 million to 1.18 million. Despite a recovery of sorts in the years that followed, the Cheliabinsk region (oblast) had

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Figure 21 The general store of a workers’ cooperative on a street in the Cheliabinsk region.

fewer animals in 1937 than it had in 1926 (24.8 per cent of the horse stock, 57.7 per cent of the number of cows, 51.5 per cent of the pigs and 57.7 per cent of the sheep and goats).51 The peasants’ protests in the winter of 1929–1930 extended far beyond those who were threatened directly by expropriation. As a result, the communist leadership was forced to slow down the collectivisation process and emphasise the voluntary transition to kolkhoz farms. In Stalin’s article entitled ‘Dizzy with success’, the faults and excesses were ascribed to the local party leaders. Many kolkhozy that had been set up during the first campaigns of 1930 had weak foundations. As soon as the authorities declared that membership in the kolkhoz was voluntary, many peasants

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opted to leave. In the next phase of collectivisation, the authorities set more reasonable targets and used less force and more economic levers against individual peasants. By 1932, the number of kolkhoz peasants in the Urals had dropped to approximately 70,000. In 1931 and 1932, many protest actions took place in the Urals: leaflets were printed and distributed calling for the elimination of Soviet power, while exiled Russian political groups performed a variety of terrorist acts.

Figure 22 Harvesting with horses in 1930 on a sovkhoz in the Magnitogorsk building settlement.

Figure 23 The Barancha sovkhoz in the summer of 1930. Since 1929, 17 sovkhozy had been formed in the Cheliabinsk region.

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Agricultural production in the Urals as a whole fell during collectivisation. The gross harvest (calculated at the point of harvest, regardless of how much was actually barged and stored later) dropped from 4.94 million tons in 1928 to 3.35 million tons in 1932. The number of draught animals was halved, from 12.7 million horses and oxen to 5.3 million.52 The poor harvest of 1931 and equally dire predictions for 1932 forced the authorities in the Urals to cut rations in the cities and even for kolkhoz members. At the same time, food products were exported from the Urals. In 1931, 5 tons of butter; 6.5 tons of bacon; 345 railcar-loads of eggs and living birds were sent abroad, including 438,500 hens, 275,000 geese, 25,000 ducks (an 80 per cent increase from 1930) and 552,933 units of game; 49 tons of meat preserves (98,000 tins); 493,000 cans of preserved fish; 22.5 tons of frozen alpine char and 18.4 tons of frozen salmon. This can probably be explained by the fact that certain administrations were responsible for exports, while others were responsible for internal procurement. The regional party committee in Sverdlovsk was not authorised to change centrally decided export plans; it was considered more important to obtain hard currency from foreign trade, even if it resulted in a semi-starving population.53 Despite poor harvests prior to 1932–1933, the famine in the Cheliabinsk region during this period was not as serious as in the Ukraine and northern Caucasus. Large parts of the Urals (70 out of 143 regions) experienced what were euphemistically termed ‘foodstuff problems’ (prodovol’stvennye zatrudneniia); in other words, hunger that led to widespread begging and theft from the property of the kolkhozy. The special settlers, the deported kulaks from other regions, were hit by the disaster during this winter. In 1932, as harvest time approached, a law was adopted that became popularly known as ‘the law of the five grains of corn’ (zakon o pjati kolosach). In this decree of 7 August, severe punishments – ranging from forced labour in camps to the death penalty – were administered for the theft of kolkhoz property. The grain that hungry and starving peasants took from their own fields amounted to much more than a few grains of corn. Groups of peasants and entire families, often numbering 20–30 people, would take tens of kilograms of grain at night and then hide it. Stalin wrote to another party leader that the law was to be applied primarily to such groups. On the basis of this law, 27,700 people in the Urals were sentenced for the theft of kolkhoz property and other misdemeanours during grain harvests. From August 1932 to May 1933, 763 persons were sentenced to death, 961 were given camp terms

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of up to ten years, 305 were sentenced to shorter camp terms and 165 were given the penalty of labour (with reduced earnings) at their ordinary place of work. Most of those sentenced were ordinary members of the kolkhozy, the so-called middle class and poor peasants.54 Some years later, many of the sentences were commuted and the individuals were given amnesty from camp sentences in general. Arson of kolkhoz property and the burning of haystacks was widespread. The Cheliabinsk regional party committee (obkom) sent an order to the Troitsk region in the southern part of the oblast that reliable kolkhoz members should form a guard to protect the fields and the haystacks, day and night. The local departments of the secret police OGPU were responsible for bringing in the harvest.55 At the same time, the new cadres in the kolkhozy were tested in purges. In the autumn of 1932, many local leaders set up their own stores of grain to feed the kolkhoz families in winter rather than fulfilling the quotas of state deliveries. In a letter from a local party organisation, the leadership of the kolkhozy were threatened with severe punishments if state grain requisitions were not fulfilled first. Kolkhozy that did not fulfil their quota were forced to give up the small reserves they had set aside. This suggested an upcoming severe famine in the Urals.56 In 1933, more than 30,000 persons were dismissed, including holders of senior leading positions and many ordinary kolkhoz members (mechanics, tractor operators, etc.).57 When the Cheliabinsk region oblast’ was constituted in 1934, it had 4199 kolkhozy comprising 268,000 households and 118 grain and cattle sovkhozy (state farms). In 1933, 13,100 households voluntarily left the kolkhozy, in addition to the 37,000 households that were forced to leave them; only 21,800 households joined the kolkhozy. Approximately 100 machine and tractor stations (MTS) served the kolkhozy with 4780 tractors and 1115 combines. In October 1934, there were 119,000 households that were not part of state and cooperative agriculture; in other words, collectivisation had been carried out for 69.5 per cent of the population.58 From 1934 onwards, the 125,395 remaining individual peasants faced increasing pressure to join the almost 270,000 in the kolkhozy.59 As 1935 approached, there were 4780 kolkhozy and there had been a considerable increase in the total number of tractors and combines. Dekulakisation in the Southern Urals In the 1920s, the government even tried to find economic criteria to divide the rich into different categories. The decrees of 1930 separated

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the kulaks – the most prosperous group of peasants – into three categories on economic and also political criteria. The most ‘counter-revolutionary’ peasants were sentenced to concentration camps and their families were deported from the villages. Other groups of kulaks were deported to remote regions of the Northern Urals or to Siberia. Finally, members of a third subgroup of kulaks were merely deported to outlying parts of the region. Through a variety of measures, the property of the kulaks was transferred to the collective farms organised at the same time. Kulaks who owned smaller farmsteads received new property outside the village community and new special settlements (spetsposëlki) were occasionally created far from the railways and rivers. The OGPU’s order of 2 February 1930 talked about ‘liquidating the kulaks’. It is necessary at this point to digress briefly in order to make a clarification. To the Bolsheviks, ‘eliminate as a class’ meant removing the

Figure 24 The special settlement of Sukhaia Atia in the Miniar district. Although the deported ‘kulaks’ with their families in the special villages were counted as part of the Gulag administration system, their status was different from that of the camp prisoners. After some time, these villages had a developed infrastructure that included schools. The kulaks and their children could, in principle, be counted with the same rights as ordinary Soviet citizens according to a 1936 decree, although they were bound to remain in their village. The youth felt bitter because they were not entitled to the same pre-military training or even to pass the tests for the popular Voroshilov marksman plaque. Those who married a person from the free citizens in the neighbourhood had their deportation status relieved and could move from the special village. The conditions varied substantially depending on the local commandant and his attitudes more than on written laws and regulations. When some special settlements in harsh forest regions prospered and expanded, certain commandants would even talk of the risk of a ‘kulakification’ (okulachivanie). The special settlement system for these kulaks was abolished in 1948.

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social and economic preconditions for the re-emergence of kulak peasants. During the Russian Civil War, one Chekist had bragged that the Red Terror in 1918 aimed to ‘liquidate the bourgeoisie’. He was reprimanded by Lenin for his lack of understanding of elementary Marxism. The task was by no means physically to exterminate bourgeois individuals but was instead to hinder the preconditions under which the bourgeoisie itself could emerge. A similar view permeated Stalin’s speeches of the late 1920s and the threats against the kulaks. Contrary to what was written at the time in Nazi German propaganda and other descriptions of the USSR, the dekulatisaton did not aim to annihilate physically the peasants as ablebodied persons. Instead, their position in Soviet society was degraded to a that of a class without property. They were forced to do commanded work with a minimal salary, which was often paid in kind.60 The lists of the various subgroups noted who in the villages had taken part in demonstrations against Soviet power. These people were characterised as kulaks or ‘middle peasants’ to be expropriated and, together with their families, deported from their villages. The kulaks were forced to give up their cattle and tools to the collective and then travel hundreds of kilometres. It was initially decided that 2200 households in the Cheliabinsk area (okrug) were to be expropriated and lists were made for every village. The motto was that it was better to ‘over-dekulakise’ the villages than ‘under-dekulakise’ them, despite the absence of any definite criteria of what a kulak actually was. The kulaks’ houses, farming tools and cattle were confiscated. In principle, a kulak family was allowed to keep their clothes and other personal belongings, bedclothes, kitchen equipment and tools that were necessary for forestry and fishing, plus foodstuffs for three months and 500 roubles for expenses during their deportation. However, it was common for other villagers to confiscate the kulaks’ personal items. More than 30,000 households were classified as ‘kulak’ throughout the Urals and expropriated. The Southern Urals, which included Cheliabinsk and its surroundings, accounted for 4000–5000 of these households. In the end, the number of ‘counter-revolutionary kulak’ families was fixed at 4685, the fathers of which were sent to Gulag concentration camps or even executed. For the Cheliabinsk region (okrug), this category of kulaks accounted for 700 families. The second category of wealthy peasants, who were to be sent to remote locations, comprised 15,200 families in the entire Urals area and 2250 families from the Cheliabinsk region alone. Expropriations and deportations were mostly performed by OGPU military units, sometimes with support from the Red Army. According

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to official reports, most of these decisions had been approved at public meetings with poor peasants and kolkhozniks. In addition to the two above-mentioned categories, another 700 peasant families were deported from their farmlands but received permission to resettle within the same region (okrug); that is, in the vicinity but outside of the kolkhoz.61 In order to increase the number of regions with complete collectivisation, the Urals executive committee decided on 8 March 1931 to deport the remaining kulaks from regions where the kolkhoz area had reached 40 per cent of the total. All households that had not joined the kolkhozy were automatically included in the vague ‘kulak category’ because of their presumed political attitude – regardless of whether their economic status corresponded to the original criteria for the category – and deported from the region. In 1931, 12,000 peasant families were sent from the Urals and the same fate befell another 5000 households the following year. At the same time, the greater Urals regions received 123,000 kulak deportees from other parts of European Russia and the Ukraine. This gave the Urals one of the greatest concentrations of deported kulaks in the Soviet Union. From the point of view of these individuals, the dekulakisation was a tragedy of enormous proportions. Although many people managed to flee from their villages in the early 1930s, most did not. Thrifty peasants who had achieved a certain measure of well-being and who had been respected in their villages were forced to leave everything they had worked for and start anew under horrendous conditions. Their families had to start new lives in barren forest areas in ‘special settlements’ that lacked any health care facilities. The local soviet and party organs in the deportation regions had not made sufficient preparations to carry out such colonisation. During the winters of 1930 and 1931, innumerable children and elderly people died in the ‘special settlements’. It has not yet been possible, even in recent historiography, to calculate exactly how many people were doomed to death in these Urals regions. Although it might sound paradoxical, the food supply situation was eventually stabilised as the OGPU – after 1934 the USSR People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD) – took over full responsibility for these ‘special settlements’. The NKVD’s directorate for the concentration camps and the special settlements for kulak families was then responsible for feeding, building schools and culture houses and for commandeering able-bodied adults to various work at sites. This led merely to a slight improvement in living conditions. In November 1932, for example, NKVD convicted 140 persons who had allegedly sold 40,000 tons of grain at speculatively high prices that should have been

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distributed to the ‘special settlements’ in the Urals and Western Siberia. Nevertheless, the demographic situation among the deportees deteriorated. Even in January 1935, there were more deaths (1292) than births (743) among special settlers in the Cheliabinsk region (oblast’). So what did the state and party leadership think that these measures had achieved? Many explanations have been proposed as to why the Soviet leadership, under the supreme guidance of Stalin, carried out the brutal collectivisation. According to the most distorted parts of the descriptions of the kolkhoz system, which were given in later years by Stalin himself, a more stable supply of foodstuffs was considered to be an essential result. This differed from the earlier vision of growing

Figure 25 The GPU commandant at the Verkhneasinsk special settlement with youngsters striving to fulfil their daily quota of sawn timber.

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production by mechanisation and modernisation. Henceforth, the leadership could carry out their intended industrialisation without great concern for the changing needs of the direct producers in the Russian countryside. The status of these producers had been changed because of collectivisation, and the new passport system introduced in 1932 had led the peasantry to a refined form of serfdom in which they did not have the right to leave their home villages and were forced to perform the planned tasks at kolkhozy or at nearby building sites. The American historian, James Schneider, has explained the brutal collectivisation from a military perspective, as an effort by Stalin to combine the ideas of military strategists such as Aleksandr Svechin and Boris Shaposhnikov concerning the economic preparedness of modern societies for total war. Without a secure source of food procurement, the Soviet Union would not be able to withstand a well armed enemy in a modern war. Schneider considered this to be a rational element that could clarify some of the reasoning behind Stalin’s new strategy in the 1920s and 1930s. In other respects, Stalin referred to the experience of the Russian Civil War and the significance of a stabilised, reliable home front.62

Figure 26 The brown coal fields in Kopeis are 12 kilometres long and 11 kilometres wide. The resource was discovered in 1904 and mining started in 1916. The coal mines were nationalised in 1918. Rail-bound excavators were produced at the Putilov works in St Petersburg in 1901 and this line of production continued in the Soviet period.

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Figure 27 Deported kulak families arrive at the mines in the brown coal district east of Cheliabinsk. Up to 1935, 2671 families (10,776 persons) were sent to Kopeisk. The working conditions were so harsh that almost 50 per cent of the people deported had fled from the area within a few years. A total of 2913 people fled in 1931, 6038 in 1932, 3070 in 1933 and 460 in 1934. The miners’ city of Kopeisk expanded through the 1920s to approximately 31,000 inhabitants by the end of the decade. The deported peasants had to build their own worker’s villages (trudposiolok) with some 2300 barracks and 1263 dugouts.

Viktor Zemskov made a detailed study of the various categories of special ‘colonists’. According to a decree of 18 August 1930, the dekulakisation intended peasants to colonise the Northern Urals and Western Siberia and develop the agriculture, crafts and forestry of the area. However, from 1931–1932 onwards, the exiled peasants were more commonly commanded to building sites or industrial factories and were therefore regarded as a universal labour force.63 In 1932, the Urals executive committee sent out a directive on how the special settlers should be put to work. The local OGPU was now responsible for workplaces, housing and feeding, as well as for schools for the deported children. This resulted in somewhat better conditions than had existed in 1930 and 1931, when tens of thousands of deported people, mostly elderly and children, had died from famine and diseases.64 The local Soviet authorities were obliged to provide the settlers’ children with cultural and educational facilities. Schools were to be built to provide a seven-year school and at least one school for every 9000 inhabitants. In the larger spetsposëlki, reading houses and clubs were also to be built and experienced teachers, preferably party members, were to be sent to these villages.65 The underlying motive was to educate the children in an atmosphere in which they would be separated from their so-called counter-revolutionary parents.66 From the Ukraine and the Central Ivanov industrial region, as well as from within the greater Urals regions, 1.8 million kulaks and their family members (over 300,000 households) were deported. In 1931–1932,

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many individuals appealed against their deportation sentence but only a small percentage of these appeals were directly approved. For example, if a peasant’s son had served in the Red Army, the peasant would not be subject to dekulakisation. In other cases, the commission would investigate the appeal concerning the status of a peasant. Fewer than 10 per cent of those who protested were allowed to return to their home villages. Others were acquitted of the expropriation charges and received compensation but were convinced to stay at their new deportation places. As the new infrastructure developed, these places were no longer called ‘settlers’ village’ (spetsposëlok) but ‘workers’ village’ (trudposëlok). The new ex-kulak villages in Cheliabinsk oblast’ were described in 1934 in a regional NKVD report to the Main Directorate of Correctional Camps and Workers’ Villages (Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerei i Ispravitelno-Trudovykh Posëlok, GULagITP NKVD SSSR). This report, which ran to more than 150 pages, included data on the geographical location and specialisation of each village, the population structure, the re-education of ex-kulaks and the number of nurseries and cottage hospitals. This part of the Gulag in the Cheliabinsk oblast consisted of 34 workers’ villages (trudposëlki), with deported peasants from the IvanovoVoznesensk area, the Ukraine and other parts of the Urals. A total of 52,256 individuals and 14,532 families lived there, distributed as shown in Table 1.67 These villages were dispersed across a region of 2.5 million inhabitants and thousands of ordinary villages, where the kolkhoz was the Table 1 Place in Cheliabinsk oblast (activity) Magnitogorsk (Magnitostroi) Miniarsk (LPCh) Satka (Magnezit-factory) -’- (Bakal-mine and factory building) Karabash (copper mine) Kamyshel (brick factory) Zlatoust (construction, mines) Kamensk (Sinarstroi) -’- (mining) Kyshtym (fishery sovkhoz in Uvil’di) Cheliabinsk (Tomino-sovchos) -’- (NKVD penal and forced labour colony) Total

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Number of villages

Families

Inhabitants

4 4 1 2 3 1 4 1 2 1 1 2

6842 301 376 429 681 360 537 465 531 23 146 906

24,104 1121 1373 1612 2790 1421 1997 1880 1951 84 323 1922

34

14,532

52,256

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predominant form of organisation. The ‘special settlers’ met labour requirements for forestry/logging in the Miniarsk area, manual ore and coal mining in Karabash, Satka, Zlatoust, Kopeisk and Kamensk and digging and building works for new factories in Magnitogorsk and Kamensk. As many as 60 per cent of the labourers at some building sites were ‘special settlers’. The average living space in these villages was 1.88 square metres per person; 47,199 of this consisted of dugouts that were considered unfit for living, 53,693 were in barracks with one common room and 101,556 were standard barracks with separate rooms for each family. The NVKD report also showed that the worst conditions existed in the more remote areas, where the adults were engaged in logging. In 1935, 5 kilograms of flour were distributed for each working person per month, along with 0.5 of grain and 0.3 of sugar. It was also noted that there were few opportunities for the special settlers to acquire foodstuffs using traditional methods and that many of the older people used substitutes and let the children eat. There were even occasional reports of cannibalism. In November 1932 a group of 140 people were convicted of embezzling 4000 tons of grain that should have been sent to special settlers in the Urals and in Western Siberia.68 After a couple of years, the situation stabilised. The settlers were able to move from dugouts to houses, often with several rooms, that they had built themselves. In those areas where the forests had been cleared, the ground was used for agriculture and the food situation improved slightly. Many of the deported peasants had followed vocational training courses, particularly for the mining and building professions. Still, the living conditions in the coal miners’ city of Kopeisk were inferior to those in nearby Cheliabinsk. The 50,000 inhabitants in the city lacked running water and a sewage system and the old water main from Cheliabinsk was made of wood and ran the risk of rotting. The NVKD report concluded that the water question in Kopeisk needed to be solved within a few years.69 A total of 24,916 people in 7632 families were deported to the Kopeisk coal mines. Because of the poor housing and living conditions 2913 persons fled in 1931, 6038 in 1932, 3070 in 1933 and a significantly reduced number of 460 in 1934. In all, 12,481 people –50.4 per cent of the deported ex-kulaks – fled from these special villages in Kopeisk. During the first years of the settlements, mortality was extremely high. In 1931, over 800 deaths were registered among the deported persons; 1130 died in 1932, 704 in 1933 and in 336 in 1934. From epidemics alone, 283, 416, 24 and 12 people died in each of these years, respectively. This

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alarming situation was described in a report by NKVD’s Cheliabinsk director, A.M. Minaev.70 By way of comparison, 6886 kulak families had been deported for the construction of the metallurgical works in Magnitogorsk. The total population was 24,063, including all family members, 13,447 of whom were considered to be among the able workforce. This was a marginal but important group during the first building phases in Magnitogorsk. As of 1 January 1935 the Cheliabinsk Coal Mining Directorate Cheliabugol counted that there were 2671 families and 10,776 family members. Of these, 4551 were considered to be able to perform physical labour. In total 4888 persons were employed; in addition to the mines they also worked in agriculture and artisan shops belonging to the Cheliabugol. These deported peasants constituted approximately 45 per cent of the total workforce in Kopeisk coal mining. Even in 1934, mortality was higher than nativity among the special settlers in Cheliabinsk oblast; 1292 persons died that year and only 743 were born. This report raises some interesting questions, given that it was written by the local NKVD for the Gulag central authorities. What data might have been manipulated and what data could the local authorities hide without risking further trouble? Did they under-report mortality and indicate only a portion of those who had died? Did they miscalculate the number of births due to unreported infant deaths? The major question is whether NKVD’s commandants in the special settlements had reason to file a biased report to the population registrar and the regional statistical authorities. Only careful checking over a longer time period could provide clear answers to these questions, so some of the population and production data should be treated with a degree of scepticism. In 1934, Cheliabugol reported that many ex-kulak brigades had achieved far in excess of 100 per cent of the work norms. In that year alone, 114 kulaks who had shown such enthusiasm for labour had regained their citizen’s rights. Proposals for rationalisation in production and overfulfilment of production norms were honoured with monetary rewards. Throughout the 1930s, Cheliabugol strove to alleviate the housing problems in Kopeisk and established some facilities for sport and general education. However, compared to the conditions in Cheliabinsk, the town remained underprioritised and backward far into the 1950s. The Cheliabinsk oblast was characterised by forced urbanisation in the 1930s and suffered from the same growing pains as Soviet society in general. The cities of the Southern Urals had still not achieved a strong, steady population structure. In many respects, each town

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was characterised by the habits and manners of the migrants from the countryside. Another migrant current was constituted by the 7100 households (33,158 people, including family members) who had moved voluntarily from poorer regions in Russia to Cheliabinsk oblast. Of these, 5985 had joined kolkhozy and 403 families had later decided to return to their home regions. On 21 April 1940 the Supreme Soviet adopted a resolution to move 10,000 more households from other regions to Cheliabinsk oblast. By January 1941 10,420 families had arrived, of which 2410 had returned by 15 February.71 Another widespread phenomenon in the 1920s and 1930s was the flight from the countryside. During the famine years of 1921 and 1922, many peasant families had left their homes and moved from the Cheliabinsk region. After the forced collectivisation started, the number of migrants increased dramatically. In 1930, more than half of the homes in the Troitsk region – 23,056 out of 45,947 – were deserted. By 1935, more than 17,000 homes in the oblast had been registered as empty for over three years. Some of the deported ex-kulaks coming to Cheliabinsk as migrant peasants (pereselentsy) were given these deserted houses. Special settlements were also set up on land that did not belong to the collective farming units. Other special settlers were less fortunate and had to build their first houses during the short summer, often using a special bricks formed with a mix of hay, linen and other materials. In 1926, 83.8 per cent of the population of Cheliabinsk and the surrounding gubernii lived in the countryside. By 1939, this number had dropped to 57.8 per cent. In absolute terms, the countryside population had decreased from 1.98 million to 1.62 million persons, while the urban population had grown from 382,000 to 1,182,000. With the borders of 1938, Cheliabinsk oblast comprised 163,500 square kilometres, with a population of 2,802,904, according to the census of 17 January 1939. This meant an overall population growth of 18.54 per cent since 1926 (when the population, within the same borders, was 2,368,460). The Southern Urals grew mostly due to what is called mechanical population growth. This was comprised primarily of the migrant industrial workers who were attracted from other parts of Russia and Ukraine to the new industries in the Urals. Many of these people were deported ex-kulaks and their families who had lost most of their property during the forced collectivisation of 1930–1933. Conscious and long-term efforts to erect giant industrial plants, such as the Magnitogorsk iron and steel works, as well as a large number of metal and machine-building enterprises in Cheliabinsk, changed

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society profoundly. One major effect of the collectivisation of the countryside was the loss of human capital that had been accumulated among the most productive peasants. Dekulakisation meant that hundreds of thousands of the most thrifty peasants, with years of agricultural experience, had to forego their participation in the development of the region. Eventually, however, a compromise was reached between the state and the peasants in general and a stable supply of grain for the growing cities was secured. Therefore, Stalin could fairly claim to have achieved one of the conditions for a secure home front in case of war. However, it is also clear that Stalin considered the interests of the state to be more important than human rights and individual property.

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Figure 28

‘The building of socialism’, poster by N. Kotov from 1927

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3 The Industrial City As a Socialist Vision and Soviet Reality

The Bolshevist views on socialism, particularly on democracy but also in many other respects, differed from what other Russian socialists and social democrats, especially the Mensheviks, had considered to be fundamental. There is an obvious risk in using ideological concepts that mean different things to different people as guidelines. Even since the breakdown of the Soviet communist regime, historians have argued about how best to characterise the system that emerged in the 1930s and existed in various forms until 1991. Ironically, if one uses the terms ‘socialism’ or ‘communism’ without qualification to describe the economic and social conditions in the USSR, this usage matches the terminology that Stalin announced from the mid-1920s and onwards. Thereafter, it was taboo to question whether socialism – as previously understood in Europe – could be established in a country like Soviet Russia. The criterion for the ‘socialist direction’ of the development, as established in the party, solely concerned property relations. As more and more enterprises in industry, agriculture and elsewhere fell into state or cooperative ownership, the official line was that socialism had triumphed over private capitalism. Stalin’s claim that socialism was established in 1936 in connection with the adoption of the new constitution can be questioned from several different aspects. This has been done by the Swedish slavist, Professor Anton Karlgren, among others. In his biography of Stalin, Karlgren described how Soviet society actually preserved and developed the signs of a typical class society, instead of achieving equality and other socialist goals. Karlgren described everyday life and high politics in the USSR and pointed at the growth of new privileged groups and exploited classes. He even talked of a new ‘party bourgeoisie’ as the ruling class. Karlgren was decades ahead of debates by other experts on the Soviet Union. These later debates were 69

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spurred by the dissident Yugoslav thinker Milovan Djilas and his book The New Class, which argued that a system was established from the 1930s onwards that had characteristics from Tsarist and Western societies.1 In general, those observers in the West who did not embrace the self-image of the Soviet rulers had fewer illusions regarding conditions in Soviet Russia and could better describe the country’s evolution, both during and after the Stalin era.2 Today, with access to the reports of the secret police, as well as diaries and correspondence between Soviet citizens, it is clear that there was much more discussion and questioning of the official ideology in the Soviet Union than scholars in the West used to think. Lenin and the Bolsheviks who took power in Russia in 1917 had not counted on transforming the agrarian-dominated Russian society in a socialist direction unless there was a revolution in Germany and other states of Western Europe. Towards the end of his life, Lenin realised that his goal of spurring a general socialist revolution had failed and that victory in the Russian Civil War had not created the preconditions for a socialist transformation in Soviet Russia. Even less clear was the question of how to modernise Russia’s economy. In Lenin’s last writings, he pessimistically but realistically described state capitalism in the form it had taken in Germany during World War I as a prototype for Russia. Lenin had studied the leading German statesman Walter Rathenau (1867–1922), particularly his book on Germany’s wartime economy, and looked forward to meeting him. However, in 1922, Lenin had a stroke and Rathenau was assassinated. Of course, history contains alternatives, which never came to fruition because of what are referred to as accidental circumstances. Therefore, it can only be speculated upon as to how far these alternatives might have progressed before encountering the same challenges as those that struck Lenin’s successors.3 In the mid-1920s, the ideological struggles intensified in the sole, ruling party. Stalin managed to get more followers in the Communist Party to accept his idea of how socialism could be established in Soviet Russia through industrialisation and by radical changes in the production conditions in the countryside. With his vision of ‘socialism in one country’, Stalin had coined a formula that legitimised his position as theoretical leader among the party elite, and at the same time appealed to the broad masses of the people. The party’s propaganda could then imbue a new Soviet patriotism in order to create an enthusiasm and a willingness to make sacrifices, given that socialist ideals seemed to be guiding star. Can Stalinism therefore be seen as a version of socialism? This book argues that it is necessary to make a distinction between an abstract

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model of a capitalist economy (based on one theory or another) and the concrete national market economy systems. In the same way, it is worthwhile to make a strict distinction between a model (sometimes called an ideal or a utopia) of a socialist society (within the Marxist, social democratic or communist tradition) and the concrete forms that societies with communist regimes have had in the 20th century (and which some regimes still have today). Of course, the historical circumstances in this part of Russia mean that the distance to a model of a socialist society is quite great. Therefore, a case study at the regional level can only clarify and modify the complexity of the development. The transformation can be better explained as the leadership’s efforts to achieve a military-industrial mobilisation of the country’s productive forces; in a wider sense, it wished to develop education and progress in technology in order to secure the state against internal and external opponents and enemies. The unique power position of the communists implied that all information about the society could be directed and controlled. In the Marxist tradition, a programme for social revolution was brought in. In certain respects, the Soviet Communist Party was reminiscent of a religious sect, in which Lenin and, in later years, Stalin were regarded as sacrosanct. Their speeches and even single sentences could be used to legitimise a practice that was anything but socialist. One of the first signs that these Bolsheviks had entered a quasi-religious course was their decision to enbalm Lenin’s body in 1924 and to build a mausoleum to his memory as a place of pilgrimage. This was something of a return to medieval traditions in which the Orthodox Church would sometimes display the mortal remains of its saints as examples of miracle-working. However, in another dimension than that of the emerging cult of Lenin, Soviet Russia recognised the memory of those who had fallen in the Civil War, in the Urals and elsewhere. Streets and squares were named after them and statuettes were created to celebrate the pioneers of the revolution. A necropolis for fallen Red Guards and Red Army soldiers was raised on a central square in Cheliabinsk, just as those who died in battle in Moscow from October to November of 1917 had been buried in graves along the Kremlin wall on Red Square. There are many apparent similarities between traditional Orthodox religious processions and Soviet mass demonstrations with portraits of the Communist Party leaders. The power of the Communist Party in the Urals became clear after a military confrontation with virtually anyone who had opposed Soviet power in 1917. What the local leaders in the Southern Urals envisioned

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was hardly an all-encompassing utopia of a future kingdom of happiness. Instead, they looked like a growing group of industrial leaders who wanted to give the Urals a central place in the Soviet Union on the basis of the region’s natural resources and despite its backward infrastructure. The realism, efficiency and energy – in contrast to the ideological slogans, official speeches and indoctrination that permeated the party’s resolutions and many of its concrete activities – should not be underestimated. This contrast is particularly clear when analysing the regional archival material – surveys for decisions and stenographic protocols from meetings in the 1930s. The Communist Party was strictly centralised. Nominations to important posts were controlled by the nomenklatura, a list of appointments that had to be approved at central committee level. A city like Cheliabinsk, with several hundred thousand inhabitants, was governed by the local communist cadres. Within the category of industrial and town planning in Cheliabinsk were a number of carefully prepared decisions that were based on precise descriptions of the situation and followed by detailed plans for action. Rather than an abstract utopian or kingdom-come idea for the workers, the Cheliabinsk communists envisioned modern industries, the best in Western technology and a developed education system. Even if this was described as socialism, one should not lose sight of the realities and social conditions that can be analysed even without such an ideological concept.4 Until 1934, Cheliabinsk and the surrounding districts were part of the huge Urals region. The party committee in Sverdlovsk (known as Ekaterinburg prior to 1918) had successfully lobbied for extensive investments in the Ural-Kuznetsk Kombinat project. The first five-year plan, from 1928 to 1932, contained many industrial items that would give the cities in the Urals a key role in the country’s future industrial structure. However, as these enterprises were built and the collectivisation of agriculture was carried out, it became clear that it would not be possible to govern the entire Urals area properly from only one centre. In 1934, the area was divided into the Sverdlovsk, Perm (later Motolov) and Cheliabinsk regions (oblasts). New regional power centres were then formed that were more or less under the control of the central committee, the politburo in Moscow. In this way, Cheliabinsk was included in a decision-making structure that had Moscow as its centre. From 1934 onwards, when Cheliabinsk was consolidated with its machine-building industries and the iron and steel works in Magnitogorsk had been completed, the Southern Urals formed a definite economic-geographical unit. Only minor changes later took place in the oblast’s borders as certain

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Figure 29 Map of the Eastern Urals with the main cities from north to south. The 1934 administrative borders are shown.

parts in the north and some agricultural districts in the east were moved to the Kurgan oblast, which was formed in 1941. The neighbouring city of Magnitogorsk was dominated by the iron and steel works and this led to the People’s Commissariat of Heavy Industry becoming as important as the Communist Party organisation in matters of daily organisation in the city. Cheliabinsk, on the other hand, had a more complex industrial structure and a widespread network of party committees at the factories and in the city districts. After 1934, the regional party committee (oblastnoi komitet, obkom) was the last resort for fulfilling plans. The communists in individual enterprises were subordinated to the direction of the factory, the people’s commissariat and to the powerful obkom. Appointments and promotions were easier to control than the specific results of industrial investments

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and other investments at the local level. The existence of a series of bottom-up parallel information organs did not make it easier to survey the situation. Historians are fortunate that so much of the reality from those days was recorded, in one way or another. The first secretary in the new Cheliabinsk regional party committee was Kuz’ma Ryndin. Ryndin’s life, in a way, represented a generation of Bolsheviks: their formation as a group during the revolution, the Civil War and the establishment of the one-party state. His character provides an idea about those who led the forced industrialisation in the 1930s. His fate also provides a background to the extensive purges in the party towards the end of the decade. For this reason, the description of his life is split into two parts. The first shows how Ryndin advanced within the Communist Party and how he handled the task of guiding the Cheliabinsk region during the second five-year plan (1933–1937). Chapter 5 of this book, which chronicles the activities and fate of the obkom chairman in 1937, serves to exemplify how the terror was spread on a regional level. Ryndin’s career, leadership style and position in the hierarchy provide a background that can be compared with other party functionaries in the 1930s. Kuz’ma Vasil’evich Ryndin was born in 1893 in the village of Yearl in the Ufa district (a guberniia in what is now Bashkiria). In 1915, he started to work at the iron works in the city of Sim and he joined the Russian Social Democratic Party (RSDAP) later that year. The following year he helped to organise a First of May meeting for young workers in the city. Because he risked being arrested for this, he moved to Revda and then to Nizhnii Tagil in the Northern Urals, where he found a job as blacksmith.5 After the February revolution in 1917, Ryndin returned to Sim, where he became a member of the city’s revolutionary committee. After the Soviets were crushed by the White Armies, he carried out underground resistance against the Kolchak dictatorship. When the Red Army defeated Kolchak’s units in the Urals in 1919, Ryndin was appointed head of the Ufa district Cheka, the powerful organisation that had been set up for state security to combat the counter-revolution. It actually acted as a secret police service with wide and extraordinary powers to punish, without judicial trial or sentence, anybody who was considered an enemy of Soviet power. For the next year, Ryndin also served as a political commissar in the Red Army’s Western Front, the army group under the command of Mikhail Tukhachevskii that advanced into Poland in 1920. After the Civil War, Ryndin returned to the Urals and established his career in the Communist Party. In 1921–1922, he was party secretary in the industrial city of Zlatoust, in Nizhnii Tagil from 1923 to 1924, in Perm in 1925 and 1926, and from 1927 in the Urals regional

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Figure 30 In 1936–1937 the Chairman of the Cheliabinsk Regional Committee (obkom), Kuz’ma Ryndin (born 1893), led the first purges of party cadres and industry leaders. In the summer of 1937, Ryndin was a member of the threeman commission (troika) that carried out mass repressions according to the infamous NKVD Decree No. 00447 against former kulaks and criminals, which resulted in the executions of thousands of innocent people. Ryndin himself was arrested on 12 October 1937. After harsh interrogation, he ‘confessed’ to antiSoviet activities in the so-called ‘Right-Trotskyist block’ and was sentenced to death in February 1938. Ryndin was formally rehabilitated from all charges in March 1956.

committee. His background was typical of many party cadres who had been moulded during the Civil War period, who never had the chance to receive a solid education but showed their practical and organisational capacity within the ruling party. Ryndin supported Stalin in his struggle against the internal rightwing opposition led by Nikolai Bukharin. Towards the end of the

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1920s, the preconditions returned for the ruling group to imagine the social changes in the same terms as they had during the Civil War. The polemics of 1928–1929 between Stalin and Bukharin reflected the range of opinions within the ruling party. Stalin then formulated a radical policy that in many respects reminded others of what Trostky’s defeated Leftist opposition had called for: higher investment in industry and economic pressure against richer individual peasants. From 1929, Ryndin was a member of the party’s control commission, which meant that he often checked the ideological reliability of the cadres. He participated in the purges of the followers of Bukharin within the party organisation in Moscow. After 1930, the Moscow region’s party committee was led by Lazar Kaganovich (1893–1991), one of the hardest-working functionaries of the 1930s. He was secretary of the politburo, people’s commissar of the transport industry and first secretary of the Moscow party organisation. Kaganovich seems to have been the ideal role model for Ryndin, who on at least one occasion even referred to him as ‘my teacher’. In September 1936, after being appointed head of the Cheliabinsk regional bureau, Ryndin suggested that the city would be renamed Kaganovichgrad but Stalin rejected the idea. In the 1930s, the Bolsheviks renamed many cities, mountains, electric power stations, enterprises and kolkhozy after themselves or recently deceased communists. This habit started in 1919 during the Civil War and might have had Byzantine ideological roots. There were obviously limits to these habits and Stalin refused some name changes. A campaign was organised in Cheliabinsk to change the name of the city, which comes from a Tatar word meaning ‘hole’. It was suggested that the city’s name should refer to the proud history of the Bolsheviks and be named ‘Koba’, the revolutionary name that Iosif Dzhugashvili used in the early 1900s. However, on this occasion Stalin rejected the name change. In general, the so-called cult of personality that surrounded Stalin’s public image from the late 1920s onwards seems to have been something that he controlled himself for both the popular masses, who, as Stalin once said, might need ‘a little God’ (Bozhok), and also vis-à-vis the communists. When Vyachislav Molotov once mentioned ‘the Leader’ (Vozhd) too many times in a speech, Stalin muttered that this was excessive eulogising and that he had not expected that from Molotov, whom he evidently held in higher esteem than many other party members. Ryndin’s career was typical of many who led the grand projects of the first five-year plans in the 1930s. As second secretary of the Moscow regional party committee, he supervised the defence industry, the iron

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Figure 31 ‘We must finally recognise that of all the valuable capitals in the world, the people, the cadres are the most valuable and the most decisive capital’, Stalin concluded in his speech to the Red Army academies’ final examination celebration on 4 May 1935. ‘The cadres decide everything!’ says the text on this poster by Gustav Klutsis. It is a photomontage of two groups of people: one that waves and rejoices with flowers, the other as an anonymous mass by the feet of the leader. The slogans appear grotesque when read in their historical context. In the early 1930s thousands of specialists in industry and the army with ‘suspect backgrounds’ were purged, sometimes after show trials, and sentenced to long camp terms or execution. A few years later, tens of thousands of experts were again the victims of a new wave of terror, controlled by Stalin, that swept through the party, the economic administration and the armed forces.

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and steel works and the electro-technical industry. From 1929 to 1932, Ryndin worked in the Moscow branch of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate Rabkrin, a control organ that, as the name suggests, was originally created to check the bureaucracy in administration and industry. In the 1920s, however, the Rabkrin gradually became yet another organisation that merely increased bureaucratisation.6 Ryndin was a member of the party’s central committee from 1930 onwards, first as a candidate member and then, following the 17th Party Congress in 1934, as full member. In 1932, he returned to the Urals to lead the Nizhnii Tagil district’s party organ and in 1934 was appointed head of the new Cheliabinsk regional party committee. In other words, Ryndin was a representative of the new nomenklatura, the functionaries in state and party organs whose appointments were controlled by higher party organs. The following example illustrates how the party’s supervision could manifest itself. In a letter to Lazar Kaganovich and others dated 13 September 1934 Stalin wrote that Ryndin was one of those regional secretaries who had turned into ‘petty demagogues’ and were too meek with the cadres. Stalin said that Ryndin should be told to fulfil the plan completely and on time or face charges and be dismissed. On 30 September 1934 the politburo then approved a decree from the council of the people’s commissars that stated precisely what Stalin had suggested and a group of leading functionaries was sent from Moscow to the Cheliabinsk region.7 Lazar Kaganovich undertook an inspection trip to the Urals and Siberia to check the progress of the grain deliveries to the state. On 7–9 October he arranged a meeting with the party secretaries in the Cheliabinsk region and heads of the machine and tractor stations. He appealed to their memories from the struggles 15 years earlier during the Civil War. This meeting adopted a resolution that not only described the deficiencies but also ascribed them to alleged ‘counter-revolutionary elements’, individuals who had participated in Kolchak’s and Dutov’s armies and had infiltrated the leadership of the kolkhozy. The regional branch of the NKVD was instructed to speed up the handling of these exposed persons and to publish its verdict in the local press.8

The changing character of Cheliabinsk city in the 1930s The central districts in Cheliabinsk changed drastically within a few years. Broad streets were built with alleys that separated the wide pavements from the roadway in the middle. In the centre, many of the old buildings were torn down and small wooden houses made way for multi-storey buildings.

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Figure 32 Construction of new houses on the Workers’ and Peasants’ Street and Kommuna Street in 1928. In the background are the Catholic Church and the church of the Monastery of the Ascension, with its tower torn away, and a wooden building that used to be the girls’ lyceum.

The disappearance of the Orthodox churches and cult centres of other religions was remarkable and symbolic. The Bolsheviks had the most radical anti-religious policy of all of the international workers’ movements in the inter-war period. This policy had sharpened since the Orthodox Church had supported the counter-revolution’s defence of Tsarism and pronounced its opposition to the Bolshevik leaders in 1918 for separating state from church. In the 1920s and 1930s, a widespread campaign was launched in Cheliabinsk and elsewhere against all religions: Christianity, Judaism and Islam were considered to be social institutions that should no longer hamper man’s consciousness.9 In 1922, an anti-religious movement was created by the party against the Orthodox clergy in particular. Instead of celebrating Easter, people were told to work and then take holidays some days later. The struggle against religion included meetings, lectures and demonstrations, exhibitions and such actions as ‘anti-Easter’ or ‘anti-Christmas’. Popular textbooks were distributed with atheist propaganda. Party members and young communists were the leading members of the ‘Union of the Militant Godless’ (Soiuz voinstvujusjchich bezbozhnikov).10 Towards the end of the 1920s, the fight against the clergy and religions intensified. Synagogues and all the Orthodox churches (except one) were torn down. In 1921, a nunnery in the centre of Cheliabinsk was closed down. Some nuns were accused of being counter-revolutionary

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elements and were sent to concentration camps, while elderly ones were sent to old people’s homes. In 1926, the nunnery buildings were taken over by the city authorities with the intention of rebuilding them into a house of congress; no traces of the building’s former use were to remain. However, there was a lack of money for this grandiose building plan, so both the nunnery and the Voznesenskii church were torn down and replaced with the ‘Iuzhnyi Ural’ hotel. The main cathedral, Khristorozhdestvenskii, was torn down in 1932 and the Holy Trinity church was rebuilt into a museum. Other churches were simply torn down or renovated for use as printing houses and other purposes. The mosque was closed for cult purposes and used by clubs, while the synagogue was transformed into dormitories.11 Where wooden houses and churches had been torn down, multi-storey buildings were erected. In the central square, a seven-storey administration building was constructed for the party’s regional committee and the executive Soviet organs. Farther to the west, on Spartacus Street, was

Figure 33 The Iuzhnii Ural (Southern Urals) Hotel was built on the former site of the Hodegetria nunnery. The original plan was to build a huge congress hall that could hold 700–800 people. This was in line with the plans to build the Palace of Congress on the former grounds of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior near the Moscow River.

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Figure 34 Parks were designed and trees planted along the streets. This photo from the 1930s shows cleaning and cutting in a park in Cheliabinsk’s city centre.

the ‘Chekists’ house’ – an entire block comprising single-family flats, restaurants, cinemas and service facilities. It was originally intended for only NKVD employees but in practice was also used for party cadres and engineers.12 There were now ten saunas and bath houses and three laundries in the city. A new tram and bus network was expanded to service the needs of the factory workers.13 More streets were paved or asphalted; a total of 500,000 square metres was paved and 48,000 square metres of pavements and four streets in the centre were asphalted. The central Spartacus Street, which ran east-west, was widened to 50 metres and was given wide pavements that were separated from the roadway by alleys. Parks were built and many trees were planted in the city. For example, 9840 trees were planted in 1937 alone. The City Gardens were refurbished and a new leisure and culture park was inaugurated, with surrounding forest areas for walking. The Dynamo Stadium opened for football matches and athletics competitions. In general, all building projects turned out to be much more expensive than estimated and there was a constant distance between plans for public buildings, schools and hospitals and their fulfilment.14 This part of the chapter shows a simplified map of the main streets and some of the buildings and enterprises in Cheliabinsk.

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Magnitogorsk is one of many examples of a city that was created during the forced industrialisation around a huge enterprise, where only peasant villages had existed before. In contrast, Cheliabinsk is an example of how typical Russian provincial cities were drastically changed during industrialisation. The city’s centre and the new dwelling areas were built at a time when architectural trends were changing. Accordingly, Cheliabinsk’s centre and the new factory city districts displayed a combination of Soviet constructivism, as seen in the Main Post Office and the first Culture Palace, and so-called Stalinist neoclassicism, as in the Great House on Revolution Square, the Opera and the Theatre of the Cheliabinsk Tractor Factory. The Main Post Office and its telegraph station were built according to drawings by N.K. Futukov in the constructivist style that was predominant in the early 1930s, and opened in 1936. It is situated on Kirov Street, has three-storey wings and a four-storey corner house with an attic. This was the last building in Cheliabinsk to be built in the constructivist style.15 Later in the 1930s, Soviet Russian architecture acquired its distinctive neoclassicist form

Figure 35 The Main Post Office, built in 1936, was the last building in the city designed in the constructivist style. In 1935, a statue of Sergei Kirov, the party chairman who was assassinated in Leningrad on 1 December 1934, was raised in one corner of the building.

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with columns and decorations on the garlands, roofs and friezes. These contrasting building styles call for an explanation of the social courses of events that were reflected in the changing architecture.16 In order to understand the new society’s class divisions, the population can be divided in order of falling status into the nomenklatura (the leading officials who were controlled by the Communist Party), the technical intelligentsia and the cultural personalities and workers with various levels of qualifications, from ‘shock workers’ to ‘stakhanovites’ with substantially higher than average wages. Further down the class divide were the unqualified and seasonal workers who were mostly engaged in building activities at industrial enterprises.17 It can be argued that the particular architectural style known as Stalinist neoclassicism corresponded with the tastes of the new ruling class and the ambitions of the elite. At the same time as a new industrial society was being created at great cost for the broad masses, the architecture was a classical, monumental aspect of this society that would withstand the test of time forever. Anatole Kopp analysed the transition from constructivism to Stalinist neoclassicism in L’architecture soviétique à l’époque stalinien (1978). In the preface to this book, the French economist Charles Bettelheim characterised the

Figure 36 ‘Late Stalinist Empire’ style. This 1936 photo shows the construction of a seven-storey block with the Central Gastronom food store and apartments for the regional Soviet cadres on Spartacus Street (today Lenin Avenue) and Revolution Square, where a necropolis existed until the 1950s with graves of martyrs, fallen revolutionaries and Red Army soldiers.

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architectural changes as reflecting a restoration of relations of production, which were in all essential aspects the same as capitalism, even though they were veiled by socialist rhetoric and ideology, which was consciously or unconsciously used to legitimise the new system. There is an increasing reassessment of Stalinist architecture in Russia today. It is judged less critically than it was before for being anachronistic, as was the case with Moscow’s high-rises, which were pejoratively called ‘Stalincakes’. Less emphasis is placed on the totalitarian traits in city planning and more on the far-sighted social thinking.18

Sotsgorodók – a socialist ideal for the tractor factory city district The Soviet project included a vision of a model socialist city. In The Socialist City (1930), Nikolai Miliutin presented some grand ideas for the rational planning of Soviet cities.19 In many respects, the Soviet Union was considered a pioneering nation for modern city planning and architecture in the inter-war period. Some of the grand building projects in Moscow and other cities received proposals from famous Western architects such as Le Corbusier and Naum Gabo, as well as architects from Germany, the United States and elsewhere.20 Their designs were found in the new factory buildings and dwelling areas that were erected in the 1930s in the USSR. Among the best-known examples of entire cities or city districts that were designed by modernist architects were Ivan Leonidov’s plans for Magnitogorsk and Nizhnii Novgorod (later named Gorkii). Workers would receive individual flats in multi-storey buildings, while women would be relieved of household tasks since every block would be equipped with a dining hall, laundries and daycare centres. It is noticeable for the modern observer, however, that the grandiose plans for industrial development did not always match the corresponding investments in the city’s infrastructure.21 Unlike the cities mentioned above, Cheliabinsk was not an example of well thought out city planning. The first five-year plan for 1928–1932 included the erection of a number of factories in the city. The tractor factory was to be situated far to the east of the centre, south of the railway and with dwelling complexes to the north of its site. However, more factories were soon built. For example, the Ordzhonikidze Machine-building Works was situated south of the tractor factory and its dwelling complexes were downwind from the latter. Several other metal industries were located without careful consideration of the distances to the dwelling areas and the predominant wind directions. Only in 1935 did the authorities try to

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Figure 37 A bus on the number 1 line that opened on 13 September 1925 and stretched from the city centre to the railway station and farther on to the Koliushchenko Factory.

achieve a better balance between the requirements of the model socialist city and the existing and future industrial structure.22 In the mid-1930s, a general plan was adopted for the expansion of Cheliabinsk that considered the predominant westerly and south-westerly winds. Accordingly, the workers’ city districts were to be located west of the factories, such as the tractor factory city district situated on Lake Pervoe. Model socialist towns (sotsialisticheskii gorodok, abbreviated sotsgorodok) were to be built around the new factories and the regional power station. The project for the sotsgorodok by the Cheliabinsk Tractor Factory was designed by Andrei Burov (1900–1957), one of the leading architects in the 1920s in the constructivist Union of Contemporary Architects (OSA, Ob’edinenie sovremennykh arkhitektorov) and a member of the Cheliabinsk Traktorstroi group. In 1931, he was sent to the Ford factories in Detroit to study the development of industrial construction design, after which he designed the tractor factory. Originally, the sotsgorodok plans included the total socialisation of everyday life as well as the cultural and educational programmes. The sotsgorodok was to include entire blocks of family apartments and blocks with so-called communist housing principles. The latter were called dwelling combinats (combines). However, the ideas of creating

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Figure 38 Map of modern-day Cheliabinsk with its industrial districts to the east.

Figure 39 The Workers’ and Peasants’ Street (known since 1935 as Kirov Street) in 1932–1933. In the foreground is one of the first blocks built in the Soviet period in the centre of Cheliabinsk to have individual flats.

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such ‘communes’ (the Russian word kommuna alludes to the socialist tradition, as in the Paris Commune of 1871) were not realised. In the sotsgorodok, individual living was combined with partial efforts to create a common sector. Some of the houses were built based on the model of each group having their own apartment. The kitchen was shared with others on the same floor. Every house was to have a common eatery, where the family could have their breakfast or evening meal served by special cooks. The eating house was, however, later transformed to the Restaurant Vostok. Only one house on Gorkii Street was built totally in accordance with the ‘commune principle’; in the other houses, the families had their own kitchens. Service and amusement places were accessible. In addition to shops, the city offered a bathing and washing complex, a trade school with dormitories and a cinema (today called ‘The Kirovets’ cinema) and two clubs (later integrated into the Palace of Culture and the Theatre of the Cheliabinsk Tractor Factory). Burov’s project was one of the first in the USSR in which an entire town district was built according to the principles of constructivism.23 Many Cheliabinsk housewives entered the workforce in the 1930s. However, there was evidently still a large number of housewives who were outside the workforce because many children could not receive daycare. In 1933, the share of women in the labour force was 28.5 per cent; it was somewhat lower (19.3 per cent) in the construction sector. In other

Figure 40 Five-storey blocks with apartments for workers, engineers and clerks at the tractor factory. Today, the alleys either side of Spartacus Street have been reduced to make way for heavy traffic on the four-lane road.

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words, almost every third woman was engaged in the labour force.24 Of the 408 Cheliabinks Tractor Factory (ChTZ) workers who had advanced to positions of responsibility in the economic administration, only 31 were women. This was criticised by the city party committee, as was the fact that only one woman had been promoted to workshop overseer.25 The total dwelling area in Cheliabinsk city was calculated differently in various reports from the authorities. However, a common feature of all these reports was the crisis situation prior to the war in 1941. From 1928 to 1938, the city’s population grew from 67,000 to 312,000, yet the total dwelling area in the same period only rose from 298,600 square metres to 826,000. A population growth of 100,000 persons had

Figure 41 ‘Down with kitchen slavery! Give us a new everyday life!’ A poster argues how food courts, restaurants and daycare centres for children would liberate women from drudgery at home and enable them to choose their own professions. In the tractor factory city district, a few houses were built according to this model, with common restaurants, laundries and kindergartens. However, the collectivist forms of life of these so-called ‘kommuna’ never predominated.

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been predicted up to 1933 and the average dwelling space per person was expected to rise from 3.4 square metres to six. In reality, however, the average living space was only about 3 square metres. The situation deteriorated drastically during the war years, when tens of thousands of families were evacuated to Cheliabinsk and forced to share the same space as the already overcrowded population.26 A report from the party’s central control commission to Stalin and Molotov concerning ‘the housing and living conditions at the Tractor Factory in Cheliabinsk’ described in drastic terms how the enterprise had neglected the housing question. Many houses had severely decayed, while management had not kept its homes in repair or built a sufficient number of new ones. The budget allowances for building homes had not been fully used for several years and few of the scheduled building schemes had been completed. A total of 52,824 square metres of living area was added in 1934 but in the three following years, as the number of employees had increased significantly, only 23,134 square metres of living area had been built. At the same time, barracks with a total area of 26,500 square metres, which had been erected in 1929–1930 and had decayed, were torn down. In reality, this meant that the living space decreased by 3426 square metres. By 1 January 1939 the tractor factory had provided only 48.3 per cent of its workers with apartments, while the remaining 15,366 people had no modern housing. The report then provided a detailed description of some of the worst living conditions. On the 6th section, 14 families – a total of 40 people – lived in a dormitory of 129 square metres. Nine workers’ families with infants lived in dark, moist rooms in a basement with a total area of 35 square metres. In springtime, the basements were filled with water. The commission said that 2134 workers and their families, including young children, lived ‘in unsuitable, damp and cold basements’. Nine hundred and fifty-eight workers’ families lived in half-demolished barracks that had been rented from nearby factories. Because of the housing shortage, seven ‘workers’ villages’ (trudposëlki) comprised mainly of half-dugouts had appeared in the vicinity of the tractor factory. In these villages, 17,467 workers and clerks lived with their families. The commission frequently employed the term ‘wrecking’ with regard to the building methods that had led to widespread mould damage. Wooden material instead of metal had been used to cover the sewage system, drain pipes were lacking, the roofs were leaking and the electricity system often malfunctioned. In 1938, the report continued, ‘few effective measures had been taken to liquidate the consequences of wrecking’. Only 2.7 out of the 5.1 million rubles that the tractor factory had planned to spend on housing

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was actually used. Similar ‘wrecking’ was noted in the construction of water and sewer pipes along the roads in the Tractor Factory city district. The workers had paid almost three million rubles in rent for their apartments and rooms and the factory had allotted 816,000 rubles for municipal purposes. Despite higher rents, the workers in the barracks did not received fresh water on a regular basis and were unable to wash themselves properly for days on end. The food served for the workers was bad. All the dining places were situated near the workshops and workers could only be served during working hours. In the trudposiëlok there was only one restaurant, which could not serve meals on a mass scale. The only dining hall (stolovaia) in the village had closed down. The poor living conditions were the most important factor behind the high turnover of labour. In 1936 17,419 workers (64.5 per cent of the total workforce) left the factory, and the trend continued in 1937, with 18,192 workers (66 per cent of the total) departing. This investigation by the central control commission was shown to the people’s commissar of the machine-building industry, L’vov, to the head of the directorate of the tractor industry, P. M. Zernov, and to director Umanets at the Cheliabinsk Tractory Factory. They confirmed its conclusions on all matters and then set up a series of proposals to improve the housing of the enterprise and the municipal services.27 Basically, the city continued to experience problems throughout the 1930s with regard to housing, although these did not receive the same attention as production and planning targets. There were gradual improvements, however, and certain city districts did acquire a better functioning infrastructure; at the same time, a clearly differentiated hierarchy of living conditions was more discernable.

Barracks for industrial workers in ‘shanty towns’ The speed with which the original vision of a socialist model city based around modern industrial factories was lost is striking. By far the top priority was the creation of the factories, which meant that the workers and their families had to continue living in barracks, huts and dugouts. Thirty to forty people would live in the barracks, in dormitories with bunk beds. For some time, the majority of workers lived under such conditions, not only in Cheliabinsk but also in other cities in the Urals and in the Kuznetsk region of Siberia. Single people and married couples lived together in the barracks, with their sleeping places separated only by blankets or rugs. The better barracks had wooden bunks or iron beds rather than bunk beds but bedclothes were in short supply.

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Many people around the tractor factory lived in barracks that had originally been considered as only temporary one-storey houses. Approximately 48 per cent of the workers at the tractor factory were under 23 years of age.28 To the north of the first blocks with barracks, construction of one-family single houses [individual houses, e.g. one family one building, or apartment blocks where families had individual flats?] started in the 1930s. In the latter half of the 1930s, the area to the east of Lake Pervoe, where small villages had existed for many years, was developed. These construction works were not planned and, even by the Soviet standards of the day, the buildings were hastily and chaotically erected in order to alleviate the housing shortages in the barracks.29 The government’s policy made it practically impossible for regional party leaders to alleviate the social misery that they constantly encountered in the early 1930s. If they failed to meet industrial production and construction targets, they risked their careers, while the centre would overlook the non-fulfilment of the social ambitions in the plans. Following an inspection of the miserable conditions in the barracks around factories in Novosibirsk, one party boss exclaimed, ‘Why do the workers not revolt?’ This may be partly explained by the fact that workers already understood that complaints could lead to further deterioration, and accusations of slander that could lead to forced labour in camps under even worse conditions. Another explanation could have been that the situation in the villages, from where most of the new workers had recently arrived, was even worse. Finally, even though the situation had lasted for several years, the workers might have been convinced that the problems would be solved fairly soon. The fact that barracks and four- or five-storey apartment blocks had been erected quickly and carelessly with bad building materials caused a severe housing crisis in Cheliabinsk. From 1932 to 1939, the population of the city grew from 59,000 to 274,000, while the living space area only increased from a total of 560,000 to 1,043,000 square metres. Each person in Cheliabinsk had an average living space area of only 2.8 square metres.30 In March 1937, the NKVD secret police performed an unannounced check of the conditions in Cheliabinsk. Its report depicted the housing and living situation in a negative light. On the outskirts of the city were six relatively large villages with barracks and dugouts that had been constructed without any plan. Over 50,000 people lived in these villages. One village, called Port Arthur, in the south-eastern part of the city was named after the Russian fortress in the Far East that became famous in the Russo-Japanese War in 1904–1905. It had originally grown up in chaotic fashion to the east of the railway in the late 19th century, and

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by 1937 its 17,000 inhabitants worked at machine-building enterprise No. 78 and the tractor factory. The village of Kolupaevka, south of the city, had been founded in 1900 and in the 1930s consisted mostly of half-dugouts and had over 6000 inhabitants, most of whom were workers at the Koliushenko Factory. The village of Medvedevka consisted entirely of dugouts for temporary workers at various factories, while the village of Nagornyi, north-east of the city centre, also had mostly dugouts and over 10,000 inhabitants who worked at the tractor factory. The village of Oziornyi was situated in the eastern part of Cheliabinsk near the southern tip of the Lake Pervoe Ozero. It was built at the same time as the tractor factory in the early 1930s, and people used to call the village ‘Partizanskii’ as it was situated far away and consisted mostly of a chaotic complex of dugouts. In the mid-1930s, Oziornyi had approximately 5000 inhabitants, most of whom were workers at the tractor factory. Around 6000 people, many of whom had only temporary jobs, lived in the village of Kirsaroi, north of the city, where criminal elements were widespread. These villages had no running water and simple wells had been dug for water for cooking. The sanitary conditions were extremely bad. Many barracks were torn down, windows were broken and substituted with paper or cardboard. Half-dugouts of 8–10 square metres might house two families with ten to

Figure 42 Primitive barracks and huts made by the workers themselves for temporarily employed personnel at the tractor factory.

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twelve members. Most dugouts were moist and draughty and there were no laundries nearby. Since there were no places for culture or entertainment, the report noted that the main pastimes for the young people in the villages were card playing, heavy drinking and fighting, especially during holidays. The lack of communication from the Suburban villages posiolki was a further factor that isolated the inhabitants from city life in general. The NKVD report quoted complaints that there were no passable roads that would allow ambulances to reach the sick in these villages. As the distance to the hospitals was too great, women often gave birth to children in their homes ‘under un-sanitary conditions and without midwives’. The complaints were numerous and frank, as in the following example: ‘In the evenings, it is not possible to get away from our cursed village of Kirsaroi. It is dark everywhere. To go into the city or to a club is too far and too dangerous. There are too many hooligans.’ The NKVD report also quoted women in the workers’ village of Port Arthur. One young lady, Pershina, exclaimed: Nothing is done for the women. Most of them are still religious. Oh, how many among our housewives do not wish to join circles with singing in choirs or sewing groups? I and many like me would eagerly take on social work but nothing is possible. When you read in the newspaper about how women take part in study circles and of the success stories, I feel shame and I cry because we are doomed here. The NKVD report concluded that ‘these villages have been deserted by the city soviet and the social organisations. The villages are nests of culturelessness, drunkenness, hooliganism and criminal activities.’31 The children in the village of Oziornyi had to walk 5 kilometres to their school. The city authority had delayed the building of a school in the village or consideration of whether children would be allowed to travel for free on the tram. Oziornoe had no police at all. Many housewives wanted to work but could not because there was nowhere to leave the small children. In addition, the workers in these villages had to walk more than 5 kilometres to the tractor factory. The workers had complained both to the city district soviet and the city council about the bad transport facilities, which involved many changes when travelling by tram. Sometimes, no trams would go at all. As the street lights were often out of order, workers had to stay overnight at the factory, said Konovalov at the forge of the factory. There were numerous complaints about the lack of goods in the shops. There was seldom enough bread and foodstuffs, and the queues were long and a permanent part

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of everyday life. ‘Speculation’ with scarce commodities was frequent. It was often impossible to find clothes for children.32 The city newspapers often contained criticisms of these conditions and, from time to time, the authorities would try to remedy the situation.33 However, the well recognised criticism was just as often rebutted with reference to the dire economic situation of the city administration.34

Health care and education What really changed the appearance of the city in the 1930s lay in general education and improved health care. Twenty-three new schools were built in the 1930s, along with three high schools and institutes and five technical colleges. All children were guaranteed basic education. The task was also to eradicate illiteracy among the adult population. Many people joined the study society that helped adults to learn reading and writing (Russian abbreviation Vsevobuch). The following quote from American engineer John Scott, who worked for several years in the nearby town of Magnitogorsk, shows how enthusiasm for study was an important trait in the Soviet life of the 1930s: Every night from six until twelve the street cars and buses of Magnitogorsk were crowded with adult students hurrying to and from schools with books and notebooks under their arms, discussing Leibniz, Hegel, or Lenin, doing problems on their knees, and acting like high-school children during examination week in a New York subway. These students, however, were not adolescents, and it was not examination time. They were just the run of the population of the Soviet Union making up for several centuries of lost time.35 The Pedagogical Institute was organised in 1934 with faculties for history, physics, mathematics, geography and literature, as well as a special faculty for the natural sciences. By 1939, over 1400 students had passed through the day courses at the Pedagogical Institute and just as many had followed the evening courses as external students. One hundred and eighty students had been admitted at the so-called workers’ faculty and 150 had followed the teachers’ courses as free auditors. The Pedagogical Institute had over 100 teachers, 17 of whom had completed doctor’s degrees and six of whom had bachelor of sciences degrees.36 The Cheliabinsk Pedagogical Institute had an especially important role given the great lack of teachers. In the early 1930s, ordinary schools contained over 30,000 pupils who were taught in two or even three

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Figure 43 Vocational education in schools attached to the industrial enterprises. This photo shows woodworking lessons at the Urals Railways School Number 2. In 1928–1929, factory and professional education received a new status thanks to contracts with enterprises that provided the schools with new equipment and tools. In Cheliabinsk, 12 professional schools employed 18 specialist teachers.

shifts with more than 30 pupils per class. Teachers were also enrolled in the campaign to ‘liquidate illiteracy among the adult population’.37 However, in actual fact, it was not possible to engage everyone. Of the 535 workers at the tractor factory who were to undergo courses in reading and writing, 169 did not take up the opportunity. Of those who did attend the courses, 85–90 per cent followed the lessons regularly.38 This poor turnout called for new measures. The responsible party members at the tractor factory received a disciplinary reprimand and were ordered to organise ‘a daily, systematic course in reading and writing’ within ten days and find new teachers for reading circles within five days. Members of the Komsomol (Communist Youth League) at the factory were to supply 40 people to help with these courses of basic training in reading and writing.39

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Figure 44 The Cheliabinsk City Library was founded in 1898. Workers from the railways are shown here visiting the library.

Figure 45 Stakhanovite workers with their wives on an excursion. Cars had been bought by the tractor factory in response to a direct order from People’s Commissar Sergo Ordzhonikidze, who wished to give premiums for the outstanding engineers and best workers at the plant.

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Figure 46 Dormitory for the students at the Pedagogical Institute. Out of 278 teachers in the city, only 13 had higher education, while 31 had only a basic elementary school background.

In 1931, a series of professional schools opened in Cheliabinsk: an automobile and road construction school and an energy and building school. The oldest vocational school was transformed into a tractor and food industry school.40 In order to cope with the growing demand for teachers, an evening course department was set up with two separate directions: one for party members and one for youth in the Komsomol. One hundred and fifty pupils were recruited from the tractor factory, 190 from the regional electric power station, the ferro alloy factory and the nickel works and 100 from the coal mines, in addition to 250 students from other organisations in the city.41 The city adopted a general plan for the expansion of hospitals and clinics attached to the industrial enterprises. The number of places in the city’s hospitals increased from fewer than 300 in 1928 to over 1700 in 1932. The old city hospital was totally renovated in 1935. The Cheliabinsk outpatient department was adapted to accommodate 625 patients, including 200 for each of the surgical and therapeutic sections. Besides the hospital proper, apartments were also built for the head doctor, the surgeon, the midwife and the finance director. Head nurses received their own flats, departmental and surgical nurses received separate rooms and staff nurses were accommodated in dormitories for up to 40 persons. Cheliabinsk received an ophtomological clinic with 60 berths, a blood doning centre, a regional epidomological and sanitary inspectorate.42

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In June of 1933, Kazimir Lovin, the first director of ChTZ, asked the People’s Commissariat of Health in the Russian Federal Soviet Republic for budgetary allocations that would guarantee adequate health care for everyone employed at the factory, at both the stationary and ambulatory polyclinics attached to the enterprise. Until then, ChTZ had only ‘a little sanitary town’ (medgorodok) in the barracks, which was decaying and had insufficient equipment and instruments. There was a constant lack of educated personnel.43 The ChTZ polyclinic was repaired, the walls were tightened up and painted, as were the roofs and ceilings, and the water supply system was improved.44 The extent to which health care developed during the second fiveyear plan (1933–1937) is reflected in the growing number of doctors, nurses and hospital beds, as well as in the increase in the number of workers who attended health resorts, sanatoriums and convalescent homes and the number of people who participated in the start of Soviet tourism and other forms of relaxation.45 Before the war, the Cheliabinsk oblast had six health resorts with a total of 1800 beds. Among these were two balneological resorts (which use mud packs around the body) by Lake Gorkoe, the radon kurort (health resort) in Sungul, the tuberculosis sanatorium at Uvilde and the so-called climate sanatoriums at Troitsk. There were also more than ten sanatoriums for children with tuberculosis. In total, these 18 sanatoriums had almost 4000 beds. During the war, they were used largely as hospitals for wounded soldiers.46 In the first half of 1936, the NKVD reported an alarmingly high mortality rate, especially infant mortality, in the Southern Urals. In the Cheliabinsk oblast, the number of deaths was greater than the number of births. The general situation was the same in the cities as it was in the countryside. It was expected that new epidemics would erupt before the summer, and this was happening at the same time as the children’s hospital had reduce its patient capacity. As a result, five to seven children were refused entrance every day, despite which there was still 80 children for the 50 sickbeds. The NKVD report contained details from the smaller cities in the region, where the situation was much worse. The lack of doctors and use of incorrect medication had led to high infant mortality. ‘Although these facts are well known, neither the health departments nor the procuracy have taken any measures to demand responsibility from anyone’, concluded the NKVD.47 In July 1936 the party regional committee adopted a resolution ‘on the education and increasing competence of medical personnel’.48 The Cheliabinsk OGPU directorate reported to Party Secretary Ryndin about how bad the water supply from the filtration and pumping station

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in Sosnovo was for the city and for the new factories. Current stops in supply led to production fulfilment failures, while insufficiently clean water had led to the spread of infectious diseases. The GPU stated that no medical personal were involved in the water purification, that the water was chlorified only and that testing was performed only once a day. The cleaning plant itself was not covered, which meant that dust and dirt from nearby workplaces and construction sites was drawn in to the water basins. The cleaning station’s electric cable had been incorrectly installed in 1932, which meant that the electricity supply was often interrupted. A number of conclusions can be reached from these documents, to which the new obkom secretary had to react. The plenipotentiaries of the secret police had a clear picture of the situation in industry and the city’s infrastructure, and they reported directly to the concerned local authorities and also upwards in the GPU (later NKVD) hierarchy. However, the extent to which Ryndin managed to remedy the most concerning deficiences in the city’s supply of industrial and drinking water that summer is unclear. Repeated raids and instructions led to a better situation.49

Sport During the 1920s, many initiatives were taken to develop football, athletics and sports with mass orientation.50 The Olimpiia football team was founded in 1922 and played at Aloe Pole, a park in the city centre. The football clubs lacked a stadium of their own until 1930. Football was easier than many sports to fit into the ideology that physical education could serve the country’s defence needs in the long term. A football match was compared to battle and the team spirit reflected what was needed from a platoon on the battlefield. Physical education and sports were a large and prestigious part of the responsibility of the industrial enterprises. The Cheliabinsk Tractor Factory organised its own Pioneer’s Camps.51 In July 1936, ChTZ allotted 800,000 rubles to build a stadium that was to be ready for use by 1 July 1937 and 100,000 rubles for cottages for young workers to be ready by August of the same year. ChTZ allocated a further 70,000 rubles to construct a so-called Cultural Base near the recently opened park.52 The so-called Spartakiads were originally seen as a rebuttal of the ‘bourgeois’ Olympic games. More than 8000 athletes participated in the first Spartakiad in Moscow, most of whom were from Russia, with others from Western Europe. However, many were also members of the communist parties in Europe. Some of Cheliabinsk’s best athletes were sent to the qualifying competition in Sverdlovsk.

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Figure 47 A bicycle race from Miass to Moscow (1800 kilometres) involved a team from the Miass Gold Excavation Plant.

Figure 48

Mobile film projection teams travelled throughout the countryside.

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Figure 49 1930s.

A jazz orchestra performs at the tractor factory theatre in the mid-

It was decided that the Dynamo club should organise an ice rink in wintertime, with 300 pairs of skates to be rented out. A running track and a hockey rink complex was also to be established, as well as a separate ice rink for children and a ski base with 500 pairs of skis for hire. In the same manner, the Dzerzhinets club was to arrange skating places and keep 400 pairs of skates and 1000 pairs of skis for hire, as well as build an amusement area for children with carousels and chutes. The aim was that at least 3000 people should be able to take the tests for the ‘Ready for Work and Defence medal’ (in Russian GTO, Gotov k trudu i oborone). Similarly, all other enterprises, schools and technical institutes were instructed to establish ski and skating rental bases, on a smaller scale. In Cheliabinsk, many ski and skating competitions were organised in all parts of the city.53 A final reflection on everyday life in Cheliabinsk is that the descriptions in this book could be supplemented by DVDs with excerpts from the many films that attracted cinema-goers in the 1930s, both Soviet and imported examples. The factories’ so-called ‘cultural palaces’ had music for any taste, from classical to jazz and other modern dance forms.

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Figure 50 Gustav Klutsis’ poster from 1932 illustrates how four horses drawing one sowing-machine would be replaced by one caterpillar tractor drawing four sowing-machines. The working class was to lead the technical development for their peasant allies. The catchphrase formulated by Stalin states: ‘By the end of the five-year plan, the collectivisation process must, in the main respects, be completed’. The harsh reality, however, involved resistance by the peasants to the collective forms of property and production, crop failures in 1931 and 1932 and, finally – as a consequence of hard requisition norms from the kolkhozy – a massive famine that had millions of victims in 1932–1933 in the Ukraine, the Northern Caucasus, the Volga region and the Southern Urals.

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4 The Tractor Factory’s Civilian Production and Military Potential

Tractorisation (traktorizatsiia) was one of the strange catch-words created by the Bolsheviks. Automobilisation (avtomobilizatsija) and radiofication (radiofikatsiia) were other new words that referred to the mass consumption of cars and radios. In the first five-year plan, large-scale solutions for agriculture were the obvious aim. The mechanisation of agriculture followed international models and was considered imperative for the modernisation of the whole country. However, many things were rather more chaotic than planned during Stalin’s ‘revolution from above’. Instead of a progressive transition to mechanised agriculture, in which model farms could have served as ideals for new collective farms, the actual result was an undermanned kolkhoz system with special so-called machine and tractor stations. Instead of specialists and motivated kolkhoz members, hundreds of thousands of the most thrifty peasants had been deported to far-off forests and had not found a new lifestyle that could surpass their old peasant culture. On the contrary, the new existence reminded many people of the old serfdom. Many peasants and their sons who filled the new workplaces in the cities’ factories and building sites brought with them a ‘country mentality’. Contemporary travellers to Russia were surprised by how the rural elements in the Soviet cities, and social historians characterise the phenomenon as a form of de-urbanisation. Almost 9000 industrial factories were built in the USSR during the three five-year plans prior to World War II. Start-up problems were common in these hundreds of industries with their relatively unqualified workers who came more or less directly from the villages. The tractor factory in Cheliabinsk is in many respects as typical of the epoch as of its management, specialists and workers. Wheel tractors were produced in Leningrad as early as the 1920s. The party’s politburo decided in 1929 that factories for caterpillar tractors 103

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Figure 51 In November 1929, the first poles were set in the ground for the future tractor factory workshops. Much of the design work for the factory’s equipment was done at the Detroit office of the Cheliabinsk Tractor Plant, where 40 Soviet and 12 American experts used their experience from the advanced machinebuilding and automotive industries in the USA.

were to be built in Stalingrad, Kharkov and Cheliabinsk. The Stalingrad Tractor Plant was built on a contract with Caterpillar Inc. and the Kharkov factory with assistance from International Harvester Inc. The Kharkov Tractor Plant had close contact with the locomotive factory in the city that also produced the first Soviet tanks. According to these plans, the Soviet Union should have had a peak capacity in its tractor industry of over 100,000 tractors per year. The directives for the tractor factory in the Urals were formulated centrally with due consideration of the available raw materials from the region’s iron and steel works. Coal was extracted in the opencast mines in Kopeisk and the Cheliabinsk basin. The regional coal-fired electric power station satisfied the enterprise’s energy demand and building materials were plentiful in the vicinity. The Cheliabinsk Tractor Factory (CHTZ) in the end received a larger planned capacity than the Stalingrad and Kharkov factories combined – 40,000 tractors per year. The ChTZ was typical of Soviet industrialisation in that the latest technology was brought in from the USA, Germany or the United Kingdom. However, the ChTZ differed from many other construction sites in that the entire project was to be handled by the factory’s own specialists. The Cheliabinsk Tractor Factory was a high priority object. The Supreme Economic Council (and from 1932, the People’s Commissariat of Heavy Industry NKTP) followed the construction, as did individual members of the politburo. A resolution of 23 May 1931 referred to the deficiencies in the building plans. On 15 September 1931, the polit-

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Figure 52 Measurements at the Cheliabinsk Traktorstroi site. In June 1929 excavations started according to the project developed by the GIPROMEZ construction bureau in Leningrad, in conjunction with the experts at Cheliabinsk Tractor Plant in Detroit.

buro condemned the fact that high-quality imported metals, which had been earmarked for ChTZ, had been sent elsewhere. This led to an investigation by the procurator and penalties for the guilty parties.1 On 23 May the politburo adopted a series of resolutions intended to speed up the completion of the tractor factory.2 Sanitary facilities such as water supply, sewerage, heating, ventilation and electrical supplies were delayed. No engineers or technicians were to be removed from Cheliabinsk Tractor Building site (Traktorstroi) to other factories until the production of tractors had started. Simultaneously, the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Trade was obliged to provide equipment for the workshops, the originally planned capacity of which had by then been raised to 20,000 tractors per annum. Between 20 and 25 inspectors were sent to the supply factories that were to deliver equipment to ChTZ.3 The NKTP was to supply all

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the necessary building materials to ChTZ. On 28 November 1932 The Council for Labour and Defence published a resolution on the definitive completion of the factory.4 The Cheliabinsk Tractor Factory was one of the most important projects for forced collectivisation in the early 1930s and the coordination of all involved enterprises was closely checked by people’s commissar Sergo Ordzhonikidze.5 The supreme leadership not only received reports from the enterprises. The OGPU secret police had a special EKO economic directorate that collected and analysed information, which was then presented to a small group in the party leadership. The secret police regularly reported on the construction of the Cheliabinsk Tractor Factory, both during the construction period and after production had started.6 The centralised control of production continued. On 30 September 1933 Stalin criticised other members of the politburo regarding the revelation that many tractors had been sent to areas other than agriculture. Stalin stressed that ChTZ had been primarily built to satisfy the needs of agriculture, yet the sovkhozy and machine and tractor stations had received only 600 out of 1365 caterpillar tractors. The same applied to the distribution of wheel tractors and lorries, far too few of which had been sent to the kolkhozy and machine and tractor stations (MTS).7 The construction period of the tractor factory is one of many examples of how Soviet labour forces changed during the course of industrialisation. Recruited peasants who performed unskilled labour at the sites were given a crash course in their new profession. Many received their first courses in reading and writing at this time. They were encouraged to go from building trades into training for the machine-building industry. A substantial part of the Soviet working class at the end of the 1930s had arrived from the countryside merely a few years before. Managers of building sites and industrial enterprises encountered numerous problems as the former peasants had difficulty getting used to the rhythm and discipline of factory life.8 One day in November 1929 Kazimir Petrovich Lovin and his assistants arrived to the site east of Cheliabinsk where the new factory was to be situated. Lovin was born in 1893 in the Sushki village in the Vitebsk province (guberniia). He began to work in St Petersburg at the age of 14. From 1912, he had contacts with the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Party and played an active role in the 1917 revolutions. Lovin had participated in the reconstruction of the power stations in Petrograd after the war and in the building of Moscow’s MOGES power station. Having completed his studies at a technical institute, he was appointed head of Moscow’s united power stations in 1925 and

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Figure 53 Kazimir Lovin (1893–1937) was in charge of the construction of the plant from 1929 to 1933 and, thereafter, its first director until he was brought up on fabricated charges of being an enemy of the Soviet regime and executed in 1937.

then head of the Cheliabinsk Tractor Building Site. In 1930, he and several other experts travelled to the United States to study how the tractor industry had developed at enterprises like Caterpillar and Allis Chalmers. Lovin visited several enterprises in the United Kingdom and the United States. The Russians had models of almost all the tractors in the world and had evaluated the terms for licensed production from International Harvester, Caterpillar and other companies. Amtorg, the Soviet trade delegation in New York was actively involved but the negotiations with Caterpillar led to no conclusion. The Soviet side was willing to consider only technical assistance and was not prepared to accept the further demands from the Americans. Other complications included that the drawings would be done only in English and all measurements would be Imperial (yards, inches, pounds, etc.) rather than in the metric system. As a result the Russians rented an entire floor of a skyscraper in Detroit to set up their own office, the Cheliabinsk Tractor Plant, and with the help of their own and American experts, designed

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Figure 54 Horse-drawn carts with gravel and building materials. These labourintensive methods were characteristic of Soviet industrialisation.

the new factory. From Cheliabinsk, 40 qualified workers were instructed to travel to the United States in order to study modern methods of tractor production and contemporary building materials and procedures.9 These workers, who were nominated by the party, received courses in English. Grigorii Treubov, the secretary of a party committee, was appointed the leader of the group. In Moscow, all were given new suits and instructions before their first trip abroad. The group also included workers from the future Ford Automobile Factory in Nizhnii Novgorod (named Gorkii from 1934 to 1992) who were to study the car production process at American firms. The Soviet delegations travelled via Hamburg or Le Havre to the United States. The individuals who travelled to the USA to learn more on tractor production were in their early thirties; Treubov was born in 1896, the others just after the turn of the century. Some had worked at the power station in Cheliabinsk, while others had been recruited from faraway places. When they returned from the United States, they soon advanced to the rank of foremen or supervisors but, for a few of them, the visit abroad led to other consequences. Treubov and several others had bought the recently published autobiography Moia zhizn’ (My Life) by Leon Trotsky.10 Trotsky had been excluded from the Communist Party

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in 1927, sent to internal exile in Alma-Ata and then expatriated in 1929. He remained a legendary personality from the Russian Revolution and the Civil War so it was hardly surprising that the specialists from Cheliabinsk would be eager to read his book. It is worthwhile noting, however, that none of them seem to have hidden their opinions on Trotsky’s book. When the Great Purges started after the show trial in August 1936 against Grigorii Zinoviev and others, their outspokenness cost them dearly. Before the project group from Cheliabinsk started to draw up the blueprints for the factory they had travelled around the state of Michigan to enterprises in the car, tractor and engine industry. Some of the workers had contracts to study and work for a longer period of time in American firms, where they acquired technical skills in certain aspects of the production process. When these technicians and workers returned to Cheliabinsk in 1931, they began to assemble and start a factory production line according to the drawings they had made in Detroit. In most respects, the first tractor that was produced in Cheliabinsk was a copy of the Caterpillar 60-horsepower model from 1925–1931. However, the Russians called it the ‘Stalinist-60’ (in Russian Stalinets-60). In 1934 Lovin was appointed director of ChTZ. Naturally, the cadres at the factory were scrutinised from a political point of view. All the cadres from the construction period who were to be employed at the new factory had their biographies checked by the secret police on behalf of the people’s commissariat. The profiles given to each person at their place of employment would follow them throughout their working life. The Communist Party and security organs would appoint commissions at regular intervals to check further into the personal files for data on their past, their relatives, their possible contacts in foreign countries and, just as importantly, their political activities before and after the 1917 revolutions.11 In December 1929 alone, 1754 persons from the countryside were registered at the labour exchange in Cheliabinsk. This was roughly half the number of newly registered workers. On 1 January 1930 the number of registered workers was 3336, of whom 2808 were unqualified workers, including 1644 women. Over 30,000 people worked at the industrial enterprises and the mine in Cheliabinsk in 1931 and the authorities counted on that figure doubling within the following year or two.12 On 9 April 1930 the Urals regional labour directorate wrote to the kolkhoz unions in the Cheliabinsk region and the responsible authorities ordering that 27,000 people were to be sent to the new industrial factories, exclusively by moving superfluous labour from the country-

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Figure 55 One of the future workshops of the Cheliabinsk Tractor Factory during the building phase. The fact that solid steel constructions were used from the very beginning allowed the conveyor and movements to be converted swiftly from one workshop to another for the production of heavy tanks during World War II.

side to the cities. The kolkhozy were estimated to have 18,117 persons, from various working specialisations, who it would be suitable to recruit to building sites. The kolkhoz peasants were not free to leave as they wished; they were required to have a permit to move before they could register at the Cheliabinsk labour exchange.13 During the construction period, there was substantial labour turnover at ChTZ. In January 1930 it was decided that 7000 Komsomol (Communist Youth League) members and 3000 poor peasants should be trained as building workers during their worktime at the ChTZ.14 At the end of 1930 the number of employed personnel was 10,504. This was lower than the 14,941 calculated in the building plan. In October alone, 2614 persons were employed, of whom 1801 joined of their own accord, 279 had been enlisted by the representatives of ChTZ and 205 were forced labourers, usually petty criminals from the corrective colony in the region. In the same month, however, 3120 workers quit ChTZ for various reasons, such as the fact that no workers’ clothes or shoes had been distributed or that the requirements for housing conditions had

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not been adequately satisfied. In the same month, 19,249 violations of labour discipline (working time, absence, etc.) were recorded.15 The composition of the labour force on the construction sites in the Urals varied from place to place. The tractor factory construction site did not have a lot of forced labour, while other cities in the Urals used a lot more. An iron and steel works and a railcar factory were built in Nizhnii Tagil, mainly by deported kulaks. In the neighbouring city of Magnitogorsk, criminal and political prisoners made up a substantial proportion of the labour force in the early 1930s. Historiography in recent years has tended to exaggerate the role of forced labour during industrialisation. Discussions about the significance of the Gulag during the Stalinist industrialisation have been radically changed by fundamental research in the archives in recent years. In 1940 Gulags made up only 1.2 per cent of all industrial production and 90 per cent of industrial construction work was done by free labourers.16

Figure 56

The conveyor belt in the workshop where tractors were assembled.

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Figure 57

The first serial-produced tractors on their way out of the factory.

The methods used to increase labour productivity changed during the 1930s. The Stakhanovite movement from 1935 onwards took precedence over earlier forms of premiums to ‘shock workers’ (udarniki) through its emphasis on increased production by rationalisation and more intensive forms of labour. In actual fact, Stakhanovism was implemented in many various forms. Successful workers not only received higher wages but also special privileges and better apartments and were often appointed to administrative posts at the factory. On 1 August 1937 the Cheliabinsk Tractor Factory employed 21,135 people, 17,841 of whom were workers. Of these, 6060 workers were enrolled in the Stakhanovite movement. These were given better opportunities to study, were offered tickets to the amusement and culture park, could have books delivered to their home from the library, received better health care and in many cases did not have to line up for food. Fifteen apartments had been built for Stakhanovites with individual ‘radio-points’ – inbuilt loudspeakers in one room. These workers could also receive assistance to build their own small country houses (dachas).17

Foreign specialists Foreign specialists held key roles in many cities in the Soviet Union during industrialisation. Germans, Italians and people of other nationalities

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were recruited by representatives from the USSR and not all workers who left for the Soviet Union had ideological motives. The great depression had struck particularly hard in certain countries and the expectation of employment in Russia was certainly attractive. In total, it is estimated that more than 40,000 foreign workers were employed in Soviet industries in the early 1930s, only a minority of whom were members in a communist party. Most were employed in the large factories in the Urals, the Kuzbass basin and in Kharkov under the direction of the People’s Commissariat of Heavy Industry (before 1932, under the Supreme Economic Council VSNKh). Today there is a rich body of memoirs and, since 1992, contemporary documents have been published on how various categories of immigrants and political refugees experienced everyday life, factory conditions and the political atmosphere in the Soviet Union.18 Eyewitness descriptions of the grand building projects in the Soviet Union in the first half of the 1930s have been provided by persons who had sought escape from the unemployment-ridden conditions in Germany and the United States or from the oppressive regime in fascist Italy. Their memoirs contain observations by experts, technicians and ordinary workers about how they had to foster a first generation of Soviet industrial workers to be exact, careful and punctual. Foreign workers and engineers wrote of enthusiastic but overly self-righteous communists who often tried to exceed the established practice and disregarded elementary technical requirements. This frequently led to damage to expensive imported equipment that had to be repaired at high costs.19 There were hundreds of Germans, Americans and other foreigners in Cheliabinsk, often with their families, who set their imprint on the city life in this pioneering era. The city’s centre still looked like any provincial Russian town, with its low-rise, wooden houses. A few kilometres to the east, however, a completely new city district arose with its long factory workshops and four- to five-storey apartment buildings.20 More than anything, the foreign workers were struck by the many contrasts between modern industrial technology and the primitive work forms.21 Among the most important foreigners was Edward J. Terry, the chief advisor on the construction of the factory. Many foreigners left Cheliabinsk after the inauguration of the tractor factory. In 1934, around 180 foreign workers and specialists remained; including their family members, they numbered around 300 people. Of these, 128 were Germans or Austrians, 17 Englishmen, five Hungarians and ten Czechoslovaks. One hundred and twenty-seven were married and 41 were single. Only 22 were members of the Soviet Communist Party, 16 were candidate members and 31 were members of another

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country’s communist party. Four were members of the the Komsomol. Two political study groups for Englishmen and Germans had gathered 60 participants in 1934. Fifty foreign workers had acquired their own allotment gardens, a total area of 3.5 hectares. A German ‘agitation brigade’ and its orchestra had travelled to a sovkhoz and had also performed at the First of May celebrations at the city’s electric power station to an audience of over 500 persons. Twenty-four foreigners were members of a sports club that competed in Magnitogorsk, Zlatoust and Cheliabinsk. Meetings were arranged between the foreign specialists and the Russian workers to discuss labour questions, organisation at the factories and improved technical skills among the Russian workers. Visits were made to Kashtak and to the ferro-alloy works, where over 200 people had participated in the meetings. Some 100 people attended a lecture in May 1934 on the situation in China, where the communists had recently completed what would become known as ‘The Long March’ away from pursuing Kuomintang troops. A lecture on the situation in Nazi Germany was particularly addressed to the women among the foreigners. Twelve foreign specialists participated in an orchestra that performed concerts for the factory’s workers eight times a week. A special library had been organised with over 2000 books in English, German, Hungarian and Czech. A summer camp for 20 of the specialists’ was organised in July. For the youngest children, another camp was organised jointly with the Russian children’s organisation (pionery). The foreign specialists received 25 tickets to the spas on the Crimea, in southern Russia and in the Caucasus; four travelled to Siberia and ten stayed at retreats in the Cheliabinsk region. There was a functionary among the factory’s management who had responsibility for foreign specialists.22 The Soviet authorities had close control over the foreign specialists. Any sign of intelligence gathering was tracked and political opinions and other personal matters were carefully recorded. For example, the American Edward J. Terry (born 1893) worked for the Cheliabinsk Tractor Plant bureau in the United States in 1930 and from 1931 was a leading specialist in Cheliabinsk. He was characterised by the local secret police as ‘anti-Soviet’ and was reported to have expressed his total scepticism of the Russians’ ability to get the plant ready for production. He had taken a lot of ‘compromising photographs’ of the building site and the workshops. At least ten foreign specialists were depicted as hostile, incompetent and therefore dispensable, from the factory’s point of view. However, for most of the foreigners in the register, it was said, ‘compromising documents have not been found’.23

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Figure 58 The Tractor Factory was officially inaugurated on 1 June 1933

Another sign of the times was the almost lyrical descriptions of Soviet industrialisation. The official propaganda described how the country would become modern and self-sufficient with tractors that would provide great opportunities for large-scale, collective farming. The poet and Nobel Literature Laureate in 1958, Boris Pasternak, visited Cheliabinsk and the Traktorstroi with other authors in May–June 1931. He wrote of his impressions in a letter to his wife, Z.N. NeiguazPasternak, and compared the tractor factory building site with the pyramids of Egypt, but also sarcastically described the façade that had to be

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erected before the arrival of the authors. Pasternak and other poets and authors read at poetry evenings for the factory workers.24 Experience gained from the Stalingrad Tractor Plant showed that small-scale production should begin before serial production. It was planned that the tractor conveyor could start in 1933 when the factory was to be officially inaugurated. Before that, a smaller unit called the experimental and testing factory (Opytnyii zavod) was built and was initially directed by an American, John Thane, and his assistant, both of whom had worked at Caterpillar. Tractors of every known brand were disassembled and studied at this factory and whatever seemed to be useful was used in the original Cheliabinsk design. As for the labour force, the intention was to recruit as many workers as possible to gain experience in the experimental factory, which started production in

Figure 59 The President of the USSR, Mikhail Kalinin, spoke at the inauguration of the factory in June 1933.

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November 1930. Over 4000 people worked there before they were transferred to the main plant in 1933. More important were the 100 or so American workers from Detroit who were the first overseers at the experimental factory. The solemn inauguration of the factory, which was enormous by the standards of the day, took place on 1–3 June 1933. Thousands of workers, building workers and soldiers from the city’s garrison gathered to listen to speeches by President Mikhail Kalinin and local party leaders. Orchestras played when some ten tractors rolled out from the assembly workshop. There were three days of festivities with singing and dancing in the nearby parks. Sergo Ordzhonikidze, the people’s commissar of heavy industry, visited the tractor factory some weeks later together with the chairman of the Urals regional party committee, Ivan Kabakov. The number of workers at ChTZ increased from 3247 in the first quarter of 1933 to 11,943 by the end of the year. In 1934, the number of employees grew from 12,761 to over 16,700 and by 1939–1940, the number of blue and white collar employees was approximately 15,000. The factory had many initial problems and constant deficiencies in quality control. In 1934, the first year of production, an average of 9.6 per cent of production (in price terms) was discarded. Thereafter, the amount of rejected sank to 5.7 per cent of production value in 1936 and then increased alarmingly over the next two years. In 1938, the losses were 34.3 million rubles, or 10.6 per cent of production value. This was mainly due to the fact that there was no clear understanding of how the conveyor production line should be organised. It was also caused by the high turnover of labour and the fact that the new workers received only elementary training before been placed at the machinery. This led to insufficient quality and costs that were far higher than had been calculated. Furthermore, in the individual workshops it was difficult to maintain working discipline or work rate. Lovin, who was in charge of the construction of the tractor factory, had been struck by illness and exhaustion. He was relieved of his duties and reassigned to matters closer to his training, as deputy head of the Main Energy directorate, Glavenergo in Moscow. In March 1934 Ordzhonikidze appointed Aleksandr Bruskin as the new director of ChTZ. Izrail Nesterovskii was appointed as main engineer, L.A. Meksin as deputy main engineer and I.G. Markhasov as chief designer. Aleksandr Bruskin (1897–1939) was born in Kherson and completed his engineering education in 1922 at the mechanic-technological fac-

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ulty of the Kharkov Institute of Technology. He then studied at polytechnical institutes in Germany in 1923 and 1924. At Kharkov he worked as mechanic and as designer and advanced to the position of workshop overseer in 1927 at the tractor factory in the city, while also teaching at the Kharkov Institute of Technology. From 1929, he was chief engineer at the Traktorstroi, the Kharkov Tractor Building site. He was sent to the USA in 1930 to order machinery and to make designs for the new factories in Kharkov and Cheliabinsk. He was then appointed technical director and, in 1932, became director of the Kharkov Tractor Factory. In March 1934, Ordzhonikidze appointed him as the new director at ChTZ. In Bruskin’s time, changes were made in the foundry and coordination between the other workshops and the assembly line was improved so that, by 1936, a daily production of 100 tractors was achieved. In other words, the annual production capacity was nearly 30,000 tractors. At the same time, the factory was rebuilt to produce the stronger, diesel S-65 tractor. By the first quarter of 1937, a total of 69,261 tractors with kerosene engines had been produced. After the reconstruction of the workshops, production of the diesel-driven S-65 tractor started in the third quarter of 1937. From 1938 onwards, an S-65G model with a gas accumulator on diesel basis was produced in parallel with the S-65.

The significance of the tractor factory for the Red Army A Red Army representative, Pavlovskii, visited the future Cheliabinsk Tractor Factory for a couple of days in November 1930. In his report, he noted that the experimental factory had opened on 7 November in order to start building tractors and to educate qualified workers. This was done in order to avoid all the problems that had haunted the tractor factories elsewhere, notably in Stalingrad. Pavlovskii left an order for two tractors with the specifications that were required by the Red Army Motorisation and Mechanisation department (UMM RKKA). The order was for tractors with a maximum speed of 9 or 12 kilometres per hour. Higher speeds were not yet possible as the carts had no springs. In the long run, however, the army required a faster tractor, and it was decided that the experimental factory would build a four-geared tractor with a much higher maximum speed. Pavlovskii also argued that the tractor factory should be under Red Army supervision during its construction phase, partly in order to avoid sabotage but primarily so that all the requirements of the defence commissariat regarding buildings and future lines of production could

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1st quarter 2nd quarter 3rd quarter 4th quarter Entire year

– 52 610 988 1650

1933 1174 2281 2008 3637 10,100

1934 4475 4560 5354 6061 20,450

1935 6497 7575 7160 7827 29,059

1936

Table 2 Production of tractors at the Cheliabinsk Tractor Factory in the 1930s

8002 – 1372 3611 12,085

1937

2731 3562 2678 2672 11,143

1938

1699 3726 2760 3074 11,259

1939

2815 2403 2270 1069 7757

1940

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Figure 60 In 1936, the diesel-driven Stalinets-60 tractor from Cheliabinsk was presented at the World Exhibition in Paris, where it received the Grand Prix. In 1936 caterpillar tractors from Cheliabinsk were tested under hard conditions: seven tractors covered a distance of 2000 kilometres in snowy terrains in Iakutia and another group with Stalinets-60 had climbed up to 4000 metres above sealevel in the Pamir mountains. These tractors were also adjusted to the demands of the mining industry and produced for the Red Army as artillery haulers.

be met.25 A representative of the military at industrial enterprises – voenpred in Russian, abbreviated from voennyi prestavitel’ – became an institution in Soviet industry. The Voenpred had the last word on the approval of products that were sent to the army and had a significant influence on the organisation of production. In the first instance, a military representative would be sent to the experimental factory in Cheliabinsk to supervise the production of T-24 tanks even before the main factory was ready. The T-24 tank was a modification of the first Soviet tank, the T-12, which had been produced at the Kharkov Locomotive Works and would enter serial production in 1931. It had riveted plate iron with a thickness of only 20 millimetres in the gun-turret and the front. Its total weight was 18.5 tons and it had a 300-horsepower petrol M-6 engine and a maximum speed of 22 kilometres an hour. Only 20 T-24 tanks were ever produced, since a decision was made in 1931 to develop a version of the fast American

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Christie tank, which the Soviet authorities had acquired licences to produce. Several factors should be taken into consideration concerning these tanks when making international comparisons. The first of these is the question of the engines’ effect with caterpillar or wheel operation. The second is that the Soviet Union, for several reasons, opted for and managed to develop a diesel engine that was powerful enough for heavy tanks. This would prove to be quite advantageous during World War II. The Soviet tanks were less flammable and could use less refined diesel. Finally, it is important to compare the thickness and quality of the armour and armaments such as guns and submachine guns. The Christie tank had solid potential for further development due to its configuration and combined wheel and caterpillar operation. The first Soviet modification was called the BT-2 (Russian abbreviation of bystrokhodnyi tank or fast-moving tank). It had an imported or produced-under-licence 400 hp Liberty engine and a maximum speed of 72 kilometres per hour with wheels or 52 with caterpillar tracks. Walter Christie himself had reached much higher speeds in the USA but the results attained in Russia were more than sufficient for the Red Army’s requirements for new armour. The BT-2 tank had one 37 millimetre Hotchkiss gun and one 7.62 millimetre machine gun. In the 1930s, the Russian designers refined this fast-moving,

Figure 61

The BT-2 tank.

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light tank with its total weight of 11–14 tons in models called BT-5 and BT-7. 26 Some of the design ideas introduced for this originally American tank would later be incorporated onto the successful T-34 tank. Until the end of the 1930s, the Red Army preferred tanks with a combined wheel and caterpillar track operation. However, this not only made the production process more complex, but also limited the possibility of strengthening its armour without risking too much of an increase in the tank’s total weight. In the 1930s, the methods producing of armour evolved so that more specific parts could be made thicker. The technique of manual welding allowed for casting and welding of detail in armour plates. This was an important leap towards the production of tanks that could withstand hits by shells. As for the thickness factor, it is the effective thickness in the horizontal level that counts. This is illustrated by the following figure. The incline of 60 degrees implies an effective thickness twice as deep in the horizontal direction. The angle of penetration of a shell is determined by how it has been fired and whether the tank moves in the horizontal plane or not. In practice, inclinations of the front part of the tank over 45 degrees mean that the projectile would change direction and ricochet against the armour. Even if a shell did penetrate a thick plate, it would lose much of its kinetic energy. As a counter-measure, German engineers designed a shell with arrows that, because of their

Figure 62 By lowering the armour plate to an angle of 30 degrees, the active thickness was increased by a factor of two. Projectiles bounced off the tank more easily and their hitting power was reduced.

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Figure 63 The BT-7 tank.

much higher speed, could penetrate deeper, regardless of the angle of inclination. These changes had already been included in the Soviet modifications to the BT-2 and its successors. The last versions, BT-7 and BT-7M, had achieved a good combination of mobility, armour and fire power and they were the foundations of the designer Mikhail Koshkin’s models that would lead to the medium-sized T-34 tank.27 Diesel engines that were powerful enough for tanks weighing dozens of tons were yet another technological factor that would make the Red Army more powerful than its enemies during World War II. The diesel engine had two obvious advantages: it used low octane diesel and the fuel tank itself was non-flammable, even when hit by shells.

Evolution of the military doctrine A decisive factor following any war is how the army manages to analyse the past war and then foresee the contours of coming wars. The 1920s and 1930s were characterised by the paradox that the losers and outsiders after World War I – the Soviet Union and Germany – achieved the most far-going reforms, while the victors – France and the United Kingdom – had found themselves in a conservative position of passivity

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in the areas of technology and doctrine. In the exhausting battles of the Great War, the first tanks appeared as a means to bring mobility back to battles. The English transported these vehicles in cisterns, hence the name ‘tank’ for an armoured gun-wagon. The tank was only one of several new types of weapon that had radical consequences during World War I. Aeroplanes and new chemical weapons had also changed the preconditions of battle. From 1926 to 1932, there was secret and mutually advantageous cooperation between the Red Army and the German Reichswehr. When their cooperation started, both armies had, independently of each other and of the more famous British military theorists, created similar concepts for the use of armoured vehicles. Military historical research has established the background to the German doctrine on armour as compared to the theories on future war that were advanced by Britons J.F.C. Fuller and B.H. Liddell Hart. The new Soviet doctrine was not an imitation of Fuller’s or Liddell Hart’s ideas, still less a copy of the German blitzkrieg, as is sometimes claimed in Western literature.28 The development of the Soviet armed forces in the 1930s was actually founded on the theory of deep operations, which assumed that future wars would be long and would involve many states. They would therefore include situations with great, mobile battles and long periods of impasse. The main method of subduing an enemy would be through offensive actions to surround or split the opposing army. Key components of success would be intensive advances in the direction of the main attack and pre-empting the enemy’s counter-measures. The mechanised units should be able to achieve great mobility through fast tanks, the BTs and later the T-34s. Operative and strategic studies had already shown that a drawn-out war would inevitably lead to situations with operative pauses, when an enemy would have time to re-establish its positional defences. Therefore, mobile warfare should start with by breaking through the well prepared defences of an enemy’s tactical zone. Studies had shown that such a breakthrough with mechanised units would leave opposing forces too torn down to develop their own breakthrough into an operative depth. Therefore, an offensive army group must contain one echelon dedicated to creating a breach in the enemy’s tactical defences, through which the mechanised units could then pass in order to achieve initial success. The base for the troops in the first echelon was the infantry, as it was necessary to take the fight to the enemy in their trenches. In the first instance, the artillery should wipe out an enemy’s defensive positions. However, even under the most favourable conditions, the artil-

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lery could only be expected to eliminate a relatively small part of the enemy’s defensive line. Therefore, tanks were necessary to support the advancing infantry. This would clear up enemy firing positions at tactical depths that had withstood the initial artillery attacks and then open up the way for the next divisions to advance deep into the operative zone. In the first half of the 1930s, the Red Army considered that the light T-26 tank would be the main support for the advancing infantry, with up to 60 tanks per kilometre of the breakthrough area. The T-26 was a modification of a British Vickers tank, with changes made in Russia by the chief designer, M.A. Zigel. The tank weighed 9.4 tons and was produced at the Voroshilov Works in Leningrad from 1933 to 1936. In case of war, it could also be produced at the Cheliabinsk Tractor Factory. It had a 45 millimetre gun model/1932 and 136 shells, and a 7.62 millimetre machine gun. The T-26 had 16 millimetre thick armour (25 in the turret) and a 90 horse power petrol engine. Its maximum speed was 30 kilometres per hour. The T-26 was made in many versions, as self-propelled artillery and as a fire-thrower. The T-26 tanks were successfully employed during in the battle of KhalkhinGol against the Japanese army in the summer of 1939. Between 1931 and the German invasion of Russia in 1941 more than 11,000 T-26s were produced. However, none had been produced at the Cheliabinsk Tractor Factory, where only the latest design changes had been carefully recorded as a measure of economic preparedness. The theoretical development of the Red Army in the 1920s and early 1930s was intensive. This epoch was among the most productive in theoretical terms as well as at a technological level. Debates were relatively open and were held on the unexpected changes in World War I for all the involved states and armies. One of the most influential Russian proponents of a new form of mobile warfare was Vladimir Triandafillov (1894–1931), who produced pioneering articles and books. From the late 1920s, these were the main guidelines for the Red Army. Triandafillov died in an aeroplane accident in 1931 but his basic work was continued by others under the guidance of deputy people’s commissar of defence, Mikhail Tukhachevskii.29 Of great significance for the reconstruction of the Red Army was the introduction of the concept operational art (operativnoe isskusstvo), which defined a level between tactics and strategy. A war could no longer be decided in one single, general battle, and separate tactical victories could easily be compensated for by the enemy because of the new forms of communication.30 Step by step, the Red Army developed its new ideas of deep battles with fast-moving and fast-shooting tanks. These had to be capable

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of breaking through a heavily defended line and advancing towards the further deep defence lines of the enemy, while the slower (but mechanised within the foreseeable future) infantry would advance to consolidate its hold over conquered terrain. It was well known in the rest of the world in the mid-1930s that the Soviet Union had acquired strong armour. At manoeuvres held in Kiev and Minsk in 1935 and 1936, respectively, many foreign observers were impressed by watching hundreds of tanks in action in conjunction with parachute troops and the infantry. The theory on armour was ahead of the Soviet industry’s capability but it spurred the ongoing modernisation of the defence industries. It would take several years before the factories in Leningrad, Kharkov and Stalingrad had tanks in production that fully satisfied the army’s technical and tactical requirements. The backwardness of Soviet industry was overcome as the Soviet designers managed to refine and adapt to the internal preconditions of the best British and American tanks, which were initially produced on licence. In 1940, after a series of modifications and having equipped it with the original Soviet diesel engine, Soviet designers presented what was to become the legendary T-34 tank, considered by some to be one of the best in World War II. Stalin’s forced industrialisation had created the necessary capacity to produce the tens of thousands of tanks, as well as countless other military equipment, that would prove decisive during the war.31 The swift development in anti-tank guns soon demanded a different type of tank that could withstand an intensive artillery attack from an enemy. Tanks were therefore more heavily armoured. The heavy tanks were then considered to be suitable only for breakthrough operations. The first Soviet heavy tanks had been produced on a small scale for the strategic reserve of the headquarters (the T-28 and T-35). Now the heavy tanks had to be produced on a mass scale.32 The Red Army was twice struck by the repression of the OGPU-NKVD secret police. In 1930–1931, thousands of officers were purged, many of whom had extensive experience, often with careers that stretched back to the Tsarist army. Most of them were sentenced to up to ten years in forced labour camps. The local wars in China and Spain in the late 1930s, in which the Soviet Union assisted the Nationalist government in Beijing and the Republican Army, respectively, with experts and weapons,33 were carefully analysed by the Red Army’s generals.34 Some of these evaluations were influenced by the ongoing purges of the Great Terror against the supreme leadership of the Red Army. These purges also concerned the defence industry. Many more designers and

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Figure 64

The T-28 tank.

engineers in the aviation and rocket industry perished in the Gulag or were executed than in the tank industry. Most of these military men were formally rehabilitated in Khrushchev’s time, but only in the 1990s did some of the archival source material concerning their cases reach the public domain. Iaroslav Tinchenko has analysed the little-known operation, spuriously called ‘Operation Springtime’ (Operatsiia Vesna), which in the early 1930s was predominantly directed at those officers who had been recruited to the Red Army during the Civil War, and who were now considered to have ‘counter-revolutionary ideas’. Oleg Suvenirov, colonel and professor at the Institute of Military History of the Ministry of Defence in Moscow, conducted pioneering research concerning the widespread purges in the Red Army of 1937 and 1938. His work has been further enriched by the publications of Colonel Nikolai Cherushev at the Central Russian Army Museum in Moscow. Through their research in the archives and that of other historians a lot more is known today about the wave of bloody terror that struck the Red Army high command in 1937. However, there are still far too few documents to understand the intentions of Stalin and the political leaders around him. The Great Terror had grave implications for the theoretical development of the Red Army. Thousands of officers were executed in 1937– 1938, including some who had formulated the new theories on mobile warfare, operational art and deep operations. Thereafter, it was nec-

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essary to discuss these new concepts in veiled terms. Several of the tank designers escaped the repressions of 1937–1938. However, among those who were falsely charged and executed was Nikolai Tseits, who had developed the heavy tanks. However, his ideas were refined by Aleksandr Morozov (1904–1979) and Mikhail Koshkin (1898–1940) at the Kharkov Tractory Factory, where the prototype for the T-34 tank was completed in 1938. Zhosef Kotin (1908–1979) and Nikolai Dukhov (1904–1964) were tank designers at factories in Leningrad and would later become the leaders in refining the Soviet heavy tank. By the late 1930s the Soviet tank industry had kept up some of its momentum and was even more technologically advanced than Germany.

Military-economic preparedness: The ChTZ enterprise in the 1930s The term mobilisation is usually associated with the call-up of soldiers and officers to a rallying point, where they receive their uniforms and weapons from the mobilisation reserves and are then sent in accordance with tested transport plans by rail, lorry or aeroplane to their corresponding army units. On the European continent, such mobilisation plans were highly developed after the 1870–1871 German-French War and calculations were made as to how many divisions of 10,000 or more men could be sent to the state frontiers within a certain time. These calculations formed the foundation of war planning in Berlin, Paris and Moscow in the early 20th century. In this book, however, mobilisation is mostly used in connection with industrial mobilisation, a concept that was widely in used in the interwar period concerning how states could redirect their economy to support the demands of a future total war. After World War I, organisations were set up in a number of countries to prepare – even in peacetime – the entire economy, the transport and the finance systems and internal and foreign trade for those conditions that might arise in the next war. Such organisations were established in Germany, France, Sweden and the United States.35 Mikhail Tukhachevskii even studied the experience of industrial mobilisation from textbooks used at military academies in Europe and the United States.36 Before the opening of the archives, Western observers had no exact knowledge of how the Soviet theory of economic planning also included plans to mobilise the entire industrial base in case of war. Those Russian economists who were engaged in this part of the planning were well informed about the history of planning. Naturally, however, they were

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not able to discuss such matters in ordinary Soviet economic journals. In this respect, much has changed recently. One of the leading experts on Soviet ammunition production in World War II, Ivan Vernidub, wrote: The mobilisation plans for the factories were documents that prescribed everything that must be required in peacetime, in order to change in the initial phase of a war to the stipulated level of production. However, in practice these plans were merely calculations of the necessary materials and equipment, of shop floor space and of labour resources. They often lacked a complex interconnection of all elements in the factory’s mobilisation plan. They did not foresee imbalances and did not prescribe measures to dispose of such imbalances in the production phases.37 By examining how the theories of industrial mobilisation were effectively realised in Cheliabinsk before and during World War II, this book is also a case study that may add concreteness and reality from everyday factory life to a general treatise on industrial change in the Soviet Union. These specific questions are inspired by the author’s earlier study on the principles of industrial mobilisation in case of war. How realistic were the plans that had been drawn up for conversion of a factory and which preparations had been most significant? How had the change from civilian to military production actually been prepared for at the enterprises in the Urals? How had the management estimated and taken into account the changes in manpower supply when many of the male workers were drafted into the army? The central question concerns the Soviet Union’s military-economic preparedness, which aimed to prepare the economy, the transport system and the country’s infrastructure for conversion to wartime conditions. This planning was shrouded in secrecy, both among the military and the civilian authorities and very little was written on the topic in the open press and publications. It was taught at special faculties at military colleges for those chosen to be responsible for the conversion of industry, distribution, transport, etc. when war broke out. In the period leading up to World War II, economic preparedness was just a small part of the activities in Soviet enterprises. A few people connected to the director kept track of the industrial mobilisation plan and its updating in correspondence with changing requirements from the military. The forced industrialisation under Stalin’s despotic leadership laid the foundation for Soviet endurance in World Ware II

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in other senses, primarily the enormous surge in the iron and steel industries and the parallel growth of the modern machine-building industry. More thoroughly than most of the great powers, the Soviet Union had confronted itself with a series of scenarios for the next great war and how this war would change production and living conditions. What we know about the economic preparedness of the tractor factory in Cheliabinsk is based on lists in the enterprise archives. These lists were made in autumn of 1941 by a commission from the NKVD archival directorate (all state archives were part of the People’s Commissariat of the Interior until the early 1960s). Its members’ checking of documents was completed on 16 October 1941, and suggested what enterprise documentation should be shredded and burnt, specifically documents that ‘lack interest from the point of view of production or exist in many copies in other places’. Among these materials were general plans for the tractor factory from the early 1930s, projects and calculations for mobilisation plans of ammunition and even the last pre-war mobilisation directives of 6 June 1941. These materials were also available in other archives in Moscow, and can still be accessed there. However, the detailed plans for transition at ChTZ according to the mobilisation plans of the mid-1930s have been lost forever. By 11 June 1941 the Archival section of NKVD’s directorate in Cheliabinsk had already checked which material from the ChTZ archive could be disposed of. It concluded that 34 dossiers had ‘historical, scientific and practical information value’ and the rest could be destroyed.38 The saved inventory lists at the ChTZ experimental factory hint at how they prepared for industrial mobilisation. They include, for example, a translation of an article from Machinery (8 February 1934) on the serial production of aeroplanes in factories in Blackburn, England, and the Soviet expert’s comment that this article requires ‘careful consideration’ by other industries tasked with serial production. The experimental factory’s special library also contained secret bulletins from the State Planning Commission (Gosplan) and the People’s Commissariat on Industrial Mobilisation.39 From 1929, when the factory itself started being built, instructions had already been drawn up for how the completed factory should organise its possible wartime production in accordance with mobilisation plan S-30, and also a series of directives for how the tractor factory should organise its cooperation with other enterprises in the city and elsewhere in case of general mobilisation.

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The enterprise archive had kept instructions on defence-industrial production planning for 1930 and 1931, as well as directives for how the plan for labour resources in case of industrial mobilisation should be handled. All of these were at first handled in accordance with the S-30 mobilisation plan but were later coordinated with the new MV-10 plan.40 It is worth noting that by the time the Cheliabinsk Tractor Factory started serial production of civilian products – tractors, spare parts and equipment – its special department at the experimental factory had already received several booklets on industrial mobilisation practices in France and Poland. For 1933–1934, the library also had received a bibliographical bulletin on military production. From 1933, the archives also contained a note on the production plan for T-28 tanks at ChTZ, in case of war, to be prepared for by the end of the second five-year plan, that is, by 1937. Although the commission decided in 1941 that this plan should not be destroyed, it has not yet been found in the regional archive’s collections on ChTZ. From 1933, the special department also had directives for the new M-3 mobilisation plan in accordance with the decisions of the People’s Commissariat of Defence. The special workshop at ChTZ was responsible for the permanent checking of the mobilisation plan for production of tanks. However, from an historian’s point of view, the regrettable fact is that these plans were eliminated when the war actually broke out in 1941. The archival commission decided that the mobilisation plans from the 1930s had become obsolete and that they had no technical or historical value, which was the criterion for keeping older records in the factory’s archives. From 1934 onwards, that is from the first year of ChTZ, there were demands from the Red Army’s mobilisation directorate regarding what was to be produced according the M-3 mobilisation plan. Every enterprise with such mobilisation tasks was to have an updated production and technology plan for the first period of a total war. The technical director or the chief engineer had responsibility for the industrial mobilisation plan.41 The mobilisation plans of the enterprise were to be sent to the main directorate of the People’s Commissariat for approval. At the centre, the mobilisation plans from enterprises were to be coordinated and the definitive plans for the first period of war sent back to the factories. At the factories, a trusted group in the special departments were to supervise three key things: first, that the mobilisation plans were updated to the latest requirements of the armed forces; second, that the machinery of the factory was sufficient and flexible enough for battle condi-

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tions within the short stipulated time and third, that the important raw materials and other goods were always in stock. One of the leading individuals at the Cheliabinsk Tractor Factory involved in industrial preparedness was Izrail Nesterovskii (1898–1938). He was born in Kherson in the Ukraine and started working at nine years of age. After finishing at the trade school, he got a job as blacksmith at the Putilov Works in Kherson. He worked as teacher at the Kherson trade school in 1921 and was appointed head of a trade school in Odessa a few years later, while studying at the Odessa Industrial Institute. He then became chief engineer at an enterprise in the city before being appointed chief mechanic at the tractor factory in Kharkov. In March 1934, he was transferred to the Cheliabinsk Tractor Factory where he became the chief engineer. In December 1934, the head of the ChTZ experimental factory, who was allowed to read top-secret acts, was commanded to prepare the factory for the production of tanks in case of war. He was to study the drawings of the T-29 tank that was produced in Leningard. The task to prepare ChTZ for wartime conditions contained instructions from several main directorates of the People’s Commissariat of Heavy Industry.42 On 10 January 1935 Nesterovskii reported to the Special Machine – Building Trust (Spetsmashtrest) in Moscow, ‘no production of tanks takes place yet at ChTZ’. Spetsmashtrest had enquired about standardisation so that tractor and tank spare parts could be produced in the same machinery and according to the same drawings. On 12 January 1935 Director Bruskin protested to the main directorate against the order to produce three T-29 tanks: ‘As you know,’ he said, ‘we are completely unprepared to produced three T-29 tanks since no preparations have been made for that purpose yet’. He demanded that one tank and a set of blueprints and drawings be sent to Cheliabinsk. NKTP thus commissioned those factories that made parts for that tank to send drawings to ChTZ and keep the Cheliabinsk factory updated on any changes in the design of the T-29 tank. It was also emphasised that the specialists at ChTZ should receive more information on experiments and research on tanks. Director Barynov from the testing and experiment workshop at the Kirov Works in Leningrad explained in a letter to NKTP that the expert from ChTZ Oleinikov had been shown everything concerning this tank and that a set of drawings had been sent to ChTZ on 26 February.43 In February 1935 the directorate of NKTP discussed whether the T-28 or the T-29 should be produced during wartime at ChTZ. Otherwise, the factory’s mobilisation plan could not be updated. On 25 February

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Oleinikov gave his report to the Kirov Works, in which he described the production of the T-28 with its 12-cylinder aeroplane engine, and also the T-29, which was a further refined version of the American Christie tank with combined wheel and caterpillar track operation. Three or four engineers at ChTZ were required to study all the drawings for both tanks until it had been decided which of them should be produced at ChTZ in case of war.44 On 26 February 1935 the people’s commissar of heavy industry, Sergo Ordzhonikidze, signed order No. 51-ss (‘ss’ denotes sovershenno sekretno, top secret) on the ChTZ’s preparation of tank T-29-5. Two mechanics from ChTZ were to travel to the Kirov Works in Leningrad to study and take part in the testing of this tank. The test and experimental workshops of the Kirov Works were to create a complete set of blueprints and drawings of the tank and send these to Cheliabinsk.45 Seven people – three mechanics, one electrician and specialists from the assembly lines at the Kirov Works – arrived from Leningrad to set up these facilities at the second factory. The defence industry had traditionally been concentrated in and around St Petersburg until World War I and, to a large extent, remained there during the first phase of forced industrialisation in the planning era since 1928. However, the more thorough economic preparedness spread this knowledge to other enterprises.46 Behind these descriptions of the activities at the experimental workshops of ChTZ was more than so-called planning on paper by a few specialists. More and more of the development work at the big Soviet producers of tanks was assimilated. This also included training to foresee all the measures that must take place in case of an industrial mobilisation. This explains why the Soviets managed to improvise a wartime economic system in 1941 at so many enterprises that was to exceed the seemingly superior German economy. Even if the civilian production at ChTZ had severe quality problems, another and more demanding task had been solved by training for industrial mobilisation. The tractor factory had, just like the nearby machine-building factory No. 78, undertaken extensive preparations for production of shells in wartime. The Soviet Union had decided never to repeat its mistakes of World War I by allowing there to be a deficiency of ammunition in case of a new total war.

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5 Stagnation and Streamlining in the Whirlwinds of Terror, 1936–1939

Figure 65 Poster by Viktor Govorkov, 1940: ‘Stalin in the Kremlin takes care of each and every one of us.’ Victoria Bonell (1977, p. 168) notes that 100,000 copies of this poster were printed, making it one of the most widely distributed to clubs and enterprises. The image reinforced the impression that the general secretary of the Communist Party worked hard until late in the night. He actually rose very late in the day but thereafter had a strict routine of meetings with visitors from various party organs and enterprises. The fact that the logbook of these visitors was kept in the archives has made it possible to disentangle certain myths on Stalin’s work routines.1 134

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Repression and terror were present in all periods in Soviet history but were especially severe in the latter part of the 1930s. The year 1937 is associated with massive, bloody purges in the Communist Party, the state apparatus and among the industrial enterprises. Contemporary observers at the time were stunned by the reports from the public trials in 1936–1938 in Moscow against leading party members. A few believed that the accusations and confessions were based on reality. Other reporters were frightened of the state terror and speculated about how the old party members might have been tortured in order to break their willpower. One such contemporary witness was the Swedish social democrat Zeth Höglund, who described his impressions in articles in the Socialdemokraten newspaper and later published a book entitled Witch-night over Europe.2 Since that time, the causes and driving forces in the great purges have been debated, not only in the scholarly world but also by writers and philosophers. Russian emigrants, including natural scientist Fritz Houtermans (writing under the pseudonym Frederick Beck) and the historian Konstantin Shteppa (writing under the pseudonym W. Godin) described with many pertinent insights how the terror had developed on a nationwide scale. They argued around dozens of explanations that had been forwarded among their compatriots, victims as well as ordinary Soviet citizens.3 Since the opening of the Russian archives, the research on repression in Stalin’s time has again intensified. Every generation naturally makes its own representation of the past. However, such information as has been required in the political debates in European political organisations on ‘coming to terms with communism’ has actually been available before. What the archives have added are delineations and better background descriptions. Among the pioneers are the Russian historian Roy Medvedev’s monumental Let History Judge, a translation of the Russian version, K sudu istorii. Medvedev’s father was a political officer in the Red Army who was sentenced to the Gulag camps in 1938, where he died a few years later. Roy Medvedev wrote his settlement with Stalinism when he was employed at a research institute in the 1960s. His book could not be published in the Soviet Union. In fact, he was dismissed from his post and excluded from the Communist Party for having criticised the ongoing attempts to rehabilitate Stalin. The Russian version of the book contains enormous amounts of information that was excluded in the abridged English version published in the early 1970s.4 Medvedev’s book was updated in the late 1980s, as was another classic work – Robert

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Conquest’s The Great Terror: Stalin’s Purges in the 1930s. Both of these scholars based their presentations on the many memoirs and articles that had appeared in the USSR after the de-Stalinisation campaign started in 1956. Medvedev could also refer to many unpublished manuscripts and some archival data that had been used by other historians who intended to write about the forced collectivisation, the dekulakisation and the purges. The framework of interpretation in Let History Judge was close to the official, Khrushchevite version of Stalin as an usurper of power who had distorted the basically sound plans for a long-term socialist transformation drawn up by Lenin. Both Medvedev and Conquest wrote mostly about the terror that struck the Communist Party members – high officials in the state and economy administration. Medvedev tried to set the Stalinist dictatorship in a wider historical framework and advanced social and economic factors to understand why Stalin’s absolute dictatorship had become possible. The terror in the Soviet Union is often explained by the intentions, actions and orders of Stalin or of a few leading personalities in the party and state apparatus. However, the massive purges and the widespread support for unmasking ‘enemies of the people’ can also be seen as evidence that many other groups in the society took part in these processes. Such an alternative perspective was launched by historian Robert W. Thurston, who also hinted at the fact – which was hotly disputed some 15 years ago but is more recognised today – that large groups in society were not hit by the terror at all. Thurston’s view of the dominant Cold War presentation of the Soviet Union as permeated with fear may have been somewhat exaggerated. However, his contribution spurred research into a new area.5 After the opening of the Russian archives, and since a huge number of documents have become available, much more is known about the mechanisms of repression. It is necessary to distinguish between different levels. First, there was repression against leading communists who had been opponents of Stalin and his policies. Second, there were the actions that led to widespread purges against party cadres – the nomenklatura in industry, agriculture and transport. The third part, which had been least known but which represented by far the greatest number of victims, was the so-called mass operations. The three great Moscow show trials took place on the first level. They were held publicly and there were widespread discussions about why and how it had been possible to force the accused to confess their guilt, of even the most unthinkable crimes. In these trials, Grigorii Zinoviev, Karl Radek and Nikolai Bukharin, as well as dozens of the Bolshevik ‘old

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guard’, were sentenced to death or, in a few cases, to long prison terms. In June 1937, Marshal Tukhachevskii and seven generals were condemned for alleged high treason. In the wake of these trials, hundreds and, in the end, thousands of their followers or relatives were purged.6 Earlier in the 1930s, the party had regularly purged its ranks and members had been excluded for their oppositional views, for breach of discipline or for moral degeneration. However, these purges seldom had such drastic consequences as camp sentences or executions. After the assassination of Leningrad’s party secretary, Sergei Kirov, on 1 December 1934, the control over the party members’ views increased. Anyone who had been in the opposition groups against the ‘general line’ in the 1920s was suspected of ‘counter-revolutionary views’ and could easily be repressed in the successive waves of purges of former oppositional communists. In March 1935 censorship sharpened regarding what public, party, school and factory libraries were allowed to display. Earlier cleansings in the libraries might have concerned the writings of bourgeois or socialist authors; from this point on, all works were withdrawn if they were written by or contained articles by Grigorii Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev and others who had been accused of being associated with the murder of Kirov.7 At an intermediate level, another wave of repressions was directed against cadres in the party and managers in the economic administration and at factories, as well as among scientists. The extent of these purges was clarified in the late 1950s, when many victims (sometimes posthumously) were reinstated and their fate described in the Soviet press. The two highest levels in the socio-political hierarchy counted a few hundreds and several tens of thousands of victims, respectively, and were the best known in the research that could be undertaken between the 20th Soviet Communist Party Congress and the glasnost period of the late 1980s. By that stage it was already known that Stalin and his collaborators inspected and signed their approval of lists of over 40,000 persons in 1937–1938, most of whom were sentenced to death. In other purges, the politburo gave only general directions about how many persons in various categories should be convicted and left the final decisions regarding who should receive the death penalty and who should be sent to the Gulag to the local elite (usually the regional party secretary, the head of the secret police and the prosecutor). As ripples on the water, it used to be considered that several hundreds of thousands, maybe even several million people had been arrested and sentenced for political crimes in 1937 and 1938. This purge, called the ‘Ezhovshchina’, has been associated with Nikolai Ezhov, the successor

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Figure 66 1934.

The leaders at the Gulag penitentiary colony in Sinatra, 11 July

to Genrikh Iagoda as people’s commissar of internal affairs. The term is misleading to the extent that very little of this terror campaign took place on the initiative of the security police themselves. On the contrary, NKVD was, from the end of 1936, much more firmly controlled by Stalin and a few leaders in the politburo. NKVD was merely an executive organ for the Communist Party.8 From 1936 onwards, foreign workers in the Soviet defence industry – and later also in civilian industries – were dismissed and often repressed. In particular, the secret police were instructed to remove all Germans, whether they were Soviet Germans by nationality and citizenship or political refugees from Nazi Germany, from the Soviet factories. Naturally, this affected the many heavy and machine-building industries in the Urals, and in Cheliabinsk in particular.9

Purges of party members in 1937–1938 In Nikita Khrushchev’s secret speech to the 20th Communist Party Congress in February 1956, he mentioned that 110 out of 139 central committee members had been executed between 1934 and 1938. In his

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book Let History Judge, Roy Medvedev gave a lot of biographical data on these personalities. However, the main theme of the book is the evil and hunger for power of Stalin. According to this view, Stalin had a preconceived plan to eliminate all former and potential opponents to his autocratic rule in the country. Accordingly, anyone who had taken a Leftist position in the 1920s and against Stalin would be eliminated first; this included the followers of Trotsky and Zinoviev. Thereafter, the purges continued and affected more groups. Starting in early 1937, ‘Right-Trotskyist elements’ were targeted, including party members who had supported Bukharin’s line in 1927–1939 and those who had later criticised Stalin’s economic policy. As a smokescreen of cryptic formulation, these repressive measures can be interpreted as an attempt to renew the cadres in the administration, both by eliminating certain individuals and by highlighting delinquency. Certainly, dreadful conditions really existed; however, they were seldom primarily due to neglect but had a systemic character. Other means taken to discuss the causes of low labour productivity, accidents or deficient quality had often been inconsequential, since the concerned groups would rather protect each other than make administrative changes. In the Urals, the party purges started in 1936 with accusations against cadres in Sverdlovsk. Ivan Kabakov, who had been elected member of the central committee at the 17th Congress in 1934 was excluded at its plenary session in June 1937. Kabakov was accused of negligence in industry and agriculture and accused of ‘wrecking on behalf of the RightTrotskyist centre’. After prolonged interrogation, Kabakov ‘confessed’ to

Figure 67

The penal work colony in Kamyshov.

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all charges and was executed on 3 October 1937. In addition to Kabakov, those sentenced included the regional party committee’s second secretary K.F. Pshenitsyn, the head of the party’s industrial sections G.G. Ian, the chairman of the regional planning commission Uralplan G.I. Krumin and his deputy Ia.A. Istomin, as well as the party secretaries in the cities of Perm, Nizhnii Tagil, Magnitogorsk and Cheliabinsk. They were all accused, with minor variations from case to case, of perpetrating widespread wrecking and diversionary activities in the economy, with the alleged intent of undermining the defence capability of the Soviet Union. British historian James Harris interpreted the dismissal of Kabakov in Sverdlovsk as an attempt by Stalin and NKVD to use terror to break up a petty fiefdom and corrupted network around Kabakov. According to Harris, Kabakov had control of the local NKVD, so only initiatives from the centre and higher party organs could bring the region back under the tight control of the politburo.10 There could be a similar explanation for the purge process in the party organisation in Cheliabinsk. After the show trial of Zinoviev and other members of the Leftist opposition within the party in the 1920s the purges in the Cheliabinsk region were initially directed against anyone who had ever belonged to an opposition group in the party. The regional committee’s chairman, Kuz’ma Ryndin’, initially led the purges. On 4 March, 1937, at the plenary session of the central committee, he reported that 165 leading cadres in Cheliabinsk had been exposed as ‘Trotskyists’ and excluded from the party. On 12 May, Ryndin informed the people’s commissar, Nikolai Ezhov, that a member of a ‘counter-revolutionary Rightist organisation’ by the name of Tsykov had been found guilty and arrested. On 16 May Stalin received a delegation from the Urals with Kabakov and Chitarov from the Sverdlovsk obkom and Ryndin from the Cheliabinsk obkom. They remained in Stalin’s cabinet together with Viacheslav Molotov, defence commissar Kliment Voroshilov and Ezhov for almost three hours.11 In the middle of the summer of 1937 the Cheliabinsk regional party organisation held its conference, with Ryndin as the main speaker. A few days before, Andrei Andreev (1895–1971) had arrived on an inspection-and-purge tour on behalf of the politburo. On a daily basis, Andreev informed Stalin and conferred with him about what measures to take against cadres in the Volga region and, thereafter, in the Urals. In Saratov, Andreev had arrested a number of leading functionaries in the party and at the machine and tractor stations. In Cheliabinsk, however, he only gave a talk with minor criticism of Ryndin. On direct

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instructions from Stalin, Andreev was to support Ryndin against criticism from individual party members. It would have been simple to let Ryndin or any other leading cadre be the scapegoat for many of the real problems in the city. In July 1937 the NKVD leadership asked all its regional organs, jointly with the regional party committees, to inform the centre about how many ‘anti-Soviet elements’ there were in the region, as well as the number of kulaks who had returned from exile. They were to then propose how many of these should be sentenced to death and how many sent to the Gulag camps. These decisions were to be made by a troika consisting of the local NKVD and party chairmen and the regional prosecutor.12 As with many other leaders in the 1930s, Ryndin present a dual, even split profile. On one hand, he worked hard to be informed and qualified about economic matters concerning the development of the Cheliabinsk region. On the other hand, he would start campaigns to ‘expose’ opponents and implemented harsh reprisals against those described as ‘wreckers’ or ‘spies’. In the summer of 1937, Ryndin sat on the three-party commission that led the mass operations that resulted in the execution of thousands of ‘former kulaks and anti-Soviet elements’ according to the infamous order No. 00447. But the bell soon also tolled for Ryndin and he was arrested on 12 October 1937. He was subjected to extended night-time interrogation sessions and was forced to confess to a number of fabricated accusations. The documentation of these interrogations is scarce. There are protocols dated 17 November and 27 December, although he was not interrogated on these dates. On the other hand, there are seven signed protocols from 30 November and 28 December 1937, in which he took responsibility for a growing number of ‘crimes’. Ryndin confessed that he led ‘anti-Soviet activities’ from 1928 to 1934 and had organised ‘anti-Soviet’ terror in Cheliabinsk on behalf of the ‘Rightist bloc’ since 1934. In 1935, he had allegedly formed a ‘bloc’ with the party head in Magnitogorsk, Vissarion Lominadze, who later committed suicide in order to avoid arrest. In the same year, Ryndin had established contacts with the Trotskyists around Georgii Piatakov in the People’s Commissariat of Heavy Industry and, on their orders, had carried out ‘wrecking’ in the industry in Cheliabinsk. In actual fact, however, Ryndin had pushed for the expansion of industrial production during his time as party chief in the city and supervised it to the best of his ability. In light of all the problems and how much did not go according to plan, it was easy in hindsight to use anyone as a scapegoat for problems that had much more complex causes.

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Following these protocols, Ryndin finally confessed to having been an agent of the Polish intelligence services since 1933. All these fabricated charges, typical for most cadres arrested during this period of terror, were ascribed to Ryndin in the winter months of 1937–1938. He was formally excluded from the Communist Party on 8 February 1938 and was executed two days later. His ‘confessions’ were read to party meetings in the city districts and in the region. With the benefit of hindsight and with access to other documents, it is possible to discern how the NKVD interrogators had woven together some real meetings, events, accidents and malfunctions and then forced the accused – often through torture – to sign any protocol.13 Just as had happened at similar meetings concerning the victims of the purge in other parts of the Soviet Union, the Cheliabinsk city party committee denounced Ryndin on 25 October 1937. A resolution denounced ‘the band of Ianus-faced wreckers’ and named Stepanov, Simonov, Freiman, Krichevskii, Raskin and several others who had been arrested as the time as ‘enemies of the people’. In close collaboration with the Trotskyists, the resolution said, they had profited with Polish and German spies for a number of years from the ‘lack of vigilance among Cheliabinsk’s communists’. They had occupied all the key posts in the party organisations and the soviets in order systematically to carry out ‘wreckage’. It was stated that their goal had been to re-establish capitalism through insidious double-dealings, forgeries and distortions of Soviet laws so that the party’s directives on production plans could not be fulfilled in industry and agriculture. This had created discontent among the population, and then the local party leadership had suppressed anyone who criticised the social evils. Nepotism and servility flourished under ‘this group of fascist legionaries’. The fact that Ryndin’s ‘group of wreckers’ had managed to carry on their dealings for so long was a serious lesson for the entire regional party organisation. This was explained, according to the resolution, by the fact that the local communists had forgotten ‘comrade Stalin’s repeated instructions that class struggle had not ceased but was continuing in new, even sharper forms’ and that the enemy had used more refined forms in its struggle against Soviet power. The new party organisation expressed their gratitude to NKVD and comrade Ezhov, who had exposed Ryndin’s ‘rightist wreckers’ group. The new regional party secretary, Dmitrii Ogurtsov, was only to lead the organisation from October 1937 until May 1938. He was arrested on 7 May, accused of ‘collaboration with enemies of the people’ in the city of Gorkii and summarily executed. He was replaced by the 42-year-old Dmitrii Antonov, who had spent two winters in a parish church

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before starting to work in the mines at the age of 13. After the revolution, Antonov had the opportunity to study at the workers’ faculty in Kharkov and then at the mineralogical institute (Gornyi institut) in Moscow. His career in the Communist Party included his post as chairman of the control committee at the institute and later at the People’s Commissariat of Labour and the Academy of Foreign Trade. He worked for a couple of years as deputy head of the industrial directorate of the central committee with responsibility for the fuel industry.14 From 1935, Antonov was part of the central party apparatus as assistant to the head of the CC industrial department and its fuel section. As the main machine-building industries in the Cheliabinsk region had not fulfilled their production plans in 1939 and 1940, Antonov was dismissed. The official explanation was that he had not ‘liquidated the consequences of wrecking’ in the industry and administration. This might refer to the fact that Antonov had neglected all but those matters that were of direct interest – the coal mines and the mineral resources in the Southern Urals. Antonov was not repressed, however. He admitted that he had not coped with the problems of being a leader for the industries in Cheliabinsk and that the crisis phenomena had deepened in recent years. From February 1940, he was again at the disposition of the central committee. In a couple of rounds, the entire political and economic leadership in Cheliabinsk had been arrested on various trumped-up charges. By 1938, practically all the experienced cadres had been eliminated. Their place had been taken many inexperienced but sometimes better educated younger technicians who were hastily promoted. This chapter presents the terminology and mentality of those years, as it was expressed at the meetings in the region, much of which has been known for many years. The great show trials in Moscow have not, however, been discussed by historians in recent years. The pattern of the purges that emerged in Cheliabinsk was, to varying degrees, similar to that in other regions of the Soviet Union during the Great Terror.15

Repression against technicians, engineers and leading cadres in the economy The purges on mid-level cadres followed a pattern; the first ones arrested in 1936–1937 were those who had earlier been Trotskyists or closely linked with Piatakov and other opponents. The next round of arrests included the real or alleged supporters of Bukharin’s more moderate policy in the late 1920s. From early 1938 onwards, the central

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committee urged the regional party committee to end its ‘excesses’ in purges within the party. However, it was only after the politburo called the purges to a halt in November 1938 and after Ezhov’s dismissal that a partial reconsideration concerning some of the most fabricated affairs was investigated, although very few persons were rehabilitated or liberated under the new people’s commissar of internal affairs. In August 1936, Aleksandr Bruskin was appointed deputy people’s commissar of heavy industry. His predecessor, Georgii Piatakov, was arrested and accused of diversion. These seemingly absurd accusations of ‘conscious sabotage’ and ‘wrecking’ (Russian vreditel’stvo) often contained a grain of truth. Mine pits would collapse and equipment was destroyed because of negligence or extended periods of use. Many accidents in the Soviet economy and transport system could be explained by ‘the human factor’. However, even the authorities were aware that they were not due to any ‘systematic counter-revolutionary activity’, as the charges often claimed. Still less were they intended to ‘undermine the socialist system’ or ‘restore capitalism’. But for a few years from 1936 on every arrest of a leading cadre was announced in the press with an enumeration of all the offences that this person was said to have committed. Thereafter, that person’s successor and his colleagues would gather and adopt a resolution or programme to ‘combat the consequences of wrecking’ (bor’ba s posledstviami vreditel’stva). This, in essence, was simply another way of saying that everyone should work harder and follow the technical instructions, check quality norms and adhere to timetables. NKTP was the largest people’s commissariat in the 1930s. Its directorates governed all the important new industrial enterprises built in the period of the plans, as well as old factories that had roots in Tsarist times. Moscow’s new town plan even included a project to tear down the Vasilii church on Red Square and build a skyscraper for the heavy industry ministry in its place. The administration of a growing number of enterprises became more and more complicated. From the second half of the 1930s a growing number of people’s commissariats were formed in place of the subdivisions within NKTP, which was split in 1936 on sectorial principles. Some branches were left within the new NKTP and Ordzhonikidze remained its leader. Other enterprises were led by the People’s Commissariats of Light Industry (NKLegProm), the Machinebuilding Industry (NKMashProm) and the Defence Industry (NKOP). A few years later, NKMashProm was, in turn, separated into a new People’s Commissariat of Heavy, Medium and Light Machine-building Industries. By 1939, NKOP had split into ministries for ammunition,

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armaments, aeroplanes and shipbuilding. The number of people’s commissariats (referred to as ministries after 1946) grew to several dozen. The accusations that the Cheliabinsk branch of NKVD levelled against engineers and technicians in the wake of the trial of Piatakov and others in Moscow in January 1937 were met with widespread scepticism. Some charges were clearly groundless, such as when the head of the railway directorate in the Southern Urals was accused of a number of counter-revolutionary actions. In a report from a mass meeting, an NKVD informer said that ‘NN had frankly declared that the charges were false and that the authorities were looking for a scapegoat. Now they blame everything on K who actually did his job well. No Red Army soldiers died in the collision; they were free riders who hang on the brake car.’16 The secret police reports mentioned that engineers at ChTZ had openly declared their scepticism, and that a tailor had said at a meeting that the communist leaders must be responsible for the people they have appointed. Others were reported as having expressed sympathies for some of those convicted at the show trial, particularly journalist Karl Radek and deputy people’s commissar Piatakov. The ‘special survey’ (spetssvodki) of the secret police was based on a wide basis of informant networks in various parts of Soviet society. Although they do not present a representative selection of views, they at least provide a hint of the various opinions that reigned in various layers of society. Still less do these reports allow for any quantification in a scientific, sociological sense. It is noteworthy, however, that there was obviously a wide range of ideas that differed substantially from what was reported in the Soviet press and newsreels on ‘diversion’, ‘wrecking’ and the machinations by agents of foreign states. Among the victims in Cheliabinsk was the former director of ChTZ, Kazimir Lovin, who had been transferred to the energy directorate of the People’s Commissariat of the Building Industry. He was arrested on 20 August 1937 and sentenced to death on 15 November. One of his successors, the former chief engineer and director at ChTZ, Izrail Nesterovskii (b. 1898), was arrested during the fourth regional party conference on 3 July 1938 and sentenced to death on 29 August. Like most political victims of the terror, he was only rehabilitated after the 20th Communist Party Congress in 1956.17 From 1934 to 1936, Ivan A. Kniaziev (1893–1937) was head of the Southern Urals Railways and was then promoted to deputy people’s transport commissar. He had extensive experience in railway management, having started his career before World War I. During the Civil

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War, he was commissar with responsibility for railway transport in the Red Army. Despite this, he was arrested in 1937 and accused of ‘antiSoviet activities’.18 In 1937–1938, many people from the Southern Urals Railways were sentenced to long terms in the Gulag, apparently as a result of accidents, derailments and delays that were classified as ‘counter-revolutionary crimes’.19 I.K. Zelinskii, the independent-minded pioneer at the Pedagogical Institute, was the victim of a campaign in the local press. Having been accused of tolerating Trotskyists and others as teachers, he was dismissed from his post and then arrested. He confessed to the accusations under torture but tried unsuccessfully to protest during the ‘trial’. He was executed in the summer of 1938.20 Historians have debated the widely held opinion of the time that Stalin was, to some extent, unaware of what was going on during the purge period of 1937–1938. After the events, Stalin sometimes blamed unfounded repression on people’s commissar Ezhov. Many ordinary Soviet citizens, whether they were victims of or bystanders to the terror wave, believed that they should appeal to Stalin to stop the persecutions. The substantial documentation from the archives of the Communist Party and the security police that has become available during the last two decades has shown that there is no doubt that Stalin was aware of the purges. In fact, he actually initiated and directed many of the individual cases as well as supervising the mass operations. Stalin frequently met with Ezhov during these years, and received protocols from interrogations and lists of persons to be sentenced. It was up to Stalin and members of the politburo to decide which punishment – execution or extended camp terms – should be given in the rubber-stamp trials for accused party members, industrial specialists and others. However, on their own initiative, the NKVD organs in the regions often fabricated their own cases and falsified biographical and other data in order to present a group of innocent persons as, for example, an armoured ‘counter-revolutionary, terrorist organisation’ with links to the Japanese or Polish general staff. Many cases like this were disclosed when the next people’s commissar, Lavrentii Beria, took over the NKVD in 1939. Many Western textbooks on Soviet history often include statements implying that ‘all Soviet citizens felt a deep fear in 1937’, that all party members went to sleep with a small trunk filled with their essentials, waiting for a night-time arrest, or even that they slept with a revolver under their pillow. Such ideas were even being spread at the time of Nazi propaganda against the USSR.21 However, many of these generalisations were founded on a small number of memoirs written by

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defectors or survivors from the Stalinist forced labour camps and they serve only to over-simplify the real situation in Russia. In the 1950s, the mass interviews with former Soviet prisoners of war or labour slaves in Nazi Germany, then incarcerated as ‘displaced persons’ in the Western occupation zones in Germany, showed another pattern. Merle Fainsod and Barrington Moore Jr. published studies on how the Soviet Union was governed and the driving forces of the system, on the impact of the dominant ideology and how the terror had changed social relations. These interview-based studies showed that a significant number of people had not felt that 1937, or any other specific year, particularly exemplified the repressive apparatus and its actions. A lot depended on to which part of society a person belonged; peasants would describe the early 1930s as the fatal years, while many workers would not at all consider these events as unfounded, baseless repressive actions. Based on the fact that the new industrial labour class constituted some 20 million people and that the peasantry was still the largest group in society, it is evident that one should be careful when making generalisations of a widespread, or even ‘general fear’ in Soviet society. It is evident that during these conditions of repressive actions against the management of industrial enterprises, the economy suffered in the sense that growth rates were lower than expected. As noted above, however, many problems that had accumulated as unsolved or hushed-up questions during the first two five-year plans could be discussed in a straightforward, objective manner, even as the public discourse was full of ‘saboteurs’, ‘spies’ and ‘wreckers’. One striking example of this was on 1 September 1937, when a long session was held at the Cheliabinsk regional party committee with all the city’s great factories’ directors discussing the economic situation of the time. The meeting had a strong business-like character and was devoid of the agitational verbosity of the press reports. Naturally, none of the problems in industry discussed were presented as the result of ‘wrecking’. Ryndin chaired this meeting but he and other party leaders made only short remarks and proposals.22 Today, with access to the Russian archives, it is possible to perform micro-studies on the purge era at individual enterprises, in villages or among geographical and ethnic groups. At the Kirov Works in Leningrad, a number of commissions did conduct investigations during 1937. Their many reports describe the situation in detail, where accidents had been covered up and deficient products sent to the Red Army. Severe problems had been exposed at a number of Leningrad factories, including the Kirov Works, the Bolshevik Factory and several others

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that produced tanks. Test protocols had been falsified, sometimes even with the approval of the representative of the army (voenpred). To the extent that these reports can be judged, there was real mismanagement and widespread corruption. As a result of these investigations, the reality-based conclusions were often termed in the typical ‘counterrevolutionary wrecking’ formulas. Dozens of technicians and engineers were dismissed, arrested and sentenced to the Gulag, while others had to be much more careful in their behaviour.23 These reports on one of the main factories in the Soviet defence-industry complex are of particular interest because the future director of the Cheliabinsk Tractor Factory during the war years, Isaak Zaltsman, had been the Kirov Works’ chief engineer during these purges and in 1938 was appointed as its director.24 This situation not only promoted more loyal Stalinists or a new generation of the technical intelligentsia, it also saw a stricter enforcement of discipline in management and better control of the technological process at the factories. John Scott, a keen contemporary observer, noted in 1937 that significant changes had occurred in the group of directors at the Magnitogorsk Iron and Steel Works. This may well be said to have been the case also in Cheliabinsk; as a result of the purge waves and the constant campaign to ‘liquidate the consequences of wrecking’ the new management could be more frank and outspoken about problems in industrial management – at least, it could be less inclined to embellish the situation and cover up the backwardness. Isaak Moiseevich Zaltsman was born on 9 December 1905 in the village Tomaspol in the Vinnitsa district in the Ukraine. His father Moisei was a tailor and his mother was a housewife. Moisei had been crippled during a pogrom by Symon Petliura’s bandits during the Russian Civil War and died in 1928. Isaak had been at school for only four years before he started to work on sugar beet fields and in sugar factories. In 1922 he joined the Communist Youth League and profited from their union work and opportunities to study. In 1929, Isaak received basic schooling and trade education as welder. That same year, he was sent to Odessa’s Polytechnic Institute, from which he graduated four years later. He then found work at the legendary ‘Red Putilov Works’ (renamed the Kirov Works in 1935 after the assassination of Leningrad’s party secretary), first as deputy shop supervisor, then as head of the turbine workshop, as chief engineer of the whole factory and, in 1938, as director of the Kirov Works. At the age of 33 he was ‘entrusted with one of the greatest enterprises in the Soviet Union’, he wrote in his autobiography. Zaltsman stressed

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that his father, a Jewish tailor in an isolated shtetl in the Ukraine, would never have imagined that his son would one day advance to such a position in the new Russia. When Zaltsman took on responsibility for the Kirov Works, the Great Terror had reach its apex. Former managers, supervisors and directors had been eliminated, based either on actual technical shortcomings or false denunciations. Any false step could ruin a career. However, the example of Zaltsman suggests that there were other currents in the Soviet industrial world during these years. Based on the predominant views promoted during Cold War information campaigns, it is easy to accept at face value the idea of an all-embracing fear that permeated everything in the Soviet Union in these years. A more balanced picture or representation can be pieced together from the multitude of documents from the archives that show how much of everyday life, whether in the factories, the countryside or in the spheres of education and science, continued as usual. Far from every cadre, still less the workers, felt any fear for their part when they read about or heard of purges or wrecking. Occasionally they might have considered that there was a grain of truth in such reports. If they or any of their relatives fell victim to repression, they would consider it as an individual mistake. Another personality at the Kirov Works in the late 1930s who was to play an important role for the Soviet tank programme was Nikolai Leonidovich Dukhov, who was born in 1904 in the Poltava district in the Ukraine. His mother was the daughter of an impoverished aristocrat, his father a barber-surgeon in the Tsarist army. Nikolai received his education at the Gadiakh boys lyceum and learned English, German and French, something that was very uncommon among Soviet experts in the 1930s. He started to work at 14, first as a bookkeeper in a village soviet committee and later at a factory. He was able to continue his education in 1926 when he was sent to the ‘workers’ faculty’ (rabfak, rabochii fakul’tet) at Kharkov’s Geodesic and Amelioration Institute. After graduating from this rabfak, he was accepted at the mechanical faculty of Leningrad’s Polytechnic Institute. Thereafter, in 1932, Dukhov started to work at the Putilov Works’ design bureau, first on parts for the mass-produced tractor ‘Universal’ and the first Soviet light automobile ‘Leningrad-1’. In 1936, he advanced to the special design bureau SKB-2 at the Kirov Works and made improvements to the gearbox of the T-28 tank. Towards the end of 1938, Dukhov presented his proposal for a new heavy tank, named ‘KV’ (after defence commissar Klim Voroshilov). Dukhov’s ideas for this new type of tank were decisive and were approved by the Red Army after testing. His contribution was also acknowledged by the country’s future enemy – the Germans would call these Soviet weapons ‘Dukhov tanks’.

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Serial production of the KV tanks started in 1939, at which time Dukhov was deputy head of SKB-2. These KV tanks were used in the invasion of Finland in 1939–1940 and many useful lessons were drawn for improvements in its construction, its weapons and engine. In 1940, Dukhov was often seen on the testing and firing range as the driver of the new tank. His motto was that only the designer can improve a tank as an engineer because only he knows its character. Dukhov also took the initiative in giving other designers an education as drivers of tanks. Some parts of the Soviet defence industry, notably the aeroplane industry, were hit enormously by the terror. Other branches of the defence industry, including the production of tanks and artillery, were less subject to purges.

Mass repression campaigns The notion of the Great Terror as a distinct phenomenon has radically changed since the Russian archives opened. Research efforts used to focus on elites, the ‘nomenklatura’ and intelligentsia but these groups represented only a small proportion of all the victims. The repressions in the wider sense – the so-called ‘mass operations’ – were directed at ordinary people, the workers and peasants. The new perspective of the Great Terror stresses the so-called kulak operation in the summer of 1937 and campaigns against Germans working in the defence industry (both Soviet Germans, residents in the USSR, and exiled members of the German Communist Party).25 In the autumn of 1937, a mass action started against former kulaks who had returned from exile to their original home villages or who had received jobs on building sites. The fundamental causes are still debated among historians concerning these purges of Soviet society’s underclasses – the marginalised petty criminals without steady workplace or housing – as well as the harsher repression against ‘anti-Soviet elements’, which was based on NKVD top secret order 00447. In June–July 1937, high-level party commissions debated the scope of the operation. Preliminary data and inquiries were sent to the regional NKVD office. Then the security police determined the estimated number of ‘kulaks, anti-Soviet and criminal elements’ to be executed or sent to the camps. This operation started in August 1937 on the directive of the politburo. Other mass operations were initiated against ethnic groups such as Germans, Latvians, Poles, Finns and others; that is, people of the same nationalities as the most probable enemies in a future war.26

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Over 700,000 people were executed in 1937–1938, approximately 40,000 of whom were functionaries in the party or state apparatus. Their names were added to lists that were approved by Stalin, Molotov, Anastas Mikoian or other members of the politburo. These cadres were tried individually, with no defence lawyers, in mock trials by the socalled ‘troikas’, that is, the procurator, a local party’s representative and an NKVD officer. The victims of the mass operations essentially fell into two categories. One category was the so-called ‘anti-Soviet elements’, ex-kulaks and criminals who allegedly could threaten the state; the other category was national groups that were considered a potential ‘fifth column’ of hostile states such as Germany, Poland, Finland and Japan. The supreme political leadership had given directives to the secret police regarding

Figure 68 Nikolai Grigorievich Bukharin and his family. Nikolai was born in 1896 into a merchant’s family, took part in World War I and worked in different factories during the Civil War. He married and had four daughters and two sons. When Bukharin was arrested, he worked as mechanic at a water depot on the 1st Poletaevo station on the Southern Urals Railways. He was arrested in December 1937 and was forced to sign ‘interrogation protocols’. He ‘confessed’ that Aleksandr Dorokhov had engaged him as a spy for Japanese military intelligence at the same depot and that they were committed to providing Japan with information on the localities and movements of troops to the Far East. His ‘confession’ stated that his ‘diversionary activity’ would be to destroy the pumping stations that provided the steam engine locomotives with water. Nikolai was sentenced to death in accordance with Articles 58: 2, 6, 9 and 11 in the Criminal Code. He was posthumously rehabilitated on 3 December 1957, as no criminal activity had ever taken place.

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how many persons should be arrested and the sentences they were to receive. There are different theories to explain the widely separate phenomena of what is inappropriately called the Great Terror. In actual fact, between 1935 and 1939, several of these actions were independent of each other while some were very closely linked to one another. One type of explanation can illuminate why the ‘old guard’ in the Communist Party was purged in silence, while others were forced to appear in show trials. Today, many interrogation protocols have become available and they provide new insights into the mechanisms of terror. Other explanations are necessary to shed light on the bloody purges of the local party leaders or enterprise managers. Scholars have advanced theories on social engineering and modernisation to explain why Stalin and the political leadership would have placed hundreds of thousands of people in widely separate categories, such as priests, former noblemen, kulaks and anyone who had uttered opinions that were critical of the Soviet state. The Russian historian Oleg Khlevniuk noted some of the explanations that were advanced a long time ago, specifically the fear of and perverted ideas concerning a potential ‘fifth column’ in Soviet society. To a certain extent, this explanation may be correct. 27 However, this is only part of the explanation. During the collectivisation of agriculture in 1930–1931, the local OGPU had purged all groups in the countryside who voiced their opposition. The deputy head of the GPU secret police, Genrikh Iagoda, criticised those local OGPU chiefs who had carried out social cleansing (of merchants, entrepreneurs, teachers and priests). He stressed that these groups were to be cleansed later, not mixed up with the arrests of kulaks.28 The terrorist wave-like repression in 1937–1938 would then be interpreted as a consequent operation in line with how the ‘enemies’ of the working class should be eliminated, rather than being rationally motivated by the approaching total war and the fear of a ‘fifth column’ in the rear of the Soviet armies. Most researchers agree that over 700,000 people were executed in 1937 and 1938. Approximately the same number were sentenced to long camp sentences. The camp system has been described as being ‘integrated’ in the planned economy and it has been said that the planning organs would distribute ‘orders’ from the camp administration and their ‘demands’ for new forced labour to the secret police, who would then allegedly find reasons to arrest that number of innocent persons and ‘supply’ them to Gulags. The actual developments during the Great Terror seem to contradict this theory.

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In fact, in 1937, in its proposal for the third five-year plan between 1938 and 1942, the Gulag had calculated that its ‘kontingent’ of forced labourers would actually decrease until the early 1940s. However, as a consequence of the Great Terror, the Gulag’s administrative system had to be reformed to cope with the increased number of prisoners. New labour camps had to be erected – mainly in forests – to make use of the mostly unqualified prisoners. These camps required the least investment. Therefore, it seems illogical to assume that repression was driven by the demand for forced labour. If one assumes that the camp system was the motive for repressions, this explains why three-quarters of a million people were executed during those two years. It is safer to

Figure 69 Aleksandr Ivanovitj Kasimov was born an ordinary peasant in 1886 in the Verkhne-Uralsk area. He was living with his wife, two daughters and two sons in the village of Spasskii when he was arrested in 1937 and accused of participating in a 600-man counter-revolutionary organisation, which was allegedly led by two of the ‘enemies of the people’, the Magnitogorsk party secretaries Vissarion Lominadze and Alperovitz. Kasimov was sentenced on 2 July 1937 for preparing an armed uprising and for planning to destroy the main equipment at the iron and steel works in case of war. The 119 persons who had been found ‘guilty’ by the same 1937 decision of the NKVD and innocently sentenced on fabricated charges were rehabilitated by the regional court in Cheliabinsk in 1956.

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assume that Stalin and others in the leadership group were motivated by paranoid misconceptions of internal enemies of the system, not by calculations of the expansion and conservation of the Gulag. After Beria’s appointment as head of NKVD, the Gulag labour camp system was reformed and a revision was carried out of the main directorate for the construction of roads, canals and hydroelectric stations, as well as factories. Despite the enormous increase in the number of political prisoners in the Gulag camps towards the end of the 1930s, it should be kept in mind that the camps only contributed to a small portion of Soviet industrial production and that 90 per cent of all building activity was performed by ministries other than NKVD. In 1938, a forced rearmament started, at which time the production of the defence industry grew more than all the other branches.29

Lavrentii Beria and the streamlining of NKVD internal affairs Among the problems that historians have insufficiently analysed is the paradoxical combination of progress and terror in Stalin’s time. This is despite the fact that one of the pioneers of sovietology, Barrington Moore Jr., had analysed the totalitarian system in the 1950s, both dynamically and dialectically.30 Recently published sources, such as the reports from the secret police – OGPU–NKVD – to Stalin, make it possible to disentangle this paradox. There are many examples of how the Soviet leadership – at the same time as it fabricated conspiracies – could discern and successfully handle the real external threats. For example, in one week Stalin could read a report containing ‘confessions’ from a deposed minister who had allegedly sabotaged the Soviet defence industry on orders from the Japanese General Staff, and then study an actual intelligence report based on intercepted Japanese diplomatic mission dispatches.31 Stalin’s rule in the 1930s and 1940s was characterised by a strange duality between paranoia and grim barbarism on one hand and foresightedness and professional intelligence on the other hand. It seems to be an open question as to how Stalin himself, as well as the leaders at the security service’s headquarters in the Lubianka managed to separate their own fiction – often written by the investigators themselves – from the hard facts of economic and foreign intelligence matters. After November 1938, when the great purges were stopped based on a directive from the politburo, there are few instances of such fabricated ‘crimes’ as had been prosecuted before. Hard, concrete evidence

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was thereafter the main proof, not the forced ‘confessions’ about what was going to happen. There is a common interpretation of the consequences of the Great Terror that can be revised in the light of new archival findings. According to this version, one category after the other was repressed as ‘socially alien elements’ or ‘socially harmful elements’. Old Bolsheviks with views that differed from Stalin’s were among the first victims of the purges. Hundreds of thousands of people perished in the ‘mass operations’. In the end, after so many exclusions through the bloody purges by NKVD, the secret police itself became the object of scrutiny and a round of arrests, allegedly to ‘silence the witnesses’ of the foregoing terror. A completely new society with no real ‘historical memory’ is then said to have been created. The grain of truth in this version is that new cadres did indeed receive a new ‘historical background’. The new collective memory was stamped in the millions of distributed copies of the book entitled the Short Course, a history of the Communist Party that was carefully edited by Stalin himself. However, this interpretation may be over-simplified. On the basis of the politburo decision in November 1938, NKVD was ordered to halt its mass operations. Within a short period, the political leadership drastically changed the guidelines for the secret police. Stalin, Molotov and others in the politburo had constantly been informed in detail about the individuals charged with treason, exposed ‘organisations’ and ‘spy networks’. To some extent, they had also been convinced that repressive measures in industry, agriculture and transport did not lead to better performance. They had also read many complaints from party members, functionaries and ordinary people regarding the misuse of power by the secret police. Therefore, the directive given to the new leadership of NKVD under Beria was to look into doubtful cases and, if necessary, liberate those individuals who had been arrested on false grounds. NKVD also purged its own ranks of those who had misused their power during the preceding two years. These interrogations revealed numerous conscious falsifications, total fabrication of ‘counter-revolutionary groups’ or changed personal data (social category, nationality, etc.) in order to fulfil quotas in the mass operations. The fact that all of these internal NKVD cleansings were carefully recorded is evidence against the common theory that ‘the witnesses were to be silenced’ regarding the Great Terror.32 In Cheliabinsk, the aftermath of the Great Terror campaign of 1937– 1938 is more complex. The new NKVD regional leadership undertook an internal check of what had happened in the preceding two years.

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The protocols with some of the responsible persons in the NKVD branch showed that the purpose was to find as much solid evidence as possible, not to cover up events. The new NKVD chairman, Lavrentii Beria, had ordered that individual cases as well as mass arrests and executions should be re-investigated. Beria’s NKVD order No. 00762 gave the guidelines for the cleansing of the secret police and was drafted on the basis of a resolution from the Communist Party’s central committee. Although neither the resolution nor Beria’s order have been published, it is possible to discern the consequences and the main events in the various parts of the USSR. The man who led NKVD in Cheliabinsk during the Great Purge era was Pavel Chistov, who was born in 1905, the son of a painter. Chistov became a member of the Communist Party in 1926 and made his career in the secret police during the 1920s and 1930s. He arrived in Cheliabinsk in 1934 and was head of the regional NKVD from July 1937 to February 1938, precisely when the mass operations against various groups in society took place. Thereafter, Chistov was appointed to the construction of the hydropower station and dam in Kuibyshev. He was taken prisoner there by the advancing German troops in 1942 and sent to a POW camp in Germany. He was liberated from the Mauthausen camp in 1945 and interrogated until the autumn of 1946 in a control and filter camp in Podolsk. In accordance with Articles 58-1b and 58-11 of the Soviet criminal code, he was condemned to 15 years of forced labour for giving secret information to the Germans. He served his term in Magadan in the Soviet Far East until 1955, when he was released early but not rehabilitated. Thus, Chistov was not accused of the unlawful acts he may have committed in Cheliabinsk before the war but for the fact that he had given the Germans secret information as a POW. In Cheliabinsk, the former NKVD head, Fëdor Lapshin, and his two deputies, Lugovtsev and Voronchikhin, were arrested, as was the operative plenipotentiary from the special department of the NKVD. They were accused of transgressing their mandates and instructions and formally charged according to Article 193-17 in the Soviet criminal code. Lapshin, Lugovtsev and Voronchikhin were charged with having made illegal arrests and having instructed their subordinates to fabricate ‘counter-revolutionary criminal cases’, if necessary by provoking the arrested persons. The report mentioned a number of such fabricated cases. In 1937 and 1938 ‘confessions’ had been extracted from innocent persons who had been forced to stand still for hours, put into icecold showers or beaten with sticks. Sometimes the arrested would start to confess under instigation from co-prisoners or provocateurs. In an

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investigation led by the military brigadier lawyer, Iegudin, from the military court of the Urals military district, several ‘investigation protocols’ were found that had been written down without the accused having even been interrogated. In numerous cases, data on individuals had been falsified and class backgrounds had been changed arbitrarily to fit certain quotas for arrests in the mass operations. Ordinary peasants in the categories of ‘poor’ or ‘medium peasant’ (Russian bedniak or seredniak) were classified as ‘kulaks’. Iegudin noted in his 1940 report that illegal methods and falsified protocols formed the basis upon which many innocent people had been sentenced to death or long sentences in the camps. He mentioned that, towards the end of 1937, Pavel Chistov had fabricated a ‘counterrevolutionary espionage and diversionary organisation of former SRs’ (Socialist Revolutionaries)33 with 581 members, 494 of whom were condemned to be executed by the troika led by Chistov and Lapshin. In at least 294 different cases the investigation showed that completely innocent people had been executed. One such case saw an entire family sentenced to death: a typographer named Zykov; his wife who was a housewife; their 25-year-old daughter, Olga, who was doctor at a polyclinic, and their 21-year-old daughter, Galina, who worked in a laboratory. Another example was the innocent Evsei family, which included the father, mother and their daughter Olga, who was a student at the medical institute in Perm. In the spring of 1938, another operation was carried out against the Socialist Revolutionaries. Without any data on counter-revolutionary, let alone anti-Soviet activities, NKVD had invented a ‘menshevik and socialist revolutionary organisation’ that allegedly prepared espionage and diversions. In another case, 288 persons were arrested for their ‘counterrevolutionary terrorist activities’, and 236 were sentenced to death. In December 1937, Chistov and his collaborator, Lugovtsev, invented a ‘counter-revolutionary officers’ organisation’ with a purported membership of 231 persons. When the local NKVD was to implement the socalled ‘national mass operations’ against suspected or merely supervised Soviet citizens with Polish, German, Finnish or other nationality – on orders from Ezhov, and in the last instance from Stalin himself – they used many tricks to fulfil the operation. Anyone guilty of having a ‘suspect surname’ was arrested. When the ‘special troikas’ with extra-judicial rights restarted their activity in September–November 1938 Lapshin supervised the interrogations that led to the execution of 2430 persons and Lugovtsev controlled the process that led to the execution of 610 persons. However,

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360 of these sentences were not carried out because of the November 1938 instructions that put an end to the terror campaigns. One hundred and eighty-three of the 360 sentences were revoked directly but Iegudin’s report does not say what happened to the other 177.34 In June 1940 Lapshin and Lugovtsev were sentenced to death, Voronchikhin was given ten years and their colleague Kuranov eight years in the Gulag forced labour camps.35 The main culprit for the mass terror in Cheliabinsk escaped this internal inquisition. Iegudin’s examinations showed proof that Pavel Chistov had given instructions to fabricate cases, use torture and carry out mass executions. However, Chistov had been transferred to the NKVD building site of a hydropower station and a dam near Kuibyshev on the Volga River. After the German invasion, Chistov became a prisoner of war and his name and story were used heavily in Nazi propaganda. By the end of the war, he was arrested and charged for his traitorous behaviour during the war and as a POW. He was sentenced to 15 years in the Gulag. He was released in 1955 but was not rehabilitated.36 This new data on the cleansing of the NKVD in 1939–1940 calls for at least a partial revision of the traditional view that Beria, the new people’s commissar, merely silenced those who might have witnessed the Great Terror from the inside. Instead, the archival documents from the FSB archives in Cheliabinsk and elsewhere show the return of the secret police to a ‘sounder working habit’. In 1937–1938, people were executed simply because of their social (‘class’) background, past political activities or, more often, on the basis of protocols that had been fabricated by NKVD personnel. This was reminiscent of barbaric medieval witch-hunts, as the Swedish publicist Zeth Höglund remarked in his articles in 1938. To judge from the interrogations carried out by Iegudin and others, at least some of the NKVD officers at the time understood that they were forging documents instead of carrying out such state security operations as they had been trained to do before. Sometimes they argued that this was necessary and that their actions had been sanctioned not only by Ezhov and the NKVD leadership but also by Stalin and the party leadership. Although the secret police certainly did not become liberalised after 1938, the charges against arrested persons, whether they were artists or army personnel, technicians or musicians, seem to have conformed much more with actual events. On the basis of German interrogations of Soviet POWs, historian Gabór Rittersporn argued that many NKVD personnel really did believe in the existence of far-flung conspiracies in Soviet industry and administration during the 1930s and that these extended to foreign

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intelligence. However, the investigations in Cheliabinsk of dismissed and arrested NKVD cadres do not support this interpretation. Many of the secret police operations in 1937–1938 against ‘Trotskyist, counterrevolutionary or fascist’ conspiracies had been created intentionally, and against their better judgement by the so-called ‘authors’ (pisateli) in the NKVD.37 Beria’s regime was recalled by veterans of the military-industrial complex as a new era compared with the earlier hunt for ‘wreckers’. Beria was determined that those specialists who had been arrested on false charges or sentenced to extremely long Gulag terms for technological failures be given a chance to be liberated relatively soon. To this end, the so-called ‘sharashka’ system was re-adopted with special design bureaux attached to the NKVD for the aeroplane, ammunition and shipbuilding industries. Specialists were moved to factory prisons where they worked alongside free personnel in the daytime. As soon as these specialists had performed the first successful tests of aeroplanes, guns and other weapons they had designed, they were released from these prisons within two or three years, instead of the 8–10 years that their formal sentence required. The renowned aeroplane designer, Andrei Tupolev, had been arrested in 1937 but only slowly admitted to some charges during pressing interrogations in 1938. Towards the end of that year, he was called in front of Beria and asked to revoke his confessed crimes. Tupolev initially suspected yet another provocation but was soon convinced that the new leadership wanted him to return to his usual job. Tupolev was asked to set up a ‘sharashka’ to design new fighter and bomber aeroplanes and to recruit as many specialists as he thought necessary for this task. Within a few years, most of these prisoners had been given an amnesty and were free. The historiographical settlement with the Great Terror of 1937–1938 took place in three stages. The first was the initial scrutinisation under Beria in 1939–1940 and the liberation of a relatively small number of victims, as well as the purging of the NKVD ranks of those who had fabricated ‘affairs’ against innocent people. However, this was not a rehabilitation process as such. Beria did not question the mass operations, only the ‘excesses’ and ‘breaches of socialist laws’ committed by a few individuals. Still less would Beria, as commissar of state security, hesitate to execute those considered to counter-revolutionaries, for example after the annexation of parts of Poland and the Baltic Republics. A second stage in the rehabilitation started after Stalin’s death. The new collective leadership had a fairly clear idea of the mass repressions since the early 1930s but was hesitant about how to proceed and lessen

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the grip that terror had over society. Many of the leaders had been active in the Great Terror, even though the full scope of repressions across the country may have eluded them. Therefore, they requested information from the ministries of state security and of internal affairs. On 11 December 1953 Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) sent a report to the party leaders about the people who had been sentenced for political crimes from 1921 until the first part of 1953.38 Between 1935 and 1940, 1,980,635 people were arrested, 688,503 of whom were executed. The vast majority of these people – 681,692 – were executed in the two years of the Great Terror, when 1,548,366 people were arrested.39 First, amnesty was given to several hundred thousand Gulag prisoners, mainly ordinary and petty criminals. The political prisoners in the camps usually had to wait another three to four years before their cases were re-investigated. The political leadership was very hesitant about how to proceed with these cases. Many military men were rehabilitated relatively quickly because the leading marshals had such a strong influence. Individual party members, writers and artists were fairly easy to rehabilitate. However, neither Nikita Khrushchev nor anyone else in the politburo of the party had a clear idea about how to proceed. Khrushchev prepared an unannounced speech to the 20th Party Congress in February 1956 in which he denounced the terror that had reigned in the USSR. Except for the few names mentioned in his speech, and what appeared randomly in the Soviet press later, most of the rehabilitation process was carried out with great discretion. The Soviet public was kept in the dark, whereas by the early 1960s, the judges, the secret police and the party leadership had a detailed representation of the amount of political repression, which was officially referred to euphemistically as ‘infringements on socialist legality’. In his ‘secret speech’ to the extra session of the 20th Communist Party Congress, Khrushchev had emphasised the terror against party members and presented the terror as the machinations of Stalin and, to some extent, even Beria. Khrushchev, who was better informed than anyone about the mass terror against several hundred thousand ordinary Soviet citizens, pretended that these cases were the main events during the Great Terror. Since the opening of the former party archives, it is now known that many communists argued against Khrushchev’s form of presentation. After the conference, an abridged version of his speech was read out by party emissaries who appeared in various institutions, army units and factories. They reported that numerous questions had been raised against the simplistic analyses in Khrushchev’s speech.

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They demanded better explanations than merely talk about ‘the consequences of the cult of personality’ of Stalin. After Khrushchev’s fall in 1964 the contemporary period in Russian history was again severely censored by Communist Party ideologues. The political repression from the late 1920s onwards was not mentioned in scholarly works, and textbooks for schools and universities had only subdued references to the purges in the late 1930s. This censorship created rising discontent among the educated public. Mikhail Gorbachev and the new leadership in the late 1980s understood that only openness and frankness concerning the Soviet past could restore the Communist Party’s reputation. The first revelations under glasnost concerned the most outrageous falsifications or denials in official Soviet historiography. At the same time, it had become evident that historians’ calls for better access to the archives could no longer be denied. Even before the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russian scholars had started to publish their findings from these archives.40 A third stage in the rehabilitation started with the commissions of the Supreme Soviet in the late 1980s and has continued since with the president’s commission for rehabilitation, as well as with the main prosecutor of the Russian Federation. The Democracy Foundation, which was started by Aleksandr Iakovlev (1923–2005) has published source collections on the initial rehabilitation process in the 1950s and 1960s. These documents provided a new view of the post-Stalin political changes, when the new leadership was confronted with hundreds of thousands of more or less forged investigation files and severe sentences for fabricated crimes.41

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Figure 70 ‘Long live the Red Army – The armoured branch of the international proletariat!’ A poster by V. Elkin (1897–1991) from 1935, a period when the Red Army still relied on airships for transportation.

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6 Industrial Preparedness in Cheliabinsk, 1939–1940

Starting in the mid-1930s, the Soviet leadership believed that a new great war in Europe was inevitable. Articles in the army newspaper Red Star (Krasnaia zvezda) foresaw, as did informed organs in other parts of the world, a forthcoming war between Japan and the USA. The most serious fears from the Soviet perspective involved which coalitions were possible and most probable in terms of aggression against the USSR. Ernst Henry wrote two books on this question, Hitler over Europe? and Hitler over Russia? In the former, Henry warned of an appeasement policy towards Germany.1 The other book contained, with nightmarish precision, a possible scenario for a fascist coalition war against the Soviet Union. Ernst Henry was the pseudonym chosen by Semën Rostovskii after fleeing from the Nazis to London, where he worked as correspondent for several newspapers. During his time in Germany he had collected a lot of material on which groups in German society supported Hitler. Although Henry’s book predicted a joint fascist army invasion of the Soviet Union, his further reasoning about the outcome of such a conflict merely reflected the ideas of the Communist International, that a victorious workers’ revolution would be the ultimate consequence of a new war. The pseudonym Ernst Henry actually covers a fascinating life story. He was born in 1904 in Vitebsk, the son of a wealthy businessman Arkadii Khentov, who already had nine daughters, and was given the name Leonid. Leonid received a solid education with a teacher at home and then at a classical lycée. After the 1917 revolution, Leonid received a Soviet passport and travelled to Germany. There he was active in the Communist Youth International (KIM) as a courier between Moscow and Berlin. He then joined the German Communist Party and adopted the pseudonym Semën Nikolaevich Rostovskii. He continued his 163

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Figure 71 A map from Ernst Henry’s book ‘Feldzug gegen Moskau?’ (A Campaign against Russia?) of 1936 shows a potential combined fascist attack on the Soviet Union.

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underground political activities and, for example, was present at the founding congress of the Turkish Communist Party in 1922. He was arrested after the failed communist coup attempt in Germany in the autumn of 1923 and sent to internal exile in Saxony. After 1927, he lived in Berlin and started to collect documents about political life in Weimar Germany for two books, The Concentration of Capital and The Dynamics of the New German Imperialism. They remained unpublished, however, because Rostovskii had to leave the country after Hitler took power. Rostovskii managed to get to London and stayed in England. Much of his personal archives was lost but he decided to reconstruct parts of the manuscript and wrote what was to become the bestselling Hitler over Europe? This was one of the first early warnings of Nazi Germany’s aggressive plans against Western Europe. In 1934–1937, the Soviet Union, as a new member of the League of Nations, strove to establish an effective means against aggression. Attacks on another state were to be stifled by sanctions by the League member states. However, Moscow did not succeed in consolidating its alliance with France due to internal developments in the Soviet Union (the purges in the Red Army) and the international changes during the civil war in Spain (the inability of France to support the republic). The appeasement policy towards Hitler culminated with the 1938 Munich Agreement dismembering Czechoslovakia. The various attempts that started too late and with mutual distrust in 1939 between the USSR, France and the United Kingdom to prevent Germany’s further expansion had few chances for success. The negotiations between these powers in the summer of 1939 did not produce any concrete results.2 Soviet mistrust was due to the fact that, throughout the 1930s, it was felt that leading circles in London were not opposed to German eastwards aggression that was ultimately directed towards the Soviet Union.3 It would be misleading to speak of the militarisation of Soviet society based solely on the government’s directives to the public, industry and the army since the mid-1920s.4 The Swedish intelligence officer and later director of Swedish Military Intelligence, Frey Rydeberg, was well informed about the conditions in Soviet Russia. Based on his reading of Red Army literature and other sources, he described the societal changes with a mixture of fear and admiration of the enormous civilian and military preparedness for a coming war that had started in the 1930s. His Det militariserade samhället. Några ord om Sovjetunionens maktmedel (The militarised society: A few words of the power of the Soviet Union) was in many ways dependant on official sources. His descriptions of how various measures had been implemented in civil society

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lacked an understanding of the real conditions. It is necessary to compare with what defence preparedness actually looked like in a city such as Cheliabinsk in 1939–1940.5 The voluntary defence organisation of the air force and chemical defence, abbreviated as Osoaviakhim, was established in the 1920s. It grew into a mass organisation by enrolling the workers and other employed people at industrial enterprises. Particularly intensive exercises and campaigns were conducted in the summer of 1927, as the threat of war seemed to intensify against the Soviet Union once the British broke off diplomatic relations. As a result, by 1 October 1928 there were 123 study groups in the Cheliabinsk region with more than

Figure 72

Voluntary sniper training.

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10,000 members who studied military technology. In the 1930s, the fascination among the youth for new techniques, not least glider flying and parachute jumping, was combined with the possibility of training at new sports clubs. The iron and steel works in Asha had constructed an arena for military sports. Firing ranges were constructed close to other factories, where people could strive to gain enough points to acquire the popular ‘Voroshilov badge’ (named after the legendary marksman and people’s commissar of defence). The image that the Soviet Union wished to give to the outside world, of a nation that was well prepared for hardship and with a youth that was almost ready to carry weapons, must be nuanced, given the concrete results actually obtained. In the Cheliabinsk region, 4777 Osoaviakhim units in enterprises had 150,075 members. However, the launching of parachute training had been unsuccessful. In the city itself there were three towers for parachute jumps but two of these were not ready to use and the third was placed outside of public reach within a closed military facility. Here, the Osoaviakhim clubs existed at only 422 of the 1200 enterprises and had only 23,300 members out of a population of 390,000.6 The voluntary defence organisations became more active in 1940. On 18 June the military section of the party and Osoaviakhim completed a f5-kilometre march with gas masks on while the participants defended themselves against air attacks, camouflage and sanitising of contaminated areas.7 Another example took place in the Sovetskii city district, whose Osoaviakhim prepared and carried out a tactical exercise in July. Commanders followed a five-day course before the exercise. At Aloe pole, the square in the city centre known as the Purple Fields, ten training sessions took place with up to 300 participants, divided into sections, platoons and companies. Seven hundred and fifty people participated in the exercise itself, which was carried out with machine guns, guns and tanks. The participants were divided into cavalry, armoured, air force, infantry, signal forces and medical personnel. In a 10-kilometre march from Aloe pole, these units were attacked by different means from the ground or from the air. The attacks were to be countered in a regular way. As they reached the village of Shershnia, they trained in camouflage and regrouping forces. An analysis of the voluntary defence organisations in Cheliabinsk shows that some military preparations had indeed been carried out with young people and others. However, it is not possible to state that some form of ‘militarisation’ permeated Soviet society. Evidently, the preparedness also included the health care sectors. In case of war, many public buildings and schools

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were to be transformed into so-called evacuation hospitals. These plans were implemented as soon as World War II started in 1939, and in the following years concerned more and more buildings in Cheliabinsk. On 19 February 1941 the city’s executive committee decided that schools No. 30 and 36 should be adapted or completely rebuilt into hospitals.8 In order for these evacuation hospitals to function properly, the school authorities were to keep in stock at least 40 tons of coal and 7.5 cubic metres of firewood, corresponding to one month’s supply, at schools No. 12, 27, 30 and 36. In the spring of 1941 extensive preparations were made at another eight schools to take care of wounded and sick soldiers who would be evacuated from front line areas in case of war. In March 1941 another city decree ordered that all necessary household utensils should be procured. The factories’ clubs were to provide the evacuation hospitals with chess and dominoes sets.9 By this stage, a dozen of the factories in the Cheliabinsk region had been designated as important elements in the defence industry. The core of the Soviet defence industry was directed by the four People’s Commissariats for Ammunition, Armaments, Aeroplanes and Shipbuilding. Large parts of the machine-building industry, on the other hand, were already considered to be linked to the defence-industrial complex. In Cheliabinsk, the tractor factory, the Koliushchenko Agricultural Machinery Works and the abrasive tools factory were considered part of the defence industry, as were a host of similar factories in other cities in the region, particularly those that had taken large defence orders in peacetime.10 In these factories, the combination of civilian and military production was fairly open, although the military activities took place only in separate workshops and design bureaux. A special design bureau had started at the tractor factory in October 1937. The People’s Commissariat of the Machine-building Industry (the principal agent of the factory) had instructed that, in order to secure the design and experimental projects and the modernisation of so-called special goods for the army, special design bureaux should be started at all automobile and tractor factories. Research was coordinated in the people’s commissariat’s All-Union Institute (NATI) with its own design bureau for military research projects within the machine-building industry.11 On 30 October, 1937, Izrail Nesterovskii, the director of ChTZ, issued his directives on how to organise the special design bureau (SKB). The head of the technical department, Antyshev, was appointed as the main person responsible for the SKB. Director Shvelidze at the experimental

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factory was to prepare the workshops and rooms for the SKB. The deputy main engineer at ChTZ, Korotkov, was instructed that supply orders for the SKB were to be given the highest priority status. Shvelidze and Chief Inspector Khlebnikov were told to set higher quality requirements on special products than on civilian products such as tractors and haulers. Izrail Nesterovskii presented a long-term plan for the special work at the SKB. The first task was to develop a engine more powerful to correspond to the requirements of the Red Army’s armour directorate. Among the experiments that were to take place during 1938, Nesterovskii highlighted new starter motors, construction of a new diesel engine with a turbo compressor and a series of endurance tests on various equipment.12 As was often the case when a new group of leaders took over at a Soviet enterprise, they made overly frank criticism of the failures and/ or negligence of the person who had been dismissed from the post. When Nesterovskii was arrested, the new director, Solomonovich, sent a report to the factory’s main engineer, Nikanorov, on the ‘wrecking’ that had occurred at the factory. Although such reports should be taken with a grain of salt, there was some corroborating evidence to his statements: ‘The factory’s leadership did not consider it as necessary to prepare this factory for war ... The question of experiments with substitutes for deficit raw materials was never handled in a proper manner ... The Experimental Factory was not used for its proper purpose, did not undertake experiments but developed the ordinary products of the factory ... The mobilisation stocks at the factory had not been set up according to plan.’13 On 16 March 1939 a conference was organised at the ChTZ special design bureau. An extensive report was sent to the head of the secret department at the main directorate of the tractor industry. Attendees at the conference included the head of the SKB, Ananiev, and the engineers Bannikov, Prikhodkin, Sosnitskii, Drozdov and Kozlov. The protocol gives an indication of how those responsible at ChTZ evaluated their enterprise’s economic preparedness. A constant problem for the SKB was that most of the engineers were newly recruited and hesitant regarding which issues were to be given priority. In other cases, it was urgent to receive new drawings for shells from other factories. The director at ChTZ was even criticised for having paid too little attention to the question of mobilisation reserves. ‘I have to look all over the factory myself ... Materials have been thrown everywhere and mobilisation

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goods have instead been used for the current production,’ concluded Drozdov. Preparations for 1939 were to be made so that production of 152 millimetre shells and S-4 tractors could commence according to the army’s requirements. The lack of preparedness for mobilisation was also evident, as important equipment from Kharkhov Factory No. 183 on production of the BT tanks and ‘Komintern’ tractors had not even been unpacked and checked.14 On 10 August 1939 in connection with the uncertain situation in Europe, wartime conditions were introduced at the tractor factory in Cheliabinsk. This implied that much more overtime work could be claimed in order to fulfil the daily production plans. The most important customer was the Auto, Armour and Tank Directorate (ABTU) of the Red Army. In July 1940, serial production of the S-2 artillery hauler started. The new S-65 caterpillar tractor was successfully used in the final phase of the invasion of Finland in 1940. The heavily defended Mannerheim Line could be broken, due in part to the fact that the 152 millimetre howitzer could be brought forward in very rough terrain. In the spring of 1940, ChTZ received an order for several hundred such artillery haulers. On 25 May 1940 representatives from ChTZ were summoned – in a letter addressed to director Solomonovich from the People’s Commissariat of the Medium Machine-building Industry (NKSM) – to a conference in Moscow on 13 June concerning mobilisation preparedness at the factories.15 On 19 June the military department of the people’s commissariat sent out directives on how the mobilisation groups were to be formed, along with detailed instructions of their tasks and functions.16 In July 1940 the NKSM sent proposals for a new schedule of how the capacity of the enterprises was to surge in case of war. It was emphasised that complete checking must be carried out to ensure that all technical documentation of blueprints, specifications, etc. for all products in the mobilisation plan were actually at hand.17 At the 18th Communist Party Conference in February 1941, the Cheliabinsk Tractor Factory was mentioned as a cautionary example of how management had failed to raise productivity and quality. Director Shor was called to answer why monthly plans had been fulfilled only to an average of 80–85 per cent. At the same event, the local party representatives were criticised for not having implemented the decisions of the 18th Party Congress in 1939. They should have striven for ‘Bolshevik discipline’, strictly followed the decisions from the centre and not hesitated to punish guilty persons. At the ChTZ, the new products were not up to the expected standard. The people’s commissar of the medium

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machine-building industry, Viacheslav Malyshev, had issued a resolution on 20 March 1941 on the subject of ‘improving the instrument workshop at the Cheliabinsk Tractor Factory’. However, given what was still being debated at the Cheliabinsk regional party conference on 18–20 June 1941, only a few days before the German invasion, the resolution had not yet been implemented. This and similar examples show that the factory management did not see resolutions as laws and that the Communist Party could have a pragmatic attitude to daily work at the enterprise levels. Submission of daily reports from the workshops at the tractor factory had not yet been implemented, despite this having been stated as a priority at the 18th Party Congress. The large-scale production at ChTZ demanded precise control of every link in the production process. There were constant interruptions in production and ‘storming’ towards the end of the month to fulfil the plans. In May 1941 5000 hours were lost due to stoppages in production while 8000 hours of overtime was paid at the end of the month. An inspection of machinery and equipment showed a high degree of wear and tear and an excessive number of parts had to be rejected. The forms of wages and piece-rate versus self-costs at the factory were discussed frankly. The need for better order and cleanliness at the factories was discussed and it was noted that since these anomalies had been criticised at the highest levels, some factories had indeed cleaned up and carried away ‘hundreds of tons of metal waste and garbage that had gathered over several decades’.18 A decree from the Supreme Soviet of 10 June 1940 to reduce the quantity of discarded products had not produced any visible effects at ChTZ and factory management had not punished any guilty parties. Many details were not up to standard, while engine blocks, drive shafts, filters and many other parts were sent directly to the rejected goods category.19 The 18th Communist Party Conference on 15–20 February 1941 concentrated on those problems that needed to be solved for faster development of the defence industries. In actual fact, many of the resolutions adopted by the conference, as well as the plan for 1941 that was approved by it, involved a series of measures designed to convert the industry and the transport system to wartime conditions. On the whole, the Soviet experiences from the Spanish Civil War, the border battles against Japan in the summer of 1939 and the invasion of Finland in 1939–1940 had a decisive influence on the development on the defence industry in the Urals. An important lesson was the need

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to design much heavier tanks than those of the 1930s. One of the men who played a major role in the development of the Soviet heavy tanks was Zhozef Iakovlevich Kotin. He was born in 1908 in Dnepropetrovsk in the Ukraine and grew up in a worker’s family. In 1932, he graduated from the Feliks Dzerzhinskii Military-Technical Academy and then worked at various research institutes in Leningrad until 1937, when he was appointed head of the special design bureau (SKB) at the Kirov Works. He supervised the production of a heavy armoured tank that could withstand hits by shells. Various models were advanced, named SMK (after Sergei Mironovich Kirov, the Leningrad party leader assassinated on 1 December 1934) and KV (after defence commissar Kliment Voroshilov). The KV tank was used in the Soviet invasion of Finland and was able to withstand most of the shells that the Finnish defence had at its disposal. Accordingly, the Soviet leadership opted for serial production of the KV tank.20 When the prototype of the Kotin-designed SMK tank was shown to Stalin and the politburo members in Moscow, it is said that Stalin walked up to the model and removed one of the three gun turrets. He exclaimed that tanks should not look like new department stores with turrets and pinnacles. ‘How much is the weight of this turret?’ he asked. ‘Two and a half tons’, Kotin answered. ‘Then add so much more solid armour instead!’ Whether this is merely one of the many legends of Soviet historiography may be hard to prove. In any case, the structure of heavy tanks from the 1930s with many turrets and a large crew was abandoned thereafter. The tractor factory in Cheliabinsk was also due to start production of the new heavy tanks because it had become evident in the summer of 1940 that the capacity at the Kirov Works was insufficient. The first order to ChTZ was to produce five such tanks in 1940, during a trial period. On 10 November 1940 Director Solomonovich reported to the new people’s commissar for the medium-heavy machine-building industry, Viacheslav Malyshev, that ChTZ would not be able to start serial production of the heavy KV tank. Solomonovich’s letter informed Malyshev that all drawings and blueprints received from the Kirov Works had contained errors and even superfluous elements in the production process. Therefore, Cheliabinsk was to make their own drawings and coordinate the changes with Leningrad. According to Solomonovich, the drawings were not ‘technologically complete’. In some instances, the use of these drawings had simply led to more rejected goods. In other cases, the drawings included production

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phases that would be unnecessary if the original parts had been made more precisely. One hundred and sixty-four parts could not be produced according to the drawings without the risk of low quality. More than 1000 faults had been identified regarding how the parts should be put together. By 1 November ChTZ had changed some 350 drawings and still adhered to the principle of interchangeability. In the meantime, the Kirov Works had checked their drawings, both with respect to critiques from the Red Army’s tests of the tank in the summer of 1940 and in light of the defects that had been found by the Cheliabinsk Tractor Factory. During the first half of 1940, the hundred thousandth tractor was produced at ChTZ. In the first quarter, with various forms of ‘socialist competition’, production exceeded the plan by 191 tractors. By April, however, the production rate had sunk below the plan targets. Many workshops lacked parts and there was a shortage of metal. There were many standstills on the conveyor belt, which caused growing discontent among the workers. Since the beginning of the year, 360 workers had left the workshops, of whom 238 had been dismissed because of unauthorised absence from the workplace. The party criticised the factory’s communists for having had too many meetings; sometimes several meetings were held in the same evening. Since the meetings lasted from 7 p.m. until the early hours of the morning, the foremen and supervisor spent more time on meetings than they did on devoting themselves to leading activities. On the other hand, far too few meetings had been arranged at the factory concerning the new labour laws adopted by the Supreme Soviet in December 1940.21 ChTZ was in a vicious circle, in which bad working and living conditions in the new enterprises led to a high turnover of labour. This, in turn, caused a worsening of quality, productivity and profitability. The trade unions made a summary of the bad situation and also pointed at a series of technical defects that should have been remedied much earlier.22 In 1939, the high turnover of labour remained one of the main problems at the factories. Among Cheliabinsk’s six largest factories, 23,204 persons had left their workplace during 1939, 15,265 of whom were dismissed because of unauthorised absence. In 1939, ChTZ employed 14,131 new workers, while 15,136 persons left the factory for various reasons. The situation was the same in the first winter month in 1940; 1154 persons were employed and 1316 left the factory or were fired. 23

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On 26 June 1940 a decree from the presidium of the Supreme Soviet reintroduced the seven-day week, extended workdays to eight hours and introduced a number of penalties for unauthorised absences. Anyone who left a factory on their own initiative could be sentenced to two to four months in prison. Anyone who was absent from their workplace for a day could be sentenced to six months of correctional work – that is, forced labour – with a reduction in their wage. The background to the harsher factory laws can be explained as the awareness that total war was imminent and indiscipline in the labour force could not be tolerated. These laws cannot be described as purely ‘draconian’; even a modern enterprise with conveyor belts, quality requirements and production targets could not allow a large part of its workforce to arrive half an hour or more late. For the first time, these laws were strictly implemented and a huge number of workers were penalised. Many factories tried to raise factory discipline by a combination of premiums and penalties. Half a year after the introduction of the law, however, the problems with labour absence and turnover continued. The wartime situation called for special laws regulating the labour situation.24 On 10 July 1940 a law was passed regarding ‘responsibility for delivery of products that do not satisfy quality requirements or lack parts and for negligence of obligatory standards in industrial production’. This law placed penal responsibility on the directors and departmental and workshop supervisors for any deficiency in products from their respective levels. The penalties for breaches of the law varied from five to eight years’ imprisonment. A decree of 28 December 1940 aimed to achieve a similar increase in discipline; students at trade, railway and factory schools were sentenced to ‘prison in labour colonies’ for up to a year if they left their education.

The USSR’s preparations for war in 1941 It has been a recent subject of discussion as to whether Moscow knew in advance about Operation Barbarossa, Nazi Germany’s invasion plan, knowledge which would have allowed the Soviet Union to make a preemptive strike and forestall the planned German attack. The propaganda myth spread after 22 June 1941 by Joseph Goebbels, who referred to Hitler’s talk on the eve of the invasion, was that after the capitulation of France in summer 1940 the Soviet Union had concentrated large armies along the common border with Poland. In this situation,

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the Nazi propaganda asserted, Germany had no option but to attack the Soviet Union. From the Soviet perspective, however, the situation looked quite different.25 After the invasion of Finland in 1939–1940, so many defects in the Red Army had been exposed that far-reaching reforms were necessary. Some results of these reforms were visible in the autumn of 1940. On the technological field, the USSR was in the middle of great changes in its aeroplanes and tanks. In 1940–1941, the development of new types was sped up and modern weapons on par with the best German models were produced at a faster tempo. However, there was still a glaring gap between what the army required in order to set up mechanised units and what Soviet industry delivered in 1941. The archives in Cheliabinsk reveal more details about how the organisational measures advanced during the period before the war to prepare industrial enterprises for a transition to wartime production in the second half of 1941. The traditional, official Soviet historiography claimed that the Soviet leadership only ordered the State Planning Commission, Gosplan, to draw up a new plan regarding wartime requirements after the German invasion of 1941. However, in the months before Operation Barbarossa, intensive planning was taking place for the wartime production of ammunition, arms and much else that was expected to be required during the first period of war. In June 1941 Stalin was appointed chairman of the council of the people’s commissars, Sovnarkom; in other words, the Soviet government. In the following weeks, a number of Sovnarkom resolutions were edited to require factories to redraft their mobilisation planning. However, these measures do not support the theory that the Soviet leader had offensive intentions at that time. Many facts indicate that Stalin expected some form of new ultimatum from Berlin and did not believe that the concentration of German troops along the Soviet Union’s borders could actually be preparations for war. The resolutions signed by Stalin in early June 1941 to all the people’s commissariats concerning higher mobilisation preparedness required that all factories should be prepared, with clockwork precision, to switch to their wartime levels and assortment by 1 July. These decisions indicate that the Soviet leadership had both theoretically and practically assimilated their knowledge on industrial mobilisation. 26 On 10 June 1941 people’s commissar Malyshev, who had responsibility for large parts of the machine-building industry, sent an order

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marked ‘very urgent, strictly secret’ and ‘making of copies is categorically prohibited’, concerning ‘measures to prepare industry for transition to the mobilisation plan of ammunition’. The order was sent to three main directorates and a dozen large machine-building factories, such as the Gorkii Automobile Works and the tractor factories in Kharkov, Stalingrad and Cheliabinsk. The order specified over 20 measures that were to be taken instantly, what must be prepared and the stocks of raw materials, instruments and parts that were to be set up so that ammunition could be produced in case of mobilisation of the industry. The military section of the people’s commissariat was responsible for receiving updated information from the People’s Commissariat of Defence, NKO, regarding the required types of ammunition. The section was to receive the updated drawings and specifications of this ammunition from the People’s Commissariat of Munitions, NKB (Narodnyi Kommissariat Boepripasov). Within three days of receipt of this, Gosplan, the State Planning Commission, should specify which iron and other metal products, as well as chemicals and forged and cast details, the enterprises in the machine-building industry would require in the second half of 1941 in order to fulfil this mobilisation plan. These organs were also to study how labour resources should be distributed between the factories and whether workers needed to be recruited from other branches and their respective people’s commissariats. 27

The start of tank production at the Cheliabinsk Tractor Factory Soviet historiography consciously hid the USSR’s real preparedness for transition to a war economy. It stated that a new State Defence Committee, GKO, was formed as soon as the surprise attack by German, Italian, Rumanian, Hungarian and Finnish troops along the borders occurred. Gosplan was then instructed to change the plan for the third quarter of 1941 in accordance with the unexpected wartime situation. This historiographic myth on Soviet economic preparedness could be well-motivated at the time, since the Cold War still required a certain degree of secrecy about the planning principles.28 The same myths also surrounded the history of the great industrial plant before and immediately after Operation Barbarossa. Very little had been written about the preparedness for war at the Cheliabinsk

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Tractor Factory or that it had prepared for tank production long before June 1941. With access to the archives, it has become possible to study how the original mobilisation plans of this factory, like many other enterprises and organs in the region, were designed in the 1930s. After the war against Finland in 1939–1940, it was decided that heavy tanks should be produced not only at the Kirov Works in Leningrad but also at the tractor factory in Cheliabinsk. For a couple of months, a group of engineers, technicians and designers at ChTZ were to produce the first KV-1 tanks. This was no easy task. To start with, they lacked drawings and blueprints and they had no experience of how the different components should be produced. If a great war had started in 1936, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union would have had practically identical armed land forces. After that, the German generals continued to refine their ideas about ‘Blitzkrieg’ and they managed to win swift victories in the initial stages of World War II. The doctrine developed on the Soviet side was the obverse. There are two main explanations for this. Russian generals drew incorrect conclusions regarding the role of tanks in battle but correct conclusions on the future tank’s construction, based on their own experiences in the Spanish Civil War. They did not fully consider the specific conditions in Spain, but generalised from the bitter fights with the numerous tanks involved, the great losses and the relative lack of success. The Soviet doctrine therefore dispersed independent, mechanised units and spread their tanks out among the infantry divisions.29 Thereafter, Soviet experts understood that tanks needed to have armour that could withstand grenade attacks. Until then, tanks had armour plates no thicker than 20–30 millimetres that could withstand only machine gun fire; it was believed that the enemy artillery positions would have been destroyed before the armoured vehicles advanced with the infantry. In 1938–1939, the Red Army’s Auto, Armour and Tank Directorate (ABTU) ordered the enterprises to develop prototypes that could be tested according to the new specifications. Several projects were adopted for testing: the heavy SMK tank, which was ready in the summer of 1939 at special design bureau-2 of the Kirov Works in Leningrad, and also the heavy T-100 tank, which was designed by the design Bureau at factory No. 174. The former was designed by Nikolai Tseits and A.S. Ermolaev and the latter by I.V. Gavalanov. Both models took part in the Soviet invasion of Finland, in the battles along the Mannerheim line in the winter of 1939–1940. The heavy T-100 tank provided the basis for later versions of self-propelled artillery units, the SU-100 with a

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Figure 73

The KV-2 tank.

133 millimetre B-13 naval gun and the SU-100Z with a 152 millimetre gun, but these never went into serial production. The evaluation of the SMK tank after the war was positive; none of the Finnish shells could penetrate its armour, there were only a lot of small indentations. The SMK tank had run over a land mine and had to be saved with great difficulty by other tanks under heavy bombardment. The Finns had not found any haulers that could move the 55-ton tank. Following evaluation of the first battles, its design was modified. According to one memoir as mentioned above, it was Stalin himself who suggested that the small gun turret with a 45 millimetre gun and 300 shells be removed and only the 76.2 millimetre gun (with 150 shells in the prototype) be kept instead. “Why should a tank look like the Miur and Maryliza shop in Moscow?” he said before removing the smaller turret from the model showed to him in the Kremlin. Instead, the armour plates were to be made much thicker. This model was developed in 1940 by Leonid Dukhov at the SKB-2 and given the designation KV-1. 30 It was produced with two different types of gun turret; one was welded with 75 millimetre thick armour plates and another cast tower with a thickness of 95 millimetres. The original L-11 gun was replaced with a 76.2 millimetre F-32 gun and then in 1941 with a 76.2 millimetre ZIS-5 gun with 114 shells in stock. The armour protection was increased with millimetre mm thick plates and the walls in the gun turret up to 105 millimetres. The tank had a crew of four soldiers. The first projects had

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not stipulated the tank’s maximum speed or how much ammunition it should carry. On the basis of the KV-1, a long series of other tanks was designed – KV-2, KV-3, KV-8, KV-9 and others. Not all were mass produced but they did remain as prototypes. The KV-2 model appeared in February of 1940, with a different configuration of the turret, a 152 millimetre M-10 gun and 36 shells. Three hundred and thirty KV-2 tanks were produced in 1940–1941. More than 4800 KV tanks, of all models, were produced at the factories in Leningrad and Cheliabinsk during the war years. Delegations from Cheliabinsk travelled to Leningrad in March 1940 to study the production methods at the Kirov Works; drawings and instruments were then sent to ChTZ. Specialists from Leningrad arrived at the tractor factory, where 50 designers and 24 technicians had struggled to produce an item that they were not at all prepared to produce. Only one-third of the parts that were needed for the KV-1 had been produced. The People’s Commissariat of Building, NKStroi, was to reconstruct five workshops so that production of the tanks could start in 1940. However, no building activity had been started because of the great lack of manpower; only 1178 out of the required 5000 building workers had been hired. Very few had been recruited from the regions near Cheliabinsk and NKStroi had failed to send its 2000 workers according to the adopted plan. A series of other people’s commissariats had also failed to deliver raw materials, intermediate goods and equipment to ChTZ on time. In August 1940 the chief engineer at the new special department of ChTZ said it was evident that no production of tanks according to the original orders could start that year. 31 On 28 September 1940 the People’s Commissariat of the Medium Machine-building Industry sent instructions to ChTZ for a new mobilisation plan for 1940. In case of war, the tractor factory in Cheliabinsk was to produce the following: KV tanks Spare parts for tanks S-2 tractors S-65 tractors Engines for S-2s and S-65s Spare parts for S-2 Spare parts for S-65 152 millimetre howitzer shells 52 millimetre shells and punched containers

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400 units 100 units 3500 units 13,000 units 3000 units 10 million rubles 100 million rubles 200,000 units 2,300,000 units

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The people’s commissariat ordered the enterprise to check everything in the mobilisation plan and to determine the other factories with which it must cooperate and which parts could ordered from other factories. The chief engineer at ChTZ then completed the requirements for mobilisation at the factory. This was a detailed instruction of over 140 machine-typed pages concerning everything that must be available in case of war.32 In a letter dated 28 November 1940, the deputy head of the military section of ChTZ asked for a number of corrections to be made to this mobilisation list before 15 December.33 When assessing the industrial military-economic preparedness of the Soviet Union, it is important to make a distinction between the plans and measures that had been discussed on a general level and what had actually been implemented at the factory level.34 In June 1941 Stalin chaired the government directly and Viacheslav Molotov remained only as people’s commissar of foreign affairs. During this month, a series of decrees were adopted for the revision of industrial preparedness. Decree No. 1502-614ss, which concerned the production of ammunition, was directed not only at the NKB but to all concerned enterprises under other commissariats as well. All factories that had mobilisation plans for shells, mines and cartridges for guns, howitzers, guns and pistols were affected by this decree. These factories were required to check their plans and send them for approval to the defence and munitions people’s commissariats so that a new mobilisation plan for the second half of 1941 could be available before 1 July. The people’s commissariats were allowed to move equipment from one enterprise to another. The decree contained even more detailed instructions about what should be checked and inspected and what must be reported. As an example, the required number of metal-cutting machines was estimated to be 35,000, and 2000 pressing machines and 300 units of melting machinery were required. The decree even calculated the number of cubic metres of wooden boxes needed for the transportation of ammunition and specified that 16,000 tons of spikes were needed. Similarly, the planners had calculated the required amounts of chemicals and metals. It was up to Gosplan to coordinate this finally, which was only one part of the new mobilisation plan. Gosplan had ten days to complete the plan for the second half of 1941 and was given 20 days to present that for 1942. These documents from early summer 1941 illustrate the Soviet Union’s high level of military-economic preparedness at the time. There were well established routines for planning to ensure that the deficit situa-

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tions that occurred in World War I would never be repeated. The manner in which the party leaders hastened the revision of mobilisation plans in June 1941 displayed an awareness that war with Nazi Germany might be imminent. Officially, and for the benefit of the Soviet public, the government still spread the idea that the frequent rumours of an imminent war with Germany were false.

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Figure 74 ‘The Urals give to the front’ is the message on this 1942 poster by P. Karachentsov.

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7 Production Conditions for Heavy Tanks in the Urals

Germany’s swift victory over France in 1940 was directly linked to its surprise tank advance through the Ardennes forest. These armoured forces were seen as a key component in the German Blitzkrieg. Likewise, when planning for war against the USSR, the German leaders calculated that independent mechanised army groups could strike a decisive blow against the Russians in a campaign lasting only one summer. Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of Soviet Russia in 1941, has been the subject of many military histories. Much has been added recently since the opening of the Russian archives enabled new interpretations of how the Soviet Union prepared for war.1 Hitler’s generals assumed that a decisive victory could be won against the Red Army in the summer of 1941 just as easily as they had crushed Poland and France. Their calculations determined the requirements for the weapons to be used in the east but they did not count on meeting Soviet tanks that would be stronger than the British and French ones they had encountered in 1940. Although Soviet preparedness for war had some defects, in many respects Moscow had a better understanding of how formidable an enemy the Wehrmacht would be. The Soviet leaders were very well informed about the evolution of German armour and which tanks were already fighting. In this facet of the arms race, the Soviet Union had certain advantages, although it could not always profit from them at an operational level. Their strong armoured divisions in the western parts of Belorus, including the medium-heavy T-34, did not have sufficient fuel and weapons stores in June 1941 and could not be used in the defence after 22 June. The Soviet army had a large number of BT tanks which, if they had been correctly grouped and prepared for battle, would have been equal to the German Panzer III and IV tanks, with their similar technical specifications. 183

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However, before retreating, the Red Army had to leave many of its new T-34 and KV tanks or destroy them with explosives because they lacked fuel. Most fuel and ammunitions depots had been situated to counter an invasion in which the attack would be in the direction of the Ukraine. Right up until the last days before the German invasion, Stalin had forbidden the Red Army to increase its level of preparedness.2 Nazi Germany’s global outlook was presented in their propaganda. In connection with Operation Barbarosa, the Germans published a so-called ‘Red book’ entitled Warum Krieg mit Stalin? (‘Why War with Stalin?’), which contained Hitler’s speech to the nation of 22 June 1941. In this speech, Hitler explained why Germany had found it necessary to conclude a non-aggression pact in 1939 with the Soviet Union. He then described how Stalin had nonetheless continued to encourage

Figure 75 Nazi German propaganda in 1941. The booklet is entitled ‘Why war with Stalin?’

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communists in all countries to undermine Germany and had even allegedly started to plan for an attack against the country. Nazi propaganda had used the same story in 1933 regarding an imminent communist coup d’état that had been prevented by Hitler’s takeover of power. After June 1941, the same anti-Soviet clichés and depictions that had been in vogue before September 1939 were used. In the ‘Red book’, the USSR, the Communist Party, the state and the army were described as being totally controlled by Jews.3 One Nazi myth was that after Stalin’s second wife had committed suicide in 1932, Stalin kept 17-year-old Rosa Kaganovich – daughter of Politburo member Lazar Kaganovich – as his private secretary and mistress. According to the myth, this arrangement made Kaganovich the real power man in the Soviet Union and the centre for the ruling Jewish clique in the ‘Soviet paradise’, since he held influence over Stalin. For anyone who could follow the German propaganda at the start of the war, there could be no doubt that the brutal war of annihilation was directed both against members of the Communist Party and against the Jews as an ethnic group.4 The character of the invasion, as a war of annihilation (Vernichtungskrieg), was soon evident to the Soviet people. Numerous reports from the western regions told of repressions against the civilian population. Those who were lucky enough to flee in time with the evacuation trains eastwards had horrifying stories to tell. The systematic persecution was prepared in advance by the so-called ‘commissar order’ – not to take communist or Jewish officers as prisoners of war. This is also evident from the ‘Red Book’ published by the propaganda department of the German Ministry of Information in 1941, one the alleged reasons why Germany must prevent an imminent Soviet attack. The mass executions in 1941 of Jews and others, not just representatives of the Soviet regime, indicated that the Holocaust was part of the German invasion plans from the beginning. It has been debated whether the Nazi attack against the Soviet Union was directed primarily against the communists or the Jews. To grasp this and other Nazi world views, it is worth remembering that their presentation of ‘Judaeo-Bolshevism’ had been a constant leitmotif. Communism was presented primarily as a Jewish movement, dominated by Russian Jews who had taken power in Petrograd in 1917 and who, along with the Communist International, then aspired to global conquest. During the interwar period, there were of course anticommunists who did not have any Judaeophobic ideas. However, in the ideological contest between the socialist, liberal and conservative ideas of the time, all of which were opposed to dictatorship (Soviet communism, Italian fascism and German national socialism), the anti-Semitic

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German propaganda against the Soviet system hindered clear analysis of what was really happening in the country.5 Hitler and the German military leadership had calculated that one single ‘Blitzkrieg’ would wipe out most of the Soviet military and economic potential. However, they split their resources and advanced in three diverging directions. The first headed towards the Ukraine and thereafter towards the Volga River and Caucasus in order to conquer those resources that were vital for the German economy. A second group moved towards Moscow, with its many industries and administration, which was considered to be so centralised that the rest of the country would collapse when this goal had been reached. A third group was directed towards Leningrad and the northern parts of European Russia. The idea was that the Soviet Union would capitulate after the Red Army had been defeated in these areas. Germany would then again have enough oil and other natural resources to take up the war against the United Kingdom. The Wehrmacht’s leaders thought that only then would they need heavy tanks to combat British forces. In the first months of Operation Barbarossa, events on the battlefield seemed to confirm the German generals’ calculations. However, Germany had underestimated the scale of the industry of the USSR that had already been created in the Urals, in the regions east of the River Volga and in Western Siberia. When those factories and their infrastructure were combined with the evacuated equipment, the Soviet Union had, within half a year, acquired a new industrial basis for a protracted war. Modern Russian historians do not hesitate to discuss the fact that the Soviet Union was actually on the verge of a catastrophe in the summer of 1941. If the rapid evacuation of industrial equipment and people had failed at some essential stage, the country would certainly have been forced to capitulate or give up much more territory than was the case in 1941–1942.6 After its heavy losses in 1941 and 1942, the Red Army managed to change the course of the war and actually won it in grand-scale operations against the Germans in the last years of the war. Among the suggested explanations for the German failure in Operation Barbarossa, the ‘Russian winter’ is often mentioned, as if the weather would influence the fighting capability only of an aggressor. A group of German generals and general staff officers in American captivity after WWII studied how each of the four seasons had mostly negatively influenced their army – implicitly less than the Red Army – during the war with the Soviet Union; they attempted to show that it was primarily Russia’s

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weather conditions, its undeveloped infrastructure and road network that had prevented the Germans from winning the war.7 In the West, the Red Army’s victories used to be linked to what was pejoratively called ‘the Russian steam-roller’, implying that the success had been attained by Soviet superiority in soldiers, weapons and armaments. Linked to this argument was the idea that Soviet victory had depended on lend-lease assistance from the USA and the United Kingdom. Contrary to the proverb that ‘the winner writes the history books’, the losers’ historiography of the German-Russian war of 1941–1945 – that is, books by and memoirs of German generals – was more widespread and believed (in the West) than those of the Soviet marshals and generals. Soviet historiography until the late 1980s was only party to blame for this, because it had censored many questions that were considered sensitive or inopportune. Under Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev, the history of the ‘Great Fatherland War, 1941–1945’ was adopted to suit the party leadership, to the detriment of an objective, complex reconstruction of events.8 It is only hypothetically possible to guess what might have happened if, instead of spreading their attack in three diverging directions, Germany had systematically advanced along only one of them and then attained less ambitious but more solidly consolidated goals. On the other hand, if the German-Russian war had taken place more as the Soviet defence plans had predicted, it would have been easy to determine how well prepared their industry was. A large part of the Soviet defence-industry capacity was located in the western parts of Russia and in the Ukraine. The chairman of the State Planning Commission (Gosplan), Nikolai Voznesenskii, wrote in a classic work that, for a couple of months, a significant portion of the Soviet industrial equipment was moving around on the railways.9 One of the first decisions of the State Defence Committee (GKO) concerned an increase in tank production. At an early stage of the war it was evident that all previous estimates of wartime needs were insufficient for the requirements at the front. The man responsible for the tank production was Viacheslav Malyshev, the people’s commissar of the Medium Machine-Building Industry. He was surprised already in July 1941 to read reports on armoured battles involving up to 4000 tanks. He then suggested to Stalin that a number of large machine-building factories should be re-equipped for production of tanks or details to the tank factories. The forced evacuation of industry from the zones threatened by the fast-advancing German troops temporarily disrupted the Soviet defence industry. In the end, however, the relocation eastwards allowed

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the Soviet tank industry to be concentrated in new, huge units such as the Urals Car Factory in Nizhnii Tagil and the tractor factory in Cheliabinsk. A few months after the German attack, the most important personnel at the Kirov Works in Leningrad were evacuated to Cheliabinsk, where they would develop new tank models designed by Zhozef Kotin. The evacuation of equipment from hundreds of factories, according to plans that had to be drawn up within a few weeks, is indirect proof that much constructive thinking had been done since the late 1920s concerning wartime economic changes. The economic preparedness had included discussions about so-called ‘duplicate factories’ or ‘shadow enterprises’ that could take over production from other parts of the country that were subjected to bombardment or destruction. The planning authorities knew which links existed between factories that were to be evacuated and the existing plants and facilities in the Urals and western Siberia. Nonetheless, since the course of the German-Russian war had been so different to that outlined in various Soviet industrial mobilisation plans, many enterprises in Cheliabinsk had to be radically rebuilt and adapted to receive the evacuated equipment. The Soviet authorities managed to carry out an evacuation that was largely unplanned. The fact that it succeeded can be interpreted as a sign of how the economic preparedness plans before the war had been meant to train personnel in discipline and creative solution-seeking. Over 700 industrial enterprises of significance for armaments production were evacuated to the Urals. Here, a new basis was created for the expansion of production of tanks, guns, rifles and ammunition. The amount of machine production and raw materials that would be necessary in wartime had been recalculated in detail. The reconstruction of old factories to accommodate the evacuated equipment was carried out by the People’s Commissariat of Building, NKStroi, and the experienced organiser, Semën Ginzburg, who commanded hundreds of building battalions and a substantial number of Gulag prisoners. Like those in the Gulag had been before the war, these prisoners were a marginal but very important addition to the war effort.10 The new People’s Commissariat of the Tank Industry (NKTankoProm) was set up on 12 September 1941 and included several factories that had produced tanks in the 1930s. In Kharkov were Factory No. 183 – producer of the T-34 tanks – and Factory No. 75 – producer of the V-2 diesel engines for tanks. In Leningrad were the Kirov Works – producer of the heavy KV tanks – and Factory No. 174 – the light T-26 tank. In Moscow was Factory No. 37 – producer of the light amphibious T-40 tank; in Mariupol was the Ilich Works – producing the chassis for the

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T-34 tanks – and in Podolsk was the Ordzhonikidze Works, which produced the chassis for the T-40 tanks. Since several of these factories were already to be evacuated eastwards, enterprises that had not previously produced tanks were to take over their equipment. The best known was the tractor factory in Cheliabinsk, which received equipment from the Kirov Works in Leningrad. The car factory in Nizhnii Tagil was to receive machinery and equipment from Factory No. 173 in Kharkov and start production of the T-34 tanks. The Urals Turbo Motor Factory was to continue the engine production after the evacuation from the Kirov Works. The Urals Heavy Machinery Works in Sverdlovsk (UZTM) received machinery from a number of defence establishments, including the Izhorsk Factory outside Leningrad. In October 1941, a combine for production of heavy tanks was formed, including the Tractor Factory in Cheliabinsk (renamed during the war years as the Kirov Works in Cheliabinsk). UZTM delivered armour detail and tank guns and the Urals Turbo Motor Factory produced the V-2 diesel engines, while a series of other factories produced other items. A number of other factories were later incorporated into this group.11

Figure 76

The interior of the tank production workshops.

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The main person responsible for Soviet tank production was Viacheslav Malyshev, who was to a large extent the main organiser of production of heavy and medium tanks at the factories in Cheliabinsk, Sverdlovsk and Nizhnii Tagil. He was born in 1902 in Ust-Sysolsk (now Syktyvkar in the Perm region) and grew up in a family of teachers. After studying at the Railway Technical Institute, Malyshev worked from 1924 as mechanic and machine-man on a steam locomotive. He had the opportunity to study at the Moscow Higher Technical College, now the Bauman Moscow State Technical University in Moscow and then worked from 1934 as designer, chief engineer and director at the Kuibyshev Works in Kolomna. Malyshev was a typical representative of the new generation of specialists who had received their higher education in Soviet times, and his career advanced quickly. He had survived the Great Terror of 1937–1938 and advanced afterwards to become people’s commissar of the medium machine-building industry. From 1940 to 1944, Malyshev was deputy chairman of the State Defence Committee and between September 1941 and August 1942 and from June 1943 to October 1945 was the people’s commissar of the tank industry.12 Another personality who had been overlooked in earlier Soviet historiography was Lavrentii Beria. From the end of 1942 GKO gave Beria supreme responsibility for the tank industry, given that his predecessor Viachyslav Molotov had not coped with this task. According to memoirs that could not be published until the 1990s, Beria was an outstanding organiser who accomplished good results at factories that had been ridden with problems, without resorting to ‘repressive measures’.13 In Sverdlovsk, the gigantic Urals Factory for Heavy Machine-building UZTM was reconstructed to produce a chassis and canon turret for the tanks that were to be assembled at the factories in Nizhnii Tagil or Cheliabinsk. These three cities, with their large machine-building factories, constituted the core of the Soviet tank combine. In turn, they depended on a well-organised network of hundreds of suppliers. In Nizhnii Tagil, the Urals Railcar Factory (Uralvagonzavod) was reconstructed and equipped with machinery from the tractor factory in Kharkov and started production of the medium weight T-34 tank. Under the leadership of Semën Ginzburg, the people’s commissar of building, the Uralvagonzavod was to have an annual capacity of 9000 such tanks.14 In Sverdlovsk, the UZTM was reconstructed to produce chassis and gun turrets for the tanks that were assembled at factories in Nizhnii Tagil or Cheliabinsk. These three factories were the core of the Soviet tankbuilding network and each was dependent on hundreds of suppliers.

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Figure 77 Shell production in accordance with the industrial mobilisation plans started in 1940–1941 at the Cheliabinsk Tractor Factory and other factories.

The establishment of ‘Tankograd’ One of the many books that were important in the 1940s for the West’s understanding of the unexpected Soviet successes in the war was William Henry Chamberlin’s The Russian Enigma. Chamberlin (1897–1969) had been a correspondent in Moscow in more than a decade and later recalled his impressions of ‘Stalin’s revolution from above’ – the industrialisation and elimination of the kulaks– in a classic book entitled Russia’s Iron Age (1935).15 The play on words in the title captured both the brutal social order of the pre-historic era and the Soviet Union’s large-scale construction of iron and steel works that provided the foundation for a modern, metal-consuming war industry. Chamberlin considered that the essence of Stalin’s industrialisation was a high military-economic potential. In The Russian Enigma, he wrote that the supreme militaryeconomic potential was the secret behind the Red Army’s victories. As noted above, Chamberlin wrote that an old Russian joke says if a school child hesitates in answer to a question about where a certain metal is found, he can surely answer, ‘In the Urals!’ These mountains have small amounts of coal but rich deposits of almost any other ore, such as iron,

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copper, gold, platinum, nickel, asbestos, lead, zinc, cobalt, vanadium and potassium. Chamberlin described how a series of modern factories had emerged there, from the chemical plants in Berezniki in the north to the iron and steel works in Magnitogorsk in the south. He mentioned that Cheliabinsk was sometimes mentioned in secretive ways in the press as ‘Tankograd (the tank city)’. According to Chamberlin, most of the more than 200 new factories could easily be converted into producers of military hardware.16 The experience of the invasion of Finland in December 1939 had prompted the Soviet designers to modify the KV tanks and start serial production in 1940. The tank had armour that in 1941 had no counterpart on the German side and could withstand heavy fire from German guns. On the other hand, its engine and transmission deficiencies were soon apparent; tanks would often come to a standstill and then be an easy target for fire from non-frontal attacks. In June 1941, the Cheliabinsk Tractor Factory (ChTZ) had only one workshop that produced the KV tanks. The experiments by the special department and its designers had been surrounded by great secrecy since early 1940 in the production of this tank. Until the outbreak of the war, only 25 KV tanks had been produced at ChTZ. The main production of the factory was still the S-65, S-65G and S-2 tractors. The production of tractors at ChTZ stopped only in November 1941. In July, August and September, it had produced 25, 27 and 24 KV tanks, respectively. In October, the volume had increased to 88, in November to 110 and in December to 213 tanks. A total of 511 KV tanks were produced at the Cheliabinsk Tractor Factory during 1941. At 2 a.m. on 25 June the tractor factory received an order from Moscow to start the production of ammunition according to the new mobilisation plan for the second half of 1941 and for 1942. The order was sent as an encoded telegram with reference to the code-name of this plan as adopted on 10 June 1941. Some time later, a similar order arrived for ChTZ to produce tanks and artillery haulers according to its mobilisation plan. The converted tractor factory was thus not only to produce heavy tanks but also to supply the army with shells.17 It is difficult to summarise the total quantities of shells produced of different types and calibres in Soviet industry during the war. To give an idea of why the USSR seldom lacked ammunition in 1941–1945, as had been the case for Tsarist Russia and other states in World War I, it is necessary to break down and analyse the seemingly astronomical figures of hundreds of thousands of shells produced, divided into use by various groups, corps

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Table 3 The production plan of Cheliabinsk Tractor Factory for the 4th quarter of 1941

KV tanks S-2 tractors S-65 tractors V-2 diesel engines Tractor engines Spare parts for KV tanks Spare parts for tractors 76 mm shells 152 mm shells Zab-T-G-50 details for M-13 rocket artillery shells Rolled steel for 76 mm shells Chains for Bereznev machine gun Metal-cutting machines Steel

units units units units units rubles rubles units units units units units units tons

4th quarter

in October

490 600 1600 1300 500 15,000,000 13,000,000 39,000 75,000

125 250 250 200 200 6,000,000 4,600,000 13,000 25,000

39,000 60,000 600,000 30 16,000

13,000 20,000 200,000 10 5500

and divisions in the Red Army, and then calculate how many shells were used in various phases of the German-Russian war. Ivan Vernidub, an expert on the Soviet ammunition industry, provided detailed descriptions of most weapons and also clearly illustrated the enormous quantity of shells that had been produced prior to the arrival of raw materials and weapons by lend-lease aid from the allies. From 1941 to 1945, at the industries in the Southern Urals alone, the shells for the Red Army were loaded onto 130,000 freight cars, the unit that Vernidub found most suited for his purpose. For the entire Soviet Union, production was as follows: 1941: 21,000 railway freight cars with artillery and 1990 with howitzer ammunition 1942: 44,801 railway freight cars with artillery and 17,469 with howitzer ammunition 1943: 62,200 railway freight cars with artillery and 32,895 with howitzer ammunition 1944–1945: 143,293 railway freight cars with artillery and 50,712 with howitzer ammunition.18 With three to four times less steel and three to three-and-a-half times less coal than Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union managed to produce almost twice as much ammunition and other weapons. Germany and

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Figure 78

An ISU-152 battle tank on its way through the assembly hall.

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its satellite states used annual production of 32 million tons of steel, compared to 8–11 million tons in the Soviet Union. In the summer of 1941, Nikolai Dukhov was transferred from the Kirov Works in Leningrad to Cheliabinsk, where on 25 July he was appointed chief designer for tanks at department No. 3 of the tractor factory. It was expected that production of the KV tanks would start on a grand scale. A modified version named the KV-3 had been designed, based on the experiences from the Finnish campaign. At the outbreak of war, however, production started with the old drawings on hand for the KV-1 type. Nikolai Dukhov wanted to exploit the established conveyorbelt production practice at ChTZ. This would have required a number of modifications to the blueprints from the Kirov Works, where every

Figure 79 Isaak Moiseevich Zaltsman (1905–1988) held the rank of major-general in the engineer and tank armed services. In 1941, he was awarded the medal Hero of Socialist Labour and thereafter a number of other medals for his successful organisation of tank production in the Urals. His popularity during the war years spread far beyond Cheliabinsk and the people’s nickname for him was ‘The Tank King’ (Korol tankov).

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tank was assembled separately and small construction defects could be corrected during the assembly job. Production of tanks at the Kirov Works in Leningrad continued for some months, even after the outbreak of war, until it was decided in October that the main machinery park and the qualified workers were to be evacuated. In October 1941, Isaak Zaltsman was appointed by the Communist Party central committee as director of a new enterprise, the reconstructed tractor factory in Cheliabinsk, which was to receive equipment and personnel from the Kirov Works in Leningrad. He was also appointed as the deputy people’s commissar of the Commissariat of the Tank Industry, NKTankoProm. In the late summer months of 1941, Zaltsman and his colleagues were assigned with preparing the factory in Leningrad to withstand the expected German attack, while also preparing everything that should be sent on the railway to the east. The factory was the object of precision German bombing and artillery fire but production continued at a lower level and the tanks rolled straight from the factory to their battle positions around the city. It was only a matter of weeks before the whole city would be surrounded and beleaguered.19 The tractor factory was rebuilt in the second half of 1941. It included a new 12,000 square metre assembly hall, a 15,000 square metre mechanics workshop for processing details and assembly work, a 15,600 square metre mechanics section and a long factory especially built for the assembly and testing of tank engines, with an area of 9000 square metres. Equipment for these new halls came successively from Leningrad and Kharkov. The time allotted before the start of serial production was extremely short. In less than three weeks, 5800 machines and other mechanical equipment from Leningrad were placed in halls that did not yet even have roofs. When the designers from the Kirov Works arrived from Leningrad in October, the special design bureau moved over to the director’s building, where it occupied the entire third and fourth floors. The blueprints were made on the fifth floor. Initially there were only a few desks in the corners of the rooms and very few people worked there but this quickly changed with the arrival of personnel of all ages, men and women in all kinds of clothes. This was the large group of specialists from SKB-2 in Leningrad who worked under the direction of Zhozef Kotin. From this day, the factory started to be called ‘The Kirov Works in Cheliabinsk’, and it would soon be regarded as one of the most important defence establishments there. Under Kotin’s supervision, the SKB-2 continued to develop new tank models. Thirteen different tanks and self-propelled

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guns were designed during the war years. In conjunction with the engine expert, Ivan Trashutin, the chief designers Kotin and Dukhov introduced the KV-1S, KV-85, IS-1, IS-2 and IS-3 tanks, as well as the self-propelled artillery (Russian abbreviation SAU or SU) SU-122 and ISU152. Kotin gathered the designers E.P. Dudov, K.N. Ilin, B.A. Krasnikov, M.I. Kreslavskii and G.N. Moskvin at the SKB-2, along with other young engineers who had graduated from the prestigious Moscow Higher Technical College, now the Bauman State Technical University or the Urals University in Sverdlovsk. Ivan Trashutin was born in 1901 in the Ukraine. He studied at the Kharkov Institute of Technology and then worked as an engineer at the Kharkov Locomotive Works . In 1931, he was sent by the Soviet government for further studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After graduating from MIT, he returned to Kharkov and participated in the development of the first new diesel engine for tanks, named the V-2. For this accomplishment, Trashutin was awarded the Order of Lenin. When the Kharkov Engine Factory was evacuated in the autumn of 1941, Trashutin came to Cheliabinsk, where he was appointed head of the diesel department. The KV, IS and T-34 tanks all had diesel engines that had been designed by Trashutin’s collective. Trashutin was to remain at the Cheliabinsk factory for more than 40 years and further refined the diesel technology for both tanks and tractors. At the outbreak of the war, the Cheliabinsk Tractor Factory was expected to need 24,000 workers, 3000 engineers and technicians and 1200 clerks.20 After the evacuations, however, the composition of the workforce was as follows: Evacuated from the Kirov Works in Leningrad Of which were workers Engineers and technicians From Factory No. 75 in Kharkov Of which were workers Engineers and technicians Evacuated from Stalingrad’s Tractor factory Evacuated from Moscow Mobilised workers Workers already employed at ChTZ

7000 5891 1185 3004 1773 1033 2050 1000 10,000 15,000

Of the almost 40,000 people who were employed at the beginning of 1942, 43 per cent were under the age of 25 and 32 per cent were women. Young people who had not previously worked in industry were given trade courses so that they could quickly advance to more qualified professions and become brigade leaders and overseers. Despite

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all the hardships, management encouraged competitions and prizes for the best departments at the factory, as they had done before the war. However, the internal party report indicated that, even without any of the agitation, the workers strove to obtain maximal production volumes for the army. Everyone understood the enormous demands on new tanks at the front. During the Red Army’s heavy retreating battles in 1941 and 1942, this became more than evident, as the news was very clear to everybody. In 1942, special tank divisions were formed in Cheliabinsk and other cities in the Southern Urals. They were combined to form the Urals Corps, which was to receive its baptism of fire in the Battle of Kursk in the summer of 1943. The formation of a special tank division with soldiers from the city created tighter bonds between the army and those at the home front. The Soviet heavy KV-1 tank was initially a great surprise for the German troops, as the its much thicker armour could withstand many direct hits from the German P-III and P-IV tanks. The German anti-tank weapons in 1941 consisted of the 37 millimetre PaK 35/36 (Panzerabwehrkanone), which could penetrate 50 millimetre armour at a range of 500 metres. They were far too weak against the KV and T-34 tanks, however. There were occasions when Soviet KVs were hit dozens of times and still only suffered slight indentations in the front. The Germans soon received the PaK 38 with shells that proved stronger and could penetrate the KV from up to 500 metres. The Red Army also lost many KV tanks once the Germans identified the weak spots of the tank and could direct their fire from behind or to the sides. A series of reconstruction works took place and new buildings were added at ChTZ for the intended serial production of heavy KV-1 tanks. The first tanks left the conveyor belt in September, and from 24 September onwards the designers held around-the-clock control of the assembly workshop, with work done in two 12-hour shifts. The first tanks were produced exactly according to the drawings from Leningrad’s Kirov Works, which led to a number of problems with adaptions, correction of faults and new measurements. At the start of the heavy tank production, not all the advantages of conveyor production of ChTZ could be used. The reports from the front of the weak spots on the tanks prompted constant changes. The engines overheated easily and needed to be changed, while the brakes sometimes failed. Incorrectly designed optical instruments had made it possible for shrapnel to enter the cabin and kill the crew without the tank itself getting broken. At this time, people’s commissar Malyshev often visited Cheliabinsk to follow the progress of the introduction of tank production at the new factory compound.

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The new Kirov Works in the Urals saw a clash of industrial traditions between mass assembly-line production at the Cheliabinsk Tractor Factory and the piecemeal, separate assembly that had been used at the Kirov Works in Leningrad. Kotin noted these problems along the conveyor belt of the new factory. He did not accept all the changes that Boris Arkhangelskii, from the Cheliabinsk factory, had made to adjust the KV to the assembly-line principle. Kotin instead opted to use the same methods as in Leningrad, which meant that the entire direction of tank production had to be changed again. Arkhangelskii and several designers from the tractor factory were transferred to other workshops and replaced by persons from Leningrad. However, the experience of the conveyor principle proved very useful when the Kirov Works was ordered to produce large numbers of the T-34. In 1944, the new heavy IS tank was assembled according to the conveyor principle. On 17 October 1941 a large order of KV tanks was to be delivered to the army outside Moscow, at the time when the German offensive had reached its closest point to the capital. The tanks were completed except for the starter motors. Aeroplanes had twice been sent to the factories where these engines were produced but had crashed on both occasions. Director Zaltsman decided to put the tanks on a train to Moscow and wait for the delivery of the starting engines at a station near the capital. Zaltsman and a group of workers from the assembly workshop travelled on the same train to supervise the final delivery of the tanks, which were to take part in the first Soviet counter-offensive under the command of Georgii Zhukov in December 1941. The leadership introduced new routines for the tank divisions in order to avoid the problems that had occurred in 1941 due to the tank drivers and marksmen not being accustomed to the new vehicle and not knowing exactly how to drive the tank or direct the gun. Future crews arrived in Cheliabinsk and followed the final stages of the assembly work at the factory, then participated in the testing of the tanks at the factory’s firing range. This allowed them to gain a better understanding of the tank’s performance characteristics and the stresses it could withstand. The KV tanks were also evaluated on visits to various locations at the front by the chief designers, Dukhov and Kotin. There they talked with the officers and soldiers who reported on their battle experience. On one occasion, a lieutenant jumped out of his tank and referred to ‘that idiot’ who had designed the breech sight with an obvious defect. Kotin, who held the rank of general at the time, happened to be standing nearby but is reported to have appreciated such frank comments. During the autumn of 1941, the KV tanks mostly participated in

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defensive battles. Their thick armour enabled them to force much larger groups of German tanks to halt. The bad breech sight had less importance in such types of battles towards approaching targets. All feedback from the front and from the repair shops at the front was dutifully sent back to the designers in Cheliabinsk. On other occasions, the new tanks or prototypes were driven to the testing ground at Lake Pervoe, where they were tested under active service conditions. Similarly, the Soviet defence industry tested their guns by firing against German trophy tanks or fired against new Soviet vehicles with German guns or German ammunition. People’s commissar Malyshev constantly reminded the Soviet designers that their main task was to imagine their enemy’s development ideas and anticipate their next weapon accordingly, with even better countermeasures. In 1942, the Russian army ordered a fast, self-propelled gun, since artillery that was drawn by horses or tractors could not keep up with the advance of the tanks. A modified SAU-KV-7 was quickly built and used in the final stage of the Battle of Moscow. After that, Kotin designed the KV-9 tank and equipped it with a 122 millimetre howitzer.21 In February 1942, Dukhov was appointed chairman of the new technical expert committee on inventions and rationalisation in the tank industry. Evaluation after month-long battles had led NKTankoProm to the conclusion that the heavy tanks had to be radically changed. Many bridges and roads were unpassable for the 50-ton KV-1 tanks, while their engines were too weak for them to pass over hills. One of the first modifications was the KV-1S (S = skorostnoi, speedy), produced in 1942–1943, which was five tons lighter, equipped with a new engine and a better gear box and had a top speed of 43 kilometres per hour. Its armour in the front was 75 millimetres (82 millimetres in the turret). This tank proved very useful in the Red Army’s counter-offensive in the winter of 1942–1943 when there was a better understanding of the proper place for heavy tanks in formations. In March 1942, it was decided that the special experimental factory for tanks (then known as Factory No. 100, Opytny tankovyj zavod No. 100) should use parts from the former experimental factory. The priority of this new factory was to develop the concepts for the next heavy tank further. Chief designer at Factory No. 100 was A.S. Ermolaev, under the command of Zhozef Kotin, who was its director from March 1943. At this factory, Kotin had gathered the same group of technicians who had worked with him in Leningrad. During the war years, they designed more than ten prototypes and models of heavy tanks and selfpropelled guns. The first priority was to design lighter tanks with the same firepower and armour protection as the first KV tanks.

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Figure 80

201

The interior of the tank construction factory.

In 1942, the KV tank could still, in theory at least, withstand the German anti-tank guns because the new 75 millimetre PaKs were very scarce in the Wehrmacht. Russian tank losses remained high, however, because the German soldiers had learnt new tactics for fighting against the heavy Soviet tanks. They shot from better positions and had identified the tanks’ weak spots. More and more design defects in the KV tanks were exposed: the commander was also the loader and his peripheral vision was poor: the tank had poor radio communications with other members of its unit, which led to limited cooperation with the artillery and the infantry so the tanks could not always be directed towards the best targets. As the battles were more drawn-out and tanks had be transported over long distances, the wear and tear on them was revealed. When the experience from the battles of the summer and autumn of 1942 was evaluated, the conclusion was that the KV tanks, with their strong armour, would not have been necessary for the less fortified areas that needed to be conquered. On the other hand, the German anti-tank guns had managed to eliminate a large number of KV tanks. For the type of battles fought during that period, the medium T-34 had proven more suitable. During the same time period, the monthly production of tank ammunition increased from 110,000 to 300,000 76 millimetre shells and from 50,000 to 150,000 122 millimetre ones. In 1942, the Soviet Union overall produced 24,700 tanks, a few hundred of which were merely new

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Tankograd Table 4 Production of tanks at the Kirov Works in Cheliabinsk 1942 Month January February March April May June August September October November December Total

KV tank

T-34 tank

216 264 250 282 351 150 125 180 175 135 125 2553

– –

30 220 300 230 275 1055

Figure 81 The T-34 tank (the 1941 model, 28.5 ton, diesel V-2-34 engine, 500 horse power, maximum speed 55 kilometres per hour, 40–45 millimetres armour and 52 millimetres in the turret, an 85 millimetre gun and 77 shells) was described as the best tank in World War II. Even so, many outspoken critics of ‘tankisty’ pointed out its defects and weaker parts, which were continually improved upon during the German-Russian war.

prototypes. The heavy KV tanks formed approximately 10 per cent of the total and the medium weight T-34s roughly half. During late summer and autumn of 1942, approximately 70 per cent of the capacity of the Kirov Works in Cheliabinsk was allocated to the production of

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T-34s, while only 30 per cent of capacity was earmarked for the production of the heavy tank series. The huge losses of tank units in 1942 can be explained in part by the fact that the Germans had the strategic initiative. The Red Army had to fight in an enforced situation where incomplete divisions did not have time for reconnaissance, concentration or determination of their battle tasks. They could not accomplish any surprise movements and cooperated poorly with the other Red Army units. This often led to dispersed attacks with tanks whose commanders and drivers were unfamiliar with the terrain and the forward battle situation. This led to great Russian losses in the minefields or from German attacks on the flanks of the Soviet tank units. In October 1942, the KV tanks were taken away from mixed units to form separate heavy tanks regiments, in which all vehicles had the same speed, manoeuvrability and endurance. The new principles for heavy tanks in battle were formulated after detailed analyses in the people’s commissariat of defence in order No. 306 of 8 October and No. 325 of 16 October 1942. The German offensive had continued during the summer of 1942 and its target seemed to be Stalingrad. The tractor factory in Stalingad produced the T-34 tank, which had become one of the most appreciated among the soldiers and officers of the Red Army. However, the continued production at Stalingrad was under threat and the new production site at the Urals Railcar Factory in Nizhnii Tagil – which would become the leading producer of T-34s after the evacuation of the Kharkov Tractor Factory – had not yet reached full capacity. Therefore, the State Committee of Defence ordered that the Kirov Works in Cheliabinsk should start production of the T-34 while continuing to produce heavy tanks. The party members at the factory received specific tasks on the measures that had to be taken so that the GKO order on production of T-34 tanks could be implemented. The metallurgical workshop was to be changed and better coordination was needed with the Urals Railcar Factory in Nizhnii Tagil, where most T-34 tanks had been produced, so that the Cheliabinsk factory could receive all the drawings and assistance it needed to start up the new production line. The party resolution stressed the importance of the decrees of the Supreme Soviet of 26 June 1940 (concerning labour discipline) and of 26 December 1941 (desertion from the defence industry). ‘An iron discipline must reign at the factory’, the resolution stated, although the party committee was well aware that the factory actually faced many problems related to misdemeanours, cheating and absences that had to be tolerated even in the dire wartime conditions.22 The party resolution called for better use of the internal resources at the factory rather than calls for new equipment and materials. A special

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group from the Communist Party was to be responsible for the rapid start-up of production of the T-34 tanks. ‘The party activists promise our fatherland, our beloved leader and the commander of the Soviet people, comrade Stalin, that the Kirov Works labourers shall unconditionally start production of T-34s on time’, were the solemn final words of this resolution.23 During the first war winters, occasional threatening telegrams from Stalin addressed to individual directors were widely distributed as leaflets among the specialists and workers on factories in Sverdlovsk and Cheliabinsk. To some extent, these extra measures proved effective. On 15 August 1942 yet another resolution by the factory’s party committee expressed concern that not enough had been accomplished in the 20 days since the decision regarding production of the T-34s. By 12 August only half the number of preparatory measures in the planning agenda of the director had been achieved – a delay of five or six days. The party resolution also noted that the ordinary August monthly programme for production of the KV-1 and KV-1S, as well as tank engines, was unfulfilled. Some workshop supervisors were criticised for arguing against the simultaneous production of medium and heavy tanks. It was decided that, as much as possible, the assembly-line principles should be used for the production of the T-34s. The workshop supervisors were given deadlines by which the first new tanks must be delivered. It was stressed that, as communists, the party members had a duty to fulfil the resolution on production if they wanted to avoid being excluded from the party, which was often the first step towards harsher repressive measures.24 In little over a month, the factory’s workshops had indeed been refurbished to produce the medium tanks and the train echelons from Cheliabinsk started to send out the T-34s. In 1942 they produced 1055 T-34, 1902 KV-1 and 651 KV-1S tanks, a total of 3608 tanks in 365 working days. During the first war years, practically none of the employees in the defence industries had any days off, including Sundays and summer holidays. It is worth pondering what it meant for these people to be forced to produce ten heavy tanks a day, month after month. Obviously this was a far cry from the visions that socialists might have had 15 years earlier. The alternative society that might have appeared in the Soviet Union had this war taken place in a different form or not at all can only be guessed at. Trotskyist descriptions of the former Soviet Union characterised it as a ‘bureaucratised workers’ state’, but its ability to counteract any bureaucratism when its existence was threatened is striking. French economist Jacques Sapir explained the system’s essence better when he characterised it as ‘a mobilised economy’ (une économie mobilisée). However, Sapir overstressed the militarisation in the system, as is evident from the terminology of German title of his book, Die

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Figure 82 ‘Do not gossip! Be on your guard. In these days, even the walls have ears. There is only a small step from gossip to treason.’ The poster by Nina Vatolina was among the most widespread in the Soviet Union during the war years.

Permanente Kriegswirtschaft (The permanent war economy).25 Although it is a generalisation, it can be concluded that standard textbooks on the Soviet command economy treated the system’s prioritisation of the heavy machine-building industry and its unbalanced growth as a good precondition, as a sound principle only if the goal was to maximise the production of war materials. However, nowhere in the standard textbooks on the so-called command economy or the planning system was there any mention of the extensive peacetime preparations for swiftly converting the entire economic system to the requirements of a total war. With the historical outcome at hand – that, ultimately, the Soviet form of communism could neither be democratised nor become sustainable in comparison with market economies – it maybe more objective to ponder what would have been the result, on a European scale, if the Red Army had not countered the Nazi assault. This is a problem

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without easy answers and can also be left for fictional presentations such as Robert Harris’s counter-factual novel from 1992, Fatherland. The turning-point in the European theatre of World War II was, without any doubt, the Battle of Stalingrad, where Nazi Germany suffered its first major defeat.26 However, it was only after the battles in the summer of 1943 that the Red Army could take the strategic initiative. In the spring and summer of 1943, German troops had 75 millimetre antitank guns and an 88 millimetre gun with armour-piercing shells that, even with an angle of incidence of 0 degrees, could penetrate the KV-1S from distances of 1000 to 1300 metres. In practice, therefore, the heavy KV tank was as badly protected against German weapons as the medium T-34s. In April 1943, production of the KV-1S was stopped at the Cheliabinsk factory and the equipment was instead used to produce a self-propelled gun, the SU-152. In the winter of 1942–1943, the Russians received intelligence that the Germans had produced new heavy tanks, the T-VI type with modifications. The heavy self-propelled gun SU-152 was built on the chassis from the KV-1S and was engaged at the Battle of Kursk to counter these new German challenges. In 1943, the Wehrmacht had Panther tanks (T-V) with a 75 millimetre KwK (Kampfwagenkanone) guns with a 70 calibre gun tube, and also Tiger tanks (T-VIH) with 88 millimetre KwK guns. The ammunition included armour-piercing shells and cumulative shells with even higher penetration capability (up to 155 millimetres armour from a distance of 1000 metres). At the same time, the German troops were formed up over a larger depth than they were during the first years of the war. Their first defence line consisted of two to three trenches. In front of these and into the depth, all kinds of sapper obstacles had been erected. The depth of the German defence could be between 4 and 12 kilometres per division. At 10–15 kilometres from the first line was the second line of defence. Naturally, breaking through such defences required quite different operational planning from the Soviets, which had to break through the whole defensive depth and accomplish a breach of 8 to 12 kilometres in width. The first time the Red Army had to tackle this task was at the Battle of Kursk.27 During the operations in the Kursk Bulge in July–August 1943 2.5 million men troops were engaged to crush a German army formation of over one million men. Afterwards, six million Red Army soldiers would carry out offensives against 2.5 million Germans along a front that stretched over 2000 kilometres before finally reaching the Dnepr River. One of the main events in the Battle of Kursk was the engagement between Soviet and German armoured forces on 12 July. In order to break through the German defences in the Orël and

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Figure 83 Infantry soldiers wait for support from a tank brigade during the Battle of Kursk in the summer of 1943.

Kharkov directions, the Soviet supreme command engaged more troops and weapons than it had on any previous occasion. During the counter-offensive in the Battle of Stalingrad, the density was approximately one division per 3-kilometre front section and 30 to 80 guns per kilometre at the breakthrough. At the Battle of Kursk, the density was one division per 1.6-kilometre front and 170–230 guns per kilometre at the breakthrough areas. In order to suppress the enemy’s defences, artillery bombardment of two to three hours was used, after which the artillery was directed to those points in the enemy’s defence that were still active. However, the artillery could only reduce the defence capacity in the enemy’s first lines of defence. Reconnaissance information on the enemy’s second and third lines of defence brought much worse news. After breaking through the first lines, they encountered much more concentrated resistance. The question of by how long an artillery bombardment should precede an attack had to consider the enemy’s chances of moving its reserves to a sector where the attack could be expected. One solution was to intensify the bombardment by using also the heaviest guns from the artillery reserves of the Headquarters. After such sustained artillery fire, the Soviet infantry could then advance, at which point it would need support from tanks that should immediately be able to destroy new targets. At the Battle of Kursk, the Red Army had only KV and T-34 tanks that were no longer difficult for the German defence to take out. As a result, Soviet losses at the Kursk were as high as 6000 tanks. Only at a few parts of the front line did the Red Army managed to transfer tactical success

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Figure 84 The Battle of Kursk. Army commander Leonov inspects the situation at the battle field at Voronezhski.

into operational success, mostly in the southern area. Well prepared German lines of defence had been set up on the northern area, however, and no substantial breakthroughs could be achieved. In other words, the situation was similar to that which the Wehrmacht had encountered a month earlier when it started its offensive against the Kursk Bulge. The experiences from the Battle of Kursk dictated that the Soviet army must have a new breakthrough tank. This led to intensive efforts to develop the KV-13 tank further. In the meantime, an 85 millimetre gun was mounted on the KV-1S tanks. The new tank was called the IS-1 (after Iosif Stalin) or Object 237 and it was only produced in small numbers during 1943. This tank had an armour of up to 120 millimetres, weighed 44 tons and was equipped with the V-2-10 diesel engine, which at 520 horse power gave it a maximum speed of 40 kilometres. Its 85 millimetre D5-T85 gun had 59 grenades and a range of 160 kilometres. It is interesting to study how the Soviets competently and frankly debated the results after the battle. People’s commissar Malyshev estimated that some 6000 Soviet tanks had been lost, four times more than the 1500 tanks the Germans had lost in addition to their loss of 70,000 soldiers. Malyshev argued that this had to be seen as a warning and he asked the designers for better guns and stronger armour. The designer L.S. Troianov managed to find an effective countermeasure against the Tiger tanks.

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After the great Battle of Orël in the summer of 1943, when Soviet tanks broke through a fortified German defence line, a lot a data was collected about how the defenders’ shells had hit or damaged the Soviet tanks: calibres, distances and angles of incidence were grouped and analysed systematically. This provide a better technical basis for future technological development. Prior to this, the Soviet designers had relied more on their intuition to develop a compromise between armour protection, guns and mobility. The Soviet tank designers considered 50 tons to be the maximum weight. If this was exceeded, transportation problems would arise, bridges would be impassable and the speed would be too slow. Now they could adapt the armour on the tanks to the enemy’s patterns of fire. These data were used for the radically different contours and construction principles of the Soviet tanks towards the end of the war. During the war, the technology for casting of armour details had improved substantially and the capability of welding in armour had improved. Kotin and Dukhov and their many assistants launched the ideas of what was to be the IS-1 in the autumn of 1943. When all the models and drawings were ready, the regional party committee’s chairman was contacted. He accepted their new concept, despite the fact that a change to producing the IS-1 was not included in any plan and that it would require changes in the workshops and reduced production for at least a month. The group received permission to build three test tanks under the greatest possible secrecy at the factory. When these tanks were ready, they were transported at night-time to the firing and testing ranges. The test drivers arrived in the early hours

Figure 85

The IS-2 tank.

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and the tanks were submitted to all types of trials until it was obvious that they satisfied the expected requirements. In September, Malyshev arrived in Cheliabinsk to inspect the new tank. He took part in the night-time tests and sat in the tank beside the driver. It was then decided that the approval of the State Defence Committee, GKO, was required. Malyshev flew back to Moscow with I. Zaltsman, Z. N. Kotin and S. Makhonin. On 4 September 1943 GKO approved serial production of the IS-1 tanks. When Stalin had listened to Kotin’s report on the advantages and quality of the new tanks, he exclaimed, ‘With these tanks, we shall win the war!’ In October serial production of the IS-1 tanks started in Cheliabinsk,28 , first of the IS-1 (also called IS-85) and from December the IS-2 (the 1943 model). The IS-2 had a new 122 millimetre D-25 gun that could not only destroy targets in open terrain but also destroy sapper obstacles or suppress fire posts in trenches. The IS-2 weighed less than 50 tons but its armour was still much thicker in the turret than its predecessors (up to 120 millimetres in the front, 100 in the turret and 90 on the sides). The Wehrmacht’s anti-tank weapons at the time could not penetrate the IS-2 tank at an angle of 0 degrees from 500 metres (with their 75 millimetre PaK 40s or KwK 40/L43s on tanks). In practice, this meant that the IS-2 could direct its fire at an enemy artillery position from as close as 300–400 metres. The new and better protected tanks were also the result of a new technique of casting armour details on an industrial scale. The front piece and the parts under the turret were made from cast details, while the sides and the bottoms were made of rolled armour plates. Casting armour is the most economical method but, since it is more likely to leave microscopic impurities than rolling steel, it is not generally as solid as rolled parts. Finding a method for casting armour steel that left as few impurities as possible was one of the great technological advances during the war years. In 1943, the Kirov Works in Cheliabinsk still produced approximately 3600 T-34 tanks, in addition to 469 KV-1S and 668 self-propelled SU-122 guns, as well as 102 IS-1S and IS-2 heavy tanks. The IS-2 was constantly modified during the last year of the war. One of the most significant changes was the broken front that was introduced in June 1944. These changes were made to increase the armour protection as much as possible. With an inclination of 60 degrees, its 120 millimetre armour was effectively twice as thick. Neither the calibrated, nor the under-calibrated shells from the German 75 millimetre PaK 40 and 88 millimetre KwK 36 tank guns could penetrate the armour of the IS-2. In 1944, the Kirov Works in Cheliabinsk was ordered to participate in the reconstruction of the Stalingrad Tractor Factory and to produce spare

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parts for the S-65 tractors for the People’s Commissariat of Petroleum and for the tractors for the army.29 In 1944, a total of 5207 tanks and self-propelled guns were produced in Cheliabinsk (2210 IS-2s and 2510 ISU-122s, ISU-122Ss and ISU-152s). In Nizhnii Tagil, production of tens of thousands of T-34 tanks continued in 1944, despite the fact that the Germans had their heavy tanks – the Tigers and the Panthers – by this stage. In essence, the German designers had failed to combine strength, guns and mobility. ‘Many people imagine heavy tanks to be like some colossus on crawlers, a kind of armoured elephant’, said Zhozef Kotin. ‘But our new heavy tanks have very modest exterior measurements, much smaller than their predecessors. Still the armour is thicker and the guns are stronger ... A heavy tank must be capable of hiding itself in the terrain.’ On 3 October 1944 Zaltsman issued Order No. 1541, in which he noted that the plan targets had been achieved during the third quarter of 1944 and the production of heavy tanks had increased to a maximum desired level. ‘Now we have all the conditions’, he wrote, ‘to also fulfil the plan targets for the rest of the year. This fulfilment of the plan must go together with giving the workers more days off, with organisation of cultural activities for the management of the enterprise.’ The workers in ‘the hot workshops’ were to have three days off per month and workers in the other sectors of the factory would have two days off. The working hours of the management at the factory was as follows: work started at 9 a.m., there was a break for dinner from 5–7 p.m. and work would finish no later than by midnight or 1 a.m. In the workshops, work would begin at 7.30 a.m., breakfast would be between 11 a.m. and 12 noon, dinner was from 5–7 p.m. and the workday would end at 11 p.m. or midnight.30 The most forward-looking platform for the further development of the Soviet tanks was formulated by Mikhail Balzhi during the last year of the war. Balzhi was born in Ekaterinaslav in 1909, studied at the Kharkov Mechanical and Machine-building Institute and was then sent to the Cheliabinsk Tractor Factory where he worked until 1953 designing tanks and self-propelled guns. His career advanced from designer to head of a design bureau, deputy chief designer and, from 1947, as chief designer at the ChTZ (renamed after the re-evacuation of the Leningrad part of the workforce after the war). In 1949, Balzhi started to teach at the Cheliabinsk Mechanics and Technology Institute and, from 1953 onwards, devoted himself wholly to research and education on tank technology. During the war years, Balzhi worked under the direction of Kotin and Dukhov and was responsible for the IS-3 tanks that were finished in 1945. Balzhi came up with the idea of the IS-3 tank during a ten-day stay at a sanatorium. He returned to Cheliabinsk and two weeks later,

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Figure 86

The IS-3 tank as a monument in Cheliabinsk.

at around 1 a.m., placed a complete proposal on the table of Director Zaltsman. Zaltsman looked at the blueprints and drawings, closed his eyes and thought for a long time. Balzhi thought that Zaltsman had fallen asleep but after an hour and a half, Zaltsman looked up and said, ‘This one we shall produce!’ It was not risk-free to introduce a completely new model during this final phase of the war, when the factory was already producing at full capacity.31 The IS-3 tank had a much lower silhouette than its contemporaries. This would lay the platform for a series of modifications that provided the basic armour for the Soviet army for the next half-century. After the war, Balzhi was engaged in work on the T-10 tank and on amphibious

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tanks. Balzhi formed a differential armour that featured maximal ricochet effects. He later defended his doctoral thesis in technology and during his time at the Mechanics and Technology Institute (later the Cheliabinsk Polytechnic Institute, ChPI) he was the main advisor for 13 PhD students on the subject of tank and tractor production.

The final battle for Berlin For the final battles in Germany in 1944–1945, the Red Army set up special heavy tank formations with 30–40 tanks per kilometre of front line. The German lines of defence inside Germany itself could be up to 120–150 kilometres in depth and contained permanent defence fortifications. Therefore, massive tank units were concentrated in the main attack directions; these consisted of seven guard tank brigades, each of which contained 65 tanks. Berlin was defended by a huge German force along the rivers Oder and Neisse with a depth of 40–50 kilometres. All field and permanent fortifications were manned by troops with an operative density that is comparable to that of the Wehrmacht’s offensive operations in 1941–1942. Taking into consideration the well fortified German positions in the outskirts of the city, the defence’s tactical depth was actually 90–100 kilometres, along which were numerous anti-tank guns. Nonetheless, the 7th and 11th Guard Tank Brigades, with their IS-2 tanks in direct support of

Figure 87

A column of Soviet tanks on their way into Berlin.

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the infantry, managed to break through into Berlin with 70 per cent of their tanks intact. In other words, the IS-2 fulfilled its main mission as a breakthrough tank and in direct support of the infantry during a breakthrough of the enemy’s tactical defence zone. In total, 1354 Tiger tanks were produced in Germany and 489 of the King Tiger version. These were more complicated to produce than the corresponding Soviet heavy tanks. A total of 2005 tanks were produced during the first six months of 1945: 980 IS-2s, 405 ISU-152s, 390 ISU-122s, 200 ISU-122Ss and 30 IS-3s. The experienced IS-2 as well as the new IS-3 tanks and the self-propelled guns mentioned above participated in the final battles of World War II, notably in the 49th Guard Tank Regiment and in the breakthrough in battles against the German King Tiger tanks in the Sandomir area. Stalin, along with all the members of the State Defence Committee, GKO, and their assistants, received production reports from the factories almost daily. He and other leaders in Moscow could phone a director to make an enquiry, an order or a threat. It is probably part of the myth surrounding Stalin’s personality that most such calls would take place late at night. There are indeed a number of known incidences when phone calls were made late at night from the Kremlin and, given the time zone differences, even a couple of hours later in the Urals and Siberia. A very interesting fictional form for this leadership style can be seen in Aleksandr Bek’s The New Appointment (Novoe naznachenie). This novel is based on information from directors who were close to the people’s commissar, Ivan F. Tevosian, who was responsible for the heavy machine-building industry during the war.32 Just as often, the directives from Stalin or the GKO were sent as cyphered telegrams and the reports from the factories were also sent in stipulated forms and secret codes. Nonetheless, the Cheliabinsk regional party committee printed a leather-bound booklet with silver fittings entitled ‘Report to comrade Stalin’, in which all the achievements of the defence industry in the Southern Urals was clearly presented in figures, tables and photographs. On the first page was written, ‘The Kirov workers made a solemn vow to comrade Stalin to learn how to produce new, strong tanks. This task has been fulfilled – the front receives tanks produced by the Kirov workers.’ A total of 97,700 tanks and self-propelled guns were produced in the USSR during the Great Patriotic War from 1941–1945. Approximately 8000 of these were the heavy IS-2 tanks and SU-152, ISU-122 and ISU152 heavy self-propelled guns. Throughout all of WWII, Germany produced 65,100 tanks, 1959 of which were the heavy Tiger, King Tiger, Ferdinand and Jagdtiger tanks, in addition to 6400 Panther and

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Figure 88 Members of the 63rd Tank Brigade from Cheliabinsk reads a greeting from workers in Cheliabinsk in the summer of 1944.

Jagdpanther tanks.33 In the Soviet Union, 1,515,900 machine guns of all calibres, 12,139,900 rifles and carbines and 6,173,900 submachine guns were produced. The Soviet industry had achieved a level of production that was on par with or even surpassed that of Germany. Russian historiography on World War II, and on the German-Russian War of 1941–1945 on the Eastern front in particular, has changed greatly since 1996, as many more archival materials have been declassified and other sources have appeared. In general, it can be said that the historians have devoted most of their attention to those questions that were taboo or rarely discussed in the official Soviet historiography. The result is an impressive amount of new scholarly studies and an intensive search for revisions and reinterpretations.34 The economic history of World War II, the struggle on the home front, has not been the object of such intensive revisions. Instead, the focus has been directed on formerly neglected aspects of everyday life, the harsh near-famine situation in the countryside and even some cities and the real attitudes and mentality of people under German occupation and after liberation by the Red Army. These new works show in greater detail what was accomplished by the men, women and youngsters in industry, transport and health care – facts that were previously dominated by propagandistic sloganising.35

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Figure 89 ‘All for the front! To the front from the women of the USSR.’ A poster by Alexei Kokorekin in 1942.

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June 22 1941 seemed to be just another sunny summer’s day. Many people were enjoying a day off, walking in the streets, on their way to the amusement park or to friends. In Cheliabinsk, news of the German attack was received only at midday. The whistles at the factories started to blow and the radio loudspeakers in squares and public places sent the official TASS message that the country was at war and Viacheslav Molotov’s speech about how Nazi Germany had ‘insidiously attacked the Soviet Union and broken the non-aggression treaty’. The archival documents hardly reflect the attitudes of the general population. More than 10,000 people gathered at the tractor factory during the first three days of the war. Around the region, similar meetings were held. Some veterans recalled the near-panic situation; many had been convinced that there would be no war in 1941. A TASS telegram published as recently as 14 June had underlined that their were no complications in the relations between the USSR and Germany. However, others were more confident and believed that the war would be won by the Red Army within a few months. The party leaders and the directors of the large factories had been intensively engaged during the preceding weeks with revisions of the industrial mobilisation plans that were to be applied in case of a war. For these people, the constant reminders of the hastiness in the messages from Moscow now appeared as evidence. Hitler and the German military leadership had counted on a victory through a Blitzkrieg that would annihilate the heart of the Soviet military and economic potential in a single campaign. Vitally, however, they split their resources into three diverging attack lines: first, towards the Ukraine and further to Volga and the Caucasus in order to get to the resources that were vital for the German economy, second, towards Moscow and its many industries and the central administration of the 217

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Figure 90 A mass meeting on Sunday 22 June 1941 in the city of Miass. Similar mass meetings were held at time of Nazi Germany’s attack on the Soviet Union in many other places in the Cheliabinsk region.

Soviet Union and third, towards Leningrad and the northern parts of European Russia. One can only guess what would have happened if the German army had systematically concentrated on achieving one of its three goals. Hitler’s plan, after crushing the key elements of the Red Army, was for the German advances to force the Soviet Union to accept the Germans’ peace conditions dictated by himself. Germany would then have the necessary oil resources, minerals and other resources that were vital for its armaments industry. It would then be capable to continue its war against the United Kingdom. However, Germany had underestimated the industrial potential of the USSR east of the River Volga and in Siberia. The Soviet leadership, on the other hand, knew precisely what role the Urals could have from a geopolitical and strategic perspective. It was soon evident how important it was for the Soviet Union to rely on those industrial reserves and the potential capacity that had emerged during the five-year period in the Urals. A new infrastructure had been built and could easily be combined with industrial equipment evacuated from the western parts of the country.1 Once this infrastructure was combined with the evacuated equipment, the Soviet Union had the industrial basis for a protracted war. The German military leaders only had a superficial idea of the industries in the Urals and their significance for the Soviet Union’s defence-

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industrial potential. The character of these elementary miscalculations arose from the fact that Hitler even thought that the Wehrmacht, with the help of special troops, could advance further towards the Urals or, with the use of the long distance ‘Urals bombers’, eliminate the defence industries in that region.2 According to the original Operation Barbarossa plan, after the ground forces had reached the Volga River, which was expected to have been achieved by September or October 1941 (a breakthrough of 1500 kilometres in three or four months), the German air force units were to take on ‘the last industrial bastion of the Russians’. The Junkers-88, Heinkel111, Do-17 and Do-215 bombers could theoretically reach Sverdlovsk and other cities from some point along the River Volga. However, they would not be escorted by fighter aircraft and would only have had a chance of success if all the Soviet fighters had already been crushed.3 Even the most optimistic theoretical assumptions did not predict that the German aircraft would have had enough bombing capacity to annihilate the many defence-industrial plants that had emerged in the Urals: from Magnitogorsk in the south to Nizhnii Tagil in the north, from Molotov (Perm) in the west to Kurgan on the Siberian border. However, the Soviet security forces during the war years had to liquidate a great number of spies and saboteurs, who had either been long established or sent by air to fulfil various sabotage missions. This threat was still considered a reality in 1942. Courses in air defence and self-defence were to apply to the entire civilian population but had had little significance until this point. In May 1942 the city’s executive committee urgently called all those responsible in the city districts to check the air-raid shelters. It was then noted that the authorities had not yet issued any instructions regarding defence against air-raids, or evacuation of houses, institutions and factories in case of air attacks. The militarised guards at the factories, called voenkhran, were to take responsibility for these questions.4 The strong Russian defence in the autumn of 1941 and the successful counter-offensive at Moscow in the winter of 1941–1942 changed the character of the war, despite the enormous Soviet losses in terms of lives and weapons, to a war of attrition. In such a conflict, the industrial resources of the powers eventually became the most decisive factor. The Soviet Union had a greater resource basis and, together with aid from its allies, the United States and the United Kingdom, this basis by far surpassed and was better used for military purposes than Germany’s. In 1943, the German general staff was still pondering the possibility of eliminating Soviet iron and steel works by sending ‘kamikaze pilots’ on

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suicidal missions to Magnitogorsk and other cities in the Urals. Their defeats at Stalingrad and then at Kursk put an end to such thoughts.

Evacuation and conversion of industry The city of Cheliabinsk and the region changed drastically with the transition to wartime conditions in 1941–1942. Factories in Leningrad, Kharkov, Moscow and other cities in the west of the country were evacuated, along with thousands of workers and engineers. Important people’s commissariats (ministries) or their sub-departments were relocated to Cheliabinsk, while administrative organs were moved from Moscow to the Urals or Siberia. The People’s Commissariats of the Tank Industry (NKTankoProm), of Electric Power Stations, of the Ammunition Industry (NKB) and of Building (NKStroi) were all relocated to Cheliabinsk. Fifteen evacuated institutes or university faculties were also relocated to the Cheliabinsk region, as were dozens of trade schools.5 One hundred and thirty-three boarding schools and 92 orphanages, totalling 15,626 children, were moved to the Cheliabinsk region. The city had to take care of large groups of refugees and the absolute priority of the production sites was to serve the needs of the battle front. The government (Sovnarkom) adopted a military-economic plan for the third and fourth quarters of 1941 and for the next year, in particular for the industry east of Volga, and in the Urals, Western Siberia and Kazakhstan. The factory in practice stopped all production of civilian items and instead produced ammunition, lorries and tanks. The Ordzhonikidze Machinebuilding Works (Factory No. 78 or ‘Stankomash’) quickly changed its workshops and started production of shells and chassis for the KV tanks.

Figure 91 Evacuation of the civilian population from Leningrad’s frontier areas in April 1942, here seen at the station in Kobon.

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The ‘Stankomash’ and Koliushchenko factories produced armour-piercing shells for the BM-13 rocket artillery that the Russians nicknamed ‘Katiusha’ (Little Katarina) but which the Nazi soldiers called ‘Stalin-organs’ In the autumn of 1941, the Evacuation Council gave directives for which factories and workers should be sent to Cheliabinsk. Approximately 200 industrial enterprises (and 700 enterprises altogether) were evacuated to the Cheliabinsk region (oblast). In the spring of 1942, 427,700 refugees came to the region from other parts of the USSR. Strict centralisation made it possible to avoid dispersal of scarce resources but in certain respects, many miscalculations were made. Too many enterprises were located around the existing enterprises in the cities in the Urals or demanded many new buildings. The energy resources in the Urals were totally insufficient for the number of enterprises, which created new problems that could have been avoided if the evacuated equipment had been sent elsewhere.6 Of course, no one could follow in detail exactly when and to what extent equipment arrived for the enterprises in Cheliabinsk. Some documents are able to provide a general idea of how the local factories received hundreds of pieces of machinery, product parts and other goods that simply remained unsorted on the factory yards.7 Entire factories’ equipment was sometimes redirected from one evacuation place to another. According to an order of 15 October 1941 the ‘Kalibr’ Factory was to be sent to Tashkent in Central Asia. The dismounting started on the 19 October and was completed on 4 December. The cargo consisted of 880 metal-cutting machines, 18 forging and pressing machines and 78 machines for thermic treatment, plus many smaller details and components. This cargo was sent on 185 railcars, to which were added 40 cars with workers and engineers from the factory. On 6 November the first echelons had reached Tashkent and the mounting of machinery for the new factory began. At that time, a new order arrived stating that the enterprise should instead be relocated to Cheliabinsk. On 3 December the trains started to arrive in Cheliabinsk and by 12 January 1942 690 metal-cutting, ten forging and pressing machines, plus 23 machines for thermic treatment had arrived – a total of 723 units. However, only 370 of these had yet been loaded at the intended new factory; the rest remained near the railway station. The ‘Kalibr’ factory in Cheliabinsk was to take over the halls that had begun to be built for the new drama theatre of the city before the war broke out. However, the party archives from Leningrad and a number of other organisations had already been evacuated to these locations. Therefore, much of December passed before the question of where to send the

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archives was solved. Only in mid-January, with a delay of more than one month, was the factory equipment mounted in what would have been the new theatre, with an area of 9800 square metres, which met only 60 per cent of the factory’s requirements. An annex was built with an area of 3000 square metres. Out of the 2700-strong workforce at ‘Kalibr’ in Moscow, only 650 workers, 170 engineers and technicians and 50 clerks were evacuated to Cheliabinsk. This meant that the new factory had to recruit 1650 qualified workers (millers, revolving lathe operators, automatic lathe operators, grinders and so on). Many evacuees and their families (530 out of 1510 persons) lived in the classrooms of a basic school. Still, the final report from the Cheliabinsk representative of the State Planning Commission (Gosplan) shows how they managed in this seemingly chaotic world of various pieces of equipment from different enterprises to start production in January 1942 under completely new conditions. Thus, far too many evacuated workers and their families were living in cities that were already struggling with enormous living and provisioning problems in the 1930s. During the war years, 1942–1944, the food situation and the provisioning and dwelling conditions were almost catastrophic for the hundreds of thousands of people who lived in Sverdlovsk, Nizhnii Tagil, Cheliabinsk and other cities in the Urals. ‘Evacuation points’ (evakopunkty) had been organised to receive those arriving from Ukraine or other regions near the fronts in Russia. Many evacuees were temporarily housed in school classrooms and corridors. Thereafter, they lived together with other families in apartments that would house more and more people. The workers and specialists who were evacuated from Leningrad and Kharkov to the Cheliabinsk Tractor Factory were required to share flats, or even rooms, with another family, while others had to live in bathrooms, corridors or basements that had become makeshift dormitories. The Russian term ‘packing together’ (uplotnenie) is used to describe this type of living arrangement and it often happened that some of the workers at ChTZ had to ‘pack together’ repeatedly during the war to even smaller living spaces.8 Many internal refugees lost contact with their relatives. Letters and enquiries to the authorities tell of mothers who had lost their children during the evacuation. Refugees and wounded soldiers were taken care of as well as possible in the many hospitals that had been set up in schools and administration buildings. During these years, the city authorities and the local NKVD directorate received innumerable questions concerning lost or missing relatives from various parts of the country. Some had lost sight of each other when a train

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had stopped at a station, while others had not seen each other since a German air raid. As an example, a soldier named Chaskin, who was being treated at a hospital in Cheliabinsk, asked the NKVD to search for his mother, who had supposedly been evacuated from Leningrad to Cheliabinsk. Soldiers’ wives asked for their three-to-nine-year-old children who had been evacuated from Latvia. Another example concerns Narutskaia and Glazova, who lost track of their evacuation train during a stop in Smolensk, enquired as to which city that train had been sent. These are merely a few examples of the many questions that were sent to the information sector of the Cheliabinsk evokopunkt in October 1941.9 With time, the authorities in the Soviet Union were able to form a better overview of how the population had been evacuated from the country’s western parts in 1941, and then prepared for their systematic return as these regions were liberated from the Nazi occupiers.10 By April 1942 the Cheliabinsk region (oblast) had 427,700 evacuated persons, most of whom were dispersed throughout the cities. By mid-1945, the vast majority of them had moved back to their home towns.11 During the first, most chaotic, period food procurement in Cheliabinsk was not even sufficient for those in the defence industry, who were entitled to extra rations. As they worked in shifts of 11–12 hours, the goods in the shops had usually sold out by the time they left the factories. The trams in the city were overcrowded and often worn out. This created delays in the public transit system and workers had to walk, often up to 7 kilometres to the factories.12 In 1942, the city district around the Kirov Works (formerly ChTZ) requested and set up their own bus transport lines for the factory workers.13 From time to time, the most evident needs were treated efficiently. In the spring of 1942, doctors, police and representatives to the local soviets were ordered to organise the cleaning-up of streets and gardens and to put the garbage on the ice in the River Miass.14 Because of its many defence industries, the city of Cheliabinsk had been reclassified with special security status, called a ‘regime town of the first category’. This implied that restrictions were introduced regarding who could live in the city. The intention was also to get near total control of anyone who visited the city, even temporarily.15 For example, former criminals who had served their sentences were not allowed to live there. In some cases, the need for workers in the factories was so great that these restrictions were ignored and the recruiters who travelled to other cities and in the countryside did not check documents for these matters.16

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Cheliabinsk could also aspire to a higher status in another sense because of the tank industry’s importance for the whole country and since many state authorities, institutions and culture groups had been evacuated there. On 21 August 1943 Cheliabinsk was given the status of a ‘city of republican rank’; that is, a centre for the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic. This implied that the city would receive larger state budget subsidies for the further reconstruction of old buildings or the construction of new ones, or to radically improve the public transport system, the water treatment station, the public saunas and baths. A report on these matters indicated how worn out the transport system was; out of 87 trams, only 26 to 30 were in use and 11 out of 18 trolley-buses were in need of substantial repairs.17 The director at the Kirov Works, Isaak Zaltsman, tried to improve the transit system, at least for the enterprise’s employees. He had Spartacus Street (today Lenin Avenue), which ran from the factory area to the city centre, asphalted and ensured that the capacity and timetable of the trams were adjusted to meet the requirements of the factory.18 The formal change in Cheliabinsk’s status gave the city better opportunities to receive budget funds in order to improve its cultural life. The party functionaries sent a request to Moscow authorities asking that the theatre and writers unions should send more artists and poets to perform in Cheliabinsk.19 During the war years, several theatre and vocal ensembles stayed for longer periods in what had formerly been regarded merely as a provincial small city. Among the repertoire of the theatres were Western classics, such as The Merry Wives of Windsor, Othello and The Taming of the Shrew by Shakespeare, Tartuffe by Molière and plays by Schiller, Calderon de la Barca and Lopez de Vega. Standard plays by the Russian classics Chekhov (The Seagull, The Cherry Orchard and Uncle Vania), Leo Tolstoy and Mikhail Lermontov were often performed, as were new Soviet dramas such as Pogodin’s The Chimes of the Kremlin, Lukovskii’s Russian Sailors, and Svetlov’s 20 Years After. A puppet theatre and an operetta theatre also opened.20 The artistic leader of the theatre named after Tsvilling was E.B. Krasnianskii. He had moved from Moscow and produced successful plays such as Durov’s Hope, The Comedy of Errors, The Attack, Oleko Dundich and Three Sisters. In March 1944 the most important man in the city, regional party chairman Nikolai Patolichev, sent a request to the central committee asking that Krasnianskii be ordered to stay for another year or so in the city instead of returning to Moscow. He protested that a less renowned theatre man, Sokolov, would come instead of Krasniavskii. A letter from the regional party committee to the sector for propaganda of the central committee

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Figure 92 The opening of the Palace of Culture of the Railway Workers in the city of Ust-Katav, 1952.

Figure 93 Nikolai Patolichev (1908–1989, sitting third from left) represented a new type of party cadre who advanced and proved themselves in the heat of World War II. Patolichev was first secretary in the Cheliabinsk regional party committee (obkom). He is considered one of the most energetic regional party secretaries and was appointed minister of foreign trade after the war, a post that he held until the early 1970s.

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referred to an earlier resolution on the importance of improving the cultural level in industrial cities of Cheliabinsk’s magnitude to at least the same as in the Soviet capital. Very little was accomplished, however. Requests were also sent for more actors to be sent to the theatre groups in Cheliabinsk, that the youth theatre receive more resources, that more cinema halls be built and that renowned authors and actors be commanded to Cheliabinsk to write books and plays on the region and its inhabitants during the war years.21

Working conditions in Tankograd By the end of 1941, the labour force at the Kirov Works in Cheliabinsk totalled 40,852 employees, 27,895 of whom were workers, 6922 engineers and technicians, 2120 clerks and 3915 in other categories. There were 14,121 women, 9315 of whom were workers and 1071 of whom were engineers and technicians. Furthermore, there were some 2000 Red Army soldiers and 1000 prisoners from the Gulag penal colony on the outskirts of the city.22 Cheliabinsk’s penal-labour colony, ITK No. 3 – which was intended for petty criminals sentenced to up to three, occasionally even five, years – had originally placed 1600 prisoners at the disposal of the Kirov Works. Of these, more than 1000 worked directly at the factory. The head of the ITK soon found reason to complain that the factory had not fulfilled its obligations toward the Gulag. No fuel had been delivered to the barracks and the dormitories were unheated and lacked bedclothes. Many prisoners fell ill. Transport between the barracks and the factory seldom functioned as expected. Similar complaints arose frequently over the following years. Other reports show that Gulag prisoners stole goods from the industrial workers, sometimes even with threats of violence. Conditions would improve only with more intensive control at the workshops where the Gulag prisoners worked.23 The decree of 26 December 1941 from the Supreme Soviet declared that workers, engineers and others in the defence industry and their suppliers were to be considered as being mobilised on par with conscripts in the army. Anyone who quit on their own initiative would be charged just like an army deserter and would be punished according to wartime laws. From the second half of 1942 onwards, the law was extended to cover the coal, petrol and chemical industries and, from April 1943, also included the railway and inland water transport systems. In the end, however, these repressive measure could not completely influence labour discipline or bind the workers to the factories. During the war

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years, unauthorised absences and ‘desertions’ from the factories were widespread. Many people were sentenced in absentia and were searched for by the police with a sentence awaiting them. At regular intervals, the regional authorities would emphasise how important it was that workers did not leave their factories. On 29 June 1944 the Soviet government issued a decree with the telling title: ‘On eliminating failures in the implementation of the decree of 26 December 1941’. In the same manner, the Cheliabinsk regional soviet tried, in vain, to convince the factories not to hire persons who had departed on their own initiative from another factory. The fact that these directives had to be repeated indicates how loosely the laws were applied in actual practice. The lack of workers was too great and the knowledge of the bad living conditions was widespread. As a result, new employers would protect their recruited workers against charges of desertion. On 30 December 1944 a new decree proclaimed amnesty for anyone who had departed from their workplace if they returned voluntarily to their factory.24 By 1 January 1943 there were 49,000 employee at the Kirov Works in Cheliabinsk. Of these, 7500 had come from Leningrad, 3000 from Factory No. 75 in Kharkov, 2050 from Stalingrad’s Tractor Factory and 1000 from enterprises in Moscow. A further 10,441 had been ‘mobilised’, that is, sent to the factory instead of to the Red Army. The turnover of labour was great in 1942. In 11 months, 29,080 people had been newly recruited, while 21,807 had left the factory. No fewer than 1572 people were reported as having quit the factory on their own initiative, in violation of the wartime laws. These ‘deserters’ were sentenced in different ways, depending on the circumstances. Other enterprises could attract workers by offering better living conditions, rooms or flats.25 In many history handbooks on the Soviet Union, the labour conditions are described as having been completely militarised by ‘draconian’ labour laws, including the ones from 1940 regarding absences. First, however, one should consider the requirement that production of armaments should continue smoothly. Second, the application of the laws was fairly pragmatic. Third, there were actually many reasons for being absent from work, as is shown in the following table. Although, in principle, the wartime decrees dispensed with the right to ordinary and additional holiday, factory management continued to approve leave on a large scale. ‘Authorised absence’ in the table refers to the same form of holidays that had been allowed on short notice. On the other hand, unauthorised and therefore illegal absence (progul bez uvazhitelnych prichin) increased, from 415 persons and 820 persons apprehended in the winter months to 2800–4000 persons in the sum-

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Persons (progul)

415 761 820 1361 3200 2871 4129 13,557

Total absence

January February March April May June July Total

47,065 48,278 59,886 74,924 98,761 109,303 107,453 545,670

Workdays lost due to absence 549 942 911 1348 2148 2058 2198 10,144

Of which social & political work 316 283 521 462 584 764 1692 4622

Holidays

Table 5 Absences from the Kirov Works in Cheliabinsk, January–July 1942

3.777 3411 3632 3052 3277 2309 2311 21,769

Maternity leave

35,186 36,676 46,493 54,116 71,056 84,363 83,366 411,256

Illness

6922 6034 7328 10,209 11,895 11,077 8,957 62,422

Authorised absence

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mer months of June and July. A partial explanation was that many workers escaped to the countryside to help their relatives on the kolkhozy. During the following winter (1942–1943), the Kirov Works reported unallowed absences of 400–600 persons in 900–1000 cases per month. The number of sentences for persons who had definitely quit their workplace, who were often sentenced in absentia, was 2797. Of these, 1689 were tried as ‘deserters’, but in many cases were only punished with reduced food rations.26 At the Kirov Works, as with other factories in Cheliabinsk, the popular portrayal in textbooks of people who were 20 minutes late for work being sentenced to years in the Gulag is clearly not the case. The usual punishment would be a couple of months of forced labour at one’s own factory with reduced salary, not penal labour in remote Gulag camps. The major reasons for ‘desertions’ were noted as being (a) workers were recruited to the factory but did not have enough physical strength or qualifications, (b) bad housing and unsanitary conditions, (c) no care shown to younger workers, (d) the militia being overburdened with other crimes, (e) workers being lured to other factories in the vicinity and (f) workers allowed short holidays to travel home not returning at all.27 After the outbreak of the war, discipline, surveillance and control inside the factory were increased and any misdemeanour could be treated as a criminal act. The directors at the factories were also put under stricter control. A report that included the phrase ‘unable to fulfil the directives of the State Defence Committee GKO’ would be considered by the NKVD a crime against the state and would lead to a close check of that link in the production cycle. This often led managers to denounce any minor fault before the secret police exposed them. In April–July 1942, eight directors within the ammunition industry were arrested by the NKVD for breaches of production obligations, including N. Serov, who was one of the managers at Factory No. 78 in Cheliabinsk.28 When the men left for the army, their places in industry were taken by women and young people of either gender. The civilian population in Cheliabinsk was mobilised in several waves. On 13 February 1942 the law on ‘mobilisation in wartime of city dwellers for work in production and building activities’ was adopted, leading to many housewives, pensioners and others being employed in industry. Only from August 1943 were the labour laws for these categories slackened when, for example, working women with children under the age of eight years were allowed one day off per week.29

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Elizaveta Kochergina recalled: I was 16 years old in 1941. I was short and thin. When I and the other teenagers arrived, the overseer at the No. 541 cartridge factory [in wartime, all factories had numbers but no names, for security reasons] looked at us and exclaimed, ‘Why have they sent us a nursery?’ There were few middle-aged persons at the factory but most were young people and elderly persons. I worked at a machine that made cartridges for automatic guns. If I could not reach the machine, they put me up on a box. When after a while I could fulfil a double piecerate, the overseer changed his attitude. The workday was 12 hours or more. And so it went on for four years. Without any days off or holidays. It used to be like that: you arrived home at midnight and by 8 o’clock in the morning you had to again be at the factory. We were extremely tired. In order not to fall asleep, we used to sing by the machines. But the worst thing was the hunger. We dreamt of at least once eating a full meal. Towards the end of the war, my legs had weakened. In May 1945 I was at a hospital. Naturally, there was a lot of overtime, without compensation. In a request from Factory No. 541 it was stated that due to the lack of manpower, many workers worked up to 11 hours per day, with no days off. In December 1942, 215 workers even fulfilled the norms of two ordinary workdays in one day. The factory boasted 2200 workers who overfulfilled the daily norms, 1450 of whom were in the category of ‘Stakhanovite workers’. Director Aleshin therefore demanded that the factory should at least receive increased rations of foods and other goods for these workers.30 All factories experienced a severe lack of manpower. Towards the end of 1941, it was estimated that there were 25,865 evacuated persons who could be used in production, of whom 9200 had graduated from institutes and trade schools. There were 1284 female students from pedagogical institutes and 5763 pupils from the 9th and 10th grades in cities around the region.31 In the autumn of 1941 the Koliushchenko Works started to produce shells for the BM-11 rocket-artillery guns, which were mounted on 1.5 ton lorries. They soon became known by the soldiers in the Red Army as ‘Little Katarina’ (Katiusha). The shells were produced in cooperation with the machine-building works – Factory No. 78 ‘Stankomash’ in Cheliabinsk, Factory No. 259 in Zlatoust, the Mechanical Works in Kyshtym and the Cheliabinsk Factory for Metal Constructions. 32

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The Koliushchenko Works also received a number of other defence orders. Machinery from evacuated factories in the south of Russia had been added to its own equipment. In order to start up production, after the men had been drafted into the army, 1330 workers were recruited in September and 3109 in October. Evacuated workers from the south added another 1830 men to the workforce. Still, the management lacked over 1200 qualified workers in 21 professions. The vacancies were filled by young people who received a crash course in the trade at the factory. Vera Sheina was one of these workers, who made fins to the rocket shells. ‘When you were welding, glowing metal would fly on to your legs and feet,’ she said ‘It hurt terribly from the burns. On one occasion, I stayed at home and was sick-listed because of the big burns. Then the overseer came home and fetched me. With a bandage around one leg, I sat down on a chair and welded rocket cases.’ Later, all workers received protective clothes but there were still many accidents due to the lack of elementary protective equipment.33 During the war, labour could be commandeered and redirected between the factories in the Southern Urals. Even then, enterprises would refuse to let some of their personnel be removed. Director Melekhin at Machine-building Factory No. 54 in Zlatoust had made a list of his factory’s required labour, divided into 16 professions and totalling 1387 people. The regional party committee had sent out an order to remove 600 workers from the required professions, yet only 264 workers had as yet arrived at the Zlatoust factory from Magnitogorsk, Chealiabinsk and a few minor cities.34 After the enormous losses of the Red Army in 1941 2000 people born in 1922, 1923 and 1924 were called up in February 1942. This created additional problems at ChTZ because they had to let 90 persons who had been exempt from the draft leave the factory, just as the nearby Stankomash had to provide 80 workers.35 In October 1942, the factories in Cheliabinsk organised trade courses for another 10,000 persons, mostly short courses for the mass education of young people in the city but also for mobilised youth from the other cities and villages in the region.36 Directors and leaders from 49 factories in the region gathered for a grand meeting on 14 October 1942 to discuss education and procurement for young people who had entered the industries after the outbreak of the war. Frank reports discussed the frightening conditions in many workshops. The houses for the workers had not received maintenance and work clothes had not been provided. Many people slept in the large

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factory workshops because they lacked winter clothes or because the journey back to their dormitories was too long. Baranov from Factory No. 707 at Cheliabinsk gave an example of how he had met a 16-yearold girl who worked at a complicated, imported machine. She did not even look up as he approached but continued to work as steadfastly as before. She told him that she had been barefoot for seven months and had boils on her feet from frostbite. She had been evacuated from Leningrad and she fulfilled all the production norms. Baranov encountered other similar cases and informed the management. It transpired that there were 200 pairs of shoes and boots in stock but that no one had thought of distributing them to the workers. In barracks at the Kirov Works, inspections revealed that young women who had worked for three to four years lacked boots. They had to walk barefoot to the

Figure 94 Schoolchildren at practical work in 1943 to produce cast iron forms.

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factory to receive new ones and were sometimes even charged for having lost their shoes. In the barracks, there were instances when bed quilts and mattresses were lacking.37 On 3 December 1942 A. Goregliad, one of the managers at the Kirov Works issued an order that 100 pairs of solid felt boots (valenki) and 100 pairs of straw boots (lapti) should be made, and that a centralised repair of up to 3000 pairs of shoes per month should be organised, of which 400 pairs should be of ‘better repair with leather’ for the Stakhanovite workers.38 To a certain extent, workers often quite simply left their workplace, despite knowing that this was considered as severe a crime as desertion from the army. Since there was a constant lack of labour, the supervisors at other factories would disregard the fact that their new recruits did not present their labour book or any certificate from their former workplace. In November 1942, Filatov, the military prosecutor for the NKVD’s internal troops, reported to the Ural’s military district’s prosecutor, Blumfeldt, and the military prosecutor, Merkulov, that the number of unsolved cases as of 1 October was 963 and that another 2832 cases of desertion had been added during October. In total, there were 3795 cases to be solved in October, of which only 1119 had been checked so far. Of these, 210 had been solved with the persons attending and 909 in absentia. As of 1 November prosecutor Filatov had 2517 undecided cases. He made a clear statement that most of these desertions were due to the miserable housing and living conditions. Having received these ‘signals’ from the military prosecutor, the regional party committee in October inspected the defence industry factories to observe how the workers lived, how they were clothed and what they were offered to eat. These raids exposed a number of scandals. The situation in the dormitories and dining rooms could easily explain why a whole group of young workers from the Tatar Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic had left Cheliabinsk.39 An order by Director Izaak Zaltsman of 27 August 1943 noted that a check of the working conditions had exposed that youths under 16 years of age were often forced to work overtime and night shifts but were not paid at the proper rates. Far too often, young workers were given tasks for which they were not qualified instead of being sent on trade courses or to join work groups with higher piece-rates. Zaltsman’s order forbade youths from working overtime or night shifts. All youths born in 1928–1929 would thenceforth have a six-hour workday and would not be allowed to work after 10 p.m. They should also be fed three times a day. All claims of unpaid work should be settled immediately and premiums should be paid. Children who were only 12 or 13 years old (born

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in 1930–1931) should be removed from some of the workshops. The overseers were obliged to give them other jobs after some trade courses. Deputy Director Zverev was to inspect the fulfilment of this order and check that the children received better housing, shoes and clothes. A general health check of all the young workers was carried out.40 Another order hinted at the working conditions and the goals towards which the leaders were striving. On 21 March 1944 Director Zaltsman signed an order, ‘with the purpose of fostering habits for personal behaviour concerning the dress of overseers at the factory’. The management should wear working suits of a pattern determined by Zaltsman. As of 25 March wearing the uniform was obligatory for workshop overseers and their deputies, assistant workshop overseers, department chiefs, shift leaders, mechanics and energy technicians in the workshops. No one was allowed to wear outdoor clothes in the workshops. Zaltsman wanted everyone to arrive at work well dressed, washed and clean shaven.41 During the war years, a number of new factories were built in Cheliabinsk, albeit with great difficulties. According to the plans, Factory No. 269 for the People’s Commissariat of the Aeroplane Industry was to be ready at the end of 1941. However, far too few resources had initially been given to the local building organisation, which, besides the industrial constructions, also had to build new dwellings. There was a great need for new rooms and apartments, with over 10,000 workers and engineers still lacking their own housing. A stop-gap alternative solution was to build barracks for 7000 workers.42 During the war, the People’s Commissariat of Defence NKO set up special building battalions (stroibat), which recruited persons whose health, age or other reasons meant they were not fit to fight in the regular army units. The stroibat also contained formerly convicted criminals or persons that the Soviet powers considered unreliable for political and other reasons. Accordingly, it included formerly deported peasants and youths from the Gulag ‘special settlements’ or ‘working villages’ (spetsposëlki, trudposëlki), as well as many new Soviet citizens from the incorporated Baltic republics, Bessarabia, Western Ukraine and Belorus. Another group consisted of Soviet citizens of the same nationalities as those in the enemy coalition: Germans, Finns, Hungarians, Italians and others. In the autumn of 1941, these building battalions were divided into working columns (rabochie kolonny) and were distributed among other people’s commissariats. At the beginning of 1942, there were over 120,000 persons in 20 such working columns.43

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Figure 95

235

The assembly hall for KV tanks.

In the early period, the city of Cheliabinsk was unprepared for housing and feeding all the persons in the building battalions and there was not enough beds in the barracks. Food was insufficient for the building workers, many of whom did not receive proper winter and working clothes. During the first winter, so many people drafted to these battalions lacked winter clothes that they had to stay indoors in the barracks. In the 793rd Estonian Building Battalion, for example, 700 out of the 1000 workers had to stay indoors.44 In 1943 young men from the Central Asian Republics were also recruited to the building battalions in Cheliabinsk because many of them were considered unfit for service in the Red Army due to the fact that they did not understand Russian, the command language, and did not have pre-military training. However, there were numerous problems for these building workers in Cheliabinsk; they could not withstand the harsh climate and were often sick. As a result, most of the Central Asian workers were demobilised in 1944.45 The miserable conditions encouraged the workers to flee from their building battalions, which led to them being reported as ‘deserters’. In building battalions that predominantly contained Estonians, Belorussians and Ukrainians from the recently annexed regions, there were frequent reports of drunkenness, gang fights and go-slow working.46 In the privies and corridors, people wrote things like, ‘Down with

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Stalin, long live Hitler!’ In Building Battalion No. 65 at Factory No. 254 in Cheliabinsk, leaflets were distributed with calls to join the Hitlerite army. No one was found guilty of having produced these hand-written leaflets. In the same building battalions, theft of other prisoners’ belongings was common. A report by the military prosecutor at the Cheliabinsk garrison dated 23 October 1943 Military Lawyer of the 3rd Rank, Ostapin, to Secretary G.D. Saprykin at the Communist Party regional committee, surveyed the most notorious cases. A total of 14 individuals had deserted from the 765th building workers’ column in Chebarkul village, 55 from the 776th column in the city of Zlatoust, 37 from the 793rd column in Zlatoust, 15 from the 820th column in Kamensk and 28 from the 779th column in Kamensk. As of 23 October 301 desertions had been reported but only 133 persons had been found, arrested and sentenced; a special department of the NKVD searched for the remaining deserters. Most of these deserters from the workers’ columns were Estonian and so-called ‘Westerners’ (zapadniki); that is, from Western Ukraine and Belorus. Many in the building battalions were classified as ‘socially alien’, that is with a social background in the merchant class, representatives of the free professions and, allegedly, former members of fascist parties from Estonia and Poland. This report complained about the lack of political propaganda among the building workers. It emphasised the lack of elementary military orders but also complained of the material shortcomings that had caused frostbite wounds, the spread of diphtheria and other illnesses due to unsanitary conditions.47 However, these building battalions did complete a number of new factories under extreme conditions in a very short time. In 1942–1943, for example, the OSMCh-22 battalion built the tube-rolling factory in Cheliabinsk. Other battalions moved the equipment for a Bluming press from the steel works in Mariupol in south Russia and other machinery from the Izhërsk Works. This construction work was led by Mikhail Shildkrot. To speed up these construction projects in Cheliabinsk, building materials and scaffolding were appropriated from the interrupted construction of the Palace of Congress in Moscow. With the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour having been destroyed in 1931 – built in the late 19th century to commemorate the victory over Napoleon – and having Boris Iofan’s 300-metre high skyscraper topped with a 75-metre statue of Lenin having been approved, the foundation works for the palace had started in 1937. However, the clay in the soil meant that enormous numbers of iron reinforcing bars were required and the work was much more complicated than expected. When World War II broke

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out, construction of the Palace of Congress was interrupted and the iron reinforcing bars were moved to more urgent tasks. Thereafter, the whole project was considered useless. Too many objections had arisen to the grandiose city plan from the 1930s, of which the palace had been only a small part.48

Soviet Germans build the new iron and steel works in Cheliabinsk It was already evident from the first period of the war in 1941 that the defence industry would require much more metal than could be produced at the existing iron and steel works. Some of these works had to be evacuated and it was not possible to calculate how much of their capacity could be restarted in regions that were beyond the German airforce’s bombing range. The iron ore in Bakal was regarded as an important resource for quality steel because of its low content of carbon and impurities, so construction of an iron and steel works was started there. However, due to the lack of investment capital and labour, the construction of this second iron works (in addition to the Magnitogorsk Works) was interrupted in the mid-1930s. In early 1939 the 18th Communist Party Congress decided, in principle, that the Bakal quality steel works should be completed because its product was dearly needed for the airplane, tank, car and tractor industries. An important factor in the discussions was the location of the factory far behind any conceivable front lines. The Cheliabinsk regional party committee urged that construction of the factory should start as soon as possible. The iron and steel works in Magnitogorsk had mainly produced ordinary steel and only after the transfer of a bluming press from Mariupol in the autumn of 1941 could rolled steel be produced there. The loss of the Soviet iron and steel works during the first months of war spurred the authorities to build the Bakal factory as soon as possible. The building site was near the village of Pershino, 10 kilometres north-east of Cheliabinsk. According to the first plan, the factory would only have been ready in 1945. Construction started in February 1942, at which time the building organisation was called Cheliabmetallurgstroi and the plant’s name was changed to the Cheliabinsk Metallurgical Factory with coke works, blast furnaces, rolling mills and other workshops. As early as 19 September 1943 the first steel melt was received from the No. 1 electric furnace.49 This had been accomplished with the use of NKVD resources. A special camp, Bakalstroi, was founded on 25 January 1941 with A.N.

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Tankograd

Figure 96 The labour-mobilised Soviet Germans (trudarmeitsy) lived in barracks such as these in the labour camp north of Cheliabinsk.

Komarovskii as its first leader. Much of the building equipment was moved from another NKVD building site near Stalingrad and most of the labour force at Bakalstroi were Soviet Germans from the former VolgaGerman Autonomous Republic who had been mobilised at the start of the war. In accordance with a decree of August 1941 the Volga Germans were not taken into the Red Army but were instead ‘mobilised for work’ (trudmobilizovannye) or to build factories. The Soviet leaders did not trust their German citizens, most of whom were descendants of Germans who had come to Tsarist Russia in the late 18th century. In August 1941 it was decided that the people in the autonomous German region on the Volga should be deported to other parts of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Germans were sent to special zones in the Urals and Western Siberia. The ‘labour soldiers’ (trudarmeitsy) were placed in camps that were very similar to the ordinary Gulag forced labour camps. The first German ‘labour soldiers’ arrived in Cheliabinsk in January–February 1942.50 These men, who came from as far as Kazakhstan and other parts of Central Asia, were sent to labour armies due mainly to their lack of knowledge of the Russian language and their lack of pre-military train-

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ing. The new wartime laws were therefore discriminatory against Soviet citizens of German, Romanian, Finnish and Hungarian nationalities; although they had not committed any crime, their fate was decided by the mere suspicion that some of them would be easy prey for Nazi German propaganda. Similar security measures were taken in the United States against its citizens of Japanese origin. Some material from the NKVD’s informants inside the camp in Cheliabinsk, as well as surveys of censored correspondence from the camp, indicated that the atmosphere among ‘labour soldiers’ was often pro-German until 1943.51 It is only possible to guess their mentality if these Germans had been part of the retreating Soviet army in autumn 1941 or during the Battles of Kiev and Moscow. Similarly defeatist or pro-German expressions or hopes for a German victory had also been noted among some kolkhoz peasants before and in the first phase of the German-Russian war.52 An iron and steel works was built in record time 1942–1943 by the forced labour of Soviet Germans, who worked side by side with the Red Army’s building battalions and a small number of free workers, overseers and specialists. The ‘labour soldiers’ were in fact part of the NKVD Gulag system.53 Cheliabmetallurgstroi was a concentration camp surrounded by high barbed wire and the workplace was surrounded by armed guards with dogs. The labourers were brought from their barracks to the building site under the supervision of a convoy of soldiers. Work quotas were set extremely high and severe repressive measures were taken against any attempt to protest. These extreme conditions caused a high mortality rate. In February 1944, Cheliabmetallurgstroi counted 34,605 ‘labour soldiers’ who lived in virtual isolation from the nearby city in their barracks. NKVD had decided that whatever the cost in terms of human lives, the new steel works should be completed as soon as possible. Five electric steel blast furnaces were complete in the fourth quarter of 1942 and two more blast furnaces were equipped in the second quarter of 1943. Formally, the Soviet Germans were not prisoners but were mobilised for work at the home front. By and large, most ‘labour soldiers’ changed their attitudes over time, at least as far as can be ascertained from the reports of NKVD. They had a more positive attitude to work and many skilled specialists in various professions advanced proposals for rationalisation of the working process. Many of them would later advance to leading positions at the Cheliabinsk Metallurgical Factory (ChMZ, nowadays called MEChEL) or at the Cheliabmetallurgstroi building trust. In the late 1940s this trust was moved from the Ministry of the Interior to the Ministry for Building. In 1945 an order from Cheliabmetallurgstroi

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revealed the many proposals for rationalisations that had been made by the mobilised Germans in 1944. Many German engineers, technicians and qualified workers had received various premiums (fur jackets, summer suits, boots etc.).54 After Komarovskii, Iakov Rapoport (1898–1962) became the chief of the building project at Cheliabinsk. He was born into a Jewish clerk’s family and received a four-year college education in Voronezh. By August 1918 he was conducting pre-trial investigations for the Cheka and he advanced to become a member of the collegium of the local branch of the secret police in Voronezh. Rapoport held various posts in Voronezh’s secret police, some of which included control of the regional industry. From 1922 onwards, he led the OGPU economic directorate and was responsible for its report on the situation in Soviet industry, transport and agriculture. From 1 June 1926 Rapoport was deputy head of the OGPU committee for the camps for political prisoners and, from July 1930, was head of its production sector. In July 1934 he was deputy head of the fast-growing main directorate of the correction camps, the Gulag, and had experienced the problems of leading the Baltic Sea–White Sea canal construction project. He proved capable of being responsible for Gulag’s extensive hydrotechnical projects – the water reservoir and dams at Rybinsk and Uglich. As a result, he was appointed deputy head of the new Gulag unit, the production directorate for hydro-electric construction and the camps organised in the vicinity of those building sites. After the start of the German-Russian war, Rapoport was head of the Gulag directorate for construction of military defence buildings. He then directed the NKVD building project of a new iron and steel works in Nizhnii Tagil and was appointed head of the Tagillag, the forced labour camp that was organised to cope with this task. From 29 April 1946 Rapoport was head of Cheliabmetallurgstroi.55 Rapoport described the ‘contingent of prisoners’ as mostly consisting of ‘labour soldiers’, that is, Soviet Germans, and of criminals who had been sentenced to long Gulag terms. In addition, many German, Italian, Hungarian and other POWs, as well as interned Germans, had been detained in Eastern Prussia. The proportion of able-bodied prisoners increased in 1944, while the number of sick and weakened prisoners fell as general health improved in the camp. Rapoport noted that there was still an extremely high mortality and sickness rate in Camp No. 68. The camp leaders were criticised for not having procured enough food to keep the prisoners fit for heavy labour. Rapoport felt that the new prisoners from Eastern Prussia were mostly member of the Nazi party or the Gestapo. ‘We must understand that these guys have been taken here

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to work, not for us to do any correctional education for them’, he said. This was in contrast to the ordinary German POWs, who took part in a number of propaganda courses in order to turn them into convinced anti-fascists. The leaders of Camp No. 68 were instructed to improve the everyday conditions for its prisoners, appoint new foremen from their own ranks and divide the prisoners into companies and battalions.56 Labour-mobilised Germans also worked at the coal mines in Kopeisk, at Cheliabinskugol, Korkinugol, Korkinshakhtstroi and other production sites. After the war, the status of the work mobilised Germans changed somewhat, as they were put on a par with exiled peasants and held in the category of special colonists (spetsposelentsy). In January 1949, the Cheliabinsk region contained 384,400 Soviet Germans and their families, who had been sent there during the war. These ‘special settlers’ did not have internal passports and were not free to travel outside the special settlements without permission of the local commandant, to whom they had to report on a regular basis. Only in 1956 did they receive the same civil rights as other Soviet citizens and have their special status annulled.57

Prisoners of war in Cheliabinsk The countless German, Hungarian and Italian POWs captured by the Red Army from 1941 onwards were taken to special reception camps in the Urals and Siberia. Depending on their skills, professions, working capability and health, they were then distributed to various labour camps that were organised by the Directorate for Prisoners of War and Internees (Russian abbreviation GUPVI, Glavnoe Upravlenie Voennoplennykh i Internirovannykh), a special section within the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, NKVD. For several reasons, this directorate should not be mixed up with the Gulag camp administration. The conditions for the POWs were regulated by international conventions, which the USSR had agreed to follow. German, Hungarian and other enemy state POWs were working at the Cheliabinsk Tank Factory and other factories at least from autumn 1944 onwards.58

The countryside Most of the called-up men were from the countryside. In 1941 there were over 2700 kolkhozy, 161 machine and tractor stations (MTS) and 92 sovkhozy in Cheliabinsk region. Towards the end of the war, only 876 kolkhozy, 74 MTS and 41 sovkhozy were still functioning. A larger number

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of those who remained to work in the countryside towards the end of the war were women, the elderly and very young people. Most men in the kolkhozy had been called up to the Red Army. The composition of the able-bodied population on the kolkhozy in Cheliabinsk oblast changed drastically. In 1939, there were 206,000 able-bodied males and 231,700 females. By the end of 1941 the corresponding figures were 91,200 and 199,500. By 1942 the male workforce was 25,400 and the female workforce was 75,100. These numbers dropped to 18,200 and 71,100 in 1943 and 18,600 and 66,600 in 1944. By 1945 there were 27,200 able-bodied men and 66,800 able-bodied females.59 In 1941, there were 161 machine and tractor stations in the oblast. In the first six months of the war, 24,500 tractor drivers, 5500 drivers of harvesters and 24,000 leaders at tractor brigades were mobilised. These specialists were replaced by women, who were given short training courses. A total of 12,400 ‘mekhanizatory’ were educated. Of the 10,868 tractor drivers in 1944, 7220 were women and 1702 out of 2378 ‘kombainery’ (drivers of harvesters) were women. At the outbreak of the war in 1941, the kulak families in the Cheliabinsk region that had been exiled during the forced collectivisation in 1930–1931 (a total of 46,900 people) lived in 29 so-called ‘labour villages’ (trudposëlki), which were directed by eight regional commandants. From 1938 onwards the children of these former kulaks were allowed to apply for passports and were given civil rights (even though this was a bureaucratic procedure and linked to political conditions). At first, none was drafted into the Red Army but the heavy Soviet losses in 1941 forced a change in attitude. From 1942 even former kulaks and their children were mobilised into the Soviet armed forces. Russian historian Viktor Zemskov, who has written a comprehensive study of the ‘special settlers’, estimated that approximately half the number of men who were old enough for military service were actually called up. Other men and women from the ex-kulaks’ ‘labour villages’ were obliged to do the work that the NKVD command ordered. Such ‘special contingents’ were used during the war on sectors that had intensive demand for labour – building factories, new railway lines or in forestry. With regard to forestry, it was actually the Communist Party that decided how this form of the ‘camp economy’ should be organised. As an example, in August 1942 the regional party committee ordered that 55 families from these ‘trudposëlki’ in Magnitogorsk, Karabash and other places be transferred to the regional building trust. During the war, these ex-kulaks were to live in the vicinity of factories, mines and building sites, where they worked closely with other workers. This was against the NKVD principle of isolating ‘socially alien elements’ from the rest of society as much as possible. In this manner, the concept of a ‘special contingent’ lost

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some of its original meaning. From 1942–1943, ex-kulaks who had been deported were allowed to join the Red Army, which gave them a form of rehabilitation.60 Other ‘special settlers’ had been exiled to Cheliabinsk in 1939–1940 from Poland and the former Baltic republics. The invasion of Poland in September 1939 was partly justified by the unfair peace treaty after the Polish-Russian war in 1920, when western parts of Ukraine and Belorus had been separated from the Soviet Republic. At the same time, the Soviet power in the new territories pursued a conscious policy of undermining what was left of the Polish state during the interwar period, through brutal purges and deportations of a large number of Poles to the interior of the USSR. In total, almost 400,000 Polish citizens were exiled, of whom 134,000 were sent to camps and prisons and 243,000 were forced to build and live in so-called ‘special villages’ (spetsposëlki). Approximately 40,000 Poles were sent to the Urals, mostly to places near Sverdlovsk and Molotov (now Perm). Some 200 Polish families ended up in the coal-mining town of Kopeisk near Cheliabinsk. Immediately after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, the security regime was strengthened in these ‘special villages’. A decree of 12 August 1941 gave amnesty to all Polish citizens who were designated as ‘prisoners of war’ or prisoners ‘on other grounds’ and they had their status changed to merely refugees. Some of them joined the Polish army formed in the Soviet Union that left the country in 1942, while most of them returned to Poland after 1945. Food and Health conditions The food situation worsened drastically during the first years after the German invasion and occupation of Ukraine and Southern Russia.61 Even in the Northern Urals there was widespread famine, particularly in the countryside.62 From the start of the war the sections for workers’ procurement ORS (otdel rabochego snabzhenija) – which had existed in 1932–1936 as a closed distribution system for everyone within a factory, administration or department but then closed as consumer goods were more available – were re-established. The ORS were again responsible for the distribution of goods from centralised stocks to the employees and had their own dining halls, shops, stocks and plantations. They were also responsible for the workers’ childrens’ dining halls. Every enterprise in Cheliabinsk was obliged to provide several hundred portions of food to the children in the nearby city district. On 22 January 1943 the State Defence Committee, GKO, issued a decree on the ‘increased fight against the embezzlement of food and industrial products’. The fact that such decrees had to be issued indicates the widespread and systematic misuse and the lack of social control regarding how food was actually distributed.

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In the first winter of the war, the sickness and mortality rates among the children due to pneumonia, cholera and intestinal illnesses increased alarmingly.63 The authorities in Cheliabinsk noted that children had been under-nourished and that far too few children had access to the public dining halls in the city districts. Therefore, the machine-building works Factory No. 78 (Stankomash) was obliged to arrange to feed 1500 children of its employees and others in the city district surrounding the factory. The youngest children were to receive this food at home, while those between five and 12 years of age could choose between eating at home or in the mornings at the factory’s dining hall.64 A rationing system for food was introduced at the outbreak of the war and food was also sold through the internal shops at the factories. Rules on additional rationing were introduced in April–December 1942.65 On 10 June 1942 the city party committee, based on recommendations from Professor Gubergrits, urged all factory dining halls to increase the vitamin content in the food, for example, by adding onions and by preparing concoctions of pine needles to be distributed at every meal.66 Every worker was entitled to 400 millilitres of this drink each day.67 The deficit situation led to a change in the character of criminality in Cheliabinsk during the war years. Thefts of food and ration cards became more frequent. There were widespread problems with the Gulag prisoners, who could walk around in the factories, offer goods to the workers only to swindle them, threaten them with knives and steal their ration cards.68 The authorities struggled against the rising tide of new criminality among the many orphans. A curfew was introduced for under-aged children after 9 p.m. Children were forbidden from trading goods or doing jobs such as shoe-polishing and the like.69 During the war years, schoolchildren were sent in an organised way to work on the kolkhozy during the summers. Tens of thousands of children helped the peasants clear the fields of weeds and with harvesting. In order to alleviate the food situation, the authorities encouraged and supported the use of individual farmland for city dwellers. The workers were allowed to have their own allotments outside the city and kolkhoz members were allowed to have large private plots. This soon became very popular; it was born out of sheer necessity but later became a favourite leisure pastime. Practically all the industrial workers in Cheliabinsk received their own allotment during the war years.70 The enterprises also set aside part of their workforce in order to grow vegetables and potatoes for the needs of the factory canteens. Furthermore, some factory workers were tasked as watchmen for the private plot areas in order to prevent stealing.71

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Certain areas outside Cheliabinsk were given over to the employees’ allotments. On 15 April 1942 the city authorities designated 3754 hectares for individual plots for the workers. The city also provided the workers with seeds for vegetables and potatoes, with priority going to members of the defence industry, for evacuees from other cities and for invalids.72 The directors of the factories were responsible for the actual distribution of these allotments to workers. The factories were also to organise transport to and from the allotments during the summertime. Because there was a great shortage of salt during the war, each employee received 2 kilograms of salt, so that cabbages, cucumbers and tomatoes could be preserved for wintertime.73 During the war years, the growth of allotments in the Cheliabinsk region was substantial, as shown in the following table: Table 6 Evolution of workers allotments

Number of growers (thousands) Area (thousand hectares)

1940

1942

1943

1944

200,000 20.1

276,200 22.5

476,000 30.0

514,000 41.7

In 1945, 43,000 hectares were planted with potatoes and vegetables and the harvest in the Cheliabinsk region was approximately one-third of the harvest of the whole region. The inhabitants were estimated to have harvested approximately 250 thousand tons of potatoes and vegetables from these plots.74 Certain elements of everyday life are seldom reflected in the archival documents. The memoirs of Iakov Goldstein, a mechanic who stayed on at the Cheliabinsk Tractor Factory after the war, include an episode that highlights how some matters are often forgotten in historiography. The Kirov Works had developed an extensive system of direct product exchange with some kolkhozy in the region. One day, five young men were sent from the factory to a kolkhoz to exchange some industrial products for food. When a whole week had passed without any sign of the boys, their colleagues at the factory started to worry. However, some days later, the boys finally arrived, loaded with large sacks full of potatoes, beets and dairy products. After a timid introduction, the boys became more open about how the lonely women at the kolkhozy had at first treated them with food and drinks, and then showed them their appreciation in other ways for several days in a row.75

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To detail the demographic situation at the Soviet home front would require a separate chapter. As mentioned, mortality rose as a consequence of the under-nourishment of the population and the related decrease in immunity against sicknesses. The birth rate also fell as a consequence of the war. The number of live registered births is presented in the following table for the cities and the countryside (numbers in thousands).76 The demographic balance between men and women changed dramatically during the war. There were far fewer men than women in terms of those who were fit for work in the countryside; there were 62,955 men (aged 16 to 55) and 138,468 women (aged 16 to 49). If children older than 12 are included, the workforce in the region’s villages was close to 270,000. The cultivated area had shrunk drastically. In the spring of 1944, many people had used flour from grain that had been left on the fields through the winter months, which caused an epidemic of septic tonsillitis in Brodokalmak, Nagaibak, Chesmensk, Varnensk and other places. The regional authority sent scores of doctors and nurses to cure the patients, while new flour was distributed to these districts.77 Table 7 Nativity in Cheliabinsk region (except stillborns), thousands Year

1940

1941

1942

1943

1944

1945

Cities Countryside Total

45.9 72.3 118.2

44.7 63.5 108.2

30.0 33.4 63.4

13.6 8.9 22.5

13.2 7.3 20.5

19.6 9.7 29.2

Figure 97

Red Cross nurses (photo from 23 June 1940).

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Hunger and exhaustion, and its symptoms, such as dystrophics, among large parts of the population in the Urals were frequently reported by NKVD and other organisations, particularly towards the end of 1943. The regional party chairman, Nikolai Patolichev, called for a series of countermeasures but this solved only the worst procurement problems. Approximately two to three per cent of the workers, even in the defence industry, were sick and at risk of dystrophy. On 12 April 1944 a survey at the factories showed that a significant proportion of the workers could be characterised as having dystrophy or as being in ‘a pre-dystrophic situation’. At some factories, up to a quarter of the workers suffered from under-nourishment to such an extent that their health was in danger. The main reason for the spread of diseases had been neglect of elementary sanitary and hygiene requirements. The food in the dining halls had a very low calorie content and little protein. The recommendation to add vitamin drinks made of pine needles had been ignored. Reports from NKVD inspectors noted that the ventilation systems in many factories were out of order, meaning that the air was filled with dangerous gas and dirt. The factory management was urged to follow the decree regarding time off from work: at least two days per month for the defence industry and four days at other factories. The dormitories should be repaired and cleaned and the dining halls provided with better food.78 The pharmaceutical factory in Cheliabinsk was ordered to prepare 1.5 million doses of vitamin C. In May 1945, it was noted that the food situation at the factory dining halls had improved, with an average energy content of 3000 calories per day compared with fewer than 2000 calories per day in 1943.79 Absence due to sickness at the Kirov Works in Cheliabinsk during the first half of 1942 had been described as ‘colossal’ in the official report, which showed the following statistics for the 40,000-plus employees:80 Number of cases Influenza Chest pain, tonsillitis Furunculosis Rheumatism Tuberculosis Malaria Intestinal infections Eye diseases Infections Others Total

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6752 510 1245 314 369 53 810 350 60 6144 16,607

Lost working hours 46,785 3745 15,314 4510 7871 484 7059 2115 1536 72,298 161,717

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In the autumn of 1942, a garrison doctor warned of the spread of spotted fever, as new groups of soldiers had arrived from heavily regions with high rates of infection.81 In the early summer of 1943, there was a rapidly growing number of cases of dysentery and spotted fever. There was insufficient preparedness for disinfecting houses and other sources of the epidemics. A group of 13 doctors and 12 assistants were instructed to form five teams to stop the epidemics, inspect the workers’ barracks and other localities and carry out a thorough sanitisation.82 A special order from the commander of the Urals military district forbade Red Army soldiers from travelling in the trams in Cheliabinsk. Barracks were to be cleaned much more carefully and all uniform items were to be disinfected once a week. Only boiled water was allowed as drinking water.83 Health care at the factories in the defence industry was regulated centrally by a decision of 12 November 1941 that the local health care centres at the factories should be guided by instructions from the Republican People’s Commissariats for Health. However, many of these centres had only very general directives concerning their obligations. The hospital near the tractor factory (and then by the Kirov Works) was open not only for employees but for everyone who lived in the city district around it. One priority was to reduce the number of sickness among the workers and avoid accidents at the workplace. The doctors were also obliged to inspect workplaces from the point of view of health conditions. During the first war years, it was impossible to reduce the number of people who fell sick with tuberculosis, malaria and intestinal illnesses. During all the war years, the sickness rate was between 60 and 110 per 1000 workers. In 1944, the very young workers who had been forced to work overtime and at night were taken to the hospital and given additional nourishing food. They were given proper clothes and shoes and the factory was obliged to issue new directives regarding working hours for youths.84 In the summer of 1943 over 3000 children had the opportunity to live at a ‘pioneer’s camp’ at Lake Smolino and at children’s sanatoriums in the Southern Urals, where the general strengthening of their health was combined with work in the garden plantations and collecting healthy herbs and berries in the forests.85 On April 20 1944 Director A.F. Mokhov at the Cheliabinsk Electrode Factory sent a letter to I.I. Pertsev, at the main aluminium directorate at the People’s Commissariat of Non-ferrous Metals. The letter reported on the health situation and how the workers could be distributed according

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to their working capability. His survey accounted for 1012 workers, as well as those who had been commanded from the Gulag correctional labour colony. Of these, 124 were ‘distrofiki’ or ‘pre-distrofiki’, and were therefore totally unfit for any but the lightest forms of labour. Thirtynine workers were over 55 years and could only do specific work, while 31 were under 16 years of age and 17 workers had been commandeered as drivers or repairmen for other factories. This meant that the actual workforce was only 801 persons. The 80 persons from the Gulag colony were very difficult to discipline and 31 criminals had deserted. Director Mokhov asked the people’s commissar, P.F. Lomako, to intervene so that at least 200 workers would be sent to the electrode factory, as this was prerequisite for fulfilling the production plans.86 In the winter of 1943 so many wounded soldiers had died at the military hospital from the 151st Division that many had to be buried without coffins. Lieutenant-Colonel Zubenko demanded that the city soviet speed up coffin production, as burials without coffins was categorically prohibited.87 On 14 July 1943 it was reported that many soldiers who had died at some of the hospitals in Cheliabinsk, Zlatoust and Troitsk had been buried in mass graves without following the rules that they be buried at specially designated places for fallen Red Army soldiers.88

The political information sphere in the Urals Everyday life in Cheliabinsk during the war naturally had a lot of political activity. The Communist Party was responsible for both propaganda and providing information to the people. The party’s activists travelled to hundreds of factories and kolkhozy in the region and, from the outbreak of war, gave short speeches on current affairs, as well as more prepared lectures according to guidelines on various themes concerning the war. These included the role of the Soviet Union in world affairs, dissolutionary tendencies in the fascist bloc and the strength of the Allied Powers.89 The staff party lecturers were Gubnitskii, Iakemenkov, Fomin and Vanicek, as well as Filatov from the NKVD higher party school. Some 20 other party members gave a total of 388 lectures between March and June 1944, of which 108 were for active party members, 114 at industrial enterprises, 33 on kolkhozy and just as many at machine and tractor stations. Forty-seven lectures were presented to railway employees and ten to groups from the intelligentsia. Later, they added lectures about the liberation of the occupied parts of the Soviet Union and the reconstruction work in the destroyed cities and villages,

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as substantial aid started to be sent from the factories in the Cheliabinsk region to these places.90 Also of interest are the statistics from the Communist Party regarding how many people attended these lectures. For example, 8196 speeches and lectures in the countryside had a total audience of 524,238, according to a report to the party regional committee. On the other hand, the structure of the lecture series ‘The Foreign policy of the USSR’ gives an indication of how the people viewed the history of international relations. The subjects were: (1) Germany’s defeat in World War I and the Versailles Peace conditions, (2) the Middle East in World War I, (3) the Far East after World War I and the Washington Conference, (4) the foreign policy of the Soviet Union during the world economic crisis 1929–1932, (5) two hotbeds [Germany and Japan] for a new world war and (6) the Soviet foreign policy in 1933–1934.91 The party’s propagandists were then, as they also had to do much later, required to report the questions that were put to them at these meetings. These reports provide hints as to how well informed the people of ‘Tankograd’ actually were about the global situation. In June 1944, one such report included the following questions. What positions have the neutral states of Sweden, Switzerland and Turkey taken? How are relations between Germany and Japan? Where are de Gaulle’s troops? How has the resignation of Badoglio been interpreted? What government currently exists in Italy? Has Japan had victories in its war with the United States? Why did the United States break off diplomatic relations with Finland? Does Germany have many rocket airplanes? How will the rocket-airplane (V-1) be fought against? Do the Germans have radio-guided tanks? Have the Germans used rockets on our front? For how long will the food resources in Germany be sufficient? What are the chances that Roosevelt will be re-elected as president? Will the Germans start a chemical war? Can the landing of the Allied troops in northern France be called a second front? How many German divisions are still active today? How many of these divisions are positioned against the Soviet troops? Where is Ernst Thälman [the German communist leader arrested in 1933]? Is there a risk that Japan will attack us during the decisive battles against Germany? What new military technology has appeared in Germany?’ The audience seems to have been just as interested in international developments in July 1944, judging by their questions, which included the following. Where did the assassination attempt at Hitler take place and how was it done? What caused the attempted assassination and how did the situation in Germany change after that? What power will be

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established in Germany after her defeat? Can a socialist state be established across the world? How is Japan doing in its war against China? How will China’s defeats and its weak initiatives in the war against Japan be explained? Is there a revolutionary army in China led by the communists? Why are the Allied troops advancing so slowly in northern France? How many German divisions are fighting in Normandy, and is that a second front? Will the Allies advance claims on France concerning its territory and its colonies after the liberation of France? Are there contradictions between the Democratic and Republican parties in the USA concerning domestic and foreign policy? When, approximately, will the war finish? It can be interpreted from these questions that there was a fairly good understanding of the most important changes in the international arena and of the main battles on the European continent and in Asia. More detailed analysis of the Soviet press, central newspapers and the regional press in the Urals would make it possible to reconstruct the wartime information sphere. At the moment it is possible only to sketch an outline of the people’s knowledge and world views. It is possible that the wartime situation called for more straightforwardness and outspokeness; it would not have been possible to lie about the disasters in 1941 or the losses in 1942 before the Battle of Stalingrad. Many people in Cheliabinsk probably had their own sources of knowledge in the Red Army, despite the censorship of army secrets. Mass sport activities Despite all the hardships at the factories during the war for the workers, engineers and technicians, there was time for other activities. On 8 August 1942 a ‘Spartakiad’ in military sports was organised for the employees at the Kirov Works. For many years, the prestigious GTO medal had been awarded. GTO stood for Gotov k trudu i oborone (‘Ready for work and defence’) and the medal was awarded after tests in running, throwing, shooting and a military steeplechase. Every workshop could form a team with as many participants as they wished but only the ten best results were counted in the competition between the teams. The ‘Spartakiad’ included the following branches of athletics: the 100 and 1000 metres (500 metres for women), throwing blank grenades, high jump and long jump as well as a military steeplechase. The individual athletics events were the 400 and 5000 metres (100 and 1000 metres for women), discus, shotput, triple jump and standing long jump. The factory also organised competitions in volleyball with teams from several workshops.92

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A Spartakiad for the Urals was organised on 25–29 July, 1943 with participants from the three regions, Sverdlovsk, Molotov (later Perm) and Cheliabinsk. Cheliabinsk had 53 participants, chosen after trial games on 3–4 July and training camps in July for the light athletes, gymnasts, boxers, basketball and football teams and cyclists. Sverdlovsk won the overall games; Cheliabinsk had winners in boxing, cycling and gymnastics and also won the football game against the Sverdlovsk team.93 Wartime spin-off effects on higher education The students at the institutes in Cheliabinsk were mobilised during the first war winter to assist with the unloading of evacuated machinery and equipment at various enterprises, which meant that they missed part of their education schedule that year. Thereafter, the institutes tried to give as complete courses as possible, given the special requirements in wartime. A mechanical machinery institute was founded in 1943 with two faculties: a tank technological and mechanical-technical faculty. This institute was primarily intended to educate engineers for the military-industrial complex. Overall, education in Cheliabinsk was closely linked to the Kirov Works and its hundreds of highly qualified specialists from Leningrad, Kharkov and Moscow. In later years, the institute would become the prestigious Cheliabinsk Polytechnic Institute and would cover such high-tech courses as rocket technology.94

Victory Day 1945 in the Southern Urals On 5 May 1945 the morning news reported that the Nazi German army group in Berlin had been crushed by the Red Army. This news spread quickly to all factories, schools and institutions. Mass meetings were convened in a regular, organised form. At the Kirov Works in Cheliabinsk, a meeting was organised for both the night and day shifts, which arrived earlier than usual at the factory. During the same day, 82 meetings were held in the tractor factory city district alone and 302 speakers talked to an estimated audience of almost 50,000 people.95 The victory festivities in Cheliabinsk started on 9 May, when people stayed awake around the city’s loudspeakers. At 4.15 a.m. it was reported that Germany had signed an unconditional surrender. The day was declared to be a general holiday. People soon started to assemble in small groups in the streets. From the early morning until late in the evening, meetings to celebrate the victory were held in factories all over

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the Urals.96 In Cheliabinsk 250,000 people from all city districts gathered in the afternoon for the first demonstration through the streets in four years. On 13 May the first weekend of peacetime, the grand victory celebrations started with a day of people’s strolling (narodnoe gulianie). The city’s squares and streets had been cleaned and orchestras played dance music across the city. People danced or watched movies in outdoor theatres until late the next morning. After 1418 days, the war on the home front was over.

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Figure 98 Nina Vatolina’s poster from 1948 illustrates the recovery after World War II and the damage caused by the Nazi occupation of large parts of the Soviet Union: ‘A new five-year plan – a five-year plan with magnificent building sites. Let us rebuild, raise and start 5900 enterprises between 1946 and 1950!’

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9 The New Military-Industrial Complex in Cheliabinsk during the Cold War

In the early Cold War period, Cheliabinsk had the appearance of a typical Soviet company town with several new centres for higher education in the natural sciences. The education of engineers and metallurgical specialists was linked to factories that were closely connected with the armed forces. The city was dominated by large metal and machinebuilding industrial plants that were largely or totally part of the military-industrial complex. A technical institute named the Mechanical and Technology Institute had been founded in 1943 (later becoming the Cheliabinsk Polytechnic Institute, ChPI) and had two faculties: one for tank technology and the other called the mechanical-technical faculty. The tank designer Nikolai Dukhov had received new awards in 1945 for his contributions and was promoted to the rank of majorgeneral in the Engineers. Dukhov had taught at the institute since 1943, where the foundation was laid for the education of new cadres for the tank industry. After graduation, the best engineers from the ChPI were distributed among the enterprises in the defence industry.1 Tankograd – a huge complex centred around the tractor factory with its suppliers in nearby machinery factories – is situated in the eastern part of Cheliabinsk. At the far end of the long Lenin Avenue (earlier called Spartacus Street), a monument was erected to honour the physicist Igor Kurchatov, one of the fathers of the Soviet atomic bomb. In the 1940s, Kurchatov and the nuclear physicists were in the nearby closed atomic city (in Russian Atomgrad) of Ozërsk (earlier known as Cheliabinsk-40) and at the Maiak plutonium works. Between these two points – Tankograd and Atomgrad – a kaleidoscopic representation of post-war development can be sketched. There were several factors that favoured the localisation of new defence industries to the Southern Urals. 255

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256 Tankograd

Figure 99 1950s).

The Polytechnic Institute (ChPI) in Cheliabinsk (photo from the

The working rhythm returned to normal. The reconstruction requirements were enormous. The public had no exact knowledge of how many people had died in the war but the demographic scars from it were visible everywhere. The proportion of women on the kolkhozy had risen substantially in the post-war years. Innumerable men had returned from the battlezone with permanent wounds and had to look for lighter jobs. However, there was a firm belief that the people would deal with the new reconstruction tasks. The military-economic preparedness planning that had been applied since the early 1930s seemed to be endorsed in all respects by World War II. Without those extensive preparations for a total war, the conversion of Soviet industry in 1941–1942 would hardly have been possible. Some of the victories on the battlefield may have been won at too high a price, given the lack of training and the loss of cadres in the Stalinist purges. However, the fact that the USSR withstood the unforeseen effects and the catastrophes in 1941 had convinced both the planners and the political leadership that the same priorities must now be made as before the war.

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The civil-military combination, which at the tractor factory had initially intended to produce caterpillar-tracked instead of wheel tractors, had been severely tested by the unexpected events during the war. The economic preparedness and planning that had permeated the Soviet industries in general had withstood the strain of the war against Germany. However, in the very last phase of the war, the United States’ use of atomic bombs against Japanese cities had raised new challenges for both the civilian and military planning authorities. One particular example may illustrate how the theory of economic preparedness could be implemented in Soviet practice after World War II. The USSR carried out rearmament during the Cold War but not just in the usual sense of the term. The production facilities at Cheliabinsk pharmaceutical factory should, according to the mobilisation plan for 1949, have had a so-called mobilisation capacity for the production of smoke and gas protection apparatus. According to an inspection, the factory had calculated how much raw material would be necessary in case of war and had also completed all the drawings and technical documentation. However, the necessary storage of these raw materials was insufficient and many machines that had been delivered and stored in separate workshops ran the risk of being spoilt over time. The total storage area was 1250 square metres, although at least another 1150 would be required. According to this inspection, the lack of mobilisation preparedness was due to the fact that no one definite person in the medical industries had responsibility in the last instance for the production of military goods. Thereafter, the Cheliabinsk regional director of the Allunion Ministry for Food and Other Reserves listed a number of urgent measures.2 In the field of theoretical nuclear physics, the scientists of the Soviet Union were on par with the leading ones in the world. However, in the first years of World War II no practical efforts were made to develop an atomic bomb; it seemed too costly and there was even uncertainty as to whether it would be possible to explode such a bomb fast enough to influence the ongoing war. However, when information reached Stalin from Soviet intelligence concerning the British and American nuclear project, he gave the green light to speed up research on the atomic bomb. When the US atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had proven the strength of this weapon, the decision was made to organise an intensive Soviet atomic project. One research centre was located in Arzamas-16 (a city called Sarov) in the European part of Russia, and another centre not far from Cheliabinsk. This was given the cover name Cheliabinsk-40, and a plutonium reactor was built there. Other parts

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of the atomic project were located in faraway places in the Urals under deep secrecy. These cities were closed off from the outside world, with special restrictions for all who lived there.3

The reconversion of the tractor factory after the war The factory encountered many transformation problems in the years that followed the end of World War II. To what extent was the factory to continue producing tanks? How much of the factory’s capacity should be devoted to tractor production? What division of labour should be established in relation to other factories?4 Reconversion entailed the factory restarting production of tractors for agriculture and continuing its production of tanks.5 The factory’s plan opted for a daily production of 50 S-80 tractors and five heavy IS-3 tanks, as well as production of V-11 engines and spare parts to these vehicles and the S-60 and S-65 tractors that had been produced until 1941. This implies an annual production of 15,600 tractors and 1560 heavy tanks.6 Some of the hectic pressure on the tractor plant during the reconstruction period is reflected in the long letter that Director Izaak Zaltsman sent directly to Stalin. In it he wrote, ‘Considering my responsibility for the fullfilment of the 1948 plan for heavy tanks, which is of such importance for the country, I am forced to turn directly to You and ask for Your instruction regarding the resolution of the Council of Ministers of 5 April this year with No. 1116-399s, that support for the Kirov Works must be given as soon as possible.’ The factory’s plan for 1948 included the production of 16,500 model S-80 tractors, almost twice as many as were produced in 1947. The average daily production was to be 64 tractors in the third quarter of the year and 76 tractors in the fourth quarter. This was far above the factory’s projected capacity of 50 tractors per day. Of the 164 new machines that the tractor factory had ordered, only 49 had been delivered. Furthermore, Zaltsman had asked for another 228 special and 110 universal machines. The building directorate at the Council of Ministers had fulfilled only one-fifth of the annual plan. The lack of decent housing made it impossible to employ more personnel and the lack of qualified workers was felt severely. ‘The enterprise struggles to use all its internal resources’, Zaltsman emphasised. ‘In order to expand capacity while production is still running, we have completely reconstructed the workshops and moved over 400 machines. More than 700 engineers and technicians have moved to production. They are instead

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introducing new technology and trying to increase productivity. Almost the entire workers’ collective is working overtime. The instrument workshop, repair workshop and other workshops have been used for the production of parts and details for tractors.’ In a directive of 18 October 1948 on ‘measures to improve productive actions at the factory’, Zaltsman demanded that the engineers and technicians should ‘avoid petty control over the overseers’ and other leaders of production. The degree of administration should diminish, the number of meetings should be reduced and every production section should receive more competent personnel with responsibility for each workshop. The number of orders from the factory managers should be reduced and more emphasis should be placed on checking how they were implemented. Zaltsman also indicated which courses for further training of 300 shop supervisors and 700 workers should be organised in the fourth quarter of the year. His directive also set tasks for the housing conditions and the dining halls at the factory.7 After the first reconversion at the end of the war, the Cheliabinsk factory produced the S-80 caterpillar tractor, which could also be used as a hauler for artillery guns. In addition, the factory also produced the V-11 and V-12 tank diesel engines and spare parts for all products. At the same time, a new S-64 caterpillar tractor was developed for both civilian and military use. Work continued on the IS-4 tank that had been sent for testing by the Soviet army; the first test runs showed that it was a failure.8 Production of the IS-4 started again in 1948. Ivan Nosenko, the minister for the transport workshops,

Figure 100 A machine and tractor station (MTS) was the formal owner of the agricultural machinery park.

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Figure 101 The S-80 caterpillar tractor, a new-generation tractor with many applications.

criticised ChTZ for several defects in the tanks. In February 1949, Zaltsman was ordered to stop production and correct all defective parts. Together with chief designer Kotin from the Leningrad Kirov Works, Zaltsman was to develop a new heavy tractor according to the technical and tactical specifications of the Army’s armour directorate.9 Consequently, only a few IS-4s were ever built and approved by the Soviet army. The drawings for this tank were to be placed in the mobilisation reserve and all efforts were to be concentrated on the 50-ton IS-5 heavy tank.10 After the war, Zhosef Kotin returned to the Kirov Works in Leningrad, where he directed the production of the IS-4 tanks (from 1947), PT-76 amphibious tanks and a number of other military transport vehicles. Kotin had achieved the rank of colonel-general in the engineering troops and had received many orders and medals for his accomplishments during the war. Some of his speeches to selected audiences and highly classified articles summed up his experience from battlefield confrontations with German tanks and set the broad lines for the future development of the Soviet tank industry.11 The IS-8 heavy tank, re-named the T-10, further developed the best traits of the IS-3. Despite its great armour protection, its high speed and powerful gun, the IS-3 had achieved limited success because of the

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commander’s limited vision. The T-10 tank had the same configuration for its chassis as its predecessor but with a 120 millimetre armour plate at the front, 80 on the sides and 220 in the cannon turret. Nonetheless, the total weight was only 50 tons and the T-10 tank remained in active use until 1995.12 It became urgently necessary to improve the cleaning of exhaust from the large factories in Cheliabinsk. For far too long, both household and industrial waste from the tractor factory, the iron and steel works, the Sergo Ordzhonikidze machine-building works and the sulphuric acid and the nickel factories had been dumped straight into the River Miass. Besides the obvious sanitary risks, the dumping of chemicals and phenols made it impossible to use the Miass as a fresh water reserve farther south in the Urals.13 During the war years, less attention was paid to how the tanks had been transported through the city, from the factory to the test and firing ranges. In July 1945 the city executive committee sent out directives regarding which roads could be used for heavy traffic, in order to stop the tearing up of the road surface and destruction of railway crossings.14

The labour force Demobilised soldiers returned from the fighting army and were met at railway stations around the country in solemn ceremonies. By February 1946 8005 demobilised individuals had returned to Cheliabinsk, including 3908 privates, 3504 sergeants and 588 officers. The authorities had received enquiries about 3863 families in which one or several members had been demobilised, 3333 families with members who had been reported dead in the war, 2469 families with close relatives who had become invalids and 1686 families that still had a member active in the Soviet army. Most questions concerned housing or changes of apartments, requisitions of new clothes (in 6020 cases) or shoes (3745 cases). The families received fuel (charcoal or firewood), housing, cash money aid or foodstuffs and basic utilities. The Leningraders wanted to return home as soon as possible. They even threatened to strike unless they were informed when their journey back would start. A secret report from the party committee at the tractor factory referred to rumours among workers about a new law that would give the workers the right to leave the factory of their own will. Other rumours were based on the fact that management had raised the issue of better housing and living support. This was interpreted as a sign that

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workers would be tied to the tractor factory in Cheliabinsk. Although the dormitories were lacking in certain areas, no one complained during war conditions. Many returned exhausted from their work shifts and hardly paid any attention to how badly the sites needed repairs. When the war was over, however, there was an increase in the number of complaints regarding bad dormitories, the lack of amusements and many other things.15 Many workers with families and children had to live in common rooms, where they might only have a corner to themselves. Workers’ wives often wanted to find work at the factories but did not dare leave their belongings in the dormitory.16 There were many cases of evacuated workers and their families living as tenants for a period of time, only to learn that they had to leave their flat when the soldiers returned. Some workers even lived in barns. During the summer of 1945, many meetings were held to convince the Leningrad, Kharkov and Stalingrad workers – 30,000 out of the 45,000 employed at ChTZ – about why they were still needed in Cheliabinsk.17 Those workers who agreed to stay on at Cheliabinsk factories were promised their own flats. However, many supervisors hesitated to encourage such an initiative since they knew that the management would not be able to fulfil such promises. By the summer of 1945 there were approximately 250,000 prisoners of war in ten camps across the Urals. The State Defence Committee, GKO, on 16 and 29 December 1944 had made it legal to intern German civilians as labour in the Soviet economy. Enterprises in the leading people’s commissariats were to receive some 140,000 interned Germans. In accordance with a GKO decree of 3 February 1945 the 1st and 2nd Belorussian Army Groups and the 1st Ukranian Army Group were to arrest and inter all physically able German men aged 17 to 50 years and send them to the NKVD camps for POWs and to labour battalions.18 The Soviet lack of manpower after the war led to more intensive use of POWs and Gulag prisoners at the tractor factory in the latter part of the 1940s. The Ministry of Internal Affairs, MVD, organised a penal labour colony in connection with the factory. However, since its 2000 prisoners were already living in extremely cramped conditions, the MVD, could not satisfy the request of the ChTZ to transfer another 1000 prisoners to Cheliabinsk until the factory’s management had built more barracks for them.19 In the spring of 1948, Zaltsman had requested that the Hungarian and Romanian POWs who had been repatriated be replaced by other kontingenty of either POWs or Gulag prisoners. Regular recruitment of youths from the trade schools could satisfy only a small fraction of the

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demand for labour. The Ministry of Internal Affairs refused to send more POWs to Cheliabinsk but the number of Gulag prisoners was authorised to rise to 3900, provided that the factory could assure a sufficiently large living area for them. The ministry was also prepared to exchange the exhausted prisoners who were unable to work with healthier ones. In a report earlier in 1948, Zaltsman had written to Lavrentii Beria and requested that more prisoners be sent to the factory. The answer was that the Gulag camp at the Kirov Works in Cheliabinsk had total living space of 5500 square metres for its 3425 prisoners, only 2740 of whom were regularly working at the factory. The others were too weak or starved to work. The average living space of 1.6 square metre per prisoner was less than the stipulated 2 so the MVD asked Zaltsman to build more camp barracks to accommodate the requested increase of 2125 prisoners. The MVD directorate in Cheliabinsk also lacked the resources required to provide a strong enough guard for these kontingenty in three shifts.20 Special kontingenty at the Kirov Works in Cheliabinsk, as of 10 April 1949 1. Forced labour prisoners from Camp Unit No. 3 were used for the following types of work: Metallurgical workshop 1460 Loading and unloading at the railway workshop’s storage and delivery sections 505 Maintenance work at the factory 65 Building and sawing at the factory’s reconstruction unit 49 Total Gulag prisoners 2059 2. Prisoners of war from Camp No. 2: Workshops for tractor production Copying and making wooden models Engine construction Maintenance workshops Assembly and building Repair works and maintenance Loading and unloading Total POWs

796 121 36 109 23 216 54 1355

Source: OGAChO, R-792, op. 16, d. 90, l. 32–33. In a report of 24 October Deputy Director Safronov mentioned that 2045 POWs were employed at ChTZ. The distribution among the workshops was essentially the same as above.

In 1949 5593 German POWs who were employed by the Ministry of Transport Machine-building Industry were to be released (1237 in the first quarter of the year, 1516 in the second, 1380 in the third and 1460 in the last). With the exception of the school buildings that had been temporarily used as dwellings for the German POWs, all camp

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buildings and special hospitals were to be given to the Ministry of the Interior, which was to place work-fit Gulag prisoners in the enterprises that had previously used German POWs. Starting in 1949 the Ministry of Labour Reserves was systematically to educate young people in those professions and to those enterprises.21

Housing conditions The evacuation of factories during the war meant that the general city plan from the mid-1930s was no longer relevant. On 16 January 1946 the Soviet government issued a decree regarding ‘residential and public buildings, cultural and welfare activities in the city of Cheliabinsk’, which included guidelines for the city’s architecture. The architecture committee was to formulate a new long-term plan for the city’s further expansion and also to propose a more detailed short-term plan for the next few years. An area equivalent to 11,000 square metres was to be paved or asphalted, 9000 pathways were to be asphalted, electric lights were to be installed and 60,000 trees planted along the streets. Two new parks were to be laid out by the River Miass and the city’s circus. In general, the authorities were instructed to conduct extensive cleaning

Figure 102 A recreation room for young workers at the tractor factory.

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Employees with families living uncomfortably

25,300 3962 1635 2658 8351 3401 1214 5171

Factory

ChTZ No. 200 No. 255 UralZiS No. 78 No. 114 No. 259 No. 66

9000 – – – – – – –

Of which: dug-outszemljanki

Table 8 Housing conditions for employees in Cheliabinsk

9900 2500 1635 2658 8333 2531 1173 2171

Barracks 5700 51 – – 18 26 36 –

Basements & corridors

700 1402 – – – 841 – 3000

Others living uncomfortably

45,700 2954 – 5429 10,149 831 4299 7199

Living in comfort

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up operations throughout the city and to drain and then reclaim the marshlands surrounding Cheliabinsk.22 There was an even greater shortage of living space after the war than there had been in the 1930s, even for the employees of the militaryindustrial complex. The data on these factories suggest that the situation outside the priority defence sector may well have been even worse. However, no fundamental changes in the housing conditions were possible in the immediate aftermath of the war because building resources were directed to the new atomic compounds in the Cheliabinsk region. The following table illustrates the living conditions at the ‘number factories’ in the defence industry. 23 Director Zaltsman frequently asked the centre in Moscow for more budgetary means with which to alleviate this situation. The tractor factory had expanded its production capacity more than twice since 1940, its workshop floor had grown in area 1.6 times and the number of employees 1.9 times, yet the total living space had increased by only 1.32 times. The average living space per person was a mere 4.5 square metres, compared to the minimum norm of 9. In November of 1948, 33,193 persons – 44 per cent of everyone at ChTZ – lived in substandard conditions; 5054 people still lived in barracks that had been built in 1930 and should have been torn down many years before, 3130 lived in basements and more than 10,000 in various annexes, 1677 had found small rooms in clubs and by laundry shops, while almost 9000 people lived in dug-outs they had made themselves. In the building plan for 1949, the council of ministers (Sovnarkom) – that is, the government – had only provided funds for new dwellings with a total area of 11,000 square metres. Zaltsman requested that at least 25–30,000 square metres be built in 1949 and the following years, in order to at least solve the worst housing problems. His main argument was that ‘the serious disproportion between the factory’s capacity and its residential conditions’ had made it impossible to recruit permanent qualified workers.24 In the immediate post-war years, over 13,000 workers (mostly young people) lived in dormitories with two-layer wooden berths or in decaying houses or barracks. Their average living space per person was 1.5–2 square metres. The situation improved only marginally over the next few years. They were permitted to move into modern, well-equipped dormitories with at least 4.5–5 square metres per person and no more than six people in a room. By the early 1950s, only 6000 younger workers were still living in the worse type of dormitories. To avoid factory workers having to spend two to three hours looking for bread and other goods, Zaltsman sent a request to the minister and

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deputy minister of the transport machinery industry, Ivan Nosenko and Mosin, that ChTZ be allowed to organise the sale of bread and foodstuff in the dining halls of the factory, and that the ChTZ should take over this activity from the city trade department (gortorgotdel).25 The post-war situation was desperate, both because so little had been built before 1939 and because demand for housing had increased drastically due to the population that had been evacuated to Cheliabinsk. Between 20 and 80 per cent of people involved in the arms industries were in need of new housing. This gives an idea of what the situation must have been like for enterprises in sectors that had lower priority than the defence industry. During the first decade after the war, the factories were allotted budgetary subsidies with which they could build new houses. Many of these plans were not fulfilled, however, either due to a scarcity of building materials or because there was still a need to prioritise production. From the late 1940s onwards, enormous resources were spent on establishing ‘atomic cities’ and their specific infrastructure and high-security regimes.

The end of the career of the ‘Kings of Tanks’ The career of Isaak Zaltsman came to a sudden end when he was removed from his post by a decision of the party’s central committee on 11 July 1949. The official reason was that his attitudes to his employees was brusque, tactless and unworthy of a party member (raznuzdannochuliganskoe, nepartijnoie otnosjenie). The explanation continued that Zaltsman had failed to mobilise the factory collective in the three years following the war.26 This alluded to criticism within the local party committee, which surfaced in 1946, that Zaltsman had continued the same harsh style that had been commonplace during wartime conditions. In 1946, Zaltsman had been criticised by the local party organisation for his raw, domineering style and his use of swear words and threats to obtain results. This was, however, only a formalistic reason that lacked foundation in the real situation in the Communist Party. Zaltsman was actually held in high esteem among engineers and technicians, as well as among the workers, not the least for his frank and straightforward leadership style during the war years. He had never set unrealistic demands and, as soon as circumstances allowed in 1943, he had set aside money for better working and living conditions.27 A more likely reason for Zaltsman’s removal was that he had refused to denounce his former colleagues in Leningrad who were the targets of the first post-war purges. Aleksei Kuznetsov and Nikolai Voznesenskii

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and several others were arrested during this ‘Leningrad affair’, allegedly for wrongdoing during the war but more likely as a result of Stalin’s struggle against independent groups in Leningrad. For his refusal to denounce the arrested party members, Zaltsman was accused of defending ‘enemies of the people’. He was dismissed as director of the tractor factory but not excluded from the Communist Party. He was not formally demoted from his rank as general and kept his three Lenin orders – the Suvorov, Kutuzov and Hero of Labour orders. Stalin is said to have asked how Zaltsman had started his career. When he was informed that it had been as a workshop overseer, Stalin exclaimed, ‘Well, send him to some place where he can be an overseer!’ Zaltsman was sent to a small enterprise in the city of Murom (300 kilometres east of Moscow). The managers there soon realised that the demoted Zaltsman was a liability, a personality who could not be hidden away. Isaak Zaltsman was known by the workers as the legend behind the wartime success in ‘Tankograd’ and workers would gather around to hear his stories. At parades and meetings, he used to wear all his orders and medals. Naturally, the public paid more attention to Zaltsman than they did to the local party leadership in the small city. He did not receive any tasks that matched his capability and he soon managed to be transferred to a machine-building enterprise in Oriol. In 1955, all of the accusations against him were retracted and he was able to return to Leningrad where he was appointed head of a new experimental factory attached to the grand Kirov Works. Isaak Zaltsman never returned to Cheliabinsk. Neither the party nor the tractor factory invited him or commemorated his achievements at the great anniversary celebrations of Victory Day in 1955, 1960 or 1965 or thereafter. This was despite the fact that few people could claim to have made a contribution that was as significant to the victory over Nazi Germany as Isaak Zaltsman. In 1984, the Communist Party’s journal, Kommunist, published an article by Zaltsman entitled ‘To remember the lessons from Tankograd’.28 Zaltsman remained energetic and worked on the development of new tanks right up until his death on 17 July 1988.29 A memorial plaque was finally placed in his honour near the entrance to the factory.

Youth protests in post-war Cheliabinsk The mentality of the Soviet people changed in many respects during World War II. In particular, it has been emphasised how the soldiers at

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the front (frontoviki) had experienced such drastic contrasts from their pre-war civilian lives in the USSR that they could now be characterised as a new social category. The former soldiers displayed their temper, showed greater self-confidence and responsibility than the generation that had led the social construction in the 1930s in line with the party ideology. These new attitudes were frequently on display in meetings in and around Cheliabinsk. Questions to lecturers about post-war development and the conditions in Western Europe bear witness to a relative openness and a critical attitude.30 There is no reason to exaggerate or underestimate how social problems could actually be hotly debated in public even in the Stalinist society. Material needs, technical mistakes and social problems were discussed, just as they had been in the 1920s and 1930s, in the newspapers and journals and on general meetings. In Cheliabinsk, the post-war period witnessed several campaigns to expand cultural life and amusements in the city. The industrial enterprises started teams in such popular sports as football and ice hockey. During this time, had Zaltsman initiated the founding of the ‘Tractor’ ice hockey team and saw to it that a winter stadium was built nearby. Towards the end of the 1940s, the biggest sport hall in the city was built by the Tractor Factory. The most popular summer sports were football, volleyball and track and field events, and skiing was popular during the winter. In summer, excursions were organised for large groups of factory workers and their family members to the lakes and mountains in the area. Every Saturday, the culture and recreation park organised theme evenings for young people, with lectures, amateur theatre shows and performances by sportsmen and concerts by classical and dance orchestras.31 Zaltsman’s time as director of the tractor factory is also linked to the construction of summer houses (dachas) and boarding houses along the Lake Smolino. In the post-war period, the ‘Kirovets’ cinema was built and the ChTZ theatre received new auditoriums. Zaltsman also supported the building of artists’ and music studios and a children’s park in the Traktorostroitel’nyj rajon (today known as Tereshkova Park, named after the first female cosmonaut).32 The ideological activities arranged by the factory’s party committee did not engage as many people as one might imagine, given how the Soviet system tends to be described in the West nowadays. The circles that studied the history of the Communist Party and meetings for activists in the party and the communist youth organisation

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Figure 103 The Palace of Culture (Dvorets Kultury) at the iron and steel works in Cheliabinsk had over 800 clubs for various leisure activities in the 1950s.

had a relatively modest and low participation rate among the workers and youths at the tractor factory. On the other hand, the Communist Party was the organiser of all activities in the Palace of Culture of the factory. The Communist Party had the final say on any attempt at independent organisation outside the communist youth organisations. Students at the Pedagogical Institute in Cheliabinsk had published a newspaper entitled ‘Student’, which contained only poems and essays, but it was soon prohibited. 33 As a result, four students – O.L. Plebeiskii, G.L. Sorokin, A.I. Levitskii and B.Ia. Bruk – decided to publish an underground version of the newsletter, which they called ‘Snow Wine’ (Snezhnoe vino). Although they used the aesthetics of Russian symbolism, the secret police and the protocols carried out by the security bodies felt that the journal was merely ‘anti-Soviet, political propaganda’. Only two issues of ‘Snow Wine’ were published and they contained a few blank pages on which readers could write their own commentaries. The few copies of ‘Snow Wine’ that have been preserved in the archives contain negative commentaries against the ‘romantics’ who published the journal.

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In accordance with the infamous Paragraph 58, the editor of the journal was condemned for ‘spreading anti-Soviet propaganda’ and was sentenced to prison and camp terms of various durations.34 Students who chose to form study groups adopted much from Marx, Engels and Lenin. They contrasted the descriptions from official propaganda with what they could observe, particularly during the severe hunger of 1946 when families were starving, even in the cities. The police in Cheliabinsk found a group of teenagers, schoolchildren in the 7th grade who had produced leaflets that read ‘Down with the government!’ and had glued them to the walls of houses. Members of some youth groups in Moscow and Leningrad were harshly sentenced to 10–25 years in the Gulag. Three students from Moscow were even given the death penalty. The authorities strove to give as little publicity as possible to these affairs in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and they can be analysed only from pre-trial and court protocols. In Cheliabinsk, the police found a group of students led by I.S. Dinaburg, G.F. Khenchik and G.I. Bondarev that called itself the ‘Idealistic Communist Youth’ (Idejnaia kommunisticheskaia molodëzh). They were accused of organising meetings in which anti-Soviet opinions were systematically formulated in order to combat the established order. However, it is doubtful if the terminology of the court sentence in any real way reflects the actual discussions that took place during these meeting and what they actually debated. The NKVD-MVD had a long tradition of fabricating protocols, so the statements in the sentence must be considered to be unreliable. This characterisation is based only on the excerpts and summaries that the Ministry of the Interior, MVD, chose to reproduce. G.I. Bondarev and others said in their interrogations that the Communist Party had turned into a petty-bourgeois party, had betrayed Marxism and lacked ideas. ‘The party follows an incorrect line because the working class is essentially kept in an oppressed, exploited condition.’ The disillusionment among the students – as far as can be discerned – was often expressed in Marxist ideological terms. According to the secret police investigation, the group’s credo was as follows: ‘The party and communist youth organisations have been infected by a philistine spirit. The leading groups in the party and state apparatus constitute a new ruling class in the USSR that mercilessly exploits the working class. A revolutionary leap is necessary for the working class to take back power. To accomplish this, we are formulating a theory and looking for ways to implement it. Our theory is a continuation and development of Marx’s and Lenin’s teachings’. The three students and their relations at the Cheliabinsk Energy-Technical

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Figure 104 Gymnastics.

Institute, V.I. Bondareva and R.N. Gil’vidis, were sentenced for their activity in this discussion group. Members of similar youth groups at the time were arrested in Moscow and other cities, apparently with the ‘prophylactic purpose’ of deterring others from independent thinking and activities that were not officially controlled. Historian P.R. Rozhdestvenskii stressed that it is difficult to delineate these spontaneously formed youth groups in the Soviet Union. On the one hand, only a few sentences and deliberations were recorded at higher levels in the secret police, while on the other, numerous legends and rumours have circulated among the people. Rozhdestvenskii considered that it was mostly not a question of youth organisations with political ambitions. They were ascribed political significance only because the authorities would not tolerate any independent activity.35 The terminology used by the students showed them to have thought mostly in terms of the official ideology, and to have discussed the obvious contradictions between the proclaimed goals and the real situation in the city.36

The closed atomic cities in the Cheliabinsk region The significance and potential of the Urals as a defence-industrial centre had become evident during World War II. One of the lessons of the war was that the USSR had a geostrategic advantage in locating its heavy

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and defence industry in the Urals, far from the directions of attack of land or air forces. As regards conventional weapons, industry in the Urals remained practically unassailable. This situation only changed with the development of rocket technology and new atomic weapons. From the 1950s onwards, in the worst-case scenario of an atomic war, whole cities could be exterminated in one single blow. To a certain extent, the USSR even adapted to this threat by building new factories underground, albeit at extremely high cost. As had been the case when the iron and steel works were built in Cheliabinsk during the war, Gulag prisoners did some of the construction work at the plutonium works in Ozërsk. Other elements of the construction were performed by the regular building battalions of the Soviet Army.37 The preconditions for high-tech military-industrial units in the city of Cheliabinsk and the nearby closed cities in the Urals had therefore emerged during the war. Important parts of the Soviet atomic project were located in the nearby cities of Ozërsk, Snezhinsk and Trëkhgornoe, while rocket production was located in the city of Miass. The Cheliabinsk Polytechnic Institute had its higher education and research linked to the military industry.38 The closed cities some tens of kilometres from Cheliabinsk were shrouded in extreme secrecy, even in comparison with other Soviet enterprises. Two centres for the atomic project were located a great

Figure 105 A dance in the Palace of Culture in Uvelsky in the 1950s.

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Figure 106 Miners in Miass in July 1950 sign the Stockholm petition against nuclear weapons.

distance from each other – Arzamas-16 (Sarov) and Cheliabinsk-40 (Ozërsk) – and their research and experiment agendas were coordinated. The first atomic reactor was built in Cheliabinsk-40 for the production of weapons-grade plutonium. The entire Soviet atomic bomb project was led by physicist Igor Kurchatov (1903–1960), who lived in Cheliabinsk-40 for long periods and had the ultimate responsibility for designing the first Soviet atomic bombs. Although the Soviet atomic scientists had their own ideas about how this weapon would be constructed, it was decided at highest level – by Stalin – that the first bomb must be a copy of the successful American bomb. As a result, Kurchatov had privileged access to all Soviet intelligence material concerning the American atomic project. The importance of this material cannot be over-emphasised; without the corresponding state-of-the-art physical science and technological competence, the Russians would not have been able to interpret the intelligence documents. Within a few years they were able to test their own types of atomic bombs without the risk of having a strategic disadvantage. In August 1949, a special train left Cheliabinsk-40, escorted in front and behind by other military trains. It enjoyed green lights along its entire journey to Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan, where the first Soviet atomic bomb was detonated on 29 August. The successful detonation was not announced by the Soviet authorities. Only after American surveillance stations had noted heightened radioactive radiation in the

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atmosphere did the USSR acknowledge that it had tested an atomic bomb. The Soviet Union had managed to develop this high-tech weapon much earlier than the experts in the American administration had expected and this development upset the strategic planning of the United States in the first phase of the Cold War. However, it would take some more time before the Americans realised which of their earlier assumptions of the Soviet economy had caused these incorrect predictions. Nikolai Dukhov was not only a tank designer but, in 1948, was also appointed chief designer at the KB-11 design bureau in Arzamas-16. His exact role in the atomic project there has not been declassified. It

Figure 107 Igor Kurchatov, one of the ‘fathers’ of the Soviet atomic bomb and chief designer at the nuclear reactor in Cheliabinsk-40.

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Figure 108 ‘Is Stalin with Us?’

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is indicative of his success, however, that he was later appointed chief designer and deputy director of one of the most prestigious research institutes for automation on aeroplanes. He died from severe radiation wounds in Moscow on 5 May 1964.39 Much research remains to be done into how the region developed into a new type of military-industrial complex during the Cold War in the 1950s and 1960s. A rocket industry was established in Miass, with a special design bureau for missiles based on submarines. In fact, it was only recently discovered in the archives that ChTZ was a sub-contracted enterprise for the nuclear weapons industry.40 Cheliabinsk continued its modernisation during the remainder of the Soviet epoch. The city’s technical institutes and research centres expanded and, in certain sectors, were among the most prestigious in the country, with links to the military-industrial complex. In a somewhat kaleidoscopic way, we can now imagine how fast the changes came. We can see the evolution from Tankograd – an intensively, pulsating, complicated industrial site with its surrounding barracks and shanty towns that offered a few hours of rest for the city’s residents and evacuated workers in the 1940s – to a typical Soviet ‘company town’. The most striking lack of housing was eliminated in the 1950s with the hurried construction of five-storey houses and then, in the 1960s, more comfortable multi-storey buildings. Visitors to Cheliabinsk today can still glimpse some of the better features of Soviet everyday life, such as the three 50-metre swimming pools with their sold out one-hour sessions. In the winter, one can rent skis for a modest sum in the leisure and culture park. The traditional programmes of the dramatic, opera and children’s theatres have been supplemented with cinema palaces that look like those in the West. Revolution Square in the city centre, which became superfluous for parades, was dug up in the late 1990s to make room for an underground mall with shops directed at general public. Nearby, exclusive boutiques with famous European brands have opened for the nouveaux riches, who usually make appointments to shop individually. What was once the downtrodden, noisy and dirty street – Kirovka – has been renovated into a pedestrian thoroughfare, and its buildings from the first half of the 20th century have been given the status of historical monuments. There are many examples of openness and eagerness to tackle even the hardest question of the recent past. An ultra-modern building near the Miass River houses a new historical museum, the permanent and temporary exhibitions of which provide a broad panorama of the region’s multi-faceted history.

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10 Historical Memory and Research in Today’s Cheliabinsk

Figure 109 The ‘Tankist’ statue by I. Golovnitskii on Kirov Street – ‘To the voluntary tank soldiers’.

The Russian Civil War was ignited by local skirmishes in Cheliabinsk in June 1918. A year later, one of the decisive battles between the Red Army and the Siberian White Army took place there. From the 1930s onwards, tractors produced in Cheliabinsk had a crucial role in the mechanisation of labour at kolkhozy all over the Soviet Union. During World War II, the city was popularised as ‘Tankograd’, a term which in 278

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itself showed the close links between the fighting armies and the home front. These are merely a few historical hubs in which Cheliabinsk as a Soviet company town played a central role during Russia’s 20th century. However, from the perspective of the people in Cheliabinsk, history takes on quite a different shape and is much more multi-faceted. During the forced industrialisation, people from many different parts of the Soviet Union came to live in Cheliabinsk. Some stayed merely for a couple of years, others for several generations. During the war years of 1941–1945, tens of thousands of people were evacuated to Cheliabinsk from Leningrad, Kharkov and other cities. At the same time, industrial factories were transported from the near-front areas in the European parts of the USSR. Many of the people evacuated chose to stay in Cheliabinsk and the surrounding province after the war. The Soviet Germans who had been sent as forced workers to build the Iron and Steel Works, however, did not have any choice but to stay in Cheliabinsk until the late 1950s when their civil rights were re-established. They lived as ‘special colonists’ in the Metallurgical City district, the houses and enterprises of which they had built themselves. To a lesser degree it was obligatory for most of the Soviet population to accept the job to which they were appointed after graduation from institutes and universities. All of these changes in the population dynamics point at similarities between Cheliabinsk and other Soviet cities as ‘melting-pots’ for people with very different backgrounds; thus, to study and analyse this social and economic history has been a priority task for historians and archivists in the city and the region. Several monuments on squares and in parks in Cheliabinsk commemorate the soldiers of the Great Patriotic War 1941–1945. The Tomb of the Unknown Soldiers is placed in a square between the Main Post Office and Kommuna Street. The statue ‘The Tank Soldier’ is placed a few metres away on the same square, with an inscription that honours the Cheliabinsk people who fought in the armoured divisions that were set up in the city in 1942–1945. The volunteers from Cheliabinsk were part of the 62nd Urals Armoured Corps that first got a baptism of fire during the intensive Battle of Kursk in the summer of 1943, and thereafter liberated Oriol and Belgorod. In 1944, the same corps took part in the liberation of L’vov and by late April 1945 reached its battle position for the final assault on Berlin for an attack to take Potsdam. On Komsomol Square in another part of Cheliabinsk, one of the last IS-3 tanks produced during the war has been placed on a pedestal, with inscriptions to honour the heroes at the home front.

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280 Tankograd

Russia’s collective memory has, of course, deep imprints from the defence against the Nazi German, Italian and other armies during 1941– 1945. There are not many themes in recent history that have been so intensively under discussion in recent years as World War II. This is true not only for Russia as a whole, but also for Cheliabinsk. In recent years, new documents have shown how the Cheliabinsk region was indirectly affected by the German-Soviet war. The archivists have collected data for a martyrology with the names of over 150,000 fallen soldiers from the region. This number should be compared to the population of the province (oblast) in the late 1930s of slightly fewer than three million people. What is not generally acknowledged today in the West is that it is not only Stalinist repression and terror that left its traces in the collective memory, but that the suffering during the war period did so to an even greater extent. It goes without saying that the history of World War II both the battles against the German Wehrmacht and the struggle at the home front have an important place in the school programmes. In comparison to Germany’s war campaigns in the West, the occupation of parts of the USSR was part of a larger scheme of extermination warfare (Vernichtungskrieg), in particular against all Soviet Jews but even against others in the civilian populatation. Hitler’s schemes for ‘Operation Barbarossa’ included the extermination of all Soviet Jews, but also the mass shooting of Communist Party members and a planned elimination by starvation and other means of millions of Russians, Ukrainians and other peoples.1 Until the perestroika and glasnost period, the USSR can be described as a ‘closed society’. In Cheliabinsk – ‘Tankograd’ and later ‘Atomgrad’ – this secrecy was considered as a precondition for coping with the military and strategic challenges of the Cold War. Nonetheless, from the 1960s, Soviet historical and economic literature did shed light on certain aspects of the Soviet industrial landscape, but much more remained unclear and therefore heftily debated in the West concerning the Soviet military-industrial complex.2 This recent history was no less obfuscated for the Russians themselves, not the least as people lost trust in the official historiography. The contemporary history of the country was re-written on several occasions, evidently to suit the changing political leaderships. It is probable that as the newly elected general secretary of the Communist Party Mikhail Gorbachev hoped to strengthen the party-state system by allowing a serious debate on the ‘blank spots’ in the recent history. However, the massive publications during glasnost of the tragic history

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of the Soviet people had the opposite effect. Most Russian historians and many teachers were not at all prepared to discuss, even less to write and teach on, the formerly taboo events. The first efforts to put history’s records straight was undertaken by the journalists at the newspapers Cheliabinskii rabochii and Vechernii Cheliabinsk. These papers were full of articles on the fate of the recently rehabilitated party members, specialists and workers who fell victims to the Stalinist terror, and lists of ordinary people who suffered under the collectivisation and dekulakisation campaigns in the 1930s. At historians’ conferences and teachers’ seminars during the first half of the 1990s serious efforts were made to liberate historiography from the impact of omissions and distortions, and to establish new principles for historical research and pedagogics. Not only have the state and party archives of the former Soviet Union opened their collections to researchers but – concerning many aspects of contemporary Russian history – printed source volumes also now give the general reader access to documents that used to be hidden even from the elites of Soviet society.3 Since the 1990s, scholars in Cheliabinsk have studied the suffering of the peasantry during the Civil War, the forced collectivisation of the countryside, the dekulakisation and the establishment of special settlements for dispossessed peasants in the region without the formerly obligatory propagandistic theses upheld by the Communist Party. Igor Narskii has described in vivid detail how the peasantry in the Urals coped with and survived the hardships of the Civil War, as the political regimes changed several times.4 Special mention can be made of the works by Aleksandr Bazarov.5 Tatiana Slavko has analysed the stages of the expropriation and deportation of kulaks in the Urals.6 Viktor Kirillov defended his doctorate thesis on, and has since that written several monographs on, the repression waves against various social groups in the Central and Northern Urals, and also initiated a joint database program to link similar projects in other parts of Russia.7 M.A. Fel’dman has analysed the industrialisation of the 1930s in a broad comparative perspective – its links to and parallels with earlier periods in Russia as well as its specific traits. His assessments of the actual progress, as compared to the previous tendentiously proclaimed success story, as well as or the human costs of the forced industrialisation are characteristic of the interpretations that new archival materials have made possible.8 The general ambitions to interprete Russia’s history in the paradigm of modernity and modernisation was at the centre of a conference in the city in 2004.9 In Cheliabinsk, just as in many other parts of Russia, public interest in historical questions was particularly high during the first years

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after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Historians and history teachers lived through a crisis period when they could no longer teach or study according to the old paradigm, but had not yet found a new, solid basis for other interpretations of Russia’s recent history. However, they strove to establish a reliable new source basis to assess their history, primarily by searching for solid documentation or trustworthy witnesses. There was a widespread scepticism against new narratives and an overly strong emphasis on written documents or oral records, that would leave each individual free to come to his or her own interpretations and conclusions. The archivists in Cheliabinsk’s United State Regional Archive (abbreviated OGAChO) have likewise compiled a series of such documentary volumes that give at least a solid introduction for renewed studies of the recent past.10 They have also published a chronological source volume that gives new insight into the history of OGAChO itself.11 Historiography in the Cheliabinsk region initially concentrated on such topics that had been absolutely out of touch, called the ‘white spots in history’ by the party’s general secretary Mikhail Gorbachev. Among such topics that were studied for the first time ever was the role of forced labour in the industrialisation and construction of factories in the 1930s. The deported kulaks lived in extremely hard conditions in half-dugouts or barracks. Such facts might have been remembered well

Figure 110 The History Museum in Cheliabinsk was inaugurated in 2006.

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by the older population in Cheliabinsk, but found no place in the history books until the late 1980s. The same is true concerning the Soviet Germans in Cheliabinsk; it was comman knowledge that a relatively large proportion of the inhabitants in the Metallurgical City districts were Germans. However, no one had written their story, how they were deported and how they worked under wartime discipline in the defence industry in Cheliabinsk during World War II. On these and many other topics, journalists and publicists wrote much in the early 1990s. In the city’s newspapers, long lists with the names of victims of political repression in the 1930s were published. In a few cases, it was possible also to include a person’s life story, and these investigations step by step opened up new discussion among historians.12 However, on other topics in Soviet Russian history, there evolved a consensus concerning the growth rates and long-term patterns of development. The undeniable success story of the Soviet Union seems to have been based on the combination of mass elite and education from the late 1920s onwards. In the early 1960s, it was a common argument in the USA that one of the major factors behind the successful Soviet space programme was their all-encompassing school system. The Soviet welfare system also showed similarities with the Western European social democratic and social liberal models.13 The history of the Cheliabinsk Tractor Factory had been described only in popular chronicle form (Russian Letopis) in the Soviet period. Although that book was rich in detail, the absence of any footnote references made it impossible to decide what was crude fact and what was fiction. That many sombre sides of the factory’s history had been left out or censored proved to be true when in the early 1990s the main author, Leonid Komarov, published a new history of the tractor factory, Russia had no tanks. In that book, he not only dug deep on the effects of the Great Terror in 1937 – 1938 but also more realistically described the production conditions in the early 1930s and during the war years.14 The historians Vladimir Novosiolov and Vitalii Tolstikov, who both have lived in the closed atomic citi of Snezhinsk (Cheliabinsk-70) have written very informative books on the atomic bomb projects of the 1940s and 1950s. They have also, based on archival documents, described the severe accidents in the atomic cities in the 1950s. 15 Many Russian historians in the 1990s published new interpretations of Soviet history which adapted the classical theory of totalitarianism. Their works show how Russian historians, since the breakdown of the Marxist paradigm in the 1980s, have assimilated frames of interpretations and general theories in common with their Western colleagues.

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Some adopted the theory of totalitarianism in its classical form from Hannah Arendt and Zbigniew Brzezinski, while others regarded the 1930s as ‘the Stalinist form of modernisation’, with more or less the same ambitions as the rest of the world since the late 1800s. Aleksandr Bakunin, at the Urals section of the Academy of Sciences, was one of the most prolific proponents of this theory as a substitute for the earlier Marxist paradigm.16 Within this current, it was also possible to advance comparative analyses of various aspects in the Stalinist and Nazist states; however, this was more for highlightning of similaries and differences than for politicised purposes (as is often the case in Western Europe).17 Historians have also adopted a more empiricist approach and study’everyday history’ (istoriia povsednevnoi zhizhni). Many of the exiled Russian historians of the 1920s and 1930s have today re-entered the scientific discussions among historians. An example of this renewed interest in the Russian diaspora is a survey article by E.E. Ivanov and M.A. Kudinov on how Russian émigré writers, such as the ‘national Bolshevik’ N. Ustrialov and the ultra-conservative groups in France in the 1930s, assessed the forced industrialisation in the USSR.18 In a general sense, much that was written in the 1990s can be sorted under the heading ‘coming to terms’ with ‘Russia’s tragic past’. However, many scholars have widened their interest from events that used to be taboo, from studies of the Stalinist repression to broad analyses of the whole social formation.19 The textbooks by Boris Lichman, at the Urals State University in Ekaterinburg, enable students to advance their own ‘multi-conceptual interpretations’ of any aspect of Russia’s history. The students get examples of the main interpretations concerning industrialisation and collectivisation, the question of Stalin’s personality and responsibility for repressions and the main features during World War II. 20 Such textbooks train future history teachers to discuss with the students how different ideologies, religions and world views may influence a historical narrative. Students are trained to discern the various interpretations of Russia’s long history through Orthodox Christian, materialist (Marxist), liberal and ‘technocratic’ prisms. 21 In Lichman’s view there are no ways to promote one and only one ‘objective theory of history’. While the separate facts must be solidly established (in documents or otherwise), the interpretations are always dependent on subjective factors. The goal is that students will master several theories or conceptions, and develop their own scientific research methods so that they can argue for a chosen theory, but also find the strong and weak aspects in any other. An example of such an approach is found in an article by S.E. Alekseev and V.D.

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Kamynin on the Soviet industrialisation as ‘the object of a multi-conceptual analysis’. 22 The new historiography has evidently also changed teaching of Russia’s 20th century in the schools in Cheliabinsk, as well as everywhere else in Russia.23 During my research visits at OGAChO, I have been fortunate to discuss the challenges for teachers in the basic schools, in particular for the 9th to 11th classes when the Soviet period is the prime subject.24 It is worth noting that many young people in Cheliabinsk, as well as in other parts of Russia, take part in countrywide competition for the best historical essays. The human rights organisation Memorial each year invites school children in the upper classes to enter such a competition, on a given theme each year, but under the general heading Man in history – Russias – the 20th century?.25 Some of the prize-winning essays from Cheliabinsk bear witness to the attitudes and strivings of the new generation. From School No 59 in the tractor factory district in Cheliabinsk, Ilya Polezhaikin wrote an archive-based essay on the role of forced labour at ChTZ during the war years.26 Ekaterina Burkova and Nataliia Aksënova studied the fate of German, Hungarian and other prisoners of war in the POW camps of the city, and how the foreigners had been directed to various workplaces in the factories. There essay was actually a pioneering study based on recently declassified materials in OGAChO. They managed to present the first estimate of how many of the POWs had actually been used in industry and the mortality rates during the war years, as well as their further fate until they were repatriated. This research project was supported by their teacher, Marina Salmina’s, own investigation of the POWs buried on a decayed, overgrown cemetary in the city district.27 Denis Stepanov was interested in another topic that might have been totally taboo before – the extent of public or secret denunciations to the secret police in Stalinist Russia. His essay was based on a large number of letters from citizens to the NKVD or party organisations, and also studied how the authorities handled these accusations from anonymous or open petitioners.28 The dictum that a historian’s explanations of past events are dependent on his or her own time may seem too obvious, and it certainly does not imply that ‘each generation writes its own history’ in the sense that one can neglect accumulated knowledge. It is rather a question of small incremental additions from newly discovered facts or circumstances that have not been studied before. The transformation of Russia’s historiography since the early 1990s give many examples of such additions and new perspectives on the sum total of old and new knowledge.

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Popular history thrives on the outskirts of Russia’s recent historiography. After the period when any new narrative on Soviet history was distrusted, there is evidently an increasing demand for new narratives. The main currents in this popular history are the neo-patriotic, anticommunist on the one hand and the neo-Stalinist ones on the other hand. The former is characterised by embellishing the achievements of the late Tsarist regime and the prospects for Russia had the country not been thrown into World War I, or, in a similar version, demonising the revolutionaries in general and the Bolsheviks in particular – for their allegedly dependence on German financial support and their coup d’état in November 1917. An important focal point for this current is the regicide – the murder of the Tsarist family in 1918 – as the beginning of a more or less genocidal epoch. On the opposite side of the political spectrum, a pro-communist presentation depicts the Soviet period, in particular the Stalin era, in a hagiographic manner. Leading personalities of the Communist Party of Russia (KPRF) describe Stalin merely in such political terms as were used before the 20th Party Congress in 1956, i.e. as the wisest of the successors to Lenin, the mastermind of the industrialisation and collectivisation of agriculture and the architect of the victory in 1945 over Nazi Germany. More extremist views can be found among this ‘Leftist’ current which include anti-Semitic, conspiratorial interpretations in their narrative. In their imagination, the Soviet regime was actually dominated by Jews in the 1920s, which allegedly led to atheist propaganda by the state and the destruction of the Orthodox churches all over Russia and the catastrophes in the villages. Stalin is thus depicted as the one who in the Great Terror put an end to this purported Jewish dominance. Vladimir Karpov’s biography was the first in a series of hagiographies devoted to give Stalin a new aura after the millenium. The first volume even reproduced a fabricated ‘document’, intended to show that most of the repressed persons in the 1930s and 1940s were actually enemy agents and of Jewish nationality. At that time, together with the late Professor Viktor Danilov, I had the unpleasant task of exposing this falsification. The experts at the Central Archives of the Federal State Security could without the slightest doubt establish that Karpov had included a ‘facsimile’ of a recently written fabrication. Viktor Danilov published an article in Otechestvennaia istoriia in which he ridiculed many absurd data in Karpov’s biography, and in particular the fabricated ‘document’ allegedly by Lavrentii Beria. In later editions, Karpov rewrote this paragraph of his book and withdrew the ‘facsimile’.29 Since then, more nuanced pro-Stalinist literature has dominated the book market, many trying by

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polemics against liberal and conservative exaggerations of the Stalin-era horrors, to show Stalin instead as a great state-builder and foresighted world communist leader. A huge memorial monument has been created alongside the highway to Perm, a few miles west of Ekaterinburg. It consists of a high column with four world religious symbols – Christianity, Islam, Judaism and Buddhism – framing it at the bottom, surrounded by circular pathways of granite stones with metal plates. On these plates, the names, and dates of birth and death of the more than 18,000 people from the whole Urals who fell victim to political repression in the Stalin era are engraved. At a local archive in Ekaterinburg, a research project has worked to establish as full a picture as possible of the extent of this terror. Memorial is also the name of a civil rights movement that for more than 20 years has struggled to shed light on the crimes against human rights and against humanity in the Soviet era. Memorial has an archive with autobiographies, letters, documents and artifacts (letters, diaries, drawings, official documents for the procuracy, etc.). In cooperation with the State Archives of Russia, Memorial has published documents on the Gulags, the organisation of the NKVD and on the rehabilitations in the 1950s, as well as inventories of victims of Stalinist terror. Archival documents from the Communist Party and the secret police are reproduced. Other articles deal with the waves of repression that hit Northern Russia in the Soviet era. Similar works on this tragic chapter in Russia’s recent history have been done in Arkhangelsk and other cities. Likewise, a complete identification of all innocent victims of political repression in Cheliabinsk oblast wasstarted several years ago.30 As early as 1954 the regional security organs had started to re-investigate political cases from the late 1930s and rehabilitated many who had been innocent of any of the charges. In most cases, the persons were posthumously declared as not guilty of any crime. A few years later, the rehabilitation process took on the many accusations fabricated against ‘counter-revolutionary organisations’.31 But the really massive rehabilitation had to wait for several decades. It was only in the 1990s that thousands of victims of political repression had their sentences scrutinised by commissions set up on the orders and directives of president Boris Yeltsin. This judicial process in Cheliabinsk still continues, and is now guided by a decree from the city duma of 18 April 2003.32 At a recent meeting, it was stated that so far these commissions had established as a proven fact that in the city of Cheliabinsk and surrounding areas, 11,592 persons were executed for political crimes in the Stalin era after hearings in judicial settings, while another 7066 persons

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had been executed by non-judicial organs and with even hearings for the accused persons. In the province of Cheliabinsk, excluding the city itself, 188,347 persons were rehabilitated from 1991 to 2001. Out of these groups, 27,983 persons were convicted on ‘class basis and for political reasons’ and 30,102 persons were repressed on ethnic grounds. More than 60,000 complaints concerning restitution of property had been answered, or more often compensation was given for expropriated houses and confiscation of personal belongings.33 These are some of the changes in Cheliabinsk’s collective historical memory that made my own research project not only possible but more stimulating with every visit. However, the main factor for me as an economic historian has been the opening of the archives in Russia in general and in Cheliabinsk in particular. Contrary to a widespread opinion in the Western mass media, this is a still an ongoing process, albeit the tempo of declassification has been slower in the 2000s, which is due mainly to the cumbersome administrative procedures that have been introduced for the archives concerning declassification. Both at the central level, for example the state archive GARF in Moscow, and at OGAChO in Cheliabinsk, there is a genuine striving to declassify more of their holdings to which access was routinely restricted in the Soviet period. For this book project, I have used the holdings for the period up to 1945 that were declassified in the early 2000s.34 Finally, it should be emphasised that the OGAChO archivists do not only serve historians and other researchers, but form an organic part in the city’s collective memory. The archive has taken on the tasks of documenting – by video or audio – such events that used to be covered in Soviet times by state or party organisations themselves. Thus, official visits, conferences and meetings are regularly filmed or taped by one or several archivists. The city archivists also follow up on personal archives that belong to celebrities or to ‘ordinary people’ who have worked all their lives, or been stationed for a short time, in Cheliabinsk. They travel to all the affiliate subdivisions in the cities and villages of the Cheliabinsk province, also in order to collect, document and record the industrial and cultural sites that may soon be torn down or decay. OGAChO organises expos on historical events with original documents and artifacts to illustrate past times. Veterans of production as well as school classes are regularly invited to lectures at the archives on such events. OGAChO, jointly with the city’s television stations, produces documentary programmes. At the turn of the millenium, a long series of five- to ten-minute programmes was broadcast all through 1999 on one of the TV stations at prime time. Each programme covered a certain event, personality or

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transformation of the city’s and province’s life in the 20th century. In conclusion, it must be mentioned that some extraordinary efforts by historians and archivists in Cheliabinsk have been put into two encyclopedias, one volume on the city of Cheliabinsk and five volumes on the province. Evidently, a massive input in these collective works has come from the archives in the provinces, but more important still seems to be the striving to include as much as possible that used to be suppressed information in the Soviet era so that each and every citizen, Russian or foreigner, may form his or her own opinion on the multi-faceted and contradictory, fascinating and captivating story of ‘Tankograd’ – be it in a historical perspective or not.

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Notes 1

Cheliabinsk As a Mirror of Russia in the 20th Century

1. The conversation – ‘Que dit-on de la guerre?’, ‘On n’est pas prêt. Surtout l’usine de Tcheliabinsk. L’armée est prête, le pays paysan ne l’est pas.’ – is described in Boris Souvarine, Souvenirs sur Isaac Babel, Panaït Istrati, Pierre Pascal, Paris: Gérard Lebovici, 1985, p. 17. Isaak Babel (1894–1940) was born in the Jewish ghetto in Odessa; he grew up in the harbour town of Nikolaev and studied at the university in Kiev. He then moved to St Petersburg, where he published essays criticising Tsarism, antisemitism and the bureaucracy. Babel held a very optimistic view of the prospects for the socialist movement. During the Russian Civil War, he joined Budennyi’s Red Cavalry army. In 1923, he started to publish short stories set during that period, which he later assembled in Krasnaya konnitsa (Red Cavalry). Babel was one of the most highly regarded Soviet authors and was privileged to travel abroad. On many occasions he visited his wife Eugenia, who had lived in Paris since 1925. Babel made a speech at the International Writers Congress in Paris in 1935. Babel had been living in a Ukrainian village in 1930, at the time of the ‘dekulakization’ and deportation of peasants from their villages to Northern Russia and Siberia. He was deeply shocked by what he had seen, which was a drastic change from the policies of the 1920s. Thereafter, Babel had lived on a kolkhoz in order to gather information for a new book on the peasants’ new lives. Towards the end of the 1930s, Babel was more and more heavily criticised and he was arrested in May 1939. The NKVD secret police accused him of Trotskyism and ‘anti-Soviet activities’. He was executed on 17 March 1940. For a biography, see Reinhard Krumm, Isaak Babel. Schreiben under Stalin. Eine Biographie. (Norderstedt: Books on Demand 2005), idem, Isaak Babel. Biografiia (Moscow: Rosspen, 2008). Compare with Vitalii Shentalinskii, Raby svobody: V literaturnykh archivakh KGB, (Moskow: Parus 1995, p. 26–81) concerning the denunciations against Babel, his interrogation and confessions. At the time, his wife was falsely informed that Babel had been sentenced to a Gulag and had died on 17 March 1941. Babel was rehabilitated in 1954. The actual circumstances of his trial and execution were made public only in the late 1980s under glasnost. 2. Boris Souvarine (Lifschitz) (1894–1985) belonged to the Left wing of French socialists that protested against World War I, and was later among the founders of the French Communist Party. However, by 1924 he had already been excluded from the party for disciplinary reasons. Thanks to his independent attitude regarding the Soviet experiment, Souvarine was soon considered one of France’s most knowledgeable experts on the Soviet Union. Hist first major work was the third volume of the Panaït Istratis novel Vers l’autre flamme. It was later re-edited under the title La Russie en 1930, a title that 290

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Notes 291

3.

4.

5.

6.

referred to the Marquis de Custine’s classical description of Tsarist Russia in 1839. Souvarine eagerly followed what was happening in Soviet Russia by reading the press. Like many ex-communists, he had a special advantage in terms of his ability to analyse Soviet developments, although he was forbidden to return to the USSR. By the mid-1930s, he had collected materials for a biography on Stalin, entitled Staline: Aperçu historique du bolchevisme (Paris: Plon 1935). At the time, very few people in France appreciated this biography because the dominant mode in the Popular Front era was pro-Soviet. However, his biography withstood the test of time. Souvarine’s biography of Stalin was re-edited in France and Italy in the 1970s with an afterword by the author. On Souvarine’s struggle to create his own niche in predominantly pro-Soviet France before and after WWII in order to carry on critical research and debates on the USSR, see Jean-Louis Panné, Boris Souvarine: Le premier deçu du communisme, Paris: Robert Laffont 1993, pp. 174–261, 308– 366. V. Bozhe, ‘P. Stolypinu videlas blestiashchaia budushchnost Urala i Sibiri’, Cheliabinsk, 1999, no. 2. On the migration to Siberia, see Donald W. Treadgold, The Great Siberian Migration: Government and Peasant in Resettlement from Emancipation to the First World War, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1957, pp. 90–98, 146–149. On the early history of Cheliabinsk, see Ivan Degtiarëv, Cheliabinskaia starina. Sbornik statei i materialov po istorii Cheliabinska rannego perioda (30-e gody XVIII – seredina XIX veka). Tsentr Istoriko-kultornogo naslediia g. Cheliabinska Cheliabinsk 1996; A.L. Pastukhov, Ot Cheliaba do Cheliabinska: Puteshestvie v proshloe, Cheliabinsk: Vzgliad, 2000. Anatole Kopp, L’Architecture de la période stalinienne, with a foreword by Charles Bettelheim, Grenoble: Presses Universitaires de Grenoble 1978, p. 154. As a pioneering French architect, Kopp made several study trips to the USSR starting in the late 1950s. However, even though he was associated with the French Communist Party he could not visit any other places than the tourist-adapted cities of Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev and a few other towns. To learn about the rest of the country’s architecture, he had to be content with studying books and journals in the libraries. Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization, Berkeley, CA, & London: University of California Press 1995. It is worth noting that one of the best-selling descriptions of Soviet Russia in the 1940s was Behind the Urals: An American in Russia’s City of Steel (1943) by American engineer John Scott. Scott vividly and with great empathy showed how the steel works at Magnitogorsk had been founded. His book was translated into Swedish in the same year and a German version was edited in Switzerland. Scott worked as engineer in Magnitogorsk from 1931 to 1937. He was then stationed in Moscow until 1941 as a correspondent for British and American newspapers. During the last years of World War II, Scott was stationed in Stockholm as a correspondent for Time-Life and as an undercover agent of the new intelligence organ, the Office for Strategic Studies (or OSS). In the meantime, Scott had prepared a massive survey in Washington for US economic intelligence on Soviet heavy industry built during the pre-war five-year plans and situated beyond the Volga river, in the Urals and in Western Siberia. The level of detail included in this intelligence study indicates that Scott might have

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been engaged in US intelligence work throughout his stay in the Soviet Union from the early 1930s. See also Lennart Samuelson, ‘Making Sense of Stalinist Industrialisation: An Insider’s Approach’, in Markets and Embeddedness: Essays in Honour of Ulf Olsson, Göteborg: Ekonomisk-historiska institutionen vid Handelshögskolan, Göteborgs Universitet 2004, pp. 209–218. 7. William H. Chamberlin, The Russian Enigma. An Interpretation, New York: C. Scribner’s sons, 1943 p. 179. 8. OGAChO, f. P-75, op. 1, d. 686, l. 152–160, Protocol from the Cheliabinsk okrug party conference 25–31 May 1930.

2

From the Civil War to the Five-year Plans

1. For the party system in Cheliabinsk city and the southern Urals before 1917, see Igor Narskii’s PhD dissertation, Politicheskie ob”edineniia na Urale do 1917 g., Cheliabinsk 1995; idem, ‘Politische Parteien in der russischen Provinz (Ural, 1901–1916)’, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, 1997, No. 45. 2. Elena Pavlovna Turova, ‘God 1914. Voina. Cheliabinsk i cheliabintsy’, Neizvestnyi Cheliabinsk, vol. 1, 1996, pp. 65–83. 3. Ural: Vek dvadtsatyi. Liudi, sobytiia, zhizn, ed. A.D. Kirillov, Ekaterinburg: Ural Politicheskii 2000, p. 34–38. 4. Ivan Kashirin was enrolled with the secret police from July 1920 and took part in the OGPU repression against peasants during the 1930–1931 collectivisation in the lower Volga region. He was arrested during the Great Terror and executed in 1937. 5. Nikolai Kashirin was a member of the Military-Revolutionary Council of the Red Army in the 1920s. During the Great Terror he was implicated the one of the fabricated cases against the army. 6. For a survey of the Russian Civil War, see Evan Mawdsley, The Russian Civil War, (London: Allen & Unwin 2000); on the battles between Red and White forces in the Urals and in Siberia, pp. 75–111, 132–147. 7. Vladimir Mogilnikov’s memory has been preserved in the form of streets named after him in the small town of Brodokalmak and in Cheliabinsk. 8. The square along the White Barracks was renamed The Fallen Revolutionaries’ Square in 1920 (Ploshchad’ pavshikh revoliutsionerov). 9. For a survey of the Russian Civil War, see Evan Mawdsley, The Russian Civil War, (London: Allen & Unwin 2000); on the battles between Red and White forces in the Urals and in Siberia, pp. 75–111, 132–147. 10. Gulsina D. Selianinova, ‘Intelligentsiia i terror: Opyt grazhdanskoi voiny na Urale, 1918–1919 gg.’, Ural i Sibir’ v stalinskoi politike, Novosibirsk: Sibirskii Khronograf 2002, pp. 5–30. Before 1991, Soviet historians had written considerably more about the repressions perpetrated by the White Armies against workers and others who had supported Soviet power. Similarly onesided descriptions of the Red Terror dominated in the West, see, e.g., George Leggett, The Cheka: Lenin’s Political Police (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1981). Obviously, much research remains to be done in order to establish the extent of summary executions and other repressive measures that are habitually included in the concept of terror. From a post-Soviet perspective, it has become more vital to provide a balanced description of both sides and to explain better the widespread violence outside the direct military

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Notes 293 confrontations between 1918 and 1921. Compare Aleksei Litvin, Krasnyi i belyi terror v Rossii, 1918–1922 gg., Moscow: Iauza/Eksmo 2004, especially Chapter 3 ‘The practice of the anti-Bolshevik government’ (p. 139 et seq.) and Chapter 4 ‘Total terror. The Crucification of symbols. The Dictators liquidate the opposition’ (p. 225 et seq.). Litvin described (p. 99 et seq.) how concentration and forced labour camps were established by the Bolsheviks, as well as the 1919 laws that regulated the organisation of the camp. In his concluding chapter, Litvin shows how new cadres were recruited to the ChK. By the end of 1920, 17,000 people, mostly peasants and workers, were imprisoned in these camps. Lenin supported the harsh repression, and internal criticisms by other Bolsheviks were ignored. Today, it is important to avoid politicising the population losses of Russia between 1914 and 1921, and instead to carefully analyse and separate various factors at work. This analysis has started in the form of the most updated demographic calculations by Russian historians, Yurii A. Poliakov and Valentina B. Zhiromskaia, Naselenie Rossii v XX veke. Istoricheskie otjerki, vol. 1, 1900–1939, Moscow: Rosspen 2000, pp. 83–133. Unlike earlier studies, it is necessary to first separate the losses of the Red and White Armies from the terror that was directed on the civilian population – from both sides of the Civil War. It is then necessary to estimate the number of victims in anti-Jewish pogroms that were perpetrated predominantly by the White Armies. Thereafter, one must estimate how natality and mortality, as well as the living conditions, changed in various parts of the country. Although the registers of the population almost collapsed during the Civil War and a more reliable census was only taken in 1926, there are fairly good estimates of the different components behind the demographic development. Of course, it is not possible to determine the exact number of victims of the terror (just as for other forms of repression in later periods in Soviet history). However, this argument should not be used to denigrate the scientific progress that demographers and historians have made in recent years. It is no longer appropriate to treat the estimates made by General Denikin’s commission in southern Russia in 1919 that the Red Terror had claimed 1.7 million lives as equally valid. Those numbers reflect how wartime propaganda was formed to influence public opinion. Finally, it is necessary to estimate the approximate number of deaths in epidemics (typhus and the Spanish flu) that spread across Russia and Europe in 1918–1919. Danish historian Bent Jensen has lumped together – in ‘statistics’ of Bolshevik terror – the total population losses between 1917 and 1922. Compare the table of population losses, in Bent Jensen, Gulag og glemsel: Ruslands tragedie og Vestens hukommesestab i det 20. århundrede, (Copenhagen: Gyldendal 2002), p. 24. 11. Among the rich body of post-Soviet literature on the White Armies in the Civil War, it is worthwhile studying the objective and untendentious work by the young Evgenii Volkov (b. 1964), entitled Pod znamenem belogo admirala: Ofitserskii korpus vooruzhënnykh formirovanii A.V. Kolchaka v period grazhdanskoi voiny, (Irkutsk: Sarma 2005). 12. A street named after Sofia Krivaia in central Cheliabinsk runs parallel to the great Lenin Prospekt, the avenue that starts at Gagarin Park in the western part of the city.

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13. See calculations by Colonel-General G.F. Krivosheev of the losses during the 1918–1921 Civil War and the battles against intervention armies. He briefly discusses the source problems due to the lack of reliable reports, Soviet Casualties and Combat Losses in the Twentieth Century, London: Greenhill Books 1997, pp. 7–39. 14. P.R. Nazyrov, ‘Cheliabinsk v 1918–1919 (Iz istorii goroda v gody grazhdanskoi voiny)’, Cheliabinsk neizvestnyi, vol. 1, Cheliabinsk 1996, pp. 90–103; K. Zadirskii, ‘Tukhachevskii v Cheliabinske’, Vechernii Cheliabinsk, 13 September 1989. Also see the articles ‘Cheliabinskaia operatsiia’, ‘Ufimskaia operatsiia’, ‘Zlatoustovskaia operatsiia’, Grazhdanskaia voina i voennaia interventsiia v SSSR. Entsiklopediia, Moscow: Sovetskaia entsiklopediia, 1983. 15. Mikhail Tukhachevskii (b. 1893) has been judged by history in many ways. He was sentenced to death in a closed show trial in June 1937 for alleged high treason and espionage in favour of Nazi Germany. He then figured as one of the main culprits in the ‘confessions’ at the third Moscow show trial in 1938. A conspiracy theory was combined with the theme of his alleged plan for a coup d’état. To communists in the Stalinist generation, these myths became ‘truth’ in books like Michael Sayers and Albert Eugene Kahn The Great Conspiracy: The Secret War against Soviet Russia (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company 1946). In the 1950s, Tukhachevskii was formally rehabilitated and the falsifications in the 1937 show trial became officially known in the higher Party circles. Tukhachevskii’s main publications were republished in the 1960s and his important role in the reconstruction of the Red Army in the 1930s was recognised. A standard Soviet-era biography is Valentin Ivanov’s Marshal M.N. Tukhachevskii, (Moscow: Voenizdat 1990), particularly for its account of Tukhachevskii’s campaign with the Fifth Army of the Eastern Army Group over the Ural mountains and the Battle of Cheliabinsk in 1919, pp. 97–121. After the fall of communism, Tukhachevskii’s role in the Soviet experiment was interpreted anew. Some new information on how Tukhachevskii handled the crushing of the 1921 peasant rebellion in the Tambov region have been found in the military archives. He is referred to as the ‘bloodstained marshal’ by, for example, German Smirnov, ‘Pravda o krovavom marsjale’ in the anthology Krovavyi marshal: Mikhail Tuchachevskii, 1893– 1937, (St Petersburg: Korona 1997). For an introduction to Tukhachevskii’s role in the formulation of a new military doctrine, see Sophie de Lastours, Toukhachevski: Le Bâtisseur de l’Armée Rouge, (Paris: Albin Michel 1996). A recent addition to the body of Tukhachevskii literature, with interesting excerpts from the interrogation of Tukhachevskii in May–June 1937, is Iuliia Kantor, Voina i mir marshala Tukhachevskogo, (Moscow: Vremia 2005). 16. Larisa V. Borisova, Voennyi kommunizm: nasilie kak element khoziaistvennogo mekhanizma, (Moscow: Institute of Russian History of the Academy of Sciences/MONF 2001). 17. Vladimir Bozhe, ‘Trudovye armii v Sovetskoi Rossii (1920–1921): Diskussiia o meste trudovykh chastei v khoziaistvennoi zhizni strany’, Istoricheskie chteniia, vol. 4, pp. 104–109. 18. Georgii L. Piatakov (1890–1937) led the economic recovery and reconstruction in three different phases after the 1917 revolutions. He started as head of the labour army in the Urals, was then put in charge of

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19.

20.

21.

22. 23.

24.

25.

refurbishing destroyed coal mines in the Ukraine in the early 1920s and, finally, in the 1930s became deputy commissar of heavy industry with special responsibility for defence industries. His management style and methods were formed during the first two of these phases. Piatakov was close to Trotsky and joined the Leftist opposition in the mid-1920s against Stalin. Although Piatakov had been an ardent promoter of the interests of the defence industry, he was arrested on fabricated political motives and false charges of economic failures in late 1936. He was sentenced to death at the second Moscow show trial in February 1937. See Andrea Graziosi, ‘G.L. Piatakov: A Mirror of Soviet History’, ‘At the Roots of Soviet Industrial Relations and Practices: Piatakov’s Donbass in 1921’, in A New Peculiar State: Explorations in Soviet History, 1917–1937, (Westport & London: Praeger 2000), pp. 1–64, 119–178. For Trotsky’s view of the situation in Soviet Russia during the Civil War, see Terrorism and Communism, Chapter VII, ‘The question of labour organization’. The interpretations of Trotsky’s suggestion to use ‘labour armies’ (trudarmiia) in 1919–1920 spurred controversy in the academic community. For a survey, see, e.g., Francesco Benvenuti, ‘Dal communismo di guerra alla NEP: Il dibattio dui sindicati’, Pensiero e azione politica di Lev Trockij, vol. 1, (Milano: Leo P. Olschki 1982), pp. 261–288. For a historical background that clearly states the contemporaneous limits of the Bolsheviks’ labour policy, compare Lars T. Lih, ‘Our Position is in the Highest Degree Tragic’: Bolshevik ‘Euphoria in 1920’, in Mike Haynes & Jim Wolfreys (eds), History and Revolution: Refuting Revisionism, (London: Verso 2007), pp. 118–137. See Leninskii sbornik, vol. XI, pp. 345–403, for the passages in Bukharin’s Ekonomika perekhodnogo perioda that Lenin had underlined or commented on. Compare also Nikolai Bukharin, The Economics and Politics of the Transition Period, edited and introduced by Kenneth J. Tarbuck, (London: Routledge 1979). A.P. Abramovskii & P.N. Pankin, ‘Golubaia armiia’: Sozdanie, bor’ba, razgrom’, Istoricheskie chteniia, 4, pp. 68–70; A.V. Bakunin, ‘Grazhdanskaia voina i krasnyi terror v Rossii’, ibid., pp. 22–25; A.I. Skorikov, ‘Iz istorii povstancheskogo i dezertirskogo dvizheniia na territorii Cheliabinskoi gubernii v kontse 1919–nachale 1921 gg.’, ibid., pp. 59–62. See also Veprev & Liutov, Gosudarstvennaia bezopasnost’, pp. 194–200. Skripkov, Cheliabinsk. Vek dvadtsatyi, p. 64. P.F. Nazyrov, ‘Cheliabinsk v 1918–1919 gg.: Iz istorii goroda v period grazhdanskoi voiny’, Cheliabinsk Neizvestnyi, vol. 3, 1996, pp. 90–103. Compare statistics for the number of prisoners of war in Cheka camps in 1921, Voennoistoricheskii archiv, 2004: 6. V.L. Telitsyn, Skvoz’ ternii ‘voennogo kommunizma’: krest’ianskoe khozhaistvo Urala v 1917–1921 gg., Moscow: RAN Institut Rossiiskoi Istorii 1998; A.V. Ivanov, A.T. Tertyshnyi, Ural’skoe krest’ianstvo i vlast’ v period grazhdanskoi voiny (1917–1921 gg): Opyt osmysleniia problemy v otechestvennoi istoriografii, Ekaterinburg: Uralskii Gosudarstvennyi Ekonomicheskii Universitet 2002. Vladimir Bozhe & Igor Nepein, Zhatva smerti: Golod v Cheliabinskoi gubernii v 1921–1922 gg. Cheliabinsk 1994. Irina Iangirova, ‘K vesne 1922 goda

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26.

27.

28. 29. 30.

31.

32.

33.

34.

Notes v Cheliabinskoi gubernii umerli ot goloda okolo 10 tysiach chelovek...’, Vechernii Cheliabinsk, 23/12 1992. Iu. Iu. Khmelëvskaia, ‘Rol’ amerikanskoi missii v bor’be s golodom na Urale (po materialam Ural’sko-Ufimskogo okruga ARA, 1921–1923), Iuzhnyi Ural v sud’be Rossii, Cheliabinsk 2003, pp. 149–153. Alan Ball, And Now My Soul is Hardened: Abandoned Children in Soviet Russia, 1918–1930, (Berkeley: University of California Press 1994), pp. 154–156, 183. On child care and education in general, see Lisa A. Kirschenbaum, Small Comrades: Revolutionizing Childhood in Soviet Russia, 1917–1932, (London & New York: Routledge 2001). Anton Makarenko (1888–1939), a teacher, organised an ‘internat’ for orphans who had started to lead criminal lives. Education was combined with practical labour, and harsh discipline was often the responsibility of the children themselves. The Road to Life, an Epic of Education [1935] (Moscow: Progress 1977). For a description of the Cheka colonies for homeless children and orphan (‘besprizorniki’), see Aleksandr M. Plekhanov, VChK–OGPU, 1921–1928, (Moscow: X-history 2003), pp. 430–437. William Henry Chamberlin, The Russian Enigma, (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons 1944). G.K. Pavlenko, ‘Istoriograficheskie problemy industrialnoi modernizatsii na Urale’, Industrializatsiia v SSSR, pp. 68–71. A.A. Antufev, Ural’skaia promyshlennost’ nakanune i v gody Velikoi Otechetsvennoi voiny, (Ekaterinburg: Ural’skoe Otdelenie Rossiiskoi Akademii Nauk 1992). Edward Carr (1892–1982) took an interest in Russian history in the early 1930s. He visited Moscow in 1937 and followed the terror-stricken society at close range. However, he also saw the long-term effects of the harsh industrialisation drive more clearly than many observers. See Jonathan Haslam, The Vices of Integrity. E.H. Carr, 1892–1982, (London: Verso 1999), pp. 74–79. Historians continue to debate the question of alternatives to forced collectivisation. For a recent reinterpretation of Stalinist industrialisation, see Robert Allen, Farm to Factory: A Reinterpretation of the Soviet Industrialization, (Princeton University Press 2003). In the post-Soviet Russian historiography, the price of ‘Stalin’s revolution from above’ has also been hotly argued; see, for example, P.E. Alekseev & V.D. Kamynin, ‘Industrializatsiia SSSR kak obekt mnogokontseptualnogo rassmotreniia’, Industrializatsiia v SSSR: Uroki istorii, Cheliabinsk 2003, pp. 168–171. Nadezhda Petrovna Shmakova, ‘Mashinostroitel’naia promyshlennost Iuzhnogo Urala v 30-e gody XX veka’, Promyshlennost’ Urala v XIX–XX vekakh, Moscow: AIRO-XX 2002, pp. 208–226. In the 1920s, a popularly controlled organ to combat bureaucratisation was set up in the so-called Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate (Rabkrin). It was later combined with the Communist Party’s own control commission; see Arfon Rees, State Control in Soviet Russia: The Rise and Fall of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate, 1920–1934, (London: Macmillan 1987). Hubert R. Knickerbocker, The Red Trade Menace: Progress of the Soviet Five-Year Plan, (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company 1931), pp. 61ff.

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Notes 297 35. D.V. Gavrilov, ‘Ural’skii tyl v Velikoi Otechestvennoi voine: Geopoliticheskii aspekt’, Ural v Velikoi Otechetsvennoi voine, 1941–1945 gg., Ekaterinburg 1995, p. 58. 36. Tatiana Kirstein, Sowjetische Industrialisierung - Spontaner oder Planierter Prozess? Eine Strukturanalyse des wirtschaftspolitischen Entscheidungsprozesses beim Aufbau des Ural-Kuzneck-Kombinats 1918–1930, (Baden-Baden: Nomos 1979). This dissertation analysed the decision-making process for the mines, transport system and the city to be built to exploit the Magnitka iron ores. 37. Vladimir Kucher, Magnitka – Eto navsegda. Dela i sudby stalinskikh direktorov, (Moscow: Novosti 2003). 38. Albert A. Antuf’ev, Ural’skaia promyshlennost’ nakanune i v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny, (Ekaterinburg: Ural Section of the Russian Academy of Sciences 1998). 39. T.V. Palagina, ‘Iz istorii Cheliabinskogo elektrolitnogo zinkogo zavoda’, Cheliabinsk neizvestnyi, vol. 1, Cheliabinsk 1996, pp. 112–120. 40. OGAChO, f. R-220, op. 5, d. 1, l. 10 ch. Materialy dokladchikam na otchëtnykh sobraniakh o rabote gorsoveta za 1933. 41. OGAChO, f. 870, op. 9, d. 8, l. 1, 15. 42. OGAChO, f. 804, op. 1, d. 29, l. 24–27, Report from the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate, Rabkrin, in March 1932. 43. P.V. Kostiunina, ‘Istoriia OAO “Ufaleinikel” – pervenets nikelevoi promyshlennosti SSSR’, Iuzhnyi Ural v sud’be Rossii, pp. 189–192. 44. OGAChO, f. R-1637, op. 1, d. 186, l.1–16; OGAChO, f. R-804, op. 11, d. 514. 45. G.V. Forstman & M. D. Mashin, Ural’skie stankostroiteli. Istoriko-biograficheskii ocherk. Cheliabinsk: Iuzhno-Ural’skoe knizhnoe izdatel’stvo, 1985. OGAChO, R-220.5.1: 1–2, 6–11. Materialy dokladchikam na otchëtnykh sobraniiakh o rabote gorsoveta. 1. ‘Itogi pervoi piatiletki’. The results of the first five-year plan, from 1928–32, were presented in a heavily censured and tendentious manner. Few of the original goals had been achieved and there was a severe famine in the autumn of 1932. The manipulation of the plan results was particularly skewed for macro data on industrial production. It was undeniable that some targets had not been achieved and this was blamed on the threat of war with Japan, which was claimed to have created new priorities. This was, in fact, partly correct. However, the most unrealistic of the targets proclaimed in 1930 were simply dropped and the plan’s fulfilment was instead compared with more modest, original targets set in 1928–29. 46. OGAChO, f. P-288, op. 2, d. 605, ll. 1–7, 10–15, Dokladnaia zapiska o sostoianii promyshlennosti, transporta i gorodskogo stroitel’stva g. Cheliabinska za vremia ot III do IV gorodskoi partkonferentsii; see also Natalia P. Shmakova, ‘Mashinostroitel’naia promyshlennost’ Iuzhnogo Urala v 30-e gody XX veka’, Promyshlennost’ Urala v XIX–XX vekakh, Moscow: ARIO-XX 2002, pp. 208–226. 47. OGAChO, f. 75, op. 1, d. 566, l. 219–220, Report from OGPU to the regional party committee, 27 April 1928. 48. OGAChO, R-134, op. 1, d. 210, l. 34–36, Resolution from May 1928 on the collectivisation of agriculture in the Urals. 49. A.A. Napylov & N.V. Kostin, ‘Kollektivizatsiia kak neobkhodimaia predposylka industrializatsii SSSR’, Industrializatsiia v SSSR: Uroki istorii, Cheliabinsk 2003, pp. 28–29; M.A. Ivanova, ‘Kollektivizatsiia – samaia

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298 Notes

50.

51. 52.

53. 54.

55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60.

61.

62.

massovaia repressiia vlasti protiv naroda’, Totalitarizm v Rossii (SSSR) 1917– 1991. Oppozitsiia i repressii, Perm 1998, pp. 49–51. Postanovlenie biuro OK VKP(b) o poriadke provedeniia rabot po likvidatsii kulachestva kak klassa, 11 February 1930. On the collectivisation, the deportation of kulaks and their families in 1930–32 and the role of the OGPU secret police in these operations, see Nikolai A. Ivnitskii, Kollektivizatsiia i raskulachivanie (nachalo 30-kh godov), Moscow: Magistr. 1996, and idem, Repressivnaia politika sovetskoi vlasti v derevne (1928–1933 gg.), Moscow: Institut rossiiskoi istorii RAN 2000. On Article 58 on political crimes as defined in the Soviet criminal code, see the appendix in Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: Stalin’s Purges in the 1930s, (London: Macmillan 1968). OGAChO, f.804, op.8, d. 143, l. 21. A.A. Rakov, ‘Opyt analiza kulatskogo khozhaistva 1930 goda: Ekonomikopravovoi i politicheskoi aspekty’, Iuzhnyi Ural v sud’be Rossii: Materialy nauchnoi konferentsii, Cheliabinsk 2003, pp. 164–167; Irina Iangirova, ‘Zhertvy ‘Velikogo pereloma’, Golos, 10–17 January, 16–23 February 1992. GASO, f. 245, op. 3, d. 341, l. 30–35. V.V. Betenev, ‘Pravookhranitel’nye organy Iuzhnogo Urala v period provedeniia kollektivizatsii’, Iuzhnyi Ural v istorii Rossii, Cheliabinsk 2003, pp. 137– 139; P. Iu. Salmina, ‘Prokuratura Juzhnogo Urala v 30-e gody’, ibid., pp. 179–182. OGAChO, f. 180, op. 1, d. 367, l. 194. OGAChO, f. 180, op. 1, d. 398, l. 32. Ivanova, ‘Kollektivizatsiia – samaia massovaia repressiia vlasti protiv naroda’, p. 51. OGAChO, f. 288, op. 2, d. 5, l. 8. OGAChO, f.288, op.1, d.150, l. 198–202. Nazi German propaganda during the 1930s frequently referred to Stalin’s agricultural policy as aiming to ‘exterminate’ the peasants, using the German words ausrotten or Ausrottung (extermination). The best-selling novel based on Karl Albrecht’s life in Soviet Russia frequently used these sliding terms to inspire anti-communist, anti-Jewish and anti-Russian opinions. Karl Albrecht Der verratene Sozialismus. Zehn Jahre as Staatsbeamter in der Sowjetunion Berlin 1938 (with numerous later editions until 1943). Irina Iangirova, ‘Raskulachivanie’, rotaprint 90–02-21; idem ‘Velikii perelom Iuzhnouralskii variant’, Golos, 4–11/9 1992. The data for all of the Urals are based upon I.E. Plotnikov, ‘Kak likvidirovali kulachestvo na Urale’, Otechestvennaia istoriia, 1993, No. 4, p. 159. The standard textbooks and documentaries (khrestomatiia) used by students at Russia’s universities contain the important resolutions of the Communist Party Politburo on dekulakisation, resolutions on the number of ‘counter-revolutionary peasants’ to be executed or sent to labour camps. See, for example, A.F. Kiselëv & E.M. Shchagin (eds), Khrestomatiia po otechestvennoi istorii (1914–1945 gg.), Moscow: Vlados 1996, pp. 435–440 on collectivisation. James J. Schneider, The Structure of Strategic Revolution: Total War and the Roots of the Soviet Warfare State, (Novato, CA: Presidio 1994), pp. 237–241, 257–263.

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Notes 299 63. Viktor N. Zemskov, Spetsposelentsy v SSSR, 1930–1960, Moscow: Nauka 2003. 64. GASO, f. 245, op. 3, d. 376, l. 4–5 ob. 65. OGAChO, f. R–220, op. 9, d. 24, l. 81. 66. OGAChO, f. R–220, op. 9, d. 24, l. 83–85. 67. OGAChO, f. 1075, op, 1, d. 23, l. 89–90. 68. GASO, f. 245, op. 3, d. 376, l. 42. 69. OGAChO, f. R-804, op. 5, d. 10, l 72–87, On coal mining in Kopeisk in 1937 and preparations for increasing coal production in 1938; OGAChO, f. P-288, op. 2, d. 602, l. 53–62. 70. OGAChO, f. 1075, op.1, d. 33, l. 89–145. 71. Footnote 183 in Cheliabinskaia oblast 1917–1945.

3 The Industrial City As a Socialist Vision and Soviet Reality 1. See Anton Karlgren, Stalin: Bolsjevismens väg från leninism till stalinism, Stockholm: P.A. Norstedt & Söners 1942. Karlgren (1882–1973) was professor of Slavic languages in Copenhagen and later editor at the Stockholm newspaper Dagens Nyheter. 2. In France, Marxism has fascinated several generations of intellectuals, mainly due to the strong position of the French Communist Party in the working class. Intellectuals eagerly adopted the official Soviet self-image and the myths surrounding the ‘construction of Socialism’ in Russia. A typical hagiography is the history of Soviet Russia as presented by Louis Aragon in Histoire de l’URSS (Paris: Union Générale d’Editions 1962). As more ‘revelations’ were made by Khrushchev and others regarding the USSR, French ex-party members tried to formulate their new attitudes to Soviet history. Jean Elleinstein wrote an officially accepted textbook on ‘socialism in one country’, Le socialisme dans un pays. Histoire de l’U.R.S.S. (Tome 2) (Paris: Editions Sociales 1973). Some years later, Elleinstein tried to formulate his own explanation of Stalinism, Le Phénomène stalinien (Paris: Grasset 1975). However, this attempt exposed him to severe criticism from the Communist Party. Elleinstein later wrote biographies of Karl Marx and Joseph Stalin, without adding anything substantial in terms of knowledge. 3. Among numerous Western and Russian works on how Lenin and the Bolsheviks envisioned the prospects for their revolution in 1921 is Moshe Lewin’s Lenin’s Last Struggle (1967, new edition with a new foreword by the author, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press 2005). 4. Among those who maintained the opinion that the Bolsheviks were led by a utopian vision were two Soviet historians who were in exile in the 1980s, Michel Heller and Aleksandr Nekrich, Utopia in Power: the History of the Soviet Union from 1917 to the Present, (New York: Summit Books 1986). Lenin was allegedly ‘fettered’ by this utopian vision in 1917 (pp. 41–58), and finally, the regime that emerged in the late 1930s was described by Heller and Nekrich as ‘the socialist totalitarian state’ (p. 263). 5. This is based on N.P. Korolëv, ‘K.V. Ryndin i protsess industrializatsii v Cheliabinskoi oblasti’, in Industrializatsiia v SSSR: Uroki istorii, Cheliabinsk

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300

6. 7.

8. 9.

10.

11.

12. 13. 14. 15.

Notes 2003, pp. 109–113; idem ‘K voprosu o deiatelnosti K.V. Ryndina kak partiinogo rukovoditelia sovetskogo gosudarstva’, in Iuzhnyj Ural v sudbde Rossii, Cheliabinsk 2003, pp. 174–178. E. Arfon Rees, State Control in Soviet Russia: The Rise and Fall of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate, 1920–1934, London: Macmillan 1987. Compare R.W. Davies, Oleg V. Khlevniuk & E.A. Rees, The Stalin–Kaganovich Correspondence, 1931–1936, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press 2003, pp. 272–273. This English edition contains 182 of the original 867 letters in the Russian edition of Stalin–Kaganovich. Perepiska, 1931–1936 (Moscow: Rosspen 2002). The letters exchanged between Stalin and Kaganovich were written when one of them was on a month-long holiday by the Black Sea. Their correspondence sheds light on many economic and foreign policy problems and how the leaders argued over repressive measures and laws. Their letters have added to the knowledge of the decision-making process at the highest level of the Soviet Union. See also Stephen G. Wheatcroft, ‘From Team-Stalin to Degenerate Tyranny’, in E. Arfon Rees (ed.) The Nature of Stalin’s Dictatorship: The Politburo, 1924–1953 (London: Palgrave Macmillan 2004), pp. 79–107. R.W. Davies, Oleg V. Khlevniuk, E.A. Rees, Stalin–Kaganovich Correspondence, pp. 285–287. Pismo ob organizatsii i provedenii anti-rozhdestvenskoi kampanii v 1931 godu, OGAChO, R-221.1.107: 11–12, Materialy o rabote biuro soiuza bezbozhnikov, 1931. On the atheist, anti-religious campaigns and, from another perspective, enlightenment in the Soviet Union between the wars, which were directed against all religions – the Russian Orthodox as well as Roman Catholic and Judaism and Buddhism – see William B. Husband, ‘Godless Atheists’: Atheism and Society in Soviet Russia, 1917–1932, DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press 2000, pp. 36–100, and Daniel Peris, Storming the Heavens: The Soviet League of the Militant Godless, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 1998. On the mockery of religion, the societies of atheist propaganda and the closing of churches in the late 1920s, see Paul Gabel, And God Created Lenin: Marxism vs. Religion in Russia, 1917–1929, Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books 2006. For a detailed analysis of religious life in Cheliabinsk from the late 1800s to the 1930s, see Vladimir P. Bozhe, ‘Ocherk tserkovno-religioznoi zhizni Cheliabinska nachala XX v.’, Cheliabinsk neizvestnyi: Kraevedcheskii sbornik, vol. 1, Cheliabinsk 1996; idem, ‘Materialy k istorii tserkovno-religioznoi zhizni Cheliabinska (1917–1937 gg.)’, Cheliabinsk neizvestnyi. Kraevedcheskii sbornik, vol. 2, Cheliabinsk 1998, pp. 107–199. See Veprev & Liutov, Gosudarstvennaia bezopasnost: Tri veka na Iuzhnom Urale, Cheliabinsk: Iuzhno-Uralskoe Knizhnoe Izdatelstvo 2002, pp. 278–279. OGAChO, f. 274, op. 3, d. 55, l. 79. OGAChO, f. P.288, op. 2, d. 602, l. 53–62. The Main Post Office in the city centre is a cultural heritage building. It was rebuilt in the 1990s to achieve the original form that the architect had envisioned and, at the same time, its infrastructure and technical facilities were modernised. Kirov Street (referred to as the Workers’ and Peasants’ Street before 1935) is now a pedestrian walkway. In Soviet times it became a rough, torn street with a heavy traffic load. All the shops, cafes and offices from

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16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

the early 1900s have now been given carefully restored exteriors. Along the pedestrian street, a number of sculptures are reminders of the historical trades in Cheliabinsk. See also T. Maevskaia, ‘Glavpochtamt’, Biulleten arkhitektury, 2000, no. 2; Iu. Filinskich, ‘Poslednii ‘vzvizg’ konstruktivizma’, Vechernii Cheliabinsk, 26 February 2001. For the dominant views on town planning in the 1920s, see Anatole Kopp, Ville et révolution: Architecture et urbanisme soviétiques des annés vingt, Paris: Anthropos, 1967; idem, Changer la vie, changer la ville: De la vie nouvelle aux problèmes urbains. U.R.P.P. 1917–1932, Paris: UEG, 1975. On the history of Soviet architecture in general, compare Selim Khan-Magomedov, Pioneers of Soviet Architecture: The Search for New Solutions in the 1920s and 1930s (London: Thames and Hudson 1983). Although Khan-Magomedov had to avoid certain topics when writing in the 1980s, this book is the most comprehensive survey of the history of Soviet architecture. The massive plans to transform the centre of Moscow are described in ‘Mysterious Pages of History of the 30s’, in V.A. Vinogradov (ed.) Moscow. 850th Anniversary, Moscow 1997, vol. 2, pp. 94–96. For other interpretations of Stalinist architecture, see Harald Bodenschatz & Christiane Post (eds), Städtebau im Schatten Stalins: Die internationale Such nach der sozialististischen Stadt in der Sowjetunion 1929–1935, Berlin: Braun 2004. V.P. Terekhov, ‘Inzhenerno-tekhnicheskaia intelligentsiia Urala nakanune Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny’, Ural v strategii Vtoroi Mirovoi voiny, Ekaterinburg 2000, pp. 160–166. See Evgeniia Gershkovich & Evgenii Korneev, Vysokii stalinskii stil’, Moscow 2005; Alessandra Latour, Birth of a Metropolis: Moscow 1930–1955. Recollections and Images, Moscow: Iskusstvo-XX vek 2005. For an interpretation of the epoch’s art in the paradigm of totalitarianism, see Igor Golomstock, Arte totalitaria nell’URSS di Stalin, nella Germania di Hitler, nell’Italia di Mussolini, Milan: Leonardo 1990 (translation from Russian, Totalitarnoe iskusstvo, Moscow: Gallart, 1994). Nikolai Miliutin, Sotsgorod. Problema stroitel’stva sotsialisticheskikh gorodov. Osnovnye voproys ratsional’noi planirovki i stroitel’stva naselënnykh mest SSSR, Moscow 1930. See Jean-Louis Cohen, Le Corbusier and the Mystique of the USSR. Theories and Projects for Moscow, 1928–1936. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1992. Naum Gabo was one of more than ten foreign architects who were invited to compete for the Palace of Soviets, see the catalogue Naum Gabo and the Competition for the Palace of Soviets, Moscow 1931–1933, Berlin & Moscow 1993, pp. 197–201. V.I. Isaev, ‘Sotsial’nye problemy formirovaniia Uralo-Kuznetskogo kompleksa’, in Ural i Sibir’ v stalinskoi politike, Novosibirsk: Sibirskii khronograf 2002, pp. 126–137. Sotsial’no-ekonomicheskie ustanovki i skhema raspredeleniia territorii g. Cheliabinska, vol. 1, Leningrad 1935. ‘Printsipial’nye ustanovki rasseleniia i ego normativy’, ‘Proektnoe razmeshchenie promyshlennosti’, ‘Proektnaia schema raspredeleniia territorii Cheliabinska’, vol 2: Cheliabinsk kak nauchnyi i uchebnyi tsentr. E.V. Konysheva, ‘A. K. Burov i Cheliabinskaia arkhitektura rubezha 20-kh–30 -kh gg.’, Biulleten’ arkhitektury, 2000, No. 5; Marina Salmina, Istoriia Iuzhnogo Urala XX–nachalo XXI veka, Cheliabinsk: Vzgliad 2004, pp. 93–94.

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302

Notes

24. OGAChO, f. 180, op. 1, d. 359, l. 50. 25. On women in Soviet industry in the inter-war period, compare Wendy Z. Goldman, Women at the Gates: Gender and Industry in Stalin’s Russia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2002; Melanie Ilic (ed.), Women in the Stalin Era, London: Palgrave Macmillan 2001. 26. OGAChO, f. 804, op. 1, d. 141, l. 25; op. 8, d. 143, l. 31; op. 9, d. 4, l. 48; Dokladnaia zapiska o sostoianii zhilshchno-kommunal’nogo khozhiaistva v oblasti i g. Cheliabinske za 1940 god. OGAChO, f. P-288, op. 3, d. 704, ll. 4–8, 12–14, 17–25 & 74–94. 27. OGAChO, P-297, op. 2, d. 480, l. 35–39. 28. OGAChO, f. 220, op. 1, d. 329, l. 109. 29. E.A. Malyshev, ‘Sotsialno-kul’turnye tendentsii istoricheskogo razvitiia toponimiki zhilykh raionov ChTZ v 1930–60-ch gg.’, Industrializatsiia v SSSR: Uroki istorii, Cheliabinsk 2003, pp. 64–66. 30. OGAChO, f. 804, op. 1, d. 141, 25; op. 8, d. 143, l. 31; op. 9, d. 4, l. 48. 31. OGAChO, f. P-92, op. 1, d. 364, l. 186–191, the head of the 2nd department of the NKVD directorate in Cheliabinsk, Lieutenant-Colonel Brudno, special report (spetssvodka) on the conditions in the workers’ villages (trudposëlki), 28 March, 1937. 32. OGAChO, f. P-92, op. 1, d. 335, l. 1–5, Proposals from working men and women, engineers and clerks at the deputies’ gatherings for the election of the district soviet at the tractor factory, February 1937. 33. E. Podtiashkin, ‘Baraki’, Golos, 25 October–1 November 1991. 34. OGAChO, f. P-288, op. 3, d. 499, ll. 1–8, 78–92, 112, 123, O sostoianii mestnogo khozhiaistva Cheliabinskoi oblasti. 35. John Scott, Behind the Urals: An American Worker in Russia’s City of Steel,[1942], enlarged edition prepared by Stephen Kotkin, Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press 1989, p. 219. 36. OGAChO, f. 220, op, 5, d. 70, l. 45, Report to the City Soviet on the education at the Cheliabinsk Pedagogical Institute, 21 January 1940. 37. A.P. Cherednichenko, (ed.), Cheliabinskskii Gosudarstvennyi Pedagogicheskii Universitet, Cheliabinsk: Izdatel’stvo ChGPU 1999, pp. 14–64. 38. OGAChO, f. R–220, op. 11, d. 14, l. 105–106; f. R–220, op. 11, d. 15, l. 6–6ob, Excerpts from the Cheliabinsk city party committee on the alphabetisation campaign at the tractor factory, 3 June 1936. 39. OGAChO, f. R-792, op. 1, d. 15, l 56–57, Rezoljutsiia Chelabinskogo gorkoma, ‘O sostoianii likvidatsii negramotnosti na ChTZ, 3 June, 1936. 40. OGAChO, f. 220, op. 1, d. 605, l. 66. 41. Cheliabinskskii rabochii, 28 January 1932. 42. OGAChO, f. R-1595, op. 1, d. 26, l. 48–50. Cheliabinskskii oblastnoi otdel zdravookhraneniia. 43. OGAChO, f. 379, op. 2, d. 760, l. 30. 44. OGAChO, f. R-1595, op. 1. d. 26, l. 54–55. 45. OGAChO, f. R-1595, op. 1, d. 2, l. 13. 46. OGAChO, f.-R1595, op. 1, d. 13, l. 176–182ob. 47. OGAChO, f. R-1595, op. 1, d. 26, l. 88–91. 48. OGAChO, f. R.1595, op. 1, d. 26, l. 92–94. 49. OGAChO, f. 288, op. 1, d. 25, l. 57–61. During the two five-year plans from 1928–1937, 14.2 million rubles were invested in water supply lines, and by

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Notes 303

50.

51. 52. 53.

1937 their total length was 126 kilometres, OGAChO, f. 220, op. 4, d. 498, l. 16, op. 8., d. 143, l. 29. V.M. Semënov, V.N. Novosiolov & L.V. Shubarina, Sport na Iuzhnom Urale: Istoriia razvitiia fizicheskoi kul’tury i sporta v Cheliabinske 1919–1929 gody, Cheliabinsk: Ural’skaia akademiia fizicheskoi kul’tury 2000. OGAChO, f. 792, op. 1, d. 15, l. 72–73, Resolution of 23 July 1936. OGAChO, f. 792, op. 1, d. 15, l. 110. OGAChO, f. 792, op. 1, d. 15, l. 137–139.

4 The Tractor Factory’s Civilian Production and Military Potential 1. OGAChO, f. P-124, op. 1, d. 28, l. 11. 2. R.W. Davies, Oleg V. Khlevniuk & E.A. Rees (eds.), Stalin– Kaganovich Correspondence, 1931–1936, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press 2003, pp. 64, 82. 3. OGAChO, P-124, op. 1, d. 28, l. 11. 4. OGAChO, P-124, op. 1, d. 28, l. 57. 5. On Sergo Ordzhonikidze,(1886–1937), one of the most important personalities during the forced industrialisation, see Oleg Vitalievitch Khlevniuk. In Stalin’s Shadow: The Career of ‘Sergo’ Ordzhonikidze, Armonk, NY & London: Sharpe 1995. 6. For one such report, compare ‘Obzor raboty po stroitel’stvu Cheliabinskogo Traktornogo zavoda. Sostavlen po materialam EKO Cheliabinskgogo Opersektora PP OGPU po Uralu po sostoianiiu na 26 aprelja 1931 g.’, OGAChO, f 75, op 1, d 685, l. 104–109. 7. Davies et al., Stalin–Kaganovich Correspondence, p. 221. 8. A.G. Kireev & E.G. Khoviv, ChTZ – moia biografiia. Cheliabinsk: IuzhnoUralskoe knizhnoe izdatelstvo 1983. On the expansion of the working class, from approximately three to six million persons during the first fiveyear plan, see Jean-Paul Depretto, Les Ouvriers en U.R.S.S. 1928–1941, Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne 1997, in particular his descriptions of the conditions in the Kuznetsk region, which resemble the conditions in Cheliabinsk, pp. 187–251. 9. In his analysis of Western Technology and Soviet Economic Development 1930 to 1945 (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press 1971), American historian Antony Sutton tended to overestimate the Western part and underestimate the internal Soviet development of new technology. Nonetheless, this is a magnificent survey of practically all sectors in which Western companies contributed to Soviet industrialisation in the inter-war period. Sutton’s problem was that the archives of private Western companies were inaccessible or had kept very few documents of their Soviet affairs. The opening of formerly closed Soviet archives in the 1990s shed more light on the transfer of Western technology. On American technology and the Cheliabinsk Tractor Plant, see Sutton, Western Technology, pp. 188–191; Leonid S Komarov, ‘ChTZ – Katerpiller’, SShA: Ekonomika, politika, ideologiia, 1977, no. 1, pp. 59–70; Elena A. Kalinkina,’... Kazhdyi nash den’ oplachvaetsia zolotom...’ (O komandirovkakh spetsialistov ChTS i ChTZ za granitsu

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304

10.

11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16.

17.

18.

19. 20.

21.

Notes v 1930-e gg.)’, Industrializatsiia v SSSR: Uroki istorii, Cheliabinsk 2003, pp. 204–208. Trotsky’s memoir, Moia zhizn (My Life), was published in 1930 in Berlin, and was soon translated into many European languages. Numerous new editions have become available in recent years. OGAChO, f. R-379, op. 12, d. 6, l. 54–61. Materialy k kontrolnym tsifram khoziaistva Cheliabinskogo raiona na 1932 g., Cheliabinsk 1932. OGAChO, f. 98, op. 1, d. 3234, l. 91–92 (Cheliabinskaia oblast, p. 140). Z. Krasilshchik, V borbe za Cheliabinskskii traktornyi, Sverdlovsk–Moscow n.p. 1931, provides a detailed description of how the tractor factory was intended to produce civilian tractors and artillery haulers. OGAChO, 379. 2.11, 23ob–125. The actual role of forced convict labour during the industrialisation of the 1930s has been overestimated in much of the Western literature. For better data on the role of Gulag prisoners and special settlements in the Urals, cf. Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as Civilization, Berkeley, CA, & London: University of California Press 1995, pp. 230–235; James Harris, The Great Urals: Regionalism and the Evolution of the Soviet System, Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press 1999, pp. 105–122. For details of the camps and special settlements that were essential during the construction of the metal works and other factories in Nizhnii Tagil and the northern Urals, see Viktor Kirillov, Kniga pamiati. Posviashchaetsia Tagilchanam – zhertvam repressii 1917–1980-kh godov, Ekateringburg: UIF Nauka 1994; idem, Istoriia repressii v Nizhnetagil’skom regione Urala, 1920–1950 gody, vols 1–2, Nizhnii Tagil: n.p. 1996; idem, Zhertvy repressii: Nizhnii Tagil 1920–1980-e gody, Ekaterinburg: n.p. 1999. OGAChO, f. R-804, op. 8, d. 49, l. 120–125. Stenogramma slëta stakhanovtsev i udarnikov vsekh predpriiatii Cheliabinskoi oblasti. The full report from this Stakhanovite meeting in 1937 is 148 pages. On recruitment outside the Soviet Union of qualified workers and specialists, see Elena Osokina, Za fasadom ‘stalinskogo izobiliia’. Raspredelenie i rynok v snabzhenii naseleniia v gody industrializatsii, 1927–1941, Moscow: Rosspen 1999, pp. 105–110. See also Vincent E. Baker, ‘American Workers in the Soviet Union Between the Two World Wars: From Dream to Disillusionment’, master’s thesis, West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV 1998. Richard Cartwright Austin, Building Utopia: Erecting Russia’s First Modern City, 1930, Kent & London: Kent State University Press 2004. Sergej Shurawljow, Ich bitte um Arbeit in der Sowjetunion Das Schicksal deutsche Facharbeiter im Moskau der 30er Jahre (Berlin: Ch. Links 2003) described the fate of German workers at an electric lamp factory in Moscow. For generalisations on foreign workers, compare Sergei Zhuravlëv, ‘Inostrantsy v sovetskom obshchestve 1920–1930-kh godov’, Trudy Instituta rossiiskoi istorii RAN, 1999–2000, Vypusk 3, Moscow 2002, pp. 186–209, and the ensuing discussion among Russian historians on a new domain for archival research in a comparative perspective. Andrea Graziosi, ‘Visitors from Other Times: Foreign Workers in the Prewar Five-Year Plans’, A New, Peculiar State: Explorations in Soviet History, 1917– 1937. Westport, CT, & London: Praeger, 2000, pp. 223–266. In footnote 26 (p. 227), Graziosi refers to a long series of workers’ memoirs that are almost

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22.

23. 24. 25.

26.

27. 28.

29.

30.

31.

32.

33.

forgotten today but were widely discussed at the time because of their widely differing impressions of Stalin’s Russia. OGAChO. f. R-792, op. 1, d.3, l.14–20, Ukazaniia, spiski, perepiska ob inostrannykh spetsialistakh, 1934; OGAChO, f. 379, op. 3, d. 555, l. 29–32; OGAChO, f. 288, op. 1, d. 113, l. 19–22. OGAChO, f. P-124, op. 1. d. 60, l. 4, 4ob, 5 (1934–35) dokladnye zapiski o rabote s inostrannymi spetsialistami. Izvestiia 28 May–7 June 1931; A. Aleksandrov, ‘Boris Pasternak v Cheliabinske’, Vechernyi Cheliabinsk, 2 March 1990. RGVA f. 31811, op. 1, d. 242, l.20, A report of an inspection trip to the Tractor Experimental Plant at ChTS building site, Pavlovskii, 27 November 1930, Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi voennyi arkhiv. The modifications of the Christie tank were the BT-5 and the BT-7, the latter of which had several models such as BT-7A, BT-IS, BT-SV-2 (never put into serial production) and finally BT-7M with a V-2 diesel engine at 500 hp, a weight of 14.7 tons and a pressure on the ground of 0.68 kilograms per square centimetre. A combined wheel and caterpillar track tank, with a maximum speed of 86 kilometres per hour on wheels and 65 on tracks, it had a 45 millimetre gun and three DT7 62 millimetre submachine guns. Over 700 BT-7M tanks were produced in 1939. See A.V. Karpenko, Obozrenie otechestvennoi bronetankovoi tekhniki (1905– 1995gg.), St Petersburg: Nevskii Bastion 1996. Mary R. Habeck, Storm of Steel: The Development of Armor Doctrine in Germany and the Soviet Union, 1919–1939, Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press 2003; see also: Sergei Gorlov, Sovershenno sekretno. Al’ians Moskva–Berlin 1920–1933 gg. (Voenno-politicheskie otnosheniia SSSR–Germaniia), Moscow: Olma-Press 2001. Compare Vladimir K. Triandafillov, The Nature of the Operations of Modern Armies, [1929], edited with a foreword by Jacob W. Kipp, London: Frank Cass 1994. For a detailed analysis of how Russian army theoreticians consolidated the experience from the Russo-Japanese War 1904–1905, World War I and the Russian Civil War see the survey by the former US military attaché to Moscow, Richard W. Harrison, The Russian Way of War. Operational Art, 1904–1940, Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas 2001. On the technological arms race between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany concerning tanks, see Daniial P. Ibraimov, Protivoborstvo: Istoriia sozdaniia voennoi tekniki v SSSR i Germanii, Moscow: DOSAAF 1989. For an introduction to how the Soviet military conceived their panzer doctrine for modern wars, compare Jacob Kipp, ‘Mass, Mobility and the Origins of Soviet Operational Art, 1918–1936’, Transformation in Russian and Soviet Military History, Proceedings of the Twelfth Military History Symposium, USAF Academy 1986; Richard Simpkin, Deep Battle: The Brainchild of Marshal Tukhachevskii, with a foreword by John Erickson, London: Brassey’s Defence 1987. On Soviet military support to the Chinese Nationalist government, codenamed ‘Operation Z’, see Youli Sun, China and the Origins of the Pacific War 1931–1941, London: Macmillan 1993, pp. 109–130. For the support from the Soviet Union and the Red Army for the legitimate Spanish government in the civil war of 1936–1938, internally called ‘Operation X’, see Komintern i

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306 Notes

34.

35.

36.

37. 38. 39. 40.

41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

grazhdanskaia voina v Ispanii. Dokumenty, eds. P.P. Pozharskii & A.I. Saplin, Moscow: Nauka 2001; Gerald Howson, Arms for Spain: The Untold Story of the Spanish Civil War, London: John Murray 1998; Jurij Rybalkin, Operatsiia ‘X’: Sovetskaia voennaia pomoshch respublikanskoi Ispanii (1936–1939), Moscow: AIRO-XX 2000. D.V. Gavrilov, ‘Rol’ malykh voin v razvitii voennoi promyshlennosti Urala pered Pervoi i Vtoroi mirovymi voinami’, in Ural v strategii Vtoroi Mirovoi voiny, Ekaterinburg 2002, pp. 81–84. See, Paul A.C. Koistinen, Planning War, Pursuing Peace: The Political Economy of American Warfare, 1920–1939, Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas 1998. See Lennart Samuelson, Plans for Stalin’s War-Machine: Tukhachevskii and Military-Economic Planning, 1925–1941, London & New York: Macmillan & St. Martins 1999. Ivan Vernidub, Boepripasy Pobedy. Ocherki, Moscow: TsNIINTIKPK 1998, p. 36. OGAChO, f. 792, op. 1, d. 119, l. 10–10ob. OGAChO, f. 792, op. 1, d. 119, l. 9 otborotjnyj spisok nr 3. Proektnoe zadanie po assimiliatsii Cheliabinskogo Traktornogo zavoda mashinoi T-29 posted as the target for 1933 that all the workshops at the tractor plant (thermic, welding, coachwork, testing and assembly) should have wartime preparedness to produce the T-29 tank. OGAChO, f. R-390, op.1, d. 25, l. 103–104, Order from Sergo Ordzhonikidze, 26 October 1933. OGAChO, f. 792, op. 1, d. 10, l. 6, Letter from ChTZ’s Director Bruskin. OGAChO, f. 792, op. 1, d. 10, l. 5, 7, 8–9, 14. OGAChO, f. 792, op. 1, d. 10, ll. 24—25. OGAChO, f. 792, op. 1, d. 10, ll. 30, 31 and 43. A.N. Shcherba, ‘Stanovlenie i razvitie tankovoi promyshlennosti Leningrada do Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny’, Peterburgskaia Istoricheskaia shkola. Almanakh. 1: O Viktore Anatoleviche Ezhove i ego tvorchestve, St Petersburg 2001, pp. 232–250.

5 Stagnation and Streamlining in the Whirlwinds of Terror, 1936–1939 1. Victoria Bonnell, Iconography of Power: Soviet Political Posters under Lenin and Stalin, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press 1997, p. 168. Bonnell analysed the illustrations’ language in the posters from the Stalin era (pp. 161–279) and showed how the power elite transformed the myths on Lenin by showing Stalin as the fair and wise leader, by demonising the opponents of his regime and, after the war, depicting him as a prescient and far-sighted genius. 2. Zeth Höglund, Häxnatt över Europa: Tal till kristna och hedningar. Stockholm: Axel Holmströms 1939, pp. 102–103. 3. Frederick Beck & W. Godin, Russian Purge and the Extraction of Confession, London: Hurst & Blackett 1951. Beck and Godin discussed in detail which categories of Soviet citizens, as well as foreigners, were struck by the terror.

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Notes 307

4.

5. 6.

7. 8.

9. 10.

11.

12. 13. 14. 15.

They also summed up a dozen more or less credible explanations that were in vogue inside the Soviet Union as to why the purges took place. Roy Medvedev, K sudu istorii. Genezis i posledstviia stalinizma, New York: Alfred A. Knopff 1974; idem, Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism, New York: Alfred Knopf 1971, enlarged ed. 1990. Robert Thurston, Life and Terror in Stalin’s Russia, 1934–1941, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press 1996. For a thorough and detailed chronological survey of the day-to-day events in Soviet society, the Communist Party and the secret police, see Wladislaw Hedeler, Chronik der Moskauer Schauprozesse 1936, 1937 und 1938: Planung, Inszenierung und Wirkung, Berlin: Akademie Verlag 2003. OGAChO, f. R-390, op. 2, d. 4, l. 2. On the Great Terror of 1937 and the most recent fundamental research findings, compare Marc Jansen & Nikita Petrov, Stalin’s Loyal Executioner: People’s Commissar Nikolai Ezhov, 1893–1940, Stanford: Hoover Institution Press 2002; idem, Ezhov – stalinskii pitomets, Moscow: Rosspen 2008; Aleksei Polianskiiskii, Ezhov: Istoriia ‘zheleznogo’ narkoma, Moscow: Veche 2003; Vladimir N. Khaustov & Lennart Samuelson, Stalin, NKVD i repressii, 1936 – 1938, Moscow: Rosspen 2008. V.N. Khaustov et al., Lubianka: Stalin i Upravlenie Gosbezopasnosti NKVD, 1936–1938, Moscow: Demokratiia 2003. James Harris, The Great Urals: Regionalism and the Evolution of the Soviet System, Ithaca, NY, & London: Cornell University Press 1999, pp. 146–190. It is not known how these meetings with Stalin were minuted or otherwise documented. It is so far only possible to speculate on what might have been on the agendas. However, new insights have already been gained from a quantitative analysis of these meetings, who the most frequent visitors were and how the categories changed over the years. See Stephen G. Wheatcroft, ‘From Team-Stalin to Degenerate Tyranny’, in Edgar Arfon Rees (ed.) The Nature of Stalin’s Dictatorship: The Politburo, 1924–1953, London: Palgrave Macmillan 2004, pp. 79–107. N. Gevorkian,’Vstrechnye plany po unichtozheniiu naroda’, Moskovskie novosti, 21 June, 1992, No. 29, pp. 18–19. In March 1956, Ryndin was formally rehabilitated from all these fabricated charges. See Galina Kibitkina, ‘Vzgliad v istoriiu: Vysokoe doverie – bol’shaia otvetstvennost’, Tankograd, No. 12. 1999. Numerous regional studies and documentary collections have been published since 1992 concerning the purges. See, e.g. R.A. Khantalin (ed.) Repressii v Archangelske: 1937–1938. Archangelsk: Pomorskii Gosudarstvennyi Universitet 1999. Among the regional efforts to analyse the Stalinist era, the Komi Republic, which contains the Vorkuta coal mines, deserves particular mention. In the 1940s, these mines were exploited mainly by Gulag prisoners and there were many Gulag camps and special villages in other part of Komi. Historians and archivists in Komi have eight huge volumes entitled Pokaianie (Repentence) with the biographies of thousands of victims of Stalinist-era repression. For a survey of all the lists of victims of

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16.

17. 18.

19. 20.

21. 22. 23.

24.

25.

26.

Notes Soviet repression in various parts of the country, see Knigi pamjati zhertv politicheskikh repressij v SSSR: Annotirovannyi ukazatel, St Petersburg: Rossiiskaia natsionalnaia biblioteka 2003, edited by Anatolii Razumov from the association ‘Vozvrashchennyje imena’; on the martyrologies from Cheliabinsk oblast in particular, p. 181. OGAChO, f. P-92, op. 1, d. 364, l. 244–248, Spets-svodka ob anti-sovetskikh projavleniiakh v sviazi s protsessom k[ontra].r[evoljutsionnogo] trotskistskogo parallelnogo tsentra, Nachalnik UNKVD Cheliabinskoi oblasti, starshii maior Blat, 27 January 1937. G.I. Ierusalimchik, ‘Period industrializatsii i evreiskaia intelligentsia v 30-e gody’, in Raznye gody – obshchaia sudba, Cheliabinsk 1999. V.E. Sakhov, ‘Molokh stalinskikh repressii’, Prizyv, Cheliabinsk, 15 April 1994; N. Shukalin, ‘Nevinoven, no podsuden...’, Cheliabinskskii rabochii, 29 July 1994. ‘Rol’ sudov v repressivnoi politike gosudarstva (na primere lineinogo suda zheleznoi dorogi imeni Kaganovicha’, Archivy Urala, 1995, no. 2, pp. 154–164. A.L. Khudoborodov, ‘Kak eto bylo: O tragicheskoi sud’be direktora Cheliabinskogo gosudarstvennogo pedagogicheskogo instituta I.K. Zelenskogo v 1930-e gody’, Iuzhnyi Ural v sud’be Rossii, Cheliabinsk 2003, pp. 168–170. Gustaf Mund, GPU. Das Angriff an der Abendland, Leipzig: Niebelungen 1942. OGAChO, f. P-288, op. 2, d. 228, l. 1–148, Soveshchanie direktorov predpriiatii u sekretaria Obkoma VKP(b) t. Ryndina, 1 September 1937. GARF, f. 8418, op. 12. d.91, l. 8–18, Reports with appendices, 11 photographs from the military inspectors, letter from the military representatives (voenpredy) and sketches of spare parts. N. Antselovich. 8 February 1937; GARF, f. 8418, op. 12. d.91, l. 19–23, N. Antinov with copies to Kliment Voroshilov, Lazar Kaganovich, Valerii Mezhlauk and Moisei Rukhimovich. A short biography on Zaltsman remains the only substantial work devoted to this fascinating personality; compare Vladimir Sergiichuk, Tankovyi korol Rossii, Kiev: Nichlava 2005. The waves of repression that hit Cheliabinsk were made public during the perestroika and glasnost periods, when local newspapers published lists and short biographies of the victims of political repression. See Rasstrel’nye spiski (Lists of executions) in the newspaper Cheliabinskskii rabochii; for example, 23 March, 3, 11, 18, 25 April, 15, 29 May, 6, 28 June, 10, 19, 24 July, 7, 14, 28 August, 1991, 7, 8, 9, 14, 23, 30 July, 4, 25 August, 1, 5, 29 September, 4, 12, 24 November and 24 December, 1991; 3, 15 January, 19, 25 February, 3, 11, 31 March, 8 April, 6, 13, 19 May, 16 June, 7, 8, 9, 14, 23, 30 July, 1, 5, 29 September, 4, 12, 24 November, 24 December, 1992. Under the heading ‘Reabilitirovannye’, Vechernii Cheliabinsk published lists of 106 persons on 24 and 26 November and 3, 8, 10, 24 and 29 December 1992. Each of these issues contained hundreds of names and brief biographical data on some of them. Even in 1993 and much later, Cheliabinsk newspapers published similar articles and lists of persons who were victims of political repression during the Soviet era. These ‘mass operations’ were, in essence, unknown by historians until the late 1980s. Since then, the relevant documents from the party leadership and the security service have been published. How NKVD prepared and implemented the mass operations is presented in Vladimir Khaustov et al.,

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Notes 309

27. 28.

29.

30. 31. 32.

33.

Lubianka: Stalin i organy gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti, 1936–1938, Moscow: Demokratiia 2003. Historians in Russia and the West are still debating how best to explain the background to the exceptionally brutal mass executions; for an introduction to this debate, compare Barry McLoughlin and Kevin McDermott (eds.), Stalin’s Terror: High Politics and Mass Repression in the Soviet Union, London: Palgrave Macmillan 2003; Arch Getty, ‘Excesses are not to be permitted...: Mass Terror Operations in the late 1930s and the Stalinist Government’, Russian Review, 61 (January 2002); Nicolas Werth, ‘Repenser la grande terreur: L’U.R.S.S. des années trente’, Le Débat, November-December 2002. See also the historiographical introduction chapter in Khaustov & Samuelson, Stalin, NKVD i repressii, 1936 – 1938, Moscow: Rosspen 2008. Compare Oleg Khlevniuk, The History of the Gulag: From Collectivization to the Great Terror, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005, pp. 140–185. See Iagoda’s comment during the forced collectivisation in 1930 to local OGPU cadres, who had arrested not only rich peasant and ‘counter-revolutionaries’, but also priests, merchants and former White guardists. ‘We are not cleansing the countryside of priests, merchants and “others”. “Others”? So they do not know who they take. We will have time to finish off with merchants and priests later. It is essential to hit correctly against the target, the kulak and kulak-counterrevolutionaries’, Les Campagnes soviétiques vues par O.G.P.U.– NVKD, 1930–1934, Sovetskaia derevnia glazami OGPU–NKVD, 1930–1934, ed. Viktor P. Danilov et al., vol. 3: 1, Moscow: Rosspen 2003, p. 107. On the relative economic significance of the Gulag camp system, see Paul Gregory, ‘An Introduction to the Economics of the Gulag’, in Paul R. Gregory & Valery Lazarev (eds.), The Economics of Forced Labor. The Soviet Gulag, Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press 2003, pp. 1–21. See Barrington Moore Jr., Terror and Progress, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1954. V.N. Khaustov et al., Lubianka: Stalin i Glavnoe Upravlenie Gosbezopasnosti NKVD 1937–1938, Moscow: Demokratiia 2004, passim. For a modern interpretation of the classical version on why the Great Terror ended with the purge of the secret police, see Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization, Berkeley, CA, & London: University of California Press 1995, pp. 350–354. When Kotkin conducted his magnificent study of Magnitogorsk in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the regional archives were not yet open for researchers, least of all foreign scholars. The Socialist Revolutionary Party (SR), which was the largest party at the time of the elections to the Constituent Assembly in December 1917, had a strong basis in the countryside in the Urals. The SR party split in 1917 into a Leftist organisation that cooperated with the Bolsheviks in the first Soviet government. After a putsch attempt by the Left-SR in the summer of 1918, their organisation was prohibited. The SR took the White side in the Russian Civil War in 1918 in an attempt to reassemble a Constituent Assembly as groundwork for a democratic development in Russia. In 1922, a political trial was arranged against SR leaders for having instigated the Civil War and for terrorist activities. The persons who were accused of ‘counter-revolutionary SR activism’ during the Great Terror in the late 1930s had only been members of the SR some 20 years before and had long since ceased any political

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310

34.

35. 36. 37.

38. 39.

40.

41.

Notes activities. The major settlement by the Bolsheviks against the SR party took place in 1922, see Mark Jansen, The Trial of the Socialist Revolutionaries. Moscow 1922, Niemegen: Martinus Niehoff 1982 (Russian translation: Sud bez suda: 1922 god. Pokazatel’nyi protsess sotsialistov-revoljutsionerov, Moscow: Vozvrashchenie 1993). OGAChO, f. 288, op. 3, d. 165, l. 236–240. Memorandum po delu Lapshina, Lugovtseva, Voronchikhina i drugikh, 19 June 1940. A long excerpt from this sentence against the NKVD officials is reproduced in Igor Nepein, Palachi i zhertvy, Cheliabinsk n.p. 1997, pp. 189–193. Nepein’s book includes long excerpts from interrogation protocols with eminent local authors and journalists in Cheliabinsk who had been arrested during the Great Terror. They were broken down mentally and forced to confess to imaginary crimes. Nepein had access to the archives of the Cheliabinsk FSB and could show the mechanisms of the terror in great detail. Two of the four authors arrested were executed; the other two survived their terms in camp and told investigators in the 1950s about how they had been tortured in 1937. Nepein’s book also contains the protocols from 1940 and 1946 with the NKVD interrogators who were accused of having forced the arrested persons to ‘confess’ using illegal methods, such as falsifying the signed ‘confessions’ and inventing entire groups of counter-revolutionary networks in Cheliabinsk. For more details on how the arrested NKVD leaders in Cheliabinsk admitted interpreting orders from Moscow in 1937–1938 and carrying out their operations against fictional Polish and other conspiracies, see the extensive volume on the history of the state security organs in the Urals in three centuries by Oleg Veprev & Viacheslav Liutov, Gosudarstvennaia bezopasnost’: Tri veka na Iuzhnom Urale, Cheliabinsk: Iuzhno-Ural’skoe Knizhnoe Izdatel’stvo 2002, pp. 287–318. For an illuminating account of the methods used by NKVD to force innocents to confess, compare the articles and documents by Aleksandr V. Churakov, Voenno-istoricheskii archiv, nos 6 and 7, 2004. Nepein, Palachi i zhertvy, pp. 193–194. Nikita V. Petrov & K.V. Skorkin, Spravochnik: Kto rukovodil NKVD 1934–1941, Moscow: Zvenia 1999, pp. 436–437. Compare Gábor T. Rittersporn, ‘The Omnipresent Conspiracy: On Soviet Imagery of Politics and Social Relations in the 1930s’, in Arch Getty & Roberta Manning (eds.), Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1994, pp. 99–115. Reabilitatsiia – kak eto bylo, vol. 1, pp. 75–77. See also document 15, from 9 January 1956, on the mass terror against members of the Communist Party. Reabilitatsiia, vol. 1, pp. 317–348, the report of Pospelov to the presidium of the central committee, which provided the factual documentation for the ‘secret speech’ of Krushchev at the 20th Party Congress in February 1956. On this turbulent period in Russian historiography, see, e.g., Robert W. Davies, Soviet History in the Gorbachev Revolution, London: Macmillan 1989; idem, Soviet History in the Yeltsin Era, London: Macmillan 1997. Reabilitatsiia – Kak eto bylo. Dokumenty Prezidiuma TsK KPSS i drugie materialy. vol. 1: March 1953–February 1956, eds. A.N. Artizov et al., Moscow: MFD 2000; vol. 2: February 1956–Early 1980s, Moscow: MFD 2003; vol. 3: Mid1980s – 1991, Moscow: MFD 2004.

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Notes 311

6

Industrial Preparedness in Cheliabinsk, 1939–1940

1. Compare Ernst Henry, Hitler over Europe? London 1935 and idem, Feldzug gegen Moskau?, Strasbourg 1936. Both books were translated into Russian, as Gitler nad Evropoj? and Gitler protiv SSSR: Grjadushchaia schvatka mezhdu fasjistskimi i sotsialistitjeskimi armijami and issued in huge print runs. Rostovskii was a frequent contributor of articles to The New Statesman and The Nation. He stayed in London during World War II and after his return to the Soviet Union, he was struck by the repression during the anti-Semitic campaign in Stalin’s last years of power. In 1965, Ilya Ehrenburg tape recorded Ernst Henry’s critique of Stalinism. The notes were not published until the late 1980s, however, in the glasnost period. See also the articles by Iakov Drabkin and Lev Bezymenskii in the re-issues of Ernst Henry’s two books (Moscow: Russkii raritet 2004, pp. 469–485). 2. Michael Jabara Carley, 1939. The Alliance that never was and the Coming of World War II, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee 1999. 3. See Alvin Finkel & Clement Leibovitz, The Chamberlain–Hitler Collusion, New York: Monthly Review Press 1998. 4. Maurice Edelman, How Russia prepared: U.PS.S.R. beyond the Urals, London: Penguin 1942. 5. Frey Rydeberg, Carl Kempff & Georg Gärdin, Det militariserade samhället: några fakta om Sovjetunionen och dess maktmedel, Stockholm: Hasse W. Tullberg 1934. 6. OGAChO, f. P-92, op. 1, d. 451, l. 83–89, 103–108, 147–149. 7. OGAChO, f. R-792, op. 1, d. 23, l. 81–82. 8. OGAChO, f. R-220, op. 13, d. 1, l. 4. 9. OGAChO, f. R-220, op. 13, d. 1, l. 24. 10. OGAChO, P-288, op. 3, d. 676, l. 26–31, 35, report on the machine-building industry in the Cheliabinsk region, Dokladnaia o rabote mashinostroitelnoi promyshlennosti Cheliabinskoi oblasti. The People’s Commissariat of Machine-building, with its 11 large enterprises, was of direct importance for the defence of the country. 11. OGAChO, f. R-792, op. 1, d. 23, l. 81, 82. Jfr R-792.1.39: 83–83ob. 12. OGAChO, f. R-792, op. 1, d. 23, l. 84–88. 13. OGAChO, f. 792, op. 1, d. 29, l. 10. 14. OGAChO, f. R-792, op. 1, d. 39, l. 9–15. 15. OGAChO, f. R-792.2.23:31–32. 16. OGAChO, f. R-792.2.23: 33–39, Plan organizatsii kursov po povysheniiu kvalifikatsii rabotnikov moborganov NKSredMash. 17. OGAChO, f. R-792, op. 1, d. 23, l. 138–139. 18. OGAChO P-288, op. 4, d. 14, l. 220–206, Malinenko at the Plenum of Cheliabinsk obkom plenary meeting, 18–20 June, 1940. 19. OGAChO, f. P-92, op. 1, d. 512, l. 41, Partinformatsiia Traktorozavodskogo raikoma VKP(b) v obkom, gorkom VKP(b), September 1940. 20. Igor Shmelëv, Istoriia tanka, 1916–1996, Moscow: Tekhnika – molodezhi, 1996. On the designer and inventor Zhozef Kotin‘s life, see Konstruktor boevykh mashin (O Zh. Ia. Kotine), Leningrad: Lenizdat 1988. 21. OGAChO, f. P-92, op. 1, d. 512, l. 69–72, Politicheskaia informatsiia sekretariam gorkoma VKP (b), t. Fokinu, June 1940.

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312

Notes

22. OGAChO, f. P-288, op. 4, d. 299, l. 110–114. 23. OGAChO, P-92, op. 1, d. 451, l. 89. 24. OGAChO, P. 124, op. 1, d. 178, l. 108, Spravka o kolichestve osuzhdennykh narushitelei trud[ovoi] distsypliny po ChTZ za period s 1 iiulia po 20 noiabria 1940; OGAChO, f. P-124, op. 1, D. 178, l 89–93, Dokladnaia zapiska. Upravlenie kadrov TsK VKP(b), tov. Tsunikovu ot Burakovskogo, sekretaria partiinogo komiteta Cheliabinskogo traktornogo zavoda im. Stalina. 25. See Evan Mawdsley, ‘Crossing the Rubicon: Soviet Plans for Offensive War in 1940–1941’, The International History Review, December 2003, vol. XXV, pp. 818–865, see also Bianka Pietrow-Ennker (ed.) Präventivkrieg? Der deutsche Angriff auf die Sowjetunion, Frankfurt am Main: Fischer 2000. 26. RGAE, f. 7516, op. 1, d. 750, l. 1–10, Postanovlenie SNK 1502–1503. 27. OGAChO, f. R-792, op. 1, d. 88, l. 7–12, Prikaz po Narodnomu komissariatu srednego mashinostroeniia’O meropriiatiakh po podgotovki k perekhodu promyshlennosti na mobilizatsionnyi plan po boepripasam’, 10 June 1941. 28. The first very detailed history on the tractor factory had almost no information about the mobilisation planning or conversion preparedness for tank production; compare L.S. Komarov & Je. G. Khoviv & N.I. Zarzhevskii, Letopis Cheliabinskogo traktornogo (1929–1945 gg.), Moscow: Profizdat 1972. 29. See Mary R. Habeck, Storm of Steel: The Development of Armor Doctrine in Germany and the Soviet Union, 1919–1939, Ithaca: Cornell University Press 2003. 30. On the tank production in Leningrad before World War II, see A.N. Shcherba, ‘Stanovlenie i razvitie tankovoi promyshlennosti Leningrada do Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny’, Peterburgskaia Istorichestkaia shkola. Almanakh. 1: O Viktore Anatoleviche Ezhove i ego tvorchsetve, St Petersburg 2001, pp. 232–250. 31. OGAChO, R-792, op. 1, d. 64, l. 79–85. 32. OGAChO, R-792, op. 1, d. 73, l. 108–109. 33. OGAChO, R-792, op. 1, d. 73, l. 240. 34. M.A. Feldman, ‘K voprosu o stepeni gotovnosti promyshlennosti Urala k Velikoi Otechestvennoi voine’, Ural v voennoi istorii Rossii, Ekaterinburg 2004, p. 159–161.

7

Production Conditions for Heavy Tanks in the Urals

1. For an unsurpassed history of the Eastern Front in World War II, see Alexander Werth, Russia at War, 1941–1945, (London: Barrie & Rockliff 1964 and later). Werth, whose Russian parents had migrated to the United Kingdom after 1917, wrote several books on France’s political crisis in the 1930s and Germany’s victory over France in 1940. In 1941, after the Nazi German alliance attacked the Soviet Union, Werth travelled on a convoy steamer across the North Sea to Murmansk. His first newspaper articles from wartime Moscow were published as Moscow ’41, (London: H. Hamilton 1942). He was better able than most correspondents to feel the atmosphere among Soviet soldiers and ordinary Russians. This forms the bulk of his later book, which was limited in extent by the sources available in the late 1960s.

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Notes 313

2.

3. 4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

His son is the French historian, Nicolas Werth, who, together with Stephan Courtois and others, compiled The Black Book of Communism, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1999. (French edition 1997). Among other scholarly works on the German-Russian war should be mentioned David M. Glantz, Stumbling Colossus: The Red Army on the Eve of World War, Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press 1998; Mikhail Meltiukhov, Upushchennyi shans Stalina: Sovetskii Soiuz i bor’ba za Evropu, 1939–1941 (Moscow: Veche 2000). Meltiukhov does not categorically deny that the Soviet leadership in 1941 might have planned for a pre-emptive counterstrike against the mobilising German army. This interpretation, which originally goes back to Hitler’s own arguments for starting the invasion in 1941, has been rejected by most Russian and Western scholars. See, e.g., Gabriel Gorodetsky Grand delusion: Stalin and the German Invasion of Russia, (New Haven, CT, & London: Yale University Press 1999). An update on why the Kremlin – that is, mostly Stalin himself – was surprised by the German attack has been written by the CIA intelligence officer in Berlin during the Cold War David E. Murphy, What Stalin Knew: The Enigma of Barbarossa (New Haven, CT, & London: Yale University Press 2005). Warum Krieg mit Stalin? Das Rotbuch der Anti-Komintern, Berlin: NiebelungenVerlag 1941, pp. 57–73. This is not the proper forum for a survey of the research regarding what led to the fatal decision on the ‘Jewish question’ at the Wannsee conference in Berlin in February 1942. One hypothesis is that the decisions on ‘the final solution’ to exterminate the Jews in Europe were made after the failure of Operation Barbarossa in the autumn-winter of 1941–1942, as the German armies had failed to conquer Moscow and Leningrad. The leading German generals had understood that the war against the USSR could not be won in a single campaign but would be yet another extended war of attrition. Contrary to this hypothesis is the evidence that the mass executions of Jews, as well as of communists and army political commissars, took place in the summer of 1941 as the German armies made deep advances into Ukraine and Russia. See Pavel Polian, ‘First Victims of Holocaust: Soviet-Jewish Prisoners of War in German Captivity’, Kritika. Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, New Series, vol. 6, No. 4, 2005, pp. 763–788. This controversial theme has received relatively little attention in the scholarly literature. Nazi conceptions of ‘Jewish Bolshevism’ are discussed by Johannes Rogalla von Bieberstein, ‘Jüdischer Boschewismus’. Mythos und Realität, Schnellroda: Antaios 2003. For a general review of the representation and images of the Soviet Union in various social groups, parties, churches and institutions in Nazi Germany, see Hans-Erich Volkmann (ed.), Das Russlandbild im Dritten Reich, Cologne: Böhlau 1994. D.V. Gavrilov, ‘Ural’skii tyl v Velikoi Otechestvennoi voine: Geopoliticheskii aspekt’, in Ural v Velikoi Otetjetsvennoj voine, 1941–1945 gg. Ekaterinburg 1995, pp. 55–62. See Effects of Climate on Combat in European Russia, Historical Study CMH Pub 104–6, Center of Military History, United States Army, Washington, D.C., no year of publication. From the literature on Hitler as warlord and the role of the German Generalität, see, e.g., John Strawson, Hitler as Military Commander, New York: Barnes & Noble 1971, chapter: ‘Barbarossa – The irretrievable Blunder’. For a

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314

9.

10.

11. 12.

13.

14.

15.

Notes long-term perspective on the German planning for a war against the Soviet Union, compare Carl Dirks & Karl-Heinz Janßen, Der Krieg der Generäle. Hitler als Werkzeug der Wehrmacht, Berlin: Ullstein 1999. Nikolai A. Voznesenskii, Voennaia ekonomika SSSR v period Otechestvennoi voiny [1947], Moscow: Ekonomicheskaia gazeta 2003, pp. 101–113, especially p. 110. On his activity before and during the Great Patriotic War, see the memoirs of Semën Zakharovich Ginzburg, O proshlom – dlia budushchego, Moscow: Politizdat 1983. During those years, for obvious reasons, Ginzburg could only allude to the existence of forced camp labour in the construction industry. See Arsenii Iu. Ermolov,’Perestroika tankovoi promyshlennosti SSSR 1941–42’, Otechestvennaia istoriia, No. 3, 2004, pp. 28–34. There is only one solid biography of this important personality in the Soviet military-industrial complex: see Viktor Andreevich Chalmaev, Malyshev, Moscow: Molodaia Gvardiia 1978. This book, part of the Zhizn’ zamechatel’nykh liudei series, was more reticent than usual about disclosing any precise data about the Soviet defence industry. Malyshev later entered the Atomic Project of the Soviet Union and supervised the construction of the plutonium works in the Urals. He died at an early age from radioactive over-exposure. See also Vladimir Nikolaevich Novosëlov, ‘V.A. Malyshev i N. P. Dukhov – vydaiushchiesia organizatory oboronnoi promyshlennosti’, Industrializatsiia v SSSR: Uroki istorii (K 70-letiiu puska Cheliabinskogo traktornogo zavoda), Cheliabinsk 2003, pp. 147–150. See, e.g., Aleksei Toptygin, Lavrentij Berija. Neizvestnyj marsjal gosbezopasnosti. Moscow: Jauza/ Eksmo 2005, p. 160f. After the declassification of Beria’s role in the Soviet atomic project from 1944–1949, a slightly different picture of the people’s commissar for internal affairs evolved. The myths spread earlier by Khrushchev and others after Beria’s arrest and execution in 1953 not only ascribed the Great Terror in 1937 to Beria, but also included tales of his maniac behaviour, deviant sexual tastes and even murders of young girls who were presumably picked up by his aides-decamp on Moscow’s streets. On Uralvagonzavod in the 1930s and the reconstruction of the factory for production of the T-34 tank, see Sergei V. Ustiantsev, Alla V. Pislegina & Al’fiia Kh. Fakhretdennova, Uralvagonzavod, Elita rossiiskoi industrii / Ural Car-Making Works: An Elite of the Russian Industry, Ekaterinburg: Start 2001. Chamberlin’s description of the events in 1917, The Russian Revolution (1934), is still worth reading for anyone interested in Russia’s history. All reports from the Soviet Union in the interwar period were controversial and difficult to evaluate in practice. Western correspondents had to submit their despatches to the Soviet censors at telegraph stations. Only through background material in other articles could British and American newspapers give their readers a more solid understanding of the changes in the USSR. For an interesting comparison of how three famous correspondents described the Soviet Union in the interwar period, see Allen McTavish Johnson, ‘Moscow Dispatches, 1921–1934: The Writings of Walter Duranty, William Henry Chamberlin and Louis Fischer in Soviet Russia’, PhD Thesis,

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Notes 315

16. 17.

18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26.

27.

28. 29. 30.

31. 32.

Tulane University, 2000. During the Cold war, Chamberlin was a ‘hawk’ who criticised Franklin Roosevelt’s ‘concessions’ to the Soviet Union during the last years of war. William H. Chamberlin, The Russian Enigma. OGAChO, f. R-792, op. 1, d. 84, l. 33 Order from the people’s commissariat of the medium machine-building industry on immediate transition to production of ammunition according to the plans of 10, 11 and 14 June 1941. Ivan Vernidub, Boepripasy Pobedy. Ocherki, Moscow: TsNIINTIKPK 1998, p. 27. E.B. Druzhinina, ‘Korol’ tankov’: Fakty iz biografii I. M. Zal’tsmana’, Industrializatsiia v SSSR: Uroki istorii, Cheliabinsk 2003, pp. 179–186. OGAChO, f. R-792, op. 1, d. 95, ll. 184–185, deputy people’s commissar Nosenko at NKTankoprom to director Zaltsman at the Kirov Works in Cheliabinsk, 13 October, 1941. OGAChO, f. P-288, op.6, d. 292, l. 56–80. Resolution of 25 July, 1942 from the party committee at the Kirov works in Cheliabinsk, based on a report by director Makhonin. OGAChO, f. P-124, op. 1, d. 281, l. 92–94. OGAChO, f. P-124, op. 1, d. 282, l. 102–104. See Jacques Sapir, L’Économie mobilisée: Essai sur les économies de type soviétique, Paris: La Découverte 1989; idem, Logik der sowjetischen Ökonomie oder die permanente Kriegswirtschaft, Berlin: Lit 1992. At Stalingrad and along the Volga River, from November 1942 until February 1943, 160 Soviet divisions with over 1.1 million soldiers and 3500 tanks were engaged to destroy five Axis armies, two of which were German armies with over 50 divisions. They captured or killed over 600,000 men. By way of comparison, at the approximately simultaneous Battle of El Alamein, ten British divisions with 480 tanks destroyed nine German and Italian divisions, which lost approximately 60,000 men. The great differences in Germany’s losses in the Soviet Union and their significance for the outcome of the war in the European theatre is emphasised by David Glantz, Colossus Reborn: The Red Army at War, 1941–1943, Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas 2005, pp. xv–xvii, 37. Glantz (pp. 3–62) also highlights a series of less successful Red Army operations in 1942. The official Soviet historiography gave no mention of this or did so in a very distorted form. The Battle of Kursk has been well analysed in the literature, while the opening of the Russian archives has revealed some new facts on the force relations and on the losses on both sides, David Glantz, Colossus Reborn, p. 48–59; see also Robin Cross, Citadel. The Battle of Kursk, New York: Barnes & Noble 1993. Eduard Sobolev, Konstruktorskoe biuro: Sudby liudei i mashin, Cheliabinsk, ‘Vsem!’, 1997, p. 86. OGAChO, R-792, op. 14, d. 135, l. 14–15, 31–34. OGAChO, R-792.5.40: 40–41. The management was to make sure that the personnel would receive motor transport to and from the factory, particularly for the late night shifts. Galina Kibitkina, ‘Rozhdenie i stanovlenie Tankograda’, Tankograd, No. 10, 1999, p. 2. Aleksandr Bek, Novoe naznachenie, Frankfurt am Main: Posev 1972.

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Notes

33. P.V. Ustiantsev, A.V. Pislegina & A.Ch. Fakhretdennova, Uralvagonzavod, Elita rossiiskoi industrii / Ural Car-Making Works: The Elite of the Russian Industry, Ekateringburg: Start 2001. 34. The publication of source volumes on the Great Patriotic War was a priority task in the 1990s. A large number of archival items were published in the Velikaia Otechestvennaia voina, 1941–1945 series, under the editorship of the Institute of Military History by the Ministry of Defence. The thematic source collections on the supreme military leadership, the General Staff, the Supreme Headquarters, the partisan movement and the Battles of Stalingrad, Kursk and Berlin, etc., serve as a solid introduction to the archives themselves. Since 2007, a general order by the Russian minister of defence has started a new declassification procedure for all materials in the ministry’s central archive concerning the period up to 1945. 35. An example of this new historiography is the fourth volume of the collective Velikaia Otechestvennaia voina 1941–1945 (Moscow: Nauka 1999), entitled ‘The People and the War’. The research from the last 10–15 years is also reflected in Voina i obshchestvo (Moscow: Nauka 2004), in which some 30 articles cover both the battle history and the history of the home front, even such themes as collaboration, desertion, the relations with the Orthodox Church and the treatment of returning POWs.

8 1418 Long Days on the Home Front in the Southern Urals 1. K.I. Zubkov, ‘Ural v geopoliticheskikh stratagemakh Vtoroi Mirovoi voiny’, in Ural v Velikoi Otechestvennoi voine, 1941–1945 gg. Ekaterinburg: RAN UO, Institut istorrii, 1995; Iu.V. Velichko, ‘Strategicheskoe znachenie Urala v period Vtoroi Mirovoi voiny’, Ural v strategii Vtoroi Mirovoi voiny, Ekaterinburg 2000, pp. 72–76. 2. D.V. Gavrilov, ‘Ural’skii tyl v Velikoi Otechestvennoi voine: Geopoliticheskii aspekt’, in Ural v Velikoi Otechetsvennoi voine, 1941–1945 gg., Ekaterinburg 1995, pp. 55–62. 3. See Oleg Veprev & Viacheslav Liutov, Gosudarstvennaia bezopasnost: Tri veka na Iuzhnom Urale,, Cheliabinsk: Iuzhno-Uralskoe Knizhnoe Izdatelstvo, 2002, pp. 319–352; Vladimir P. Motrevich, ‘Novye materialy o deiatel’nosti germanskoi razvedki na Urale v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny’, VOENnyi KOMmentator, Ekaterinburg, no. 1, 2002, pp. 63–76. 4. OGAChO, f. R-220, op. 6, d. 7, l. 382–383. 5. P.G. Agaryshev & N.P. Paletskikh, ‘Cheliabinskaia oblast v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny’, in Iuzhnyi Ural v sud’be Rossii, Cheliabinsk 2003, pp. 208–211. 6. In general, on the Soviet railway system in World War II and the question of moving troops to the front in the first phases of the German-Russian war and the simultaneous evacuation of industry and people eastwards, see Georgii A. Kumanev, ‘Podvig zheleznodorozhnikov’, Eshelony idut na vostok: Iz istorii perebazirovaniia proizvoditel’nykh sil SSSR v 1941–1942 gg., Moscow: Nauka 1966, pp. 116–140.

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Notes 317 7. The reports that were sent to the people’s commissariats described the chaos that reigned when large amounts of evacuated equipment arrived in echelon after echelon. Goods sometimes remained at a station for days instead of being mounted as soon as possible; see, for example, the report in OGAChO, f. 288, op. 9, d. 288, l. 116. 8. OGAChO, f. P-220, op. 13, d. 1, l. 85–86, 317, P-792, op. 7, d. 13, l. 2–4. 9. OGAChO, f. R-1142, op. 3, d. 2, l. 31–39, 60–62; f. P-288, op. 4, d. 146, ll. 36–43. 10. Direktivnye ukazaniia vysshikh organov gosudarstvennoi vlasti po voprosam evakuatsii i reevakuatsii naseleniia, March 1940–October 1945 (more than 100 pages), OGAChO, f. R-1142, op. 3, d. 2, 25–30, 31–39, 60–62. 11. V.D. Pavlenko, ‘Rol’ Cheliabinskogo oblispolkoma v priëme i razmeshchenii evakuirovannogo naseleniia (iiun 1941–1942 gg.)’, in Iuzhnyi Ural v sud’be Rossii, Cheliabinsk 2003, pp. 212–215; M.N. Potëmkina, ‘Evakuirovannye v Cheliabinskoi oblasti: Vklad v delo Pobedy’, ibidem, pp. 216–220. 12. OGAChO, f. P-124, op. 1, d. 224, 7–12, 68, 126–132. 13. OGAChO, f. R-1177, op. 2, d. 29, l. 20–21. 14. OGAChO, f. R-220, op. 6, d. 7, l. 71–72. 15. The increased role and work of the security service NKVD-NKGB during the war years has been analysed by Aleksandr I. Volkhin, ‘Bor’ba organov NKVD-GUGB Urala i Sibiri s antisovetskoi agitatsiei i propagandoi v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny’, VOENnyi KOMmentator, Ekaterinburg, 2001, no. 1, pp. 19–46; idem, ‘Poisk povstancheskikh organizatsii organami NKVD-GUGB, borba s terroristicheskimi aktami i banditizmom na Urale i v Sibiri v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny’, ibidem, pp. 47–62. 16. OGAChO, f. R-1146, op. 1, d. 10, l. 43. 17. OGAChO, f. R-220, op. 13, d.11, l. 8–9. 18. E. B. Druzhinina, ‘Korol tankov’: Fakty iz biografii I.M. Zaltsmana’, in Industrializatsiia v SSSR: Uroki istorii (K 70-letiiu puska Cheliabinskogo traktornogo zavoda), Cheliabinsk 2003, p. 180. 19. OGAChO, f. P-288, op. 8, d. 145, l. 78–81. 20. OGAChO, f. R-1402, op. 1, d. 1, l. 225–229; Memorandum for a report on which theatre plays should be performed. It was regretted that no plays with local themes had been written by Urals authors, l. 82–83. In general, on the cultural life in Cheliabinsk during the war years, see Aleksandr V. Speranskii, V gornile ispytanii: Kul’tura Urala v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny, Ekaterinburg: UrO RAN 1996, ch. V, pp. 175–218 on the role of theatres in the mobilization efforts of the population. 21. OGAChO, f. P-288, op. 8, d. 145, l. 78–81. 22. OGAChO, f. R-792, op. 3, d. 87, l. 2. 23. Report to the deputy USSR procurator Mokichev on the problems with criminals at the enterprise, December 1942, OGAChO, f. R-792, op.3, d. 108, l. 21–22. 24. See Pravda, 27 December 1944. 25. See the survey of the labour force at the factory, OGAChO, f. P-124, op.1, d. 221, l. 176. 26. Svodka o sostoianii trudovoi distsipliny po Kirovskomu zavodu, Deputy Director Tilip. 27. OGAChO, f. P-297, op. 2, d. 858, l. 29, 8.

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Notes

28. RGASPI, f. 644, op. 14, d. 14, l. 144; data according to A.A. German & A.N. Kurochkin, Nemtsy SSSR v ‘trudovoj armii’, p. 122. 29. OGAChO, f. R-274, d.2, op.5, l. 50. 30. Report of 4 January 1943 to the city soviet executive committee, OGAChO, f. R-200, op. 13, d. 10, l. 17. 31. OGAChO, f. P-288, op. 6, d. 18, l. 32, 36–37. 32. Report on delivery in the first decade (ten days) of December according to plan of 35 Katiusha rocket artillery guns, OGAChO, f. P-288, op. 4, d. 123, l. 124; Letter from Director Poliantsev to obkom Secretary Kashina 31 October, 1941, OGAChO, f. P-288, op. 4, d. 123, ll. 70–71. 33. See G.K. Pavlenko, ‘Kadry trudovykh rezervov Cheliabinskoi oblasti, 1940– 1945 gg.’, in Iuzhnyi Ural v sudbe Rossii, Cheliabinsk 2003, pp. 240–244. 34. OGAChO, f. P-288, op. 4, d. 125, l. 106. 35. OGAChO, f. R-792, op. 3, d. 5, l. 85–87. 36. OGAChO, f. R-274, op. 3, d. 1429, l. 53–53ob. 37. OGAChO, f. P-288, op. 6, d. 213, l. 18–18ob, 33–33ob, 40–40ob. Stenogram from a meeting on 14 October 1942. 38. OGAChO, f. R-792, op. 5, d. 33, l. 21a. 39. OGAChO, f. R-1317, op. 21, d. 17, l. 130–132. 40. OGAChO, f. R-792, op. 5, d. 58, l. 116–117. 41. OGAChO, f. R-792, op. 5, d. 77, l. 92. 42. OGAChO, f. P-288, op. 4, d. 307, l. 73–74ob. 43. OGAChO, f. P-288, op. 6, d. 358, l. 1; G. A. Goncharov,’Chislennost’ i razmeshchenie’trudarmeitsev’ na Urale v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny’, Promyshlennost’ Urala v XIX–XX vekakh, Moscow: AIRO-XX 2002, p. 247. 44. OGAChO, f. P-288, op. 4, d.322, l. 1–1ob, 5–7. 45. OGAChO, f. 92, op, 5, d. 228, l. 9. 46. G.A. Goncharov, ‘Osobye stroitel’nye montazhnye chasti (OSMCh) na Urale v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny’, Ural v voennoi istorii Rossii: Traditsii i sovremennost’, Ekaterinburg 2003, pp. 27–30. 47. OGAChO, f. P-288, op. 4, d. 322, l. 28. Report to the military procurator at the NKVD troops in Cheliabinsk oblast concerning desertions from the factory, OGAChO, f. R-792, op. 3, d. 108, l. 1–1p. 48. Leonid L. Mininberg, Sovetskie evrei v nauke i promyshlennosti SSSR v period vtoroi mirovoi voiny (1941–45gg.), Moscow: ITs-Granit 1995, p. 372. It was also said that on cloudy days the Lenin statue would not be seen at all, and on sunny days the building would cast a shadow even over the Kremlin. In the 1990s, the ‘new Russians’ and the city authorities managed to quickly rebuild the cathedral according to the original drawings from the 19th century. 49. Cheliabinskaia oblast’ 1917–1945, document 262 and the commentary in footnotes 235–236. 50. For the decisions concerning the Soviet Germans, being citizens of the USSR, see the documentary volumes edited and commented by the leading expert Nikolai F. Bugai, ‘Mobilizovat’ nemtsev v rabochie kolonny... I. Stalin’, Moscow: Gotika 1998; and A.A. German & A.N. Kurochkin, Nemtsy SSSR v ‘trudovoi armii’ (1941–1945), Moscow: Gotika, 1998. 51. Those who pretended to work, did so excessively slowly or even sabotaged a building site were sentenced to up to ten years in prison and were sent

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Notes 319

52.

53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58.

59.

60.

61.

62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

to the Gulag camps. See, for example, an NKVD order of 24 March 1942, OGAChO, f. 1619, op. 1, d. 7, l. 20–22, in Cheliabinskaia oblast, 1917–1945, Cheliabinsk: Iuzhno-Ural’skoe izdatel’stvo 1999, pp. 203–204. T.V. Koshman, ‘Trudarmeitsy Kazakhstana na voennykh obiektakh Urala v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny’, in Ural v voennoi istorii Rossii: traditsii i sovremennost, Ekaterinburg 2004, pp. 71–75. Skvoz gody: Cheliabinskskii metallurgicheskii kombinat. Istoricheskii ocherk. Cheliabinsk: ChMK 1994. OGAChO, f. R-1619, op. 1, d. 33, l. 46–47. Nikita V. Petrov & K.V. Skorkin, Kto rukovodil NKVD, 1934–1941. Spravochnik, Moscow: Zvenia 1999, pp. 356–357. OGAChO, f. P-878, op. 1, d. 302, l. 15–18. OGAChO, f. R-1619, op. 2, d. 26, l. 1–2, 5. This hidden part of Cheliabinsk’s history has been meticulously clarified by history teacher Marina Salmina and her pupils at School No. 59 in the Traktorozavodskii city district. Ekaterina Burkova and Natal’ia Aksionova wrote a term paper on the German POWs in the Urals (‘Voennoplennye Germanskoi armii na Urale 1942–1955 g.g.’). Their paper was based on substantial documentation from a deserted cemetery in the city district with buried POWs, and on over 100 archival files in OGAChO. Their paper described the living and working conditions of the POWs and the role they played in the reconstruction efforts after the war. Gennadii Kornilov, Uralskoe selo i voina (Problemy demograficheskogo razvitija), Ekaterinburg: Uralagropress 1993, pp. 38–39. Kornilov was a pioneer in the analysis of the near-famine conditions in the Urals during the war years, a topic that was carefully censored in Soviet historiography. Kornilov based his research on extensive reports from the countryside of how hundreds of families whose husbands had been called up to the army were starving and how many children had bellies swollen from malnutrition. Nadezhda P. Paletskich, ‘Spetsposeleniia na Urale v period Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny’, in Industrializatsiia v SSSR: Uroki istorii, Cheliabinsk 2003, pp. 154–157. On the food situation in general in the USSR during the war, see William Moskoff, The Bread of Affliction: The Food Supply in the USSR during World War II, Cambridge, New York & Melbourne: Cambridge University Press 1990. V.P. Motrevich, ‘Golod na srednem Urale v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny’, Ural v voennoj istorii Rossii, Ekaterinburg 2003, pp. 85–88. OGAChO, f. 220, op. 6, d. 8, l. 373–375. OGAChO, f. 220, op. 6, d. 3, l. 70–72. OGAChO, f. R-1146, op. 1, d. 2l. 25. OGAChO, f. R-200, op. 6, d. 9l. 22. OGAChO, f. P-288, op. 8, d. 32, l. 14. I.A. Usjlik, ‘Bor’ba s ugolovnoj prestupnost’iu v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny’, in Iuzhnyi Ural v sud’be Rossii, Cheliabinsk 2003, pp. 225–227. OGAChO, f. 220, op. 6, d. 8, l. 378–379. OGAChO, f. R-274, op. 3, d. 1616, l. 157. OGAChO, f. P-297, op. 2, d. 904, l. 75–81.

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Notes

72. OGAChO, f. R-220, op. 6, d. 7, l. 35. 73. Zhenskoe litso Pobedy. 100 dokumentov o zhenshchinakh Cheliabinskoi oblasti v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny, Cheliabinsk 2002, p. 214, note 49, based on documents in OGAChO, f. P-385, op. 6, d. 10, l. 134, 191; P-915, op. 1, d. 62, l, 23. 74. OGAChO, f. 804, op. 7, d. 93, l. 15–27. 75. Iakov Goldstein, Otkrovenno govoria. Vospominaniia, razmyshleniia, Cheliabinsk: Rifei 1994, p. 166. Goldstein offers a lot of his own observations of the city. However, he just as often retells rumours on the love lives and affairs of his compatriots when, according to his view, fiancées and partners were changed more often than shirts and with a lack of attention to the usual morals. Goldstein’s assertion that Isaak Zaltsman had numerous love affairs with female crane operators and secretaries should be taken with a pinch of salt (ibidem., pp. 162–166). 76. Kornilov, Ural’skoe selo i voina, Ekaterinburg 1993, p. 45. 77. OGAChO, f. 1595, op.1, d.63, l. 8, rapport om hälsoläget i Cheliabinsk under krigsåren, 15 November 1944. 78. OGAChO, f. 288, op. 8, d. 32, l. 13–14. 79. OGAChO, f. 288, op. 9, d. 37, l. 40. 80. OGAChO, f. R-792, op. 7, d. 13, l. 131. 81. OGAChO, f. R-220, op.13, d. 7, l. 36–37. 82. OGAChO, f. R-220, op. 13, d. 8, l. 59. 83. OGAChO, f. R-1555, op. 1, d. 51, l. 18–18ob. 84. N. L. Usol’tseva, ‘Mediko-sanitarnoe obsluzhivanie trudiashchichsia ChTZ v gody Velikoi Otetejstvennoi voiny (1941–1945 gg.)’, in Industrializatsiia v SSSR: Uroki istorii, Cheliabinsk 2003, pp. 162–165. 85. OGAChO, f. 792, op. 7, d. 20, l. 61. 86. OGAChO, f. R-840, op. 2, d. 57, l. 64–64ob. 87. OGAChO, f. R-220, op. 13, d. 10, l. 13. 88. OGAChO, f. R-274, op.20, d. 5, l. 43. 89. See, e.g., OGAChO, f. P-288, op. 4, d. 275, l. 8–12; compare a report of 12 July 1941 on how political information was organized in the city district after war broke out, OGAChO, P-288, op. 4, d. 238, l. 11–12ob, 58. 90. OGAChO, f. P-288, op. 8, d. 145, l. 19–161, a list and description of the lectures given in 1944. 91. OGAChO, f. P-288, op. 8, d. 145, 19–21ob, 63–67, 78–81, a survey of lecturing activities in the second half of 1944. 92. OGAChO, f. R-792, op. 7, d. 13, l. 160. 93. OGAChO, f. 804, op. 7, d. 111, l. 107; Cheliabinskskii rabochii, 6 August 1943, No. 161, p. 2. 94. M.V. Gavrilinia, ‘Iuzhno-Uralskii gosudarstvennyi universitet: Vekhi istorii’, Ural v istorii Rossii, p. 308–310. Since the 1990s, the former ChPI has been renamed Southern Urals State University and has incorporated economic and juridical faculties. 95. OGAChO, f. P-288, op. 9, d. 285, l. 3–8. Petrov, Informatsiia otdela propagandy i agitatsii Cheliabinskogo gorkoma VKP(b), 5 May 1945. 96. OGAChO, f. P-288, op. 9, d. 225, l. 14–16, Informatsiia o provedenii Dnia Pobedy v gorode Zlatouste.

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Notes 321

9 The New Military-Industrial Complex in Cheliabinsk during the Cold War 1. M.V. Gavrilinia, ‘Iuzhno-Ural’skii gosudarstvennyi universitet: Vekhi istorii’, Iuzhnyi Ural v istorii Rossii, pp. 308–310. 2. OGAChO, f. R-220, op. 13, d. 39, l. 126–129. 3. The numbers after the ‘closed cities’ have nothing to do with distances or location. They were simply chosen to spread disinformation regarding the most secret objects in the military-industrial complex. 4. For a general overview on post-war tank production, see Liubov’ V. Shubarina, ‘Borba SKB ChTZ za liderstvo v sozdanii i proizvodstve tiazhëlykh tankov (1945–1960 gg.)’, Iuzhnyi Ural v sud’be Rossii, Cheliabinsk 2003, pp. 285–288. 5. E.L. Glotova, ‘Osnovnye napravleniia konversii predpriiatii mashinostroeniia Cheliabinskoi oblasti (1945–1949)’, Iuzhnyi Ural v sud’be Rossii., Cheliabinsk 2003, pp. 289–292. 6. OGAChO, R-792. 19. 44: 1–15, the Foundation and Economic Calculations on the Reconstruction in Accordance with the Order of People’s Commissar Malyshev from 26 May 1945. This also contains a short history of how the factory was built in the early 1930s. For an inventory of the worn-out parts of the factory from April 1947, see OGAChO, f. R-792, op. 15, d. 106, l. 17–22. For the activities during the 1940s, see Otchët o rabote Kirovskogo zavoda v g. Cheliabinske za 1947 god., f. R-792, op. 19-s, d. 87, l. 1–10, 52–66. Godovoi otchët po osnovnoi deiatelnosti na 1948 g., OGAChO, f. R-792, op. 19, d. 101, l. 3–10, 65–73. 7. OGAChO, P-124, op. 821, l. 116–121. 8. OGAChO, f. R-792, op. 19, d. 111, l. 84–86. Zaltsman’s notes on the IS-4 heavy tanks, OGAChO, f. R-792, op. 15, d. 54, l 1–6. Concerning tank ‘701’ see his note of 19 March 1946, OGAChO, f. R-792, op. 15, d. 9, l. 1–3. 9. OGAChO, f. R-792, op. 16, d. 181, l. 14–24. Prikaz ministra Transportnogo mashinostroeniia Soiuza SSR, Nosenko, 19 February 1949. The army’s requirements were: maximum 50 tons and a crew of four men, one D-25 122 millimetre gun, two DShK 12.7 millimetre machine guns, the same armour as on the IS-3, at least the same maximum speed, ground pressure 0.77–0.8 kilograms per square centimetre, a diesel tank of 425–450 litres to an engine of 650 horse power (13 ph per ton) and a range capacity of 2000 kilometres and 200 hours for the engine. 10. A.R. Zaets,’Proizvodstvo bronetankovoi tekhniki na Urale v poselvoennyi period’, in Ural v voennoi istorii Rossii: Traditsii i sovremennost’, Ekaterinburg 2003, pp. 35–40. 11. OGAChO, f. R-792, op. 17, d. 29, l. 79–91, Malyshev’s speech on 8 September 1946 was a magnificent survey of what actually characterises the development of armaments during a war as compared to their evolution in peacetime. 12. The articles in Bez tain i sekretov describe the most important tanks produced in Leningrad and in cooperation with the designers at the Cheliabinsk Tractor Factory. See also Liubov V. Shubarina,’Bor’ba SKB ChTZ za liderstvo v sozdanii i proizvodstve tiazhëlykh tankov (1945–1960 gg.)’, in Iuzhnyi Ural v

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13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19.

20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29.

30.

31.

Notes sud’be Rossii, p. 285–288; idem, ‘Sozdanie tanka T-10 na Cheliabinskom traktornom zavode (1948–1951)’, Industrializatsiia v SSSR: Uroki istorii, pp. 226–9. OGAChO, f. 220, op. 13, d. 40, l. 10–14 March 1950. Decision by the city soviet and the city party committee. OGAChO, f. R-220, op. 13, d. 20, l. 53–54. OGAChO, f. P-92, op. 6, d. 31, l. 92–97. OGAChO, f. P-92, op. 6, d.. 31, l. 92–97. Elena Zubkova, Poslevoennoe sovetskoe obshchestvo: Politika i povsednevnost’, 1945–1953, Moscow: Rosspen 1999, p. 43. Articles in Voprosy istorii, no. 2, 1994, p. 60, and Otechestvennaia istoriia, No. 5, 1997, p. 168. On German women who were deported to Cheliabinsk and Kopeisk in the last phase of World War II, see Freya Klier, Verschleppt ans Ende der Welt: Schicksale deutscher Frauen in sowjetischen Arbeitslagern, Berlin: Ullstein, 1999, p. 204. It has been said that these arrested German women compensated for the lost labour force that Russian men would have otherwise represented had they not been killed by the husbands of these women. In other words, it was a kind of war contribution. OGAChO, f. R-792, op. 1, d. 96, l. 111–113, letters from director Zaltsman and the head of the Transport Building Ministry Nosenko, September 1948. OGAChO, f. R-792, op. 19, d. 96, l. 95. OGAChO, f. R-792, op. 16, d. 12, l. 16–20, on the camp prisoners who took the place of foreign POWs. OGAChO, f. R-220, op. 13, d. 20, l. 61–61ob. N.P. Khomutova, ‘Zhilshchnyi vopros na predpriiatiakh voenno-promyshlennogo kompleksa Iuzhnogo Urala (1945–1955 gg.)’, Iuzhnyi Ural v istorii Rossii, pp. 303–307. OGAChO, f. R-792, op. 19, d. 111, l. 94–95. OGAChO, f. R-792, op. 15, d. 250, l. 7. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 1077, l. 32; OGAChO, f. P-124, op. 1, d. 904, l. 88–91. On the Zaltsman case, see Gennadii V. Kostyrchenko, Tainaia politika Stalina: Vlast’ i antisemitizm, Moscow: Mezhdunarodnye Otnosheniia 2001, pp. 616–618. See also the Politburo criticism of the Cheliabinsk obkom, Cheliabinsk region and city party chairman Beloborodov on 26 January 1950, TsK VKP(b) i regional’nye partiinye komitety, 1945–1953, V.V. Denisov et al. (ed.) Moscow: Rosspen 2004, pp. 240–244. Isaak Zaltsman & G. Edelgauz, ‘Vspominaia uroki Tankograda’, Kommunist, 1984, no. 16, pp. 76–87. Galina Kibitkina, ‘Korol’ tankov’, manuscript at OGAChO. On the accusations at the local level against Zaltsman, OGAChO, P-124/1/904/88–91, Postanovlenie sobraniia partiinogo aktiva Kirovskogo zavoda, 19–20 July 1949. See also the document in the source volume Sovetskaia zhizn, 1945–1953. Seria Dokumenty sovetskoi istorii. Ed. E. Iu. Zubkova, L.P. Kosheliova, G.A. Kuznetsova, A.I. Miniuk & L.A. Rogovaia, Moscow: Rosspen 2003, pp. 292–293. M.N. Fedchenko, ‘Molodëzh ChTZ. Iz opyta sotsializatsii v usloviakh proizvodstvennoi mikrosredy (1946–1950)’, in Industrializatsiia v SSSR: Uroki istorii, p. 221.

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Notes 323 32. E.B. Druzhinina, ‘Korol’ tankov’: Fakty iz biografii I. M. Zaltsmana’, in Industrializatsiia v SSSR: Uroki istorii, p.180. 33. Elena Zubkova, Poslevoennoe sovetskoe obshchestvo: Politika i povsednevnost, 1945–1953, Moscow: Rosspen 1999, pp. 146–148. 34. See also A.I. Prishepa, ‘O nachal’nom periode dissidentstva v SSSR (na primerakh Urala)’, Totalitarizm v Rossii (SSSR) 1917–1991. Oppozitsiia i repressii. Materialy nauchno-prakticheskoi konferentsii, Perm 1998, pp. 56–64. 35. P.R. Rozhdestvenskii, ‘Materialy k istorii samodeiatelnykh molodëzhnykh obedinenii v SSSR posle 1945 goda’, Pamiat. Istoricheskii sbornik. Moscow. 1981/ Paris 1983, p. 226. 36. E. Iu. Shutkova, ‘Molodëzhnaia oppozitsiia stalinizmu v poslevoennoe vremia’, Totalitarizm v Rossii (SSSR) 1917–1991. Oppozitsiia i repressii, Materialy nauchno-prakticheskoi konferentsii, Perm’ 1998, pp. 71–73. 37. Vladimir Novosëlov & Vitalii Tolstikov, Tainy ‘Sorokovki’, Ekaterinburg: Ural’skii Rabochii 1995. 38. Sergeï Vladimirovich Tulinskii, Iuzhno-Ural’skii Gosudarstvennyi universitet, 1943–2003. Istoricheskii ocherk, Cheliabinsk: IuUrGU 2003. 39. Tatiana P. Pushkarëva, ‘Dukhov, Leonid Nikolaevich, ‘Inzhener–konstruktor. 100 let so dnia rozhdeniia’, Kalendar’ znamenatel’nykh i pamjatnykh dat, Cheliabinsk 2004, pp. 159–162. On the history of Southern Urals State University (IuUrGU) from its beginnings as a technical institute for tank construction established during the last years of the Great Patriotic War, see Sergei Tulinskii, Iuzhno-Uralskii Gosudarstvennyi universitet, 1943–2003. Istoricheskii ocherk, Cheliabinsk: IuUrGU 2003. 40. Aleksandr Finodeev, ‘Uchastie Kirovskogo zavoda Narkomata (Ministerstva) transportnogo mashinostroeniia v sozdanii iadernogo oruzhiia’, Industrializatsiia v SSSR: Uroki istorii, pp. 223–225, idem, ‘Nachal’nyj etap razvitiia raketnoi promyshlennosti na Iuzhnom Urale’, Iuzhnii Ural v sud’be Rossii. Materialy nauchnoi konferentsii, pp. 279–284. See also V.P. Terekhov, ‘Stanovlenie i razvitie Ural’skogo raketostroitel’nogo kompleksa’, Ural v voennoi istorii Rossii: Traditsii i sovremennost, Ekaterinburg 2004, pp. 138–148.

10 Historical Memory and Research in Today’s Cheliabinsk 1. See articles in Igor Narskii, (ed.), Vek pamiati, pamiat’ veka: Opyt obrashcheniia s proshlym v XX stoletii, Cheliabinsk: Kamennyi poias 2004. 2. The eminent American expert on the Soviet defence industry and military strategy Raymond Garthoff described how US Intelligence almost by chance – and because of mistakes from the Soviet side – found out the location of the atomic cities in the Urals. On a blurry photograph in a regional newspaper the high-voltage electricity network in the Urals was discerned, and several years before the U-2 spy plane flew over the Soviet Union, it was figured out precisely where the Russian atomic cities were located. See Garthoff, A Journey through the Cold War: A Memoir of Containment and Coexistence, Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution 2001, p. 94. 3. Two guide books to new source materials can serve as an excellent introduction to declassified and recently published documents; compare I.A.

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4.

5.

6. 7.

8.

9. 10.

11.

12.

13.

14. 15.

Notes Kodrakov, Otkrytyi arkhiv–2. Spravochnik sbornikov dokumentov, vysjedshikh v svet v otechestvennykh izdatel’stvakh v 1917–2000, Moscow: Rosspen 2005. Igor Narskii, Zhizn’ v katastrofe: Budni naseleniia Urala v 1917–1922 gg., Moscow: Rosspen 2001. See also A.V. Ivanov & A.T. Tertyshnyi, Ural’skoe krest’ianstvo i vlast’ v period grazhdanskoi voiny (1917–1921gg.): Opyt osmysleniia problemy v otechestvennoi istoriografii, Ekaterinburg: Ural’skii gosudarsvennyi universitet ekonomiki, 2002, for a critical survey of Soviet and recent Russian historiography on the Civil War in the Urals 1918–1921. Aleksandr Bazarov, Kulak i Agro-Gulag, vol. 1, Cheliabinsk: Iuzhno-Ural’skoe knizhnoe izdatelstvo 1991; idem, Durelom ili gospoda kolkhozniki, vol 1–2, Kurgan: Zaural’e, 1997. Tatiana Slavko, Kulatskaia ssylka na Urale, 1930–1936, Moscow: Mosgorarkhiv 1995. Viktor Kirillov, Istoriia repressii v Nizhnetagil’skom regione Urala, 1920–1950 gody, vol. 1–2, Nizhnii Tagil 1996; idem, Istoriia repressii i pravozashchinoe dvizhenie v Rossii, Ekaterinburg: UMTs UPI 1999; idem, Kniga pamiati. Posviashchaetsia Tagilchanam – zhertvam repressii 1917–1980-ch godov Ekaterinburg: UIF Nauka 1994; Zhertvy repressii: Nizhnii Tagil 1920–1980-e gody, Ekaterinburg: n.p. 1999. See also his Sostoianie raboty nad knigami pamjati zhertv polititjeskich repressij v Rossii, Kazachstane i Ukraine, Nizhnii Tagil: n.p. 2002. M.A. Feldman, ‘Industrializatsiia v Rossii i v SSSR v 20–30-e gg. XX veka (metodologicheskie aspekty)’, Industrializatsiia v SSSR: Uroki istorii, Cheliabinsk 2003, p. 71–74. Igor Narskii, (ed.), Ural v kontekste rossiiskoi modernizatsii. Sbornik nauchnykh statei, Cheliabinsk: Kamennyi poias 2005. The archivists Aleksandr Finodeev, Galina Kibitkina and others at OGAChO have edited a large number of documentary collections, for example Cheliabinskaia oblast, 1917–1945, Neizvestnaia voina, 1941–1945, Zhenskoe litso Pobedy and Eti detskie voennye gody. Aleksandr Finodeev (ed.), Arkhiv – khranitel vremeni. Istoriia arkhivnoi sluzhby Cheliabinskoi oblasti v dokumentakh, vospominaniakh, fotografiakh, Cheliabinsk: ChPO Kniga 2004. See Rasstrel’nye spiski (Lists of executions) in the newspaper Cheliabinskskii rabochii, for e.g. 23 March, 3, 11, 18, 25 April, 15, 29 May, 6, 28 June, 10, 19, 24 July, 7, 14, 28 August 1991, 7, 8, 9, 14, 23, 30 July, 4, 25 August, 1, 5, 29 September, 4, 12, 24 November and 24 December 1991; 3, 15 January, 19, 25 February, 3, 11, 31 March, 8 April, 6, 13, 19 May, 16 June 1992, 7, 8, 9, 14, 23, 30 July, 1, 5, 29 September, 4, 12, 24 November, 24 December 1992. Under the heading ‘Reabilitirovannye’, Vechernii Cheliabinsk published lists of 106 persons on 24 and 26 November and 3, 8, 10, 24 and 29 December 1992. Each of these issues of the newspapers contains hundreds of names and brief biographical data. Even much later, local newspapers were still publishing similar articles and lists of persons who were victims of political repression during the Soviet era. See Stephen Kotkin,”Modern Times: The Soviet Union and the Interwar Conjuncture”, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, vol. 2, nr 1, 2001, pp. 111–165. Leonid Komarov, Rossiia tankov ne imela, Cheliabinsk: n.p. 1993. Vladimir Novosiolov & Vitalii Tolstikov, Tainy ‘Sorokovki’, Ekaterinburg: Uralskii Rabochii 1994.

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Notes 325 16. Aleksandr Vasil’evich Bakunin, Istoriia sovetskogo totalitarizma, vol. 1, Ekaterinburg 1996. 17. Compare Aleksandr V. Speranskii, ‘Totalitarnaia kultura SSSR i Germaniia 30–40-kh gg.: Skhodstva i razlichiia’, Ural v Velikoi Otechestvennoi voine, Ekaterinburg 1995, p. 101–107. 18. E.E. Ivanov & M.A. Kudinov,’Industrializatsiia SSSR glazami russkoi emigratsii’, Industrializatsiia SSSR: Uroki istorii, Cheliabinsk 2003, pp. 190–193. On Piotr Struve, Pavel Miliukov and Sergei Melgunov, as well as other Russian historians in exile, see Istoriki-emigranty. Voprosy russkoi istorii v rabotakh 20-x–30-x godov, Moscow: Institute of Russian History of the Academy of Sciences 2002; Iurii N. Emelianov, S.S. Melgunov: V Rossii i emigratsii, Moscow: Editorial URSS 1998. 19. Igor Narskii (ed.), Chelovek i voina. Voina kak iavlenie kultury, Moscow: AIRO-XX 2001. 20. Boris Lichman, Mnogokontseptual’naia istoriia Rossii. Posobie dlia abiturientov, Ekaterinburg: SV-96 2000; idem, Istoriia Rossii: Teoriia izucheniia, vol 1: S drevneishikh vremën do kontsa XIX veka & vol. 2: Dvadtsatyi vek, Ekaterinburg: SV-96 2001. 21. Compare Lichman, Istoriia Rossii, vol. 2, Dvadtsatyi vek, pp. 126–167, on the great transformations from the late 1920s to the 1950s. 22. P. E. Alekseev & V. D. Kamynin,’Industrializatsiia SSSR kak obiekt mnogokontseptualnogo rassmotreniia’, Industrializatsiia v SSSR: Uroki istorii, Cheliabinsk 2003, pp. 168–171. 23. Compare in particular, Marina Sergeevna Salmina, Istoriia Iuzhnogo Urala. XX – nachalo XXI veka, Cheliabinsk: Vzgljad 2004. 24. See for example, A.A. Danilov, L. G. Kosulina & A. V. Pyzhkov, Istoriia Rossii. XX – nachalo XXI vekov. Uchebnik dlia 9 klassa obshcheobrazovatelnykh uchrezhdenii, Moscow: Prosveshchenie 2003, p. 27 ‘Sotsial’naia sistema v 1930-e gody’, pp. 205–209, as well as the tasks for the students in the working papers Rabochaia tetrad po istorii Rossii. XX vek: 1928–1953 25. Compare the term papers in Memorial’s Russia-wide competition for schoolchildren published in the series ‘Man in History. Russia’s 20th century’: Chelovek v istorii. Rossiia – XX vek. Sbornik rabot pobeditelei. Moscow: Obshchestvo Memorial / Zvenja 2001–2008. 26. Ilya Polezhaikin, ‘Prinuditel’nyi trud na Cheliabinskom Traktornom Zavode’, term paper for 11th grade at General School No 59. 27. See Ekaterina Burkova & Natalia Aksënova’s term paper ‘Voennoplennye germanskoi armii na Urale, 1942–1955 gg.’, term paper for the 11th grade at the General School No 59’; see also Marina P. Salmina, O chëm rasskazalo staroe kladbishche. Po materialam issledovatelskoi deiatel’nosti uchashchichsia, Cheliabinsk: Cheliabinskskii gosudarstvennyi universitet 2003. 28. Denis A. Stepanov, ‘Donos kak sposob vzaimootnoshenii cheloveka s vlast’iu. (Po materialam dokumentov 1920x–1940-kh gg. v OGAChO)’, term paper for the 11th class at School No. 59 in Cheliabinsk, 2003. The young Stepanov had investigated a topic that had been much discussed in the scholarly community in the West. He eagerly listened to my descriptions of how Sheila Fitzpatrick and other historians had analysed the Soviet system of denunciations, donositel’stvo, in Stalinist Russia. For example, Sheila Fitzpatrick ‘Supplicants and Citizens: Public Letter-Writing in Soviet Russia in the 1930s’, Slavic Review, Spring 1996, no. 1, pp. 78–105.

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Notes

29. Vladimir Karpov, Generalissimus, Moscow: Veche 2003. 30. For a survey of all lists of victims of Soviet repression in various parts of the country, see Knigi pamjati zhertv politicheskikh repressij v SSSR: Annotirovannyi ukazatel, St Petersburg: Rossiiskaia natsionalnaia biblioteka 2003, edited by Anatolii Razumov from the association ‘Vozvrashchennyje imena’; on the martyrologies from Cheliabinsk oblast in particular, p. 181. 31. On the rehabilitation process of the 1950s by the KGB, see Oleg Veprev & Viacheslav Liutov, Gosudarstvennaia bezopasnost’: Tri veka na Iuzhnom Urale, Cheliabinsk: Iuzhno-Ural’skoe knizhnoe izdatel’stvo 2002, pp. 381–384. 32. ‘Ob utverzhdenii Polozheniia o gorodskoi komissii po vosstanovleniiu prav lits, postradavsjikh ot polititjeskikh repressii’, Vechernii Cheliabinsk, 27 April 2000. Local Memorial groups have since the 1990s established data on victims of political repression. Most of these data have been made available on CD-ROM disks published by the Memorial Society. 33. ‘V oblasti – 11592 zhertv politicheskikh repressii’, Vechernii Cheliabinsk, 11 October 1994; See also, Veprev & Liutov, Gosudarstvennaia bezopasnost’, p. 383; G. Gavrilova, ‘Stranichka istorii: Den’ politzakliuchënnykh’, Vechernii Cheliabinsk, 4 November 1999. 34. Compare the interview with Chief Archivist and Deputy Head of the Cheliabinsk Province Archival Committee, Galina Nikolaevna Kibitkina, ‘Voennye tainy KPSS raskryty’, Vechernii Cheliabinsk, 31 May 2001, and the lists of declassified documents: Rassekrechennye dokumenty (55-letiiu Pobedy v Velikoi Otechestvennoi voine posviashchaetsia), Komitet po delam arkhivov and OGAChO, vols. 1–2, 2000.

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Bibliography Printed sources Newspapers In my research, the bibliographical handbooks Literatura o Cheliabinskoi oblasti: Tekushchii bibliograficheskii ukazatel’, no. 1 (127)/ 1991– no. 1 (144)/2000, Cheliabinsk: Cheliabinskaia universal’naia nauchnaia biblioteka, 1993–2003, have been most useful for locating articles in the regional and city press and periodicals. The newspapers Cheliabinskii rabochii (the Cheliabinsk worker) and Vechernii Cheliabinsk (Evening Cheliabinsk) have provided background material on the atmosphere of the time. However, I did not use articles in the press as sources on the realities in the changing Soviet society.

Source publications Cheliabinsk Region in Photos, 1920–1940 /Cheliabinskaia oblast’ v fotosnimkakh, 1920–1940, ed. V. I. Bogdanovskii, text by K. A. Shishov, Cheliabinsk: Kamennyi poias 2001. Cheliabinsk Region in Photos, 1940–1960 / Cheliabinskaia oblast’ v fotosnimkakh, 1940–1960, eds. V. I. Bogdanovskii, K. N. Bochkarëv et al., Cheliabinsk: Kamennyi poias 2002. Cheliabinskaia oblast’, 1917–1945. Sbornik dokumentov i materialov, eds. P. G. Agaryshev, N. A. Prykina, E. P. Jurova, I. S. Iangirova, Cheliabinsk: IuzhnoUralskoe izdatelstvo 1998. Davies, R.W., Oleg V. Khlevniuk & E.A. Rees, eds. The Stalin– Kaganovich Correspondence, 1931–1936, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press 2003. Eti detskie voennye gody, 1941–1945. Sbornik dokumentov i materialov, eds. Aleksandr P. Finodeev, Elena P. Turova, Elena A. Kalinkina, N. A. Prykina & Irina S. Iangirova Cheliabinsk: Komitet po delam archivov 2000. Komintern i grazhdanskaia voina v Ispanii. Dokumenty, eds. S. P. Pozharskii & A.I. Saplin, Moscow: Nauka 2001. Neizvestnaia voina, 1941–1945. Sbornik dokumentov, eds. Aleksandr P. Finodeev, Igor I. Vishev, Nadezhda P. Paletskich & Jelena P. Turova, Cheliabinsk: Komitet po delam arkhivov 2000. Obshchestvo i vlast’. Rossiiskaia provintsiia. Cheliabinskaia oblast’. Dokumenty i materialy. Tom pervyj. 1917–1945, Cheliabinsk 2005. Reabilitatsiia: Kak eto bylo, Dokumenty Prezidiuma TSK KPSS i drugie materialy, mart 1953 – fevral’ 1956, eds. Andrei Artizov, Iu. Sigaev, I. Shevchuck, V. Khlopov, vol. 1, Moscow: Demokratiia 2000. Reabilitatsiia: Kak eto bylo, Dokumenty Prezidiuma TSK KPSS i drugie materialy, fevral’ 1956 – nachalo 80-kh godov, eds. A. Artizov, Iu. Sigaev, V. Khlopov, I. Shevchuck, vol. 2, Moscow: Demokratiia 2003.

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328 Bibliography Reabilitatsiia: Kak eto bylo, Dokumenty Politbiuro TSK KPSS, stenogrammy zasedanii komissii Politbiuro i drugie materialy, stredina 80-kh – 1991, eds. A. Artizov, A. Kosakouskii, V. Naumov, I. Shevchuk, vol. 3, Moscow: Demokratiia 2004. Repressii v Arkhangelske: 1937–1938 gg. ed. R. A. Khantalin, Arkhangelsk: Pomorskii Gosudarstvennyi Universitet 1999. Sovetskaia derevnia glazami OGPU–NKVD, 1930–1934 / Les Campagnes soviétiques vues par l’O.G.P.U.–NKVD, 1930–1934, eds. V. P. Danilov, A. Berelowitch, N. Werth & L. Samuelson, vol. 3, 1–2, Moscow: Rosspen 2003–2005. Sovetskaia povsednevnost’ i massovoe soznanie, 1939–1945, eds. A. Ia. Livshin & I. B. Orlov, Moscow: Rosspen 2003. Sovetskaia zhizn’, 1945–1953, eds. Elena Zubkova, Liudmila Kosheleva, Galina A. Kuznetsova, Andrei Miniuk & Larisa Rogovaia, Moscow: Rosspen 2003. Spain Betrayed: The Soviet Union in the Spanish Civil War, eds. Ronald Radosh, Mary R. Habeck & Gregory Sevostianov, New Haven, CT, & London: Yale University Press 2001. The Stalin– Kaganovich Correspondence, 1931–1936, eds. Robert W. Davies, Oleg V. Khlevniuk & E. Arfon Rees, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press 2003. Zhenskoe litso Pobedy: 100 dokumentov o zhenshchinakh Cheliabinskoi oblasti v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny, 1941–1945, eds. Aleksandr P. Finodeev, Nadezhda P. Paletskikh & Jelena P. Turova, Cheliabinsk: Komitet po delam archivov 2001.

Encyclopedias Cheliabinsk. Entsiklopediia, Cheliabinsk: Kamennyi Poias 2003. Grazhdanskaia voina i voennaia interventsiia v SSSR. Entsiklopediia. Moscow: Sovetskaia Entsiklopediia 1983. Velikaia Otechestvennaia voina, 1941–1945. Entsiklopediia, ed. M. M. Kozlov. Moscow: Sovjetskaia entsiklopediia 1985.

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Index Page numbers followed by n refer to endnotes, with note number. ABTU, Auto, Armour and Tank Directorate, 170, 177 Albrecht, Karl, 298n60 American Relief Administration, ARA, 37, 296n26 amphibious tanks, 188, 212, 260 Amtorg, 107 anti-religious propaganda, 79, 300n10 anti-Soviet elements, 141, 146, 150–1, 157 architecture, Soviet, 5, 82–4, 264, 291n5, 301n16 artillery hauler S-2, 8, 120, 170, 192 Arzamas-16 (Sarov), 257, 274, 275 Asha steel works, 45, 167 Atomgrad, 255, 280 atomic bomb, 257, 274–5, 283 atomic bomb project, 274, 283 atomic city, 255 Babel, Isaak, 1, 39, 290n1 Bakal iron and steel works, 45, 63 Bakalstroi, 237–8 Balzhi, Mikhail, 211–13 barracks, 8, 10, 62, 64, 89–92, 98, 226, 232–5, 238–9, 248, 262–3, 265–6, 277, 282 Beck, Friedrich, 135, 306n3 Bek, Aleksandr, 214, 315n32 Beria, Lavrentii, 146, 154–6, 158–60, 190, 263, 286, 314n13 Berlin, 128, 163, 165, 213, 252, 279 Bettelheim, Charles, 83 Bliukher, Vasilii, 17–18, 23 Blue Army, 35–6 Brodokalmak, 2–3, 17, 246, 292n7 Bruskin, Aleksandr, 117, 132, 144 Budionnyi, Semën, 30 Bukharin, Nikolai Grigorievich, 151 Bukharin, Nikolai Ivanovich, 35, 49, 75–6, 136, 295n20 Burov, Andrei, 85, 301n23

Carr, Edward, 41, 296n31 Caterpillar, Inc., 104, 107, 116 censorship, 137, 161, 251 Central Asia, 221, 238 central committee of the Communist Party, 44, 51, 72, 78, 138–40, 143, 156, 196, 224, 267, 312 Chamberlin, William Henry, 6, 40, 191–2, 314n15 Cheka, VChK, Extraordinary committee against counterrevolution, 23, 32, 36, 74, 240, 292n10, 295n23, 296n27 Chekh Legion in World War I, Russian Civil War, 19–21, 23–4, 27 Chekhoslovakia, 19, 165 Chekhov, Anton, 224 Cheliabinsk-40 (Ozërsk), 6, 255, 257, 274–5 Cheliabinsk-70 (Snezhinsk), 6, 283 Cheliabinsk Electrode factory, 248 Cheliabinsk Electro-metallurgical works (ChEMK), 47 Cheliabinsk Iron and Steel Works (ChMZ), 239 Cheliabinsk Politechnical Institute (ChPI), 10, 213, 255–6, 320 Cheliabinsk Regional Power station (ChGRES), 46 Cheliabinsk Tractor Factory (ChTZ), 5, 88, 98–9, 104–6, 109–10, 117–18, 128, 130–3, 145, 168–73, 177, 179–80, 192, 195, 197–8, 222–3, 231, 260, 262–3, 265–7, 269, 277, 285, 303n9 Cheliabmetallurgstroi, 237, 239–40 see also Bakalstroi Cheliabtraktorstroi, Cheliabinsk Tractor Building Site (ChTS), 85, 105 Christie, Walter, 121, 133, 305n26 345

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346 Index Cold War, 2, 6, 10, 136, 149, 176, 255, 257, 275, 277, 280, 313n2, 314n15 collective farms, see kolkhozy collectivisation of agriculture, 1, 4, 13, 24, 36, 48–56, 59–61, 66–7, 72, 102, 106, 136, 152, 242, 281, 284, 286, 292n4, 296n31, 309n28 Conquest, Robert, 136 constructivism, Soviet architecture style, 82–3, 87 cultural palace (dvorets kultury), 82, 87, 101 Denikin, Anton, 21, 293n10 desertion, 36, 227, 229, 235–6 Detroit, 85, 105, 107, 109, 117 diesel engines, 9, 118, 120–1, 123, 126, 169, 188–9, 193, 197, 202, 208, 259, 305, 321 Djilas, Milovan, 70 Dneprodzerzhinsk, 43 Dnepropetrovsk, 43, 172 Dudov, E.P., 197 Dukhov, Nikolai Leonidovich, 128, 149–50, 178, 195, 197, 199–200, 209, 211, 255, 275 Dzerzhinskii, Feliks, 33, 172 Engels, Friedrich, 271 epidemics, 31, 37, 64, 98, 246, 248, 293n10 Estonia, 236 evacuation, 168, 185–9, 203, 211, 219–23, 264, 316n6 Fainsod, Merle, 147 Far East, 20, 91, 151, 156, 250 February 1917 revolution, 16, 19, 24, 74 Feldman, M.A., 312n34, 324n8 Ferrous Alloys Factory (Ferrosplav), 47 fifth column, 151–2 Filatov, 233, 249 Finland, 150–1, 170–2, 175, 177, 192, 250 five-year plan, first, 6, 13, 42–5, 49–50, 72, 76, 84, 102–3, 291n6, 297n45, 302n49 five-year plan, second, 44–5, 48, 74, 131, 147, 302n49

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five-year plan, third, 153, 302n49 Frunze, Mikhail, 23 Fuller, J.F.C., 124 Gabo, Naum, 84, 301n20 Germany, 15, 31, 70, 84 Ginzburg, Semën, 188, 190, 314n10 GKO (State Defense Committee), 176, 187, 190, 203, 210, 214, 229, 243, 262 glasnost, 5, 10, 137, 161, 280, 290n1, 308n25, 311n1 Glavenergo, Main Energy directorate, 117 Godin, William, 135, 306n3 Goebbels, Joseph, 174 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 161, 280, 282 Goregliad, A., 233 Gor’kii (the city, today Nizhnii Novgorod), 84, 108, 142 Gor’kii Automobile Factory, 176 Gosplan (State Planning commission), 43–4, 130, 175–6, 180, 187, 222 Greater Urals project, 44, 59 Guderian, Heinz, 9 Gulag, Main Labour Camp administration, concentrataion camps, 57–8, 63, 65, 111, 135, 137–8, 141, 146, 148, 152–4, 158–60, 188, 226, 229, 234, 238–41, 244, 249, 262–4, 271, 273, 290n1, 293n10, 304n16, 307n15, 309n29 GUPVI, Main directorate for prisoners-of-war and internees, POW camps, 241 Henry, Ernst, (pen name of Sergei Rostovskii), 163, 311n1 Hitler, Adolf, 1, 163, 165, 184, 186, 217, 219, 237, 250, 301, 311n1, 313n8 Höglund, Zeth, 135, 158 Holocaust, 185, 313n4 housing conditions, 10, 62, 64–5, 85, 89–91, 110, 229, 233–5, 258–9, 261, 264–7, 277 Iagoda, Genrikh, 138, 152 Iakovlev, Aleksandr, 161

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Index industrialisation, 41–3, 47–8, 51, 61, 70, 74, 82, 104, 106, 108, 111–12, 115, 126, 129, 133, 191, 279, 281–2, 284–6, 296n31, 303n5, 303n9, 304n16 industrial mobilisation, see mobilisation plan intelligentsia, 83, 148, 150, 249 International Harvester Inc., 104, 107 Iofan, Boris, 236 Irkutsk, 32 Italy, 113, 250, 291n2 Izhorsk factory, 189

347

Kurchatov, Igor V., 255, 274–5 Kurgan, 2, 33, 36, 73, 219 Kuzbass, 113 Kuznetsk, 44 Kyshtym, 38, 63, 230

Japan, 1, 42, 151, 163, 171, 250–1, 297

Lenin, 23, 27, 35, 37, 58, 70–1, 73, 94, 136, 236, 271, 286, 293n10, 295n20, 299n3, 299n4, 306n1 Lichman, Boris, 284 Liddell Hart, Basil, 124 Lominadze, Vissarion, 141, 153 Lovin, Kazimir, 98, 106–7, 109, 117, 145 Lugovtsev, Faddei, 156–8

Kabakov, Ivan, 117, 139–40 kadety, KD, Constitutional Democrats, 14, 17 Kaganovich, Lazar Moiseevich, 76, 78, 185, 300n7 Kalibr factory, 221–2 Kalinin, Mikhail, 116–17 Kamenev, Lev, 137 Kamensk, 48, 63–4, 236 Kamensk-Sinarsk, 48 Karabash, 48, 63–4, 242 Karaganda, 44 Karlgren, Anton, 69, 299n1 katiusha, see rocket artillery launcher Kautsky, Karl, 34–5 Kazachstan, 48, 220, 238, 274, 319n52 KGB, Committee of State Security, 326n31 Khalkhin-Gol 1939 battle, 125 Kirov, Sergei, 82, 137 Knickerbocker, Hubert, 42 Kolchak, Aleksandr, 23, 25, 27, 32, 74 Koliushchenko, Dmitrii, 14–16, 21 Koliushchenko Works, 85, 168, 221, 230–1 kolkhozy, collective agricultural farms, 53–5, 57, 59, 60, 63, 103, 109–10, 239, 244–5, 290 Komarov, Leonid, 10, 283 Kopeisk, 46, 50, 62, 64–5, 104, 241, 243, 299n69, 322n18 kulaks, 58–9, 62–3, 65, 150, 242, 309n28

machine and tractor stations, MTS, 56,78, 103, 106, 140, 241–2, 249, 259 Magnitogorsk, 5, 44–6, 54, 63–6, 72–3, 82, 84, 94, 111, 114, 140–1, 148, 153, 192, 219–20, 231 Makarenko, Anton, 38, 296n27 Makhonin, Sergei, 210, 315n22 Malyshev, Viacheslav, 171–2, 175, 187, 190, 200, 208, 210, 314n12 Manchuria, 1, 23 Mannerheim Line, 170, 177 Mariupol, 188, 236–7 Markhasov, I.G., 117 Martov, Iulii, 14 Marx, Karl, 271, 299n2 marxism, 58, 71, 271 mass arrests, 14, 156 mass executions, 158, 185, 308n26 Matiasevich, Mikhail, 33 Mauthausen prisoner-of-war camp, 156 Medvedev, Roy, 135–6, 139 Meksin, L.A., 117 Memorial, 285, 287, 325n25, 326n32 Mensheviks, 16, 21, 157 Merkulov, Viktor, 233 Miass, city of, 2, 10, 15, 20, 34, 36, 45, 100, 218, 273, 275, 277 Mikoian, Anastas, 151 military-industrial complex, 6, 9–10, 43, 71, 159, 252, 255, 257, 259, 261, 263, 267, 269, 271, 273, 275, 277, 280, 314n12, 321n3

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348 Index Miliutin, Nikolai, 84 Minaev, A.M., 66 mobilisation plan, 9, 48, 128–33, 170, 175–7, 179–81, 188, 191–2, 217, 257, 312n28 Mogilnikov, Vladimir, 16, 18, 21, 292 Mokhov, A.F., 248–9 Molière, 224 Molotov (city, now Perm), 243, 252 Molotov, Viacheslav, 76, 89, 140, 151, 155, 180, 190, 217 Moore, Barringtom Jr., 147, 154 Morozov, Aleksandr, 128 Moscow, 5, 9, 13, 20, 33, 44, 47, 71–2, 76, 78, 80, 84, 99–100, 106, 108, 117, 127–8, 130, 132, 135–6, 143–5, 163, 165, 170, 172, 174, 178, 183, 186, 188, 190–2, 197, 199–200, 210, 214, 217, 219–20, 222, 224, 227, 236, 239, 252, 266, 268, 271–2, 277, 288, 291n5, 291n6, 301n16 Mosin, Vadim, 267 Motovilikhi, 201 Murom, 268 MVD, ministry of internal affairs, 160, 262–3, 271 Nazi-Germany, 1–2, 9, 42, 45, 114, 138, 147, 174, 177, 181, 184, 193, 206, 217–18, 268, 286, 294, 313n5 see also Germany Nesterovskij, Izrail, 117, 132, 145, 168–9 Nikolai II, tsar, 15 Nizhnii Novgorod, see Gor’kii Nizhnii Tagil, 5, 9, 74, 78, 111, 140, 188–90, 203, 211, 219, 222, 240, 304n16 NKB, people’s commissariat of armament, 176, 180, 220 NKLegProm, people’s commissariat of light industry, 144 NKMashProm, people’s commissariat of machine-building industry, 144 NKSM, people’s commissariat of medium machine-building industry, 170 NKStroi, 179, 188, 220

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NKTankoprom, people’s commissariat of tank industry, 188, 196, 200, 220, 316n20 NKTP, people’s commissariat of heavy industry, 104–5, 132, 144 NKVD, people’s commissariat of internal affairs (1934–46), 59, 63–5, 75, 78, 81, 91, 93, 98–9, 126, 130, 138, 140–2, 145–6, 150–1, 153–9, 222–3, 229, 236–42, 247, 249, 271, 285, 287, 290, 308n26, 310n34 nomenklatura, 72, 78, 83, 136, 150 Nosenko, Ivan, 259, 267, 315 Novosëlov, Vladimir, 314n12 October 1917 revolution, 12, 17–18 OGPU, United State Political Directorate (1922–34), 7, 24, 50–1, 56, 58–9, 62, 126, 152, 154, 240, 292n4, 298n49, 309n28 Ogurtsov, Dmitrii, 142 Omsk, 2, 25 operational art, 125, 127 Operation Barbarossa, 2, 9, 174–6, 183, 186, 219, 280, 313n4 Operation Springtime, 127 Ordzhonikidze, Sergo, 45, 96, 106, 117–18, 133, 144, 303n5 Ordzhonikidze machine-building works (Stankomash), 48, 84, 220, 261 Orël, 206–8 Orenburg, 13–14, 16, 19–20, 22 ORS, workers’ procurement, 244 Osoaviakhim, voluntary defence organization, 166–7 Ozërsk, see Cheliabinsk-40 Palace of Congress in Moscow, 80 Paris, 1, 39, 87, 120, 128, 290n1 Pasternak, Boris, 115–16 Patolichev, Nikolai, 224, 225, 247 perestroika, 280, 308 Perm, 23, 72, 74, 140, 157, 190, 219, 243, 252, 287 Pertsev, I.I., 249 Petrograd, 13, 15, 17–20, 23, 34, 106, 185

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Index Piatakov,Georgii, 33, 141, 143–5, 294n18 Planned economy, 7, 48, 152–3 Podolsk, 156, 189 Pogodin, M.P., 224 Poland, 9, 31, 74, 131, 151, 159, 174, 183, 236, 243 political prisoners, 14, 36, 111, 154, 160, 240 Potsdam, 279 Putilov works, 61, 148–9 Radek, Karl, 136, 145 radiofikatsiia, mass introduction of radio receivers, 103 Rapoport, Jakov Davydovich, 240 Raskin, Boris, 142 Rathenau, Walther, 70 rationing, 33, 244 Red Army, 10, 19–21, 23, 28–34, 36, 58, 63, 71, 74, 77, 83, 118, 120, 122–7, 135, 145–9, 162, 165, 170, 175, 183–4, 186, 193, 198, 203, 205–7, 213, 215, 217–18, 226–7, 230–1, 235, 238, 241–3, 248–9, 251–2, 278, 292n5, 294n15, 305n33, 315n26 Red Guard troops, 17–18, 20–1 rehabilitation of victims of political despotism, 159–61, 243, 287, 326n31 Reichswehr, 124 repressions, 8, 32, 37, 51, 126, 135–6, 143, 146, 149–50, 152, 153, 159–61, 280–1, 283–4, 287, 292–3, 307n15, 308n25, 308– 9n26, 311n1, 324n12, 326n30, 326n32 Rittersporn, Gabór, 158 rocket artillery launcher, 193, 221, 230, 318n32 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 250, 314n15 Rostovskii, Sergei (pen-name Ernst Henry), 163, 165, 311n1 Russian Social-Democratic Party (RSDAP), 14, 16, 18–19, 24, 74 Rydeberg, Georg, 165 Ryndin, Kuz’ma, 74–6, 78, 98–9, 140–2, 147, 299n5, 307n13

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349

sanatorium, 98, 211, 248 Sandomir, 214 Sapir, Jacques, 204–5 Saprykin, G.D., 236 Saratov, 140 Satka Works, 45, 63–4 Schiller, Friedrich von, 224 Schneider, James, 61 Scott, John, 94, 148, 291n6 Semipalatinsk, 274 Serov, N., 229 shadow enterprise, 188 Shakespeare, William, 224 Shaposhnikov, Boris, 61 Shildkrot, Mikhail, 236 show trials, 44, 77, 109, 136, 140, 143, 145, 152, 294n15, 295n18 Siberia, 1–2, 8, 14–15, 21, 23, 25, 27, 31–2, 38, 44, 46–7, 50, 57, 60, 62, 64, 78, 90, 114, 186, 188, 214, 218, 220, 238, 241, 290n1, 291n3, 291n6 Slavko, Tatiana, 281 Snezhinsk, see Cheliabinsk-70 SNK, see Sovnarkom ‘Snow Wine’, dissident group, 270 Social Democrats, 13–16, 21, 69, 136 Socialist Revolutionaries (SR), 14–17, 19–21, 32, 157, 309n33 sotsgorodók, socialist model city, 84–5, 87 Souvarine, Boris, 1, 291–2n2 soviet Germans, 138, 150, 237–41, 279, 283, 318n50 sovkhoz, state-owned collective farm, 54, 63, 114 sovnarkom, (Council of people’s commissars, SNK), 175, 220, 266 Spanish Civil war, 1936–9, 126, 165, 177 Spartakiad, 99, 251 Special Design Bureau SKB-2, 149–50, 168–9, 172, 178, 196–7 special settlers (spetspereselentsy, spetsposelentsy), 55, 60, 62, 64–6, 241–3 sport, 65, 99, 251, 269 stakhanovite, 83, 96, 112, 230, 233, 304n17

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350 Index Stalin, Joseph, 13, 34, 49, 51, 55, 60, 61, 67, 69, 70, 71, 75, 76, 77, 78, 89, 102, 106, 127, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 146, 151, 152, 154, 155, 157, 158, 160, 161, 172, 175, 178, 180, 184, 185, 187, 204, 208, 210, 214, 236, 257, 258, 268, 274, 276, 286, 287, 288, 291n2, 292, 295n18, 299n2, 300n7, 306n1, 307n11, 313n2 Stalingrad, 104, 203, 207, 220, 238, 251, 315n26, 316n34 Stalingrad Tractor Factory, 104, 116, 118, 126, 176, 197, 203, 210, 227, 262 Stalinism, 70, 136, 311n1 Stalinist neo-classicism, 82–3 Stalin-line fortifications, 43 ‘Stalin organs’, see rocket artillery launcher state capitalism, 70 Stolypin, Piotr, 2 Suvenirov, Oleg, 127 Svechin, Aleksandr, 61 Sverdlovsk (now Ekaterinburg), 9, 46, 55, 72, 99, 139–40, 189–90, 197, 204, 219, 222, 243, 252 Svetlov, M.A., 224 Sweden, 128, 250 Switzerland, 16, 250, 291n6 tank, BT, 183 BT-2, 121 BT-5, 122 BT-7, 122–3 BT-7M, 123, 305n26 Christie, 121, 133, 305n26 Ferdinand, 214 IS-1 (Iosif Stalin), 197, 208–10 IS-2, 197, 209–10, 213–14 IS-3, 197, 211–12, 214, 258, 260, 279, 321n9 IS-4, 259–60, 321n8 IS-5, 260 IS-8, 260 Jagdpanther, 215 Jagdtiger, 214 KV-1 (Kliment Voroshilov), 177–9, 195, 198, 200, 204

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KV-1S, 197, 200, 204, 206, 208, 210 KV-2, 178–9 KV-3, 179, 195 KV-8, 179 KV-9, 179, 200 KV-13, 208 KV-85, 197 Panther, 206, 211, 214 Panzer III, 183 PT-76, 260 SMK (Sergei Mironovich Kirov), 172, 177–8 T-10, 212, 260–1 T-12, 120 T-24, 120 T-26, 125, 188 T-28, 126, 131–3, 149 T-29, 132–3, 306n40 T-34, 122–3, 126, 128, 183–4, 188–90, 197–9, 201–4, 207, 210–11, 314n14 T-35, 126 T-40, 188–9 T-100, 177 Tiger, 206, 208, 214 Tashkent, 221 Tatar autonomous republic, 233 Tekelev, A.I., 2 terror, the Great 1937 terror, 24, 36, 74, 77, 126–7, 134–43, 145–7, 149–61, 190, 280–1, 283, 286–7, 292n4, 292n5, 306n3, 309n32, 309n33, 310n34, 314n13 Terry, Edward J., 113–14 Tevosian, Ivan, 214 Thälmann, Ernst, 250 Thane, John, 116 Thurston, Robert, 136 Tinchenko, Iaroslav, 127 Titov, N.N., 17 Tobolsk, 14–15 Tolstikov, Vitalii S., 283 Tomsk, 46 totalitarianism, 283–4, 301n18 town-planning, Cheliabinsk, 72, 301n16 tractor, Komintern, 170 S-2, 179, 192–3 S-4, 170 S-60, 258

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Index

351

S-64, 259 S-65, 118, 170, 179, 192–3, 211, 258 SG-65, 118, 192 Stalinets-60, 109, 120 Universal, 149 Trans-Siberian Railway, 2, 20, 23, 27–8, 32, 46 Trashutin, Ivan, 197 Treubov, Grigorii, 108 Triandafillov, Vladimir, 125, 305n29 Troianov, I.S., 208 Troitsk, 19–20, 28–9, 32–4, 36, 52, 56, 66, 98, 249 Trotsky, Leon, 7, 27, 33–4, 108–9, 139, 295n18, 295n19, 303n10 Tseits, N.V., 128, 177 Tsvilling, Samuil, 14–17, 20 Tukhachevskii, Mikhail, 28, 30, 31, 74, 125, 128, 137, 294n15, 305n32 Tupolev, Andrei, 159 Turkey, 7, 250

Varga, Evgenii, 38 Vasenko, Evdokimov, 15, 17, 23 Vega, Lope de, 224 Verkhne-Uralsk, 15, 19, 20, 153 Vernidub, Ivan, 129, 193 Versailles Peace Conference, and Treaty, 250 Vladivostok, 23, 27 voenpred, Red army representative at defense industry factory, 120, 148, 308n23 Voitsekhovskii, Sergei, 20, 23 Volga, river, region, 5, 18, 24, 37, 42, 102, 140, 158, 186, 217–20 Volga-Germans, 238 Voroshilov, Kliment, 42, 57, 140, 149, 167, 172 Voroshilov Works, 125 Voznesenskii, Nikolai, 187, 267 VSNKh, Supreme Council of the Economy, 42, 113

Ufa, 20–1, 26–8, 38, 46, 74 Ufaleisk, 48 Ukraine, 34, 41–3, 47, 55, 59, 62–3, 66, 102, 132, 148–9, 152, 172, 184, 186–7, 197, 217, 222, 234, 236, 243, 294n18, 313n4 Umanets, 90 UMM, Red Army directorate for mechanisation and motorisation, 118 Ural-Kuznetsk project, 44, 72 Uraltrak, (ChTZ since 1992), 6 Uritskii, Semën, 23 USA, 104, 108, 118, 121, 163, 187, 251, 283 UZTM, Urals Heavy Machinebuilding Factory in Sverdlovsk, 189–90

Warsaw, 31 Webb, Beatrice and Sidney, 7 Wehrmacht, 183, 201, 206, 208, 219, 280, 313n8 Werth, Alexander, 312–13n1 Werth, Nicolas, 309, 313n1 White Army, in Civil war 1918–20, 27–8, 30–2, 278

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Zaltsman, Isaak Moiseevich, 148–9, 195–6, 199, 210–12, 224, 233–4, 258–60, 262–3, 266–9, 308n24 Zemskov, Viktor, 62, 242 Zhukov, Georgii, 199 Zigel, M.A., 125 Zinovev, Georgii, 34, 109, 136–7, 139–40 Zlatoust, 2, 15, 20, 28, 32, 34, 46, 63–4, 74, 114, 230–1, 236, 249

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