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

363 Pages·2011·7.491 MB·English

by  Lennart Samuelson (auth.)

Tankograd
Also by Lennart Samuelson
PLANS FOR STALIN’S WAR-MACHINE: Tukhachevskii and Military-Economic
Planning, 1925–1941
Tankograd
The Formation of a Soviet Company
Town: Cheliabinsk, 1900s–1950s
Lennart Samuelson
Associate Professor, Stockholm School of Economics, Sweden
© Lennart Samuelson 2011
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2011 978-0-230-20887-2
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11
To Elza
Contents
Preface ix
1 Cheliabinsk As a Mirror of Russia in the 20th Century 1
2 From the Civil War to the Five-year Plans 13
The Civil War in the Southern Urals 20
The Battle of Cheliabinsk, July–August 1919 28
Militarisation of labour and force against the peasantry 33
Recovery under the New Economic Policy 39
A new industrial landscape emerges 40
Transformation of the countryside:
collectivisation and dekulakisation 48
3 The Industrial City As a Socialist Vision and Soviet Reality 69
The changing character of Cheliabinsk city in the 1930s 78
Sotsgorodók – a socialist ideal for the tractor
factory city district 84
Barracks for industrial workers in ‘shanty towns’ 90
Health care and education 94
Sport 99
4 The Tractor Factory’s Civilian Production
and Military Potential 103
Foreign specialists 112
The significance of the tractor factory for the Red Army 118
Evolution of the military doctrine 123
Military-economic preparedness:
The ChTZ enterprise in the 1930s 128
5 Stagnation and Streamlining in the
Whirlwinds of Terror, 1936–1939 134
Purges of party members in 1937–1938 138
Repression against technicians, engineers and
leading cadres in the economy 143
Mass repression campaigns 150
Lavrentii Beria and the streamlining of
NKVD internal affairs 154
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viii Contents
6 Industrial Preparedness in Cheliabinsk, 1939–1940 163
The USSR’s preparations for war in 1941 174
The start of tank production at the
Cheliabinsk Tractor Factory 176
7 Production Conditions for Heavy Tanks in the Urals 183
The establishment of ‘Tankograd’ 191
The final battle for Berlin 213
8 1418 Long Days on the Home Front in the Southern Urals 217
Evacuation and conversion of industry 220
Working conditions in Tankograd 226
Soviet Germans build the new iron and
steel works in Cheliabinsk 237
Prisoners of war in Cheliabinsk 241
The countryside 241
The political information sphere in the Urals 249
Victory Day 1945 in the Southern Urals 252
9 The New Military-Industrial Complex in
Cheliabinsk during the Cold War 255
The reconversion of the tractor factory after the war 258
The labour force 261
Housing conditions 264
The end of the career of the ‘Kings of Tanks’ 267
Youth protests in post-war Cheliabinsk 268
The closed atomic cities in the Cheliabinsk region 272
10 Historical Memory and Research in Today’s Cheliabinsk 278
Notes 290
Bibliography 327
Index 345
Preface
For more than 15 years, the conditions for conducting research on
Russia’s 20th-century history in the archives have exceeded the expec-
tations that most scholars would have had prior to 1991. Through a
series of happy coincidences over a number of years, I have been fortu-
nate 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 sup-
ported 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 discus-
sions 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 disserta-
tion, 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
ix
x Preface
fortunate enough to have Larisa Iarosh guide me through its memora-
bilia, 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 situ-
ation in 1917. In addition, it has been especially stimulating to learn
more on the basic education programmes of contemporary Russian his-
tory, 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 any-
one else she has made it so fascinating to learn ever more about the
recent past of her country.