"Tankograd." How the forge of caterpillar equipment of the USSR was born
Cheliabinsk Tractor Plant
The construction of the Chelyabinsk Tractor Plant in the 30 years of the last century was one of the most important events in the life of the country. No wonder the construction of a giant plant, designed for 40 of thousands of tractors, was supervised by the Politburo of the Central Committee. Sergo Ordzhonikidze, People's Commissar of Heavy Industry, personally supervised the progress of design and construction. It was impossible to build a modern plant in the Soviet Union on a clean place, so the Cheliabinsk Tractor Plant design bureau was formed, based in Detroit on one of the floors of countless high-rises. In the book “Tankograd. Secrets of the Russian rear of 1917-1953. ”Lennart Samuelson writes that in the USA 40 Soviet and 14 American engineers and builders worked on the appearance of the enterprise. In addition, the Institute for the Design of Metallurgical Plants was involved in the development (there were such in the USSR). Among those who before the Cheliabinsk Tractor Plant worked in the USA and Great Britain to study the experience of large plants, there was also the first director of the Chelyabinsk Tractor Engineering Kazimir Petrovich Lovin.
Soviet engineers in the office of the Chelyabinsk Tractor Plant in Detroit, 1930 year
Among the tasks was the search for a suitable tractor model, which could become the first-born of the plant. However, the process dragged on: Caterpillar lifted the price of licensed production rights, and all the drawings were in English with yards and inches. The Americans demanded 3,5 a million dollars for their plant project and, in addition, forbade the USSR for 20 years to export licensed tractors manufactured at its facilities. Lovin on 6 on March 1930 wrote to his deputies in Chelyabinsk:
“I have very few hopes of a favorable outcome for negotiations with Caterpillar. Time is irretrievably running out and, apparently, it will be necessary to work by the forces of our own bureau with the help of another, secondary tractor company and individual American specialists. This will take significantly more time. We have already lost two months. ”
Kazimir Petrovich Lovin
Albert Kahn
Construction Stages
As a result, it was decided to create a joint Soviet-American group of developers of the Cheliabinsk Tractor Plant, which had already prepared a plant project for Chelyabinsk by 1931. Many engineers, in addition to project work in the office, were employed at Detroit's enterprises, where they gained invaluable experience in organizing production. As many historians write, the sketch design of the future giant of the South Urals was ready in just 50 days. The main assistance was rendered by the famous architectural office Albert Kahn, whose experts proposed to drastically reduce the number of workshops from 20 to 3: foundry, mechanical and blacksmithing. The most important innovation of the Americans was the replacement of reinforced concrete support columns with steel ones, which made it possible to make spans wider, as well as to quickly change production facilities. This turned out to be very useful during the Great Patriotic War.
One of the shock group of the country's new buildings
Before the construction of the workshops of the future tractor plant, in November 1929, large-scale earthworks began. Naturally, there was no mechanization: the soil was taken out by carts drawn by horses. The construction required enormous human resources, which had to be taken in the village. Often training courses on reading and writing were organized right there at the construction site - industrialization went hand in hand with the elimination of illiteracy. Not to mention the fact that up to 100% of hired workers were not trained in construction professions. It is noteworthy that the labor of prisoners during the construction of the future Tankograd was practically not used, unlike the construction projects in Nizhny Tagil and Magnitogorsk. Samuelson writes that for all time in Chelyabinsk they were involved in the construction of 205 serving sentences. However, work at the Ural construction site of the decade was not particularly prestigious - the cause was the chronic lack of work clothes and shoes, as well as poor living conditions. For these reasons, in the 29-30's, shortages of labor amounted to 40%, chronically lacked construction materials, and at the end of the period, a reduction in the total funding of the superproject turned out to be a cherry on the cake.
On 30 of April 1931 of the year, the Party Central Committee adopted a special decree “On the progress of the construction of the Chelyabinsk Tractor Plant”, which openly spoke about the paramount importance of the timely opening of the plant. As a result, a second shift was introduced, and the working day became 10-hour. The construction workers of ChTZ were generously rewarded with the best workers, but such situations often occurred, one of which was recorded in the local trade union committee:
“I bring to your attention that for the award presented to me (a trip to the resort) I thank you as for the high appreciation of my work. But given the importance of the ChTZ launch on a union scale, I refuse it, and I donate all the money to the resort to a modern fund aviation».
Komsomol members at the ChTZ construction site came up with peculiar “concrete evenings” —that when, to the sounds of the orchestra and the spotlights, the young workers continued pouring the concrete structures of the plant after an 10-hour working day.
The coming tragic years of terror, unfortunately, did not pass by the organizers of the construction of the plant. From the very beginning, Kazimir Lovin, who was mentioned earlier, was appointed the head of the entire construction, who by the 1929 year had managed to establish himself as a talented manager, power engineer and builder. After the revolution, he built power supply facilities in Leningrad, and in Moscow he headed the construction of power plants and a centralized heating system. After the Chelyabinsk Tractor was built, Lovin served as director until 1934, and then left for Moscow, where he eventually became the head of Glavovenergo. It is said that in 1937, Stalin personally signed a death list, in which the name of Lovin was listed.
Colossus is on its feet
It cannot be said that the Chelyabinsk Tractor Plant was entirely built according to the patterns of the Americans. The design was attended, for example, by the outstanding domestic architect Vladimir G. Shukhov. In particular, he developed the mechanical assembly and forge workshops of ChTZ. In the literature on the architectural heritage of Shukhov, one can find such a description of the constructed structures:
“The grand workshops of the plant are full of light and air. Roofs are made of glass. A uniform soft light falls on a string of machines, illuminates the impeccable cleanliness of the floors, on which electric cars roll silently. The workshops are surrounded by a ring of green spaces. ”
Или:
“The area of workshops dressed in reinforced concrete and glass covers 183 ha, the area of one mechanical assembly shop is 8,5 ha. The length of this workshop is 540 meters ... A forge workshop with an area of 2,6 ha, volume of 330 thousand cubic meters ... The Chelyabinsk Tractor Plant is an example of a specialized plant with mass continuous production. "
Factory night illumination
Panorama ChTZ
Despite the fact that the plant was a lot of foreign, about 40% of all equipment was created in the USSR.
Looking ahead a bit, I’ll mention that in just a few years, instead of tractors Tanks. In the meantime, on June 1-3, 1933, the Chelyabinsk Tractor Plant was solemnly launched in the presence of the chairman of the Presidium of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR Kalinin. Ordzhonikidze later, following the results of the opening at the XXII Party Congress, will say:
“There is no such huge and luxurious factory not only in Europe, but, it seems, in America as well.”
Designers prepared in advance for the ceremony and assembled the first ten Stalinets-60 tractors at the pilot plant. This mini-factory inside the main one was ready already in November 1930 and was intended for a detailed study of foreign samples of automotive equipment, as well as for training future workers. It was assumed that at least 4 thousand craftsmen will be trained at the pilot plant by the start of the main production, most of which are yesterday's villagers. American John Thane, as well as a cohort of specialists from overseas Caterpillar, led the construction of the pilot plant. At least 100 Americans worked as craftsmen at the already built enterprise, including tractor workers who studied with them. It is they who in the future will become the backbone of the plant, without which it would not be possible to master the production of tanks on the scale of the Great Patriotic War.
To be continued ...
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