Khrushchev era: on the seas and on the rails
Didn't like the fleet?
Choosing such a title for the next part of my essay, I proceeded from two considerations.
The first is that N. S. Khrushchev personalized and personified the most diverse aspects of state building after the long Stalin era. And therefore, when describing them (in particular, naval construction and the development of railways, which are the direct subject of our consideration), it is impossible to avoid attention to this figure.
The second thought arose in me when reading the comments to my review "Crisis manifestations of the Cuban missile crisis" to A. Timokhin's article on the Cuban missile crisis. They often contain the categorical statement that Khrushchev did not like the fleet.
But is it really?
Let's figure it out.
And, first of all, there is a small digression associated with this person, whose reign fell, perhaps, the period of the country's highest prosperity over the past century. This flowering manifested itself in a wide variety of areas. For example, in scientific and technical, the symbol of which has become the national priority in space exploration. Perhaps we can say that the only time in his entire history Russia was at the forefront of global technological progress. And even if it lasted only a little longer than a decade, the fact itself is remarkable, unique in its kind.
Along with the technological flourishing, these years were marked by an unconditional cultural flourishing. Here one can recall the “thaw”, the Moscow Festival of Youth and Students, the Moscow Film Festival, and other facts that testify to the country's greater openness to the world. The material standard of living of the broadest strata of the people has also grown significantly. The expansion of mass housing construction allowed many people to get separate apartments, and the encouragement of gardening partnerships - to become the owners of albeit modest, but suburban areas.
Of course, this does not mean that such a beneficial state of affairs was entirely determined by the "wise leadership" carried out by Nikita Sergeevich. His figure is extremely controversial, combining both attractive and repulsive features. It is unlikely that he can be attributed to outstanding historical figures, to political titans.
But, on the other hand: could all of the above phenomena take place in a situation where the country's supreme leader was a complete insignificance, as they sometimes try to portray Khrushchev?
This reminds of the "perestroika" cliché that the Great Patriotic War was won by the people in spite of Stalin, and not thanks to him. Today it is hardly necessary to explain in detail that such statements are trivial stupidity. But does not the understanding of such stupidity mean that in relation to Khrushchev, the denial of his merits in national achievements is just as unauthorized?
Taking these preliminary considerations into account, let us now turn directly to the topic of Nikita Sergeevich's attitude to the fleet.
And, first of all, let us remember what was the legacy that he inherited (along with his colleagues in the "collective leadership" of the country) after Stalin's death?
As mentioned in the previous part, this period was marked by the construction of a large number of obsolete ships: torpedo boats, small destroyers (traditionally referred to by us as patrol ships), destroyers, light and three heavy (battle) cruisers. Their real combat capabilities did not in any way correspond to the level of their time, but rather, corresponded to the beginning or, at best, the middle of World War II.
Perhaps the only type of ships, the large-scale production of which during this period should be recognized as justified, is the minesweepers of the project 254. Throughout the Great Patriotic War, the Soviet fleet suffered from a shortage of such ships, which were clearly neglected in the pre-war period. After its end, when the water area of the Black and especially the Baltic Seas was literally "stuffed" with mines, etching them for several years became the main combat mission of Soviet sailors, which they carried out at the risk of their lives.
So did the country really need this whole armada?
Its construction is often justified by the need to ensure the utilization of industry. However, it is difficult to agree with this. If we remember what titanic efforts were made at that time to revive the material base of the country destroyed by the war, to modernize it, then we will understand that the downtime of the production capacity of the shipbuilding industry was clearly not threatened, as they say.
There is no dispute - this high-tech industry needs to preserve its core competencies and therefore simply mechanically replacing warships with other, national-economic products is not an option for it. But after all, such ships can be built and separate samples, "honing" the skills of production workers and designers on them. The release of a mass series of combat units, whose ability to provide an advantage over the enemy in combat conditions, is in question.
One more justification for this situation can be found in the literature. Say, the fleet was forced to put up with the dictates of industry, which somehow managed to win the confidence of the leader; he was unable to resist it.
But the navy readily joined this game, in which departmental interests were placed above those of the state.
I will give an example from the period after Stalin's death - to 1955.
Khrushchev watched the exercises of the Black Sea Fleet. An episode from his memoirs dating back to 1955, when the first secretary of the CPSU Central Committee watched the maneuvers of the Black Sea Fleet, sheds light on Khrushchev's attitude to the fleet. In particular, he was shown a night attack by torpedo boats on the "enemy" fleet in the harbor. Naturally, as a result of the dashing actions of the boatmen, all their targets were conditionally hit.
The distinguished guest asked: "And what, comrades - is it that the enemy can also sneak up to our ships and sink them unnoticed?" To which the sailors condescendingly replied: “Well, what are you, Nikita Sergeevich! We will detect the approaching enemy boats in advance on the screens of our locators and destroy them before they reach the torpedo launch range. "
The question arises: what feelings should one of the leaders of the country have experienced, seeing that the exercises are clearly going “with one gate” and that the conventional “enemy” is clearly “playing giveaway” in order to ensure a predetermined result? Khrushchev was not a fool - in this case, he simply would not have been able to defeat his competitors in the struggle for power. Therefore, he certainly drew the appropriate conclusions from this case of obvious fraud.
And in the fall of the same year, it was no longer an exercise that took place in the Black Sea Fleet, but a real tragedy: the death of the battleship Novorossiysk. After its explosion right at the anchorage site (as 49 years earlier another battleship "Empress Maria" died at the same place), as a result of a mediocre organized rescue operation, hundreds of sailors were killed, who found themselves walled up in the compartments of the capsized ship, literally a few meters from the rescue ... Yes, after that the leadership of the fleet was severely punished, including at the request of Defense Minister G. Zhukov.
But was this punishment unjust, undeserved? Maybe it was necessary to let things go "on the brakes", to neglect such unprecedentedly high losses in their own harbor, in peacetime ?!
Well, two years earlier, after the death of Stalin, whose personal will largely gave rise to such a large-scale shipbuilding program, his successors (among whom Nikita Sergeevich had not played a leading role at all) began to correct this obvious mistake by reducing the fleet and bringing its number to the value dictated by real political, economic and technical needs.
Yes, while they largely relied on the support of the army generals: a fact that for some reason the champions of the fleet always try to emphasize. Does it mean that in this activity the representatives of the generals were guided by sabotage, anti-state, in fact, motives?
Not at all. As I wrote earlier, this was a manifestation of a completely natural competition between representatives of different types of troops, which is typical for the military always and everywhere. They are brought up in the spirit of striving for victory. And when a war comes - this desire motivates them to feats and to victory over the enemy. But when there is no war, this craving for self-affirmation is realized in the form of intrigues and attempts to suppress competitors. This is the nature of the professional military, and nothing can be done about it.
Finally, it is reasonable to ask the question: why did the generals defeat the admirals in this conflict, and not vice versa?
I also gave the answer to it in the previous part, but I will repeat it again.
Because the authority of the "ground", their weight in the eyes of the top political leadership turned out to be higher than the sailors.
First, because in the recently ended brutal war, victory was achieved precisely on land, not at sea.
Well, and secondly, because it could not be otherwise. For example, in England the situation is always the opposite: the navy is superior in authority to the army. This is the specificity of the sea power. In Russia, the situation is the opposite, and this is an objective state of affairs due to its continental position.
However, let's get back to the personality of Khrushchev and continue to answer the question: how fair is the popular opinion about his dislike of the Navy? To what extent does it correspond to historical truth?
I must say that Nikita Sergeevich is not the first head of the Russian state whom the guardians of the fleet are trying to accuse of irrational hatred of him as such (although, perhaps, it is in the case of Khrushchev that these accusations acquire the most unbridled character).
But let's take, for example, Alexander I. Often, among the "departmental" naval historians, one can also find a reproach to the "Blessed One" that he completely "neglected" naval affairs, entrusting them to an incompetent (and besides, which, apparently, the most terrible - to a foreign!) serving the Marquis de Traversay, which resulted in the decline of the Russian fleet. At the same time, the fact that it was Alexander who was able to organize the victory over Napoleon, turn Russia into a leading European power, deciding the fate of post-war Europe, is completely ignored.
So, maybe talking about his neglect of the fleet is not entirely correct? And instead, it should be noted that, having correctly defined his priorities, he was able to bet on the force that at that moment was of decisive importance for the country - that is, on the army?
It seems to me that such reasoning will be fair in relation to Khrushchev.
Immediately, anticipating possible objections, I will make a reservation that the first steps towards detente relations with the West, which were extremely tense at the end of Stalin's rule, were taken not by Khrushchev, but by Malenkov. And even before that, another member of the "collective leadership" that came to power in March 1953 - L. Beria began to put forward proposals in this direction. In particular, on the settlement of the "German question". Therefore, reducing the level of armaments, which are a heavy burden on the national economy, was an urgent task that could not be ignored.
Nevertheless, there is no reason to say that the fleet under Khrushchev underwent some kind of "rout". On the contrary, it has undergone significant technical re-equipment. Ships with mainly artillery and torpedo armament were replaced by a new generation of them, equipped with guided missiles. And in this process, the Soviet Union not only not from the most developed countries, but at certain moments pulled ahead.
It is clear that this simply could not have happened if a person at the top of the power pyramid (especially considering the autocratic nature of power in our country at all times) would simply “dislike the navy”.
And nevertheless, it was under Khrushchev that the domestic navy suffered one of its most serious defeats. This happened during the Cuban missile crisis. I have already touched on this topic in a remark about A. Timokhin's article, also dedicated to this, no doubt, a key event, both in the context of the Cold War and from the point of view of naval practice. To my surprise, in the comments, many readers tried to challenge the very fact of this defeat. Therefore, I will repeat my argument again, once again.
The Cuban Missile Crisis occupies a very important place in the history of the Russian Navy, for it is practically the only case in the entire period of the Cold War when it had the opportunity to prove itself. However, this did not happen, and he was unable to fulfill the task that was entrusted to him by the country's top political leadership. The submarines, ordered to pass covertly to Cuba, were sighted by the American fleet and forced to surface. Surface ships were canceled altogether. As a result, the same American fleet, fulfilling the "quarantine" regime announced by the US President, had an unhindered opportunity to stop Soviet transports heading to the ports of the "Freedom Island", inspect them and not let them go further.
These are the facts that indicate that the tasks assigned by the country's top political leadership to the navy were not fulfilled during Operation Anadyr. And in order to understand the role played by our fleet in these events, it is they that are important, and not the questions that were often asked by the authors of the comments to my remark "Crisis manifestations over the Cuban missile crisis": did the Americans remove their missiles aimed at the USSR from Turkey? What could a meeting at sea of Soviet and American warships on the way to Cuba lead to? Etc. For they do not deny the fact that the Soviet fleet did not fulfill the combat mission assigned to it, and this did not allow the implementation of the plan for the covert deployment in Cuba of nuclear weapons aimed at the United States.
It is necessary to fix and understand: why did this happen?
The authors of numerous "anti-Khrushchev" publications (including A. Timokhin, whose article was my reply) are inclined to blame everything directly on the First Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee, his adventurism and lack of understanding of realities.
But is Khrushchev to blame for the fact that at the exercises of the Northern Fleet, which took place several months earlier, the admirals deliberately misled him, presenting the underwater launch of a ballistic missile from a diesel submarine as the already achieved combat readiness of nuclear carriers to perform such an operation? Or was it Khrushchev who initiated the cancellation of the trip to Cuba by surface warships, which turned out that our transports were unprotected when they met with the US Navy? Finally, it was Khrushchev who prevented the naval leadership from realistically assessing the capabilities of the US ASW, its ability to detect our submarines in the oceans?
The answers to these questions are obvious. And they show that attempts to portray the state of affairs in such a way that all the blame for the failure of Operation Anadyr lies with Khrushchev - this is a typical attempt to "switch the arrows" aimed at explaining all the failures of our fleet by external causes.
In this role, incompetent representatives of the political leadership alternately act, then representatives of the army striving to destroy a competitor, then Tukhachevsky, then someone else. The fleet itself is always so pure in its thoughts, so striving to fulfill its duty to the Motherland to the end - that it is simply not capable of any other, self-serving actions. As the saying goes, "if the native country lived - and there are no other worries" ...
Contrary to this extremely biased slogan far from the true state of affairs, competition between representatives of different branches of the armed forces is a completely natural phenomenon that takes place not only in our country. In the last part of the article, I dwelt in detail on the plot, which was called the "Admiral's Riot" in the United States. Its essence consisted in the desire of the naval elite by all means to get at its disposal a means of delivery to the goal of a nuclear weapons, which served in the post-war world as a guarantee of the importance of this type of troops in the national defense system.
Since in the early years these funds could only be aviation, the result of this struggle was the construction of a new generation of aircraft carriers for the US Navy, intended for basing jet aircraft - carriers of atomic bombs.
However, a few years later, a new system of sea-based strategic nuclear weapons appeared: nuclear submarines with submarine-launched ballistic missiles, which took up combat duty in the early 60s. From that moment, aircraft carriers lost their role in delivering the first nuclear strike and began to be mainly viewed as a tactical weapon system, whose purpose is primarily to participate in local conflicts, the outcome of which is determined by conventional weapons. Unfortunately, this "re-profiling" of the largest ships remained unnoticed in the USSR, which is why the confrontation with aircraft carrier strike groups was still seen as the main task of our fleet. This led to an important strategic mistake, the consequences of which cannot be overestimated. However, since this error was fully realized later, I will consider it in the next part of the article.
Subtotals
So, let's summarize the interim results.
The new leadership of the USSR, which came to power after Stalin's death, in terms of naval development, canceled the most senseless, heavy burdens on the economy, measures to create an armada of ships from the era that had already ended.
However, this reduction in no way meant the destruction of the fleet as such. Because it was in the Khrushchev era that he began to acquire a new look: the very nuclear missile, which is usually identified with the era of scientific and technological revolution.
But the leadership of the fleet, lacking real combat experience (especially in comparison with the army generals), as well as being in a natural situation of technical lag behind a potential enemy, did not always cope with their duties. And often, instead of improving the structure entrusted to him, seeking to increase combat readiness, he was engaged in outright fraud, as in the episodes I mentioned with a torpedo attack in an exercise in 1955 or with an underwater missile launch in 1962.
It also allowed other "punctures" (and this is - to put it mildly!), Resulting in the death of their subordinate personnel, as in the case of the Novorossiysk disaster. And in the case of the most significant operation, to which the forces of the fleet were involved - "Anadyr", its leadership also behaved unsatisfactorily, both professionally and morally. After all, the command, in fact, betrayed the submariners who were forced to surface at the request of the Americans in a deliberately hopeless situation, blaming them for disrupting the combat mission.
And so, in order to avoid considering these, no doubt, difficult and unpleasant issues, a win-win solution is used: the story that Khrushchev “did not like the fleet,” and from this, they say, all our problems in the water sector.
Fundamental reconstruction of thrust
And now, as it should have become familiar to our reader, let us turn to the topic of railways and outline the changes that took place on them during the same Khrushchev period.
Before proceeding with this, I will share one of my impressions formed after reading the comments to the previous parts of this article (more precisely, already a whole cycle).
Many of them welcome this part of my story and ask for it to be expanded. Well - I do it with pleasure! Moreover, it was in the second half of the 50s that, perhaps, the most radical and rapid changes in their entire history began on Soviet railways.
Но обо всем по порядку.
By 1955, the preconditions were formed for the next technical re-equipment of this type of transport. First of all, this concerned the electric power industry. By increasing the voltage in power lines up to 400 (and then up to 500) kilovolts, it became possible to transport large volumes of electricity over considerable distances: hundreds and then thousands of kilometers. This created new opportunities for transferring lines to electric traction, since now the regions of energy generation and its consumption could be geographically separated.
As a result, the construction of a whole cascade of hydroelectric power plants began, first on the Volga, and then on the deep rivers of the Urals and Siberia (Ob, Angara, Yenisei), the European and Asian parts of the country, the capacities of which replenished the emerging unified energy system of the country, from which, in turn, fed including long electrified railway lines.
By the same time, a high-power electric locomotive was created in the USSR. This was preceded by a rather curious story.
The first order for such a locomotive was made by the Soviet Union in March 1946 of the famous American General Electric campaign, since back in 1932 it supplied our country with electric locomotives for work at the Suram pass in Georgia. However, by 1948, when the Soviet order was completed, a cold war broke out between yesterday's allies, and the US government banned supplies to the USSR.
Then in our country at NEVZ, where before that only 6-axle electric locomotives were produced, an electric locomotive with similar characteristics was designed, which was named N8 ("Novocherkassk eight-axle"). It is interesting that after anti-government unrest broke out in Novocherkassk in 1962, the "core" of which was the workers of the electric locomotive plant, the letter "N" was removed from the name of their products, and all electric locomotives under construction in the country received the standard designation VL ("Vladimir Lenin ") with the corresponding digital index. In 1955, a pilot batch of these electric locomotives was successfully tested and was ready for serial production.
Н8 was designed for a 3 kV DC overhead catenary system. However, by the same time, a new promising AC power supply system appeared abroad (primarily in France). Due to the higher voltage in the catenary, it made it possible to increase the distance between the traction substations, which significantly reduced the cost of electrification, and also made it possible to increase the power supplied to the locomotives.
On the Moscow road, this system was used to electrify the Ozherelye-Pavelets section, the trial operation of which showed the system to work. Therefore, the initial voltage in the overhead contact network of 20 kV at the end of the 50s was increased to 25 kV.
Significant "shifts" took place in the domestic diesel locomotive construction.
Copied from the Lend-Lease "American" 1000-horsepower TE1, as well as the two-section (with a capacity of 1950 hp) TE2000 produced at the same Kharkov transport engineering plant since 2, were inferior in this indicator to powerful steam locomotives and therefore could not have them replace. A new diesel was needed.
It was also decided to take as its basis an American unit - a two-stroke (and therefore more compact and having a higher power density compared to four-stroke) Fairbanks-Morse marine engine installed on submarines. And also three American icebreakers delivered to the USSR under the Lend-Lease program, which continued to work with us in Murmansk after the war, had it. A group of engineers was sent to one of them, which is undergoing repairs in Leningrad, with the task of measuring this diesel engine and making a set of drawings for it.
So there was a Soviet analogue called 2D100 with a capacity of 2000 liters. from. A diesel locomotive TE3 was created for it, which also had a two-section layout. That is, the total capacity was 4 thousand liters. from. In 1955, he also went into series production. In fact, it was a full-fledged "killer of steam locomotives", surpassing those in all its technical characteristics, first of all - in terms of productivity and power.
It is important to note that in parallel there was a real "breakthrough" in the domestic oil industry: the highly accurate predicted fields between the Volga and the Urals were discovered, after which the production of "black gold" in the USSR increased significantly. This made it possible to consider diesel traction as economically justified, although in the pre-war years its widespread resistance was resisted, citing, among other things, the high cost of fuel.
The listed scientific, technical and economic achievements took place against the background of an acute struggle for power in the USSR, which, although not advertised, but in the closest way influenced the events taking place. The echoes of this struggle can be seen in the films of those years. Often, a "progressive" party secretary stands out from their heroes, whose antipode is a "retrograde" - an official. Thus, art workers fulfilled the installation on the advantages of the party leadership over the economic, received after the first secretary of the CPSU Central Committee, NS Khrushchev, defeated G.M. Malenkov, having achieved his removal from the post of Chairman of the Council of Ministers.
From this moment on, the center for making the most important decisions has been shifted from government structures to party structures. In modern political language, the party, led by its incredibly ambitious leader, more and more actively “intercepted the agenda” from state bodies, which since the last years of Stalin's rule have formed the core of the state mechanism.
The Plenum of the Central Committee of the CPSU, held in July 1955, adopted a resolution "On tasks for the further development of industry, technical progress and improvement of the organization of production." The plenum proclaimed the most important task of Party, Soviet and economic organizations in the field of industry to raise the technical level of production in every possible way. The main condition for solving this problem was declared to be a sharp increase in the rate of technical improvement in all industries on the basis of electrification, comprehensive mechanization and automation of production processes, the introduction of the latest machines and devices (I apologize to the reader for this boring quote, which nevertheless allows you to feel the language of the then governing documents).
In pursuance of these intentions, the government at the beginning of February of the following year, 1956, adopted a resolution "On the General Plan for the Electrification of Railways." This plan provided for the achievement of a very ambitious task: in fifteen years (1956-1970) to electrify lines with a total length of 40 thousand kilometers, increasing their length 9 times. Thus, the stake was made precisely on the wider introduction of electric traction for the intensification of railway transportation.
And just a few days later, the XX Congress of the CPSU opened in Moscow. Usually it is primarily associated with the so-called "secret speech" of Khrushchev, dedicated to the exposure of Stalin's "personality cult". But this speech served only as part of Nikita Sergeevich's strategy to acquire sole power in the country. For this, as mentioned above, it was necessary for him to give the highest weight to the party bodies, the decisions they made, in order to show their advantage over the Soviet and economic bodies. It is within the framework of this strategy that the congress not only approves the government plan for the electrification of railways, but also decides on a sharp increase in the production of diesel locomotives. For this, the Lugansk and Kolomna locomotive factories were ordered to curtail the construction of steam locomotives and join the Kharkovsky in the production of TE3.
These decisions marked the beginning of the most radical technical revolution in transport, which is usually called "traction reconstruction", meaning that its most visible embodiment was the replacement of steam locomotives, which dominated on steel tracks for over a hundred years, with new types of locomotives - diesel locomotives and electric locomotives. But in fact, to reduce it only to this, albeit a very important factor, means to fall into a strong simplification.
After all, the transfer to electric traction created opportunities for an integrated electrification of adjacent territories. The fact is that in the mid-50s, for a significant part of Soviet citizens, the use of electric energy was still not generally available. Often there were settlements in which kerosene lamps and lanterns were still used for lighting. Others were already electrified, but the source of energy was local power plants (usually powered by a tractor diesel engine), which were turned off at night, plunging the surroundings into darkness.
The adoption of a large-scale plan for the electrification of railways made it possible not only to equip them with a contact network and traction substations, allowing the use of electric locomotives. But it was also supposed to supply power to numerous consumers at stations, settlements, industrial and agricultural enterprises located along such lines. In addition to significantly improving the performance of the railway itself, this measure also contributed to the improvement of the lives of the people living along it. For the second time in its history, the domestic "piece of iron" in the full sense of the word brought civilization with it to those lands in which it ran. She very quickly changed her own appearance and also changed the appearance of the areas in which she lay.
These changes were also observed in the composition of the car fleet.
After all, the range of cars used allows you to more clearly imagine the economic features of the era. I have already touched on this aspect in the previous parts. Let me remind you that covered freight cars dominated on the railways of pre-revolutionary Russia, the main cargo of which was grain. In the years of the first five-year plans, an increasingly significant part of the park began to be made up of gondola cars intended for the transportation of coal and ore, which were signs of accelerated industrialization. In a new era, among freight cars, platforms began to be more common, on which automobile and tractor equipment manufactured at factories, the geography of which had expanded significantly, were transported.
And the social orientation of the new economy was more noticeable. Thus, more wagons for the transport of products began to be produced. These were cisterns for the transportation of milk, on which, immediately after the morning milking, it was delivered to the cities by special milk trains (or by attaching them to the post and baggage trains); wagons for the transportation of live fish. At the same time, refrigerated trains and separate sections are replacing glacier cars, which were used to transport perishable goods, which have been in operation since the beginning of the XNUMXth century, this allows them not to make long stops for refueling with ice, which significantly increases travel time.
New trends were also felt in passenger transportation.
So, the passenger cars themselves have significantly changed their design to the so-called all-metal. They were distinguished by a number of innovations. For example, for the first time, an electric generator appeared under each carriage and therefore the candles that were lit in the car when the power supply was interrupted are forever a thing of the past. The carriage interior has also changed significantly.
First of all, this applies to the most massive type: the so-called non-compartment (or open) long-distance carriage. It was the development in the future of the legendary Soviet designer Yuri Borisovich Solovyov, the author of the appearance of many objects we know very well: for example, the screw cap of a vodka bottle. It was he who, immediately after the war, a 25-year-old graduate of the Polygraphic Institute and widely known in the circles of the then "golden youth", thanks to his acquaintance with Vasily Stalin, got the opportunity to cooperate with the Kalinin Carriage Works, which was preparing a new type of passenger car for production. The interior designed by him allowed each passenger to use comfortable and functional personal space during the day and night, which was reserved for him for the entire period of the trip. Therefore, the carriage began to be called "reserved seat" (from the German platskarta, that is, "seat map"). This name remains to this day.
One of the consequences of the fact that diesel and electric locomotives began to be used instead of steam locomotives, was the reduction of passenger train stops, since the long procedure for refueling steam locomotives with water is a thing of the past. Previously, passengers used this time to also "fill up with water": boiling water in special "still" available at almost all stations. Now there was often no time left for this, and sources of boiling water appeared directly in the cars. It was the legendary titanium: a continuous boiler, the supply of water in which was replenished automatically from the wagon tank. Now tea was constantly at the service of passengers, although the tradition of drinking it immediately after departure from the next station remained for many decades.
Hack and predictor Aviator
Summing up the overall result, we can say that the "Khrushchev" era became, perhaps, the most striking, positive period in the history of our country in modern times.
This affected the development of both the navy (contrary to widespread prejudice) and railways.
Unfortunately, the latter is not very well known to the general population, but only to a narrow circle of specialists. We express our hope that we were able to fix this to some extent.
Information