On some moments of the evacuation of tank factories of the USSR during the war
How can one win a major war?
The answer to this question is, of course, quite clear: where diplomacy stops working, the government comes into play. weapon, therefore, the key to a successful conclusion of a conflict is often the competent actions of the military, from ordinary soldiers to the highest command staff.
But an army without a rear – without enterprises that provide it with supplies, including weapons – cannot even exist, much less participate in active combat operations.
Accordingly, the loss of this very rear is in fact equivalent to defeat – fast or slow, but inevitable. And the leadership of the Soviet Union understood this axiom perfectly well, having declared a large-scale evacuation of industry from the western territories of the country (close to the enemy or under threat of capture) to the east at the beginning of the Great Patriotic War.
The lists of forced "relocators" included many different production sites, small and fairly large enterprises of all-Union scale - their number was not even in the hundreds, but in the thousands. This especially concerned factories that were somehow connected with tank building, starting from subcontractors and ending with the manufacturers of combat vehicles themselves.
Thus, Moscow plant No. 37, which produced light Tanks, was evacuated to Sverdlovsk (present-day Yekaterinburg), and the Leningrad Kirov Plant and Plant No. 174 were evacuated to Chelyabinsk and Omsk, respectively. As for the Kharkov 183rd, which was essentially the cradle of the legendary T-34 tank, its refuge was Nizhny Tagil.
Of course, the process of this relocation was a great effort and was not without losses, since it was not possible to remove all the equipment from some factories. And the evacuation of industry itself is a unique phenomenon, since no one had previously tried to quickly relocate their industrial centers in the industrial era, especially in wartime.
Nevertheless, despite all the difficulties, the production of combat vehicles was established in the shortest possible time, which played one of the key roles in the victory over Germany.
Sergei Ustyantsev, historian and scientific director of the public relations department of Uralvagonzavod, speaks in more detail about some aspects of the evacuation of enterprises.
In this video, filmed as part of the First Tank project, he talks about the efficiency of the factories in their new location, the differences in the mentality of workers from different regions of the country, and the different principles of work of tank design bureaus in the USSR.
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