Ulyanovsk Automobile Plant in 1944-1945
In 1942, I was 16 years old, we were taken away, brought by car to Tagay and locked up, they were afraid that we would run away. They quickly made passports and brought us to Ulyanovsk, where an automobile plant was being built at that time. They settled us in a nearby village in huts, and we started working. They took our passports away…
…How we suffered… Hungry, dirty, lousy… But we were young – and we cried and sang songs. It was possible to run away, but they judged for it by Decree. They held a show trial in the canteen, one ran away, she was given five years…
From the memoirs of Ulyanovsk resident A.D. Anisimova.
The plant is faced with another important task
After sending equipment for the production of ZIS-5 to Miass (About the difficult and short life of the first Ulyanovsk automobile plant in 1943–44), the factory workers who remained in Ulyanovsk, stunned by such unexpected changes, only shrugged their shoulders in bewilderment, and rumors began to spread throughout the enterprise about the plant’s reorientation to the production of products not related to automobiles.
But the workers were worried in vain, because no one was going to cancel the State Defense Committee's Resolution No. 3628s on the construction of an automobile plant in the city of Ulyanovsk for the production of 3-ton trucks with two-stroke diesel engines of the General Motors type, and the matter of laying the foundations of the new enterprise became the most important task for the few remaining automobile plant workers.
On March 3, 1944, the Ulzisovites decided to help OSMCh-18. On that day, a general clean-up day was organized: inspired factory workers arrived at the new site, located beyond the Sviyaga River, and began digging the first pit for the foundation of the thermal power plant. It is clear that there was no talk of any construction equipment, so the construction site was first manually cleared of deep snow, then iron wedges were driven into the frozen ground with sledgehammers for a long time, and the chipped earth was carried on wooden stretchers. By the end of April, a concrete plant was launched, but again there was no equipment, and concrete was carried manually on stretchers and poured into formwork knocked together from old boards. The boards often did not hold up, cracked, and the concrete spread across the ground. Komsomol members spent entire days collecting metal for the installation of the thermal power plant from city dumps, in the end, with difficulty, they collected about 6 tons.
This is how, through intense work, in a constant struggle with numerous inexhaustible production and everyday difficulties, the foundation of the second Ulyanovsk automobile plant was laid...
Meanwhile, the collective mind of the Soviet automobile industry commanders came to the decision to launch the production of a new promising vehicle, the UlZIS-NATI-253, designed at NATI (former and future NAMI), with a 3,5-ton payload capacity and a two-stroke, three-cylinder diesel engine, the GMC-3-71 (Ne=76 hp at 2000 rpm; Vh=3490 cm3), which was not yet produced in the USSR. And despite the fact that a running prototype of the truck had already been assembled at ZOK NATI, the plant workers decided to demonstrate their potential and produce their own experimental vehicle (there is an opinion that NATI engineers helped them with this, and the chassis came from the Moscow ZIS).
No sooner said than done, and on International Workers' Solidarity Day, May 1, 1944, the prototype of the UlZIS-253 vehicle, in accordance with established tradition, left the factory gates after the ceremonial rally and proudly paraded through the city streets.
In November 1944, a second prototype was manufactured, which, together with the first, made a test run from Ulyanovsk to Moscow.
However, despite the production and testing of many prototypes of the UlZIS-253 (at NATI, at the Moscow ZIS and in Ulyanovsk), its serial production never took place...
The birth of the Ulyanovsk small-capacity engine plant and the continuation of the construction of the second Ulyanovsk automobile plant
Another unexpected metamorphosis occurred with the automobile enterprise at the beginning of September 1944, when, by decision of the Soviet government, it was again divided into two parts.
The first, consisting of UlZIS workers engaged in the production of small-capacity engines, remained onhistorical» the site of the first Ulyanovsk Automobile Plant and in September 1944, on its basis, founded a new Soviet production facility – the Ulyanovsk Plant of Small-Capacity Engines (the future Ulyanovsk Motor Plant), where production of the L-3/2 stationary engine continued. This event put the final point in the convoluted history of the first Ulyanovsk Automobile Plant.
The second part of the plant workers (from among those not involved in the production of ammunition) retrained as builders and began the shock work of constructing the production buildings of the new automobile and diesel plant. And only a few buildings remained at the disposal of the design and experimental department with the experimental shop subordinated to it.
The red arrow indicates the location of the first Ulyanovsk Automobile Plant, which was transformed into UZMD, the green arrow indicates the location of the construction site of the second Ulyanovsk Automobile Plant.
To make things go more smoothly, at the end of October 1944, the State Defense Committee issued Resolution No. 6846s “On measures of emergency assistance for the construction of the Ulyanovsk Automobile Plant named after Stalin, People’s Commissariat of Medium Machine Building.”
Despite this, the construction of the second car plant continued to go neither here nor there. The problems were the same, traditional ones: an acute shortage of building materials, equipment and a chronic shortage of human resources.
Comrade Dundukov made titanic efforts to find labor reserves. On his initiative, even prisoners from the local Correctional Labor Colony No. 1 were brought in for construction. But out of the thousand available, only 290 people were sent out for construction. And the physical condition of the prisoners turned out to be even more deplorable than that of the OSMCh-18 workers caught throughout the district, so there was little real help from them.
The shortage of labor at the plant's construction was even planned to be eliminated by recruiting German prisoners of war. For this purpose, the NKVD of the USSR was instructed to complete staffing of a prisoner of war camp for the construction of the Ulyanovsk Automobile Plant named after Stalin by November 25, 1944, with up to 8 people. There is no information on how many prisoners actually worked. But, judging by the lines of one of the documents (May 1945) - "Significantly fewer Germans are involved in construction than the number of workers employed to service and guard them" - there were not many of them.
This is how, in a constant struggle with incessant difficulties, the second Ulyanovsk automobile plant was truly built by the people’s labor…
On February 24, 1945, despite the decisions taken by the State Defense Committee, the construction of the new automobile plant in Ulyanovsk was still proceeding extremely slowly. On February 24, the acting director of the plant, E.A. Dundukov, wrote appeals to a number of the country's leaders, where, in particular, he reported: “The construction of the Ulyanovsk Automobile Plant named after Stalin, carried out by the People’s Commissariat of Construction extremely slowly, is currently essentially in a state of mothballing…”.
In 1945, UlZIS and OSMCh-18 were tasked with creating a complex of industrial, energy and housing facilities that would enable the development and start of production of diesel engines. To accomplish this, OSMCh-18 was to hand over to the plant for installation a foundry, forge, diesel engine and tool shops and one of the most important construction projects - a thermal power plant.
And the plant had to do a huge amount of work to prepare for production, which consists of such key elements as the manufacture of several thousand complex devices, various types of tools, cold and hot stamps, and a large number of metal models. The plant also had to manufacture non-standard equipment for several million rubles and complete the preparation of the entire working production technology and provide the entire construction complex and technical documentation. And it was also necessary to find about 3000 workers somewhere and organize a base for their training in future professions.
1945 - another collapse of hopes
There is information that in March 1945, the first diesel engine shop was installed at the new site. About a hundred new imported machine tools were installed there, and it was planned to begin mastering diesel parts and begin training workers on these machines. In the same month, they began installing the second diesel engine shop, its installation was planned to be completed in March. Due to the fact that there were not yet enough structures at the new site, it was necessary to begin organizing mechanical diesel shops at the old site as well.
Thus, at the beginning of March 1945, the leadership of UlZIS and the party activists of the city were optimistic that if not this year, then certainly next year, a new auto giant would start operating in Ulyanovsk – the pride of the Soviet auto industry, where mass production of the first Soviet serial diesel cars would begin at 30 units per year (and spare parts for them).
It seemed that the Ulyanovsk Automobile Plant would soon rise again from automobile oblivion and join the glorious cohort of domestic automobile enterprises, but then the business, as if bewitched, stalled again.
This time, the promising undertaking was ruined by the vile Americans. The problem was that the machines for producing diesel engines were purchased in the USA. But after the end of World War II, the new President Truman became furious with the USSR and forbade his capitalists to sell our country production equipment. Apparently, that is why the second Ulyanovsk Automobile Plant, which was still under construction, did not receive the entire set of equipment that would allow assembling the entire production chain for making diesel engines. And when it would receive it (and whether it would receive it at all) was a question that had no answer. And as we know, a car is unthinkable without an engine.
Therefore, it was decided to move the production of a diesel truck with a vague prospect to Novosibirsk, for which it was supposed to build a new automobile plant there, apparently with a distant prospect of receiving diesel engines from Yaroslavl. As a result, part of the workforce was cut off from UlZIS again: the workers involved in the "diesel project" (including the chief designer B. L. Shaposhnik) left for Siberia to the yet to be built NAZ.
But even there, the matter of putting the Moscow-Ulyanovsk brainchild into production did not go well.
The Yaroslavl Automobile Plant had already begun assembling equipment purchased in the USA since 1944, with the help of which it was planned to set up mass production of new Soviet 4-cylinder diesel engines of the GMC-71 family. But because of Harry Truman's hatred, the Yaroslavl people also suffered - the issue of producing the first mass-produced Soviet autodiesel stalled for them, again due to the impossibility of purchasing all the necessary machine tools. And they were either forced to manufacture the missing equipment themselves, or (which is more likely) to acquire it in a roundabout way, using the capabilities of Soviet intelligence - this is a dark matter. Therefore, the Yaroslavl people managed to put their first YaAZ-204 diesel engine into production only in 1947 with great difficulty; it was intended for YaAZ vehicles, and they did not have any extra engines for NAZ.
As a result, due to the lack of an engine, the decision to produce the UlZIS-253 in Novosibirsk also had to be cancelled, and the automobile plant under construction was repurposed for the needs of the country's defense. As a result, a chemical and metallurgical plant for the production of metallic uranium was created - Plant No. 250 (Novosibirsk Plant of Chemical Concentrates).
In short, in 1948 the Novosibirsk Automobile Plant, which had never started operating, was liquidated, and the specialists involved in the project (including L. B. Shaposhnik) moved to Minsk to MAZ.
Additionally, I consider it necessary to emphasize that these periodically conducted "cut-offs" caused colossal personnel losses to the Ulyanovsk Automobile Plant. The enterprise was already constantly short of qualified specialists, so their regular removal by the hundreds and thousands to send to other plants ultimately lowered the production potential of the formally existing UlZIS to zero.
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