Tankograd

Also by Lennart Samuelson

PLANS FOR STALIN’S WAR-MACHINE: Tukhachevskii and Military-Economic Planning, 1925–1941

TankogradThe Formation of a Soviet Company Town: Cheliabinsk, 1900s–1950s

Lennart SamuelsonAssociate Professor, Stockholm School of Economics, Sweden

© Lennart Samuelson 2011

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To Elza

vii

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

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

ix

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

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.

Figure 1 ‘Soviet Russia is a beleaguered fortress! All for the defence!’ is the main text on this poster from 1919 (printed in 20,000 copies) by D.S. Moor, the style of which is reminiscent of lubok, the Russian popular art form. ‘The Workers’ and Peasants’ defence. The communist points at the enemy and leads the battle. The worker forges the weapons. The peasant brings grain. The woman takes the place of the men in production. The youth learns military tasks.’

1

1Cheliabinsk As a Mirror of Russia in the 20th Century

‘What do they tell of the war?’ ‘They are not prepared. Particularly not the factory in Cheliabinsk. The army is ready, but the peasant country is not.’ This conversation took place in a Paris café on 21 October 1932 between the Soviet author Isaak Babel1 and the Russian-born French socialist Boris Souvarine.2 With his novel, Red Cavalry, about the legen-dary cavalier Budennyi’s army during the Civil War, Babel had acquired a position at the apex of Soviet cultural society. Although Souvarine was among the founders of the French Communist Party, he had been excluded in July 1924 for his oppositional views.

They both had a sound grip on Stalin’s changing policies and the Communist Party leadership after 1929. The key words in the conversa-tion – the war, the army, the factory and the peasant countryside – also form the central elements of this book.

The Soviet Union experienced the threat of war on several occasions. In 1927 it was threatened by the United Kingdom and in 1929 from Chinese warlords who had taken control of the Russian-owned Chinese Eastern Railway that passed through Manchuria on its way from Siberia to the Pacific Ocean. There was also a more continuous threat from Japan, which had occupied Manchuria in 1931–1932 and then from Nazi Germany after Hitler ascended to power in 1933. During the same years, a dramatic transformation started in the Soviet Union, with forced industrialisation and collectivisation of the countryside becom-ing the foremost priorities.

So how did the Soviets prepare for these wars? How was this backward and predominantly agrarian country industrialised, how was the Red Workers’ and Peasants’ Army built and how did life change for those who experienced the transformation of society? These are some of the questions that this book will seek to answer.

2 Tankograd

The Soviet Union emerged victorious from World War II, which was the opposite of what many in the West had foreseen in the summer of 1941, at the start of Germany’s Operation Barbarossa. An explanation of this paradoxical development starts with a description of how the new Soviet state was established during both the revolution and the Civil War. It will examine the changes in society, how the specific militarisa-tion of the economy was introduced and how the education system was modernised.

This book is about Cheliabinsk during the 1920s and 1930s, during World War II and during the first phase of the Cold War. It describes the specific militarisation of the economy, the modernisation of the educa-tion system and cultural life in Cheliabinsk.

On 13 (the 4th in the Julian calendar) of September 1736 Colonel A.I. Tekelev and his 600 soldiers founded a fortress on the Miass River, which they named Cheliabinsk. In the 1740s, a road was established between Brodokalmak and the Cheliabinsk fortress; at the time, these fortresses were on Russia’s easternmost borders. By 1800, approxi-mately 2500 people lived around the fortress, mostly Cossacks, trades-men and artisans. The main economic sector was agriculture, but there was also a grain mill, leather tanning, a blacksmith and soap manufacturing. Throughout the 19th century, Cheliabinsk remained a small, trade-oriented town in the Russian Empire, while small-scale gold panning started elsewhere in the southern Urals region in the 1840s.

Iron manufacturing soon started in the nearby towns of Zlatoust, Kasli and Miass. During the latter part of the 19th century, Cheliabinsk changed profoundly when the Trans-Siberian Railway was completed. Its western extension, from Cheliabinsk to Kurgan and Omsk, was com-pleted in 1894 and led to Cheliabinsk becoming a doorway to Siberia for those hundreds of thousands of peasants wishing to move to new farm-lands there. The Tsarist state not only organised the migration facilities, such as loans with favourable conditions, but also provided extensive information about the various regions in Siberia. This was one element of Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin’s efforts to create a wealthy peasantry. An administrative ‘settlers’ point’ (pereselencheskij punkt) was estab-lished near Cheliabinsk railway station. More than 30,000 people could live in the village that had been built there especially for settlers. The village comprised an administration that established a land register and ownership claims for all settlers. Between 1894 and 1909, more than four million people passed through Cheliabinsk on their way to new homes.3

Cheliabinsk As a Mirror of Russia in 20th Century 3

These new transport facilities transformed Cheliabinsk from a slum-bering small town of fewer than 10,000 inhabitants to a fast-growing city with commercial and industrial enterprises.

In many respects, Cheliabinsk and the surrounding province (oblast) are representative of the entire Soviet Union.4 The first Russian Revolution of 1905 saw the emergence of political parties for the first time and workers formed councils (sovety) in the industrial towns in the Urals. However, during the reactionary period that followed, all politi-cal activities were forced into the framework dictated by the autocratic regime. The 1917 revolution released popular, democratic movements and the Soviet power that was established in the winter of 1917–1918 represented democracy. However, the refusal of the Bolsheviks to accept the results of the elections to the Constituent Assembly was the start of a long period of dictatorship. While the Bolsheviks could certainly count on varying degrees of support among the broad popular masses and among industrial workers, they had much less of a following among

Figure 2 Saturday market in the 1920s in the village of Brodokalmak, one of the oldest settlements in Cheliabinsk province. A ‘sloboda’, a town with a non-serf population, was established in the early 18th century near the River Techa in order to protect the Kalmatsky ford. The task of the villagers was to enforce the Tsarist defence line through the Urals. By 1816, Brodokalmak had 150 farms and 907 inhabitants, two churches, one school and a market place. In 1924, Brodokalmak became a regional centre and by 2000 its population had increased to approximately 4000 people.

4 Tankograd

the peasantry, who formed the majority of Russia’s population at that time.

The one-party state that emerged in 1917–18 was consolidated dur-ing the violent Civil War of 1918–1921, which was fought not only between Red and White Armies but also against spontaneously formed peasant armies. The changes introduced in 1921 in the form of the New Economic Policy (NEP) constituted a compromise between the Bolsheviks and the majority of the population, peasants and small-scale entrepreneurs and tradesmen.

From the end of the 1920s, the Soviet Communist Party forcibly introduced changes in all spheres of life. Their intention was to make the country as independent as possible from the rest of the world. The collectivisation of the countryside was designed to convince people to move from their unproductive family farms to building sites and industrial factories in the cities. An important element of the offi-cial Soviet ideology was that personal consumption would be much higher in the future. They did not foresee that the manner in which collectivisation was implemented would actually lead to famine and harsher conditions on the collective farms than had existed on fam-ily farms.

This book is about the people who lived in the city of Cheliabinsk in the Southern Urals, who in the early 1930s built and then worked at the

Figure 3 Cheliabinsk. Panoramic view of the centre in the early 20th century

Cheliabinsk As a Mirror of Russia in 20th Century 5

tractor factory – Cheliabinskii Traktornyi zavod, or ChTZ for short (the name was changed to Uraltrak after 1992). The book describes how the city changed during industrialisation and what everyday life was like in ‘Tankograd’ during the war years, 1941–1945.

The essential purpose is to offer a concrete reconstruction of how Stalin’s ‘revolution from above’ was implemented. World War II changed all of the earlier visions that had existed for the development of Cheliabinsk. The history of the Soviet military-industrial complex takes a concrete form with the example of a few factories in Cheliabinsk and the surrounding region that represented the Soviet model of eco-nomic preparedness.

Each chapter in the book explains the extent to which and the rea-sons why the industrial city of Cheliabinsk was militarised. Findings in the recently opened archives have led to the discovery of many other interesting documents on social, political and cultural condi-tions that have been used to shed some light on the modernisation of Soviet society overall, in a wider sense. These new insights into both everyday life and industrial activities in the Soviet Union offer a multifaceted picture of the dynamics during this phase of Russia’s history.

Most cities in the Soviet Union were, to all practical intents and pur-poses, closed to foreigners, even in the 1970s and 1980s. The French specialist on the history of Soviet architecture, Anatole Kopp, noted in 1978 that it had not been possible to travel to the great industrial cities built in Stalin’s time: ‘How do they look like today, and how did they look at the end of the Stalin period, these cities that we know only by their names: Magnitogorsk, Cheliabinsk, Komsomolsk-upon-Amur and others?’ Kopp was forced to use his imagination and postcards to envi-sion how these cities actually looked.5

I experienced some of the same mystique around the legendary iron and steel works in Magnitogorsk, Nizhnii Tagil and the armoury in the Urals in 1970. As an exchange student at Moscow University, I was asked by the rector what I would also like to see during my year-long visit and I responded immediately that I wished to travel to the Urals. The rector’s answer was just as succinct, that such travels were out of the question. For many more years, I had to use my imagination in order to understand the heavy industry beyond the Volga, with little to flesh out the statistics, literature and scarce photographs. In the 1980s, under glasnost, American historian Stephen Kotkin became the first Western scholar to have an opportunity to conduct research in Magnitogorsk. In his grand oeuvre, Magnetic Mountain, Kotkin showed how the city was

6 Tankograd

founded on the steppes of the Southern Urals during the 1930s. In a similar manner, I hope that this book can offer some new insights into life in the region’s central town of Cheliabinsk between the early 1900s and the end of World War II.6

As early as the 1940s, American correspondent and author William Henry Chamberlin (1897–1969) introduced the term ‘Tankograd’ to the Western public in his book The Russian Enigma.7 However, it only became possible for foreigners to visit this city in the 1990s. Although Cheliabinsk was not one of them, there were cities in the USSR that not even Soviet citizens were free to visit and whose inhabitants had extremely restricted travel opportunities. Among these were the so-called ‘atomic cities’ for the production of components of nuclear weapons. Several atomic cities were situated in the Cheliabinsk region, including Ozërsk and Snezhinsk, which were also known as Cheliabinsk-40 and Cheliabinsk-70. Relatively little has been written about the recent his-tory of the industrial city of Cheliabinsk itself or the role of its industry during WWII and the Cold War. This book will provide a clearer image of the evolution of one specific but, in most respects, very typical Soviet company town. It is important that we have as much knowledge as possi-ble regarding the Soviet heritage and legacy for today’s Russia, not least in order to understand the reforms and development strategies chosen by post-Soviet leaders.

This book describes Soviet industrialisation in the 1930s through the example of one particular factory which was typical of how the Russians thought they could prepare their economy in case of a new war. The Cheliabinsk Tractor Factory was one of several hundred great factories that were built at a rapid pace during the first five-year plan. This example serves also to illustrate the harsh realities that emerged when American technology for tractor production, using production lines, was intro-duced to a country with a great shortage of qualified industrial workers.

The spirit of those times is reflected in the propaganda of the early 1930s. For example,

We are steaming ahead at full speed on the road from industrialisa-tion to socialism and are leaving centuries of Russian backwardness behind us. We shall become a metallic country, a land of automobi-lisation and tractorisation. When we put the USSR in a car and the peasant on a tractor, then the respected capitalists can only try to catch up with us; they who speak loudly of their civilisation. Then we shall see which country is civilised and which is advanced!8

Cheliabinsk As a Mirror of Russia in 20th Century 7

In the 1930s, the capitalist system was struck by the Great Depression. Certain economists in the West advanced ideas about state regulation or even certain measures for planning within the free market econ-omy. Sidney and Beatrice Webb, who in 1930 had visited the exiled Leon Trotsky in Turkey to discuss the fate of the Russian Revolution, made extended trips to the USSR. In their immense study, Soviet Communism: A New Civilization?, the Webbs described the Soviet state system, the economic planning organisation and almost all aspects of Soviet society in great detail. Most of their book was based on official Soviet sources and, to a certain extent, overlooked the fundamentally repressive structure in the one-party state. For this reason, the book has stood out as a prime example of how Westerners were fooled into believing official Soviet myths. Their book has been denounced more often than it has actually been scrutinised and does indeed contain many passages about the role of the secret police, named OGPU for United State Political Directorate in the 1920s and early 1930s.

For several decades, the concept of planning had positive connota-tions within the Labour Party and among socialists on the European continent as a model for a mixed economy in the welfare state. Many observers assumed that a market economy could be successfully com-bined with a directing role for the state in certain areas. Even consid-ering the high growth rates of the Soviet economy, at least until the early 1960s, the above quotation offers food for thought. For many years it was taken as a given that a Stalinist planned economy could achieve higher growth rates and direct the investments that were nec-essary for long-term development in accordance with general goals. In other words, the Soviet economy was, paradoxically, superior in terms of obtaining high growth rates, although it evidently lacked the pos-sibility to satisfy consumer requirements. The ‘convergence’ that many economists and sociologists envisioned between the two systems in the 1960s was just one expression of this mode of thinking.

In only a few decades, the Soviet Union experienced urbanisation on a scale that cannot be expressed merely with statistics. Chapter 3 describes how the city of Cheliabinsk was completely transformed in the 1930s through an enormous influx of people and the resulting problems with which the city’s authorities had to cope. In 1930, the first earth was moved in what was to become an enormous factory for the production of crawler tractors. As with the rest of the Soviet Union, the factories were built at the same time as infrastructure was estab-lished. Houses, daycare centres, schools, hospitals and leisure activity

8 Tankograd

facilities were all built simultaneously. Entire city regions grew up in cooperation between enterprises and town authorities.

At the same time as tractor production started, the construction of the surrounding area for the factory’s workers was accelerated. The ideals of the 1930s envisioned a socialist town with radical solutions to alleviate the situation for housewives, children and the elderly. In reality, however, the meagre resources were only enough for a small number of houses. Barracks for industrial workers and their families remained a reality for decades after the start of the factory. Still, the harsh realities and the hopes for the future among ordinary peo-ple is one explanation of what they wanted to defend as their new homeland.

The Soviet leaders emphasised that industrialisation was the deci-sive factor for the country’s defence capabilities. Accordingly, mining, heavy machinery and the machine-building industry were the top pri-orities. An industrial basis and infrastructure should also have a civilian component in peacetime, for the production of consumer goods and durables in particular. From a wider perspective, this Soviet model was intended to achieve a higher growth rate over time than a balanced growth for both capital and consumer industries. Consumption was held at a lower level for some time in order to reap the fruits from a higher technological level. The 1930s marked the start of an intensive period of exploitation of the rich natural resources in the Urals and Siberia that, prior to this, had not even been entirely prospected. The leadership chose to develop several major industrial regions in this inte-rior part of the country. This was, of course, an essential defence factor for the long-term plans. Chapter 4 describes how the tractor factory became part of this industrialisation effort.

Chapter 5 shows how repression, purges and mass terror interrupted seemingly successful development under Stalin’s leadership. In the sec-ond half of the 1930s, widespread purges took place in the Communist Party, industry and state administration against anyone who was considered to be an actual or potential enemy of the state. The terror reached its peak in 1937–1938. Another change occurred in the secret police in 1939 and many of the illegalities and misdeeds of the preced-ing years were punished.

The tractor factory in Cheliabinsk was intended to produce a cer-tain type of tractor and, in case of war, supply the army with tanks and artillery haulers. Chapter 6 analyses how the planning for this industrial mobilisation changed throughout the 1930s. The original

Cheliabinsk As a Mirror of Russia in 20th Century 9

design was that it would be possible to convert the entire factory eas-ily from the serial production of crawler tractors to light tanks, with most of the equipment on the conveyor belt having the same dimen-sions. The mobilisation plans for the factory also included such items as ammunition, grenades and spare parts for tanks and aeroplanes. Other items for wartime production were spread out to a large number of enterprises that were not part of the military-industrial complex.

During the war years, production of tractors stopped in Cheliabinsk. Instead, the factory started to mass produce heavy tanks after incorpo-rating equipment that had been evacuated from Leningrad, Kharkov and other cities in the European parts of the USSR. Cooperation with other enterprises in Cheliabinsk, Sverdlovsk (now Ekaterinburg) and Nizhnii Tagil was essential for the mass production of medium and heavy tanks. During the autumn of 1941, most of the equip-ment from the Kirov Works in Leningrad and the diesel engine fac-tory in Kharkov was evacuated to Cheliabinsk. Tens of thousands of engineers and workers, along with their families, followed. At that time, the tractor factory changed its name to ‘The Kirov Works in Cheliabinsk’ and, in the jargon of the day, the city started to be called ‘Tankograd’. However, Soviet newspapers and radio never mentioned where their arms were produced and photographs in the newspapers merely referred to ‘a factory in the N city’ or ‘produced deep in the home front’.

In only a few decades, the Soviet leadership had transformed its Tsarist military system into a defence capability that could withstand and win the most withering assault in the history of the world. The most strik-ing events in the early phase of World War II were Nazi Germany’s swift victories over Poland and France. The concept of ‘Blitzkrieg’ referred to deep armoured breakthroughs supported by long-distance air strikes in the rear of enemy territory. Even the most cunning of the German gen-erals behind this new doctrine, such as Heinz Guderian – who had per-sonal experience with Soviet Russia – underestimated the Red Army’s capacities in the early 1940s. ‘Operation Barbarossa’ has almost unani-mously been deemed a failure because the resources of Germany and its fascist allies were insufficient to maintain the logistics of occupying Russia.

Chapter 7 describes the changes in tank production during World War II. After the evacuation of equipment from Leningrad, Kharkov and Moscow to Cheliabinsk, Sverdlovsk and Nizhnii Tagil, the Soviet Union mass produced robust and highly efficient tanks on a scale that

10 Tankograd

far surpassed that of German industry. The wartime effectiveness of Soviet industry was a continuous feature of its planning system. During the war years, the loss of millions of people and the evacuation from occupied territories of the main providers of food for the entire country led to heavy strains on society in the Urals.

Chapter 8 provides some glimpses from the Russian home front in 1941–1945. Tens of thousands of evacuated persons, refugees and wounded soldiers were sent to the Cheliabinsk region from European Russia. The housing situation was barely resolved by packing families together in small rooms and flats that were already too small, in bar-racks or dugouts on the outskirts of the city. There were numerous prob-lems in terms of how to feed the expanded population. However, the intensive production rate at the converted tractor factory made it pos-sible to have such a surge in weapons output that the Red Army could use this as a comparative advantage, even after its disastrous losses in the initial phase of the war.

During the Cold War, Cheliabinsk achieved a greater role in the Soviet military-industrial complex. Under extreme secrecy, the important plutonium works were located not far from the city. In Miass, another town where industries had been converted to wartime requirements on a huge scale, production of ballistic missiles for submarines started. Higher education in Cheliabinsk, at the Polytechnic Institute (ChPI, today Southern Urals State University), had several faculties with a defi-nite military-industrial orientation. Chapter 9 shows this development from the late 1940s and the first phase of the Cold War.

The final chapters in the book are devoted to how historians and archi-vists in the Urals have written their region’s history in recent years. The first detailed description of the tractor factory was written in the 1970s by Leonid Komarov and others who had access to archival material and were able to interview many veterans. Soviet historiography on the Great Patriotic War of 1941–1945 i.e. the German–Russian War as part of World War II, was enormous in quantity and detail. However, because many aspects of the war years were either taboo or secret, any official historiog-raphy was considered by many during the glasnost years in the late 1980s to border on falsification. Since that time, military, social, economic and political historians in the Urals and in Russia in general have been able to draw a much richer, more detailed and truthful picture of these years. Chapter 10 reveals some parts of this multifaceted development in Cheliabinsk and also discusses the role of archivists in the region in open-ing up and publishing documents from what had previously been closed,

Cheliabinsk As a Mirror of Russia in 20th Century 11

secret holdings. Among the most promising aspects in Russia today for historians is the vivid interest among the younger generation. Nationwide history competitions are organised regularly for the higher classes in gen-eral schools, and the topics these teenagers have chosen bear witness to changes that are still to come.

Figure 4 Poster by A. Apsit for the first anniversary of the Bolshevik takeover of power. ‘The Year of the Proletarian Dictatorship. October 1917 – October 1918’ and ‘Proletarians in all countries, unite!’

13

The Russian Revolution in 1917 and the Civil War that followed between 1918 and 1921 are usually described from the centre of events – Petrograd and Moscow. This book, however, focuses on how the city of Cheliabinsk and its surroundings changed before World War I and on the condi-tions in which the new Soviet power was established in the Southern Urals. The takeover of power in November 1917 by the Red Guards and Workers’ soviets created an unstable situation. There were profound con-flicts with other groups in society – merchants, peasants and, most of all, the Cossacks in Orenburg. Many decisive moments in the Civil War took place in the Southern Urals. The New Economic Policy (NEP) in the 1920s seemed for a short time to have created a model for the recovery of the country and the evolution of a ‘mixed economy’. Ambitious invest-ment targets in the five-year plans set in 1928–1929 changed the situ-ation. Stalin and the leaders of the Bolshevik Party opted for the swift collectivisation of agriculture, which changed the Ural countryside pro-foundly. The ‘flight from the countryside’ to the cities was a major factor in determining the character of the new industrial sites in the 1930s. In less than ten years, as a result of great effort and much suffering for the population, a new heavy industry was created in the Urals that exploited the rich natural resources in the region.

The Russian personalities described in this chapter belonged to politi-cal parties and groups that can be called ‘history’s victors’. In Russia, a complex party system started to emerge in the early 1900s. However, the ‘alternatives’ of the liberal and conservative political parties were never to be actualised by history.1 Ultimately, the most radical social democrats, the Bolsheviks, were the only real victors in the Civil War.

Social democratic societies were founded in Cheliabinsk in the late 1890s. Russia’s social democracy split after its second congress in 1902

2From the Civil War to the Five-year Plans

14 Tankograd

between Lenin’s Bolsheviks and Iulii Martov’s Mensheviks and, piece by piece, the differences widened between the two sides on all of the important political questions. However, there was no such deep split in the Ural’s social democrats, who eagerly joined forces in political actions with the Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) and the liberal Constitutional Democrats (Kadets). Local organisations in the Urals were even allowed to contain members of both Russian Social Democratic Party (RSDAP) and the SR Party. At its apex, during the first Russian Revolution in 1905, the Social Democratic party counted 14,300 members in the Urals. The counter-revolution of 1906–07, with its mass arrests and exiles, almost extinguished the party. With great difficulty, party members managed to print leaflets and, in 1908, three issues of their illegal newspaper, The Worker’s Voice. The membership in the Urals declined to 2300 in 1908–1911 and to around 1200 in 1912–1916. In Cheliabinsk, Orenburg and other cities in the Southern Urals, the party had fewer than 500 members in 1912. Some life stories may illustrate this early history of the social democratic movement in the Urals.

Samuil Moiseevich Tsvilling (1891–2 April 1918) joined the RSDAP in 1905. He took part in the revolutionary events in Tobolsk in Western Siberia during the first Russian Revolution. He was arrested and sen-tenced to death but the verdict was later reduced to five years in prison. After serving his sentence, Tsvilling became a socialist agitator in the cit-ies of Tobolsk, Ekaterinburg and Cheliabinsk. He was drafted into the army in 1914 but soon started to spread Bolshevik agitation against the war among soldiers.

Sofia Krivaia (1894–1919) moved to Cheliabinsk in 1902. While she was still at school she joined radical groups that helped political prison-ers who were held in the transfer prisons in Cheliabinsk after being sen-tenced to exile in Siberia. She was arrested for the first time at the age of 14 for having contacts with the RSDAP, although she was soon released because of her age. She was excluded from school, however, and worked as a teacher and a pharmacist and organised the nurses’ trade union. In 1915, she became a member of the RSDAP and joined the Bolshevik wing of the party.

After a few years at a parish school, Dmitrii Koliushchenko (1881–3 June, 1918) worked as an apprentice blacksmith at a winery in Voronezh. He joined the RSDAP in 1903 and moved to Cheliabinsk, where he worked as mechanic. In 1910, he started work at ‘Stoll V.G. & K.’ as a blacksmith and later as a turner. He organised a social democratic workers’ group that organised the inaugural First of May parade in Cheliabinsk in 1912, as a protest against the massacres of workers at

From the Civil War to the Five-year Plans 15

the Lena gold fields in Siberia. Unrest and strikes were widespread in the Russian labour market during the years leading up to World War I. In 1914, Koliushchenko was arrested as a strike leader but was released after vehement protests from the workers at the factory.

Evdokim Vasenko (1882–1 June, 1918) was another personality in the city’s labour movement. He had a diploma from the Ekaterinburg min-ing college and worked as a clerk in the post and telegraph office. He was active during the first Russian Revolution in 1905 and sentenced to four years in prison in Novorossiisk. At the outbreak of World War I, Vasenko was again arrested and exiled to Tobolsk in Siberia.

These were typical lives among those who tried to engage in radical political activities in Tsarist Russia. Strong social-democratic group and trade unions were also organised in the old industrial towns of Zlatoust, Miass and Verkhne-Uralsk.

The outbreak of war in 1914 created a patriotic atmosphere in Cheliabinsk, as it did throughout the country. Most political parties supported the Tsar’s proclamation of war against the Kaiser’s Germany. The only party that agitated against the war from the start was the Bolshevik social democrats. As the war became more troublesome for the Tsarist government and no decisive victory had been obtained by 1916, the atmosphere changed profoundly. The general dissatisfaction intensified towards the end of that year as feeding the workers in the major cities became more and more difficult.2

The historically crucial events for Russia took place in Petrograd, where Russian elite groups forced Tsar Nikolai II to resign in February 1917. Some weeks later, a provisional government was formed. The Russian Revolution was characterised by the twin power structure that had the provisional government on one side and the worker, peasant and soldier deputies’ councils (soviets) on the other. Such a structure emerged in Cheliabinsk in early March 1917, as power passed from the governor and the Tsarist administration to the leaders of the local council (zem-stvo) and the chairman of the city duma, who were appointed as emis-saries of the provisional government. The workers’ and soldiers’ soviet re-emerged in the same form as it had had in 1905, with representatives of the Social Democrats and Socialist Revolutionaries. Samuil Tsvilling was elected chairman of the workers’ and soldiers’ soviet in the city. The situation in Cheliabinsk was still unclear and full of unrest, with several of the new organs actually being quite powerless. Because the revolu-tionary changes had undermined the police and the courts, a commit-tee for the security of the society was formed with representatives from industry, trade and the free professions, as well as from the trade unions

16 Tankograd

and labour parties. In Cheliabinsk, this committee grew into a parallel power organ until the provisional government took control throughout the entire country. In other cities in the Urals, which had similar situa-tions, the primary task of such committees was to maintain the produc-tion of necessary supplies to the fighting army.3 In 1917 a wide variety of unions and associations grew up spontaneously. In Cheliabinsk, a number of new organs, unions, clubs and commissions were formed, with broad popular support. According to various sources, the RSDAP had between 550 and 900 members in the southern part of the Urals prior to the February 1917 revolution. A few months later, the consoli-dated Bolshevik and Menshevik social democrats in Cheliabinsk had 600 members; the party was then allowed to act legally. After Vladimir Lenin’s return from exile in Switzerland in April 1917, the Bolsheviks opted openly for Russia’s withdrawal from World War I. This appealed to the masses and the number of members from among the soldiers, peasants and workers increased. By late April, the Bolshevik organisa-tions in the Urals had over 10,000 members, in addition to support from another 1,560 persons who were members of party organisations with both Bolsheviks and Mensheviks.

However, the fact that the population in 1917 was dominated by peasants, Cossacks and tradesmen meant that the Bolshevik group in Cheliabinsk did not really have a broad popular support. The Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) enjoyed by far the most support from the peas-ants, but were split on the question of whether the party should sup-port the peasants’ spontaneous takeover or confiscation of landlords’ property or whether the party should wait for new agrarian laws from a parliamentary assembly. The most powerful Cossack organisations were in the Orenburg region in the southern part of the Urals.

Dmitrii Koliushchenko, who organised the first Red Guards, was one of the leading personalities in the city’s workers’ and soldiers’ soviet after the February revolution. Another leader of the armed work-ers’ group was Vladimir Mogilnikov (1895–1918), who only had a few years of schooling in Brodokalmak and then received education at the Cheliabinsk pedagogical seminary. He was mobilised into the army in 1914 and received training at the cadet school in Kazan, after which he was sent to the 169th infantry regiment in Cheliabinsk. In 1917 he joined the RSDAP and organised the Red Guards in the city. Sofia Krivaia was another member of the first Red Guards in Cheliabinsk.

Tsvilling had earlier been arrested for spreading anti-war propaganda among the soldiers in the city but was later elected to the leadership of the Ural section of the RSDAP (Bolsheviks) and participated in the

From the Civil War to the Five-year Plans 17

sixth party congress. The elections to the soviet in August 1917 saw the Bolsheviks gain the majority of the votes, as they had done in other parts of the Urals. Under the action led by General Kornilov to establish a military dictatorship in August 1917, which was eagerly supported by officers in the Urals, the Red Guards were mobilised to fight against the threat of the counter-revolution. Tsvilling led the ‘Committee for the Salvation of the Revolution’. As the Red Guards had been completely legalised in connection with Kornilov’s action, the Bolsheviks attempted to take power on several occasions shortly afterwards. The number of organised Bolsheviks in the Urals had grown to 27,000 by July and to 35,000 by autumn as they took power in Petrograd and other cities. In Cheliabinsk, there were still only 2100 Bolsheviks in September 1917, yet the party’s core still tried to launch an armed takeover of power in the city. Evdokim Vasenko was the leading Bolshevik in most events in Cheliabinsk during 1917 and 1918. He took part in the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets in Petrograd that proclaimed the takeover of power on 25 October (7 November according to the Gregorian cal-endar). On his return to Cheliabinsk, Vasenko was elected chairman of the workers’ and soldiers’ soviet. When the news of successful Soviet takeover of power in Petrograd reached Cheliabinsk, the Bolsheviks proclaimed that all power in the city should be handed to the soviet. Vasenko led the new military-revolutionary committee in the city and was appointed commissar for internal affairs. Under his leadership, a peasant and Cossack congress was organised to approve the revolu-tionary changes, although these new organs could hold on to power only until 30 October. Following a request from the Mensheviks, the Constitutional Democrats (Kadets), the Popular Socialists, the Socialist Revolutionaries and the Cossacks, a military unit of 526 soldiers and officers under the command of N.N. Titov arrived in Cheliabinsk to dis-solve the workers’ soviet. The soviet was given an ultimatum to return power to the city duma and dissolve the soviet and the Red Guard. The Bolsheviks accepted these demands and made a resolution that the Red Guards should be dissolved. At the same time, however, they appealed to other cities for military support to Cheliabinsk as the city had been surrounded by Cossack units. The Socialist Revolutionaries, for their part, appealed to the Cossack leaders not to engage more troops and military pressure in the city as this would probably lead to widespread fighting with the workers’ guards. Vasenko led the negotiations with Titov’s Cossacks and a formula was found for handing power back to the city duma. The revolutionary situation changed again a few weeks later. Vasilii Bliukher (1890–1938) had participated in World War I but joined

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the RSDAP in 1916 and took the Bolsheviks’ side in 1917. He was a mem-ber of the military-revolutionary committee that organised the armed takeover of power in Petrograd. From there, he was sent to Cheliabinsk and brought strong Red Guard units from the Volga region to firmly establish Soviet power there. After some minor fighting, Bliukher man-aged to consolidate Soviet power in Cheliabinsk and from 2 December 1917, Bliukher chaired the military-revolutionary committee in the city. After these events in October-November, Vladimir Mogilnikov became the deputy chief of the newly organised secret police in Cheliabinsk.

The most notable armed resistance to the Bolsheviks was organ-ised by Aleksandr Dutov (1879–1921), the Cossack leader and ataman (leader). He was an aristocrat, the son of Major-General Ilia Dutov,

Figure 5 Vasilii Bliukher fought in World War I, joined the Russian Social Democratic Party (RSDAP) in 1916 and joined the Bolsheviks in 1917. He was a member of the military-revolutionary committee that carried out the Bolshevik takeover of power in Petrograd in November 1917. He was then sent to help the Red Guards establish Soviet power in Cheliabinsk. From 2 December, 1917 he was the chairman of the Cheliabinsk military-revolutionary committee.

From the Civil War to the Five-year Plans 19

and had received his military training at Nepluev Cadet College and Nikolai Cavalry Military College. Thereafter, he gained a degree at the Electrotechnical Institute in Kharkov. He participated in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905 and graduated from the General Staff Academy in 1908. During World War I, Dutov commanded the 1st Cavalry Division of the Orenburg Cossacks and by 1918 had advanced to the rank of lieutenant-general. In 1917, Dutov was appointed chair-man of the Orenburg Cossacks and was given responsibility by the pro-visional government for the food supply in the Urals. Dutov did not recognise the Soviet takeover of power in Petrograd or elsewhere. In November 1917, he led an armed uprising in Orenburg to establish mili-tary power and started by arresting dozens of local Bolsheviks. Dutov attempted to organise a wide anti-Bolshevik movement in support of the fallen provisional government. He proclaimed state of emergency throughout the Cheliabinsk and Orenburg provinces (gubernii). Power was transferred to the Cossack’s military council, which still accepted the legitimacy of the provisional government. On 15 (28) November, all Bolsheviks in Orenburg were arrested but soon managed to escape from the prison. Dutov was supported by Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries and established a ‘Committee for the Salvation of the Fatherland and the Revolution’. The name alluded to similar committees that had been formed in Cheliabinsk in August 1917 with extraordinary power to fight against General Kornilov and the threat of a military dictatorship.

Dutov’s primary support came in the form of hundreds of Cossack officers, who managed to gather 7000 soldiers and take power in Orenburg, Troitsk and Verkhne-Uralsk. However, the majority of Orenburg Cossacks were hesitant to support Dutov’s action. They were not united against the Bolshevik takeover of power and some Cossacks even expressed their sympathy for the Red side. Among these Cossacks were the brothers Ivan (1890–1938) and Dmitrii Kashirin (1888–1938), who grew up in a large Cossack family and studied at Orenburg Junker School until 1909. In 1917, Ivan became a member of the RSDAP. After the February revolution, he chaired a military division’s party commis-sion and then the Orenburg workers’ and soldiers’ soviet. During the summer of 1918, Ivan’s units fought against the units of General Dutov and the Czech Legion. He led a new partisan army in the Urals and after joining the regular Red Army units he was promoted to brigade com-mander of the Third Army on the Red side.4

A third brother, Nikolai, had also fought in World War I. After the February 1917 revolution, he became chairman of a regimental