Tankograd: Run the Lines Before the Walls?
runs the complex in Chelyabinsk that the workers already call Tankograd, the city of tanks. Having come from the Kirov plant in Leningrad, evacuated ahead of the German advance, he merges dozens of dismantled enterprises shipped east by rail onto the site of the Ural tractor works. His chief engineer, , comes with him, carrying the plans for the heavy KV tanks.
Since the autumn of 1941, hundreds of Soviet factories have been taken apart bolt by bolt, loaded onto a million and a half railcars, and moved to the Urals, the Volga, and Siberia. Machine tools, presses, and furnaces arrive in Chelyabinsk, but the halls meant to house them are not built. The foundations are barely poured, many workshops still stand open to the sky, and the Ural winter drives the thermometer down to −30 °C. The , for its part, demands tanks without delay.
Zaltsman must decide on the pace: begin assembling the machines immediately in the open air and have the crews work in the snow, exposing them to the cold; wait until the walls and heating are finished to spare both men and equipment; or first give priority to housing and feeding the evacuated workers before resuming any production.
Chelyabinsk, January 1942, director of a Urals tank plant: how to restart production when the workshops are not yet built?
Zaltsman had the assembly lines erected at the same time as the buildings: the machines ran in workshops without roofs or walls, under tarpaulins and around fires, in freezing temperatures. Workers, women, and teenagers laboured shifts of 12 hours and more, often slept beside the machines, in wretched housing and supply conditions. Tank production resumed in a little over a month — a feat that took nearly a year in peacetime. At the cost of considerable mortality and exhaustion, Tankograd became the USSR's leading producer of heavy KV tanks and then of T-34s: Soviet armoured output surged from 1942 and soon overtook Germany's, contributing to the recovery of the Eastern Front.
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