Russia at war 1941-1945

Many evacuated factories were merged with local enterprises; thus, a large tank plant from the Ukraine was integrated with a number of local plants, to form a large combine which came to be known as the "Stalin Urals Tank Works", while the Cheliabinsk Tractor Plant, having merged with the evacuated Kharkov Diesel Works and parts of the Leningrad Kirov Plant came to be popularly known as "Tankograd".

Some of the "industrial giants" could not be transplanted as single units, and had to be decentralised: thus part of the Moscow Bali-Bearing Plant being re-settled in Saratov, another in Kuibyshev, and still another in Tomsk. All this created a variety of new

organisational problems.

During the war, I had the opportunity of talking to many workers, both men and women, who had been evacuated to the Urals or Siberia during the grim autumn or early winter months of 1941. The story of how whole industries and millions of people had been

moved to the east, of how industries were set up in a minimum of time, in appallingly difficult conditions, and of how these industries managed to increase production to an enormous extent during 1942, was, above all, a story of incredible human endurance. In most places, living conditions were fearful, in many places food was very short, too.

People worked because they knew that it was absolutely necessary—they worked twelve, thirteen, sometimes fourteen or fifteen hours a day; they "lived on their nerves"; they knew that never was their work more urgently needed than now. Many died in the

process. All these people knew what losses were being suffered by the soldiers, and they

—in the "distant rear"—did not grumble much; while the soldiers were suffering and risking so much, it was not for the civilians to shirk even the most crippling, most heartbreaking work. At the height of the Siberian winter, some people had to walk to work—sometimes three, four, six miles; and then work for twelve hours or more, and

then walk back again, day after day, month after month.

There was little or no exaggeration in the stories published in the press—for instance the story of how, on an empty space outside Sverdlovsk, two enormous buildings were

erected in a fortnight for a factory being brought from the Ukraine.

Among the mountains and the pine forests there is spread out the beautiful capital of the Urals, Sverdlovsk. It has many fine buildings, but I want to tell you of the two most remarkable buildings in the area. Winter had already come when Sverdlovsk

received Comrade Stalin's order to erect two buildings for the plant evacuated from the south. The trains packed with machinery and people were on the way. The war

factory had to start production in its new home—and it had to do so in not more

than a fortnight. Fourteen days, and not an hour more! It was then that the people of the Urals came to this spot with shovels, bars and pickaxes: students, typists, accountants, shop assistants, housewives, artists, teachers. The earth was like stone, frozen hard by our fierce Siberian frost. Axes and pickaxes could not break the

stony soil. In the light of arc-lamps people hacked at the earth all night. They blew up the stones and the frozen earth, and they laid the foundations... Their feet and hands were swollen with frostbite, but they did not leave work. Over the charts and blueprints, laid out on packing cases, the blizzard was raging. Hundreds of truckskept rolling up with building materials... On the twelfth day, into the new buildingswith their glass roofs, the machinery, covered with hoar-frost, began to arrive.