Abstract
Tractorisation (traktorizatsiia) was one of the strange catch-words created by the Bolsheviks. Automobilisation (avtomobilizatsija) and radiofication (radiofikatsiia) were other new words that referred to the mass consumption of cars and radios. In the first five-year plan, large-scale solutions for agriculture were the obvious aim. The mechanisation of agriculture followed international models and was considered imperative for the modernisation of the whole country. However, many things were rather more chaotic than planned during Stalin’s ‘revolution from above’. Instead of a progressive transition to mechanised agriculture, in which model farms could have served as ideals for new collective farms, the actual result was an undermanned kolkhoz system with special so-called machine and tractor stations. Instead of specialists and motivated kolkhoz members, hundreds of thousands of the most thrifty peasants had been deported to far-off forests and had not found a new lifestyle that could surpass their old peasant culture. On the contrary, the new existence reminded many people of the old serfdom. Many peasants and their sons who filled the new workplaces in the cities’ factories and building sites brought with them a ‘country mentality’. Contemporary travellers to Russia were surprised by how the rural elements in the Soviet cities, and social historians characterise the phenomenon as a form of de-urbanisation.
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Notes
R.W. Davies, Oleg V. Khlevniuk & E.A. Rees (eds.), Stalin-Kaganovich Correspondence, 1931–1936, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press 2003, pp. 64, 82.
On Sergo Ordzhonikidze, (1886–1937), one of the most important personalities during the forced industrialisation, see Oleg Vitalievitch Khlevniuk. In Stalin’s Shadow: The Career of ‘Sergo’ Ordzhonikidze, Armonk, NY & London: Sharpe 1995.
A.G. Kireev & E.G. Khoviv, ChTZ — moia biografiia. Cheliabinsk: Iuzhno-Uralskoe knizhnoe izdatelstvo 1983. On the expansion of the working class, from approximately three to six million persons during the first five-year plan,
see Jean-Paul Depretto, Les Ouvriers en U.R.S.S. 1928–1941, Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne 1997, in particular his descriptions of the conditions in the Kuznetsk region, which resemble the conditions in Cheliabinsk, pp. 187–251.
Z. Krasilshchik, V borbe za Cheliabinskskii traktornyi, Sverdlovsk-Moscow n.p. 1931, provides a detailed description of how the tractor factory was intended to produce civilian tractors and artillery haulers.
The actual role of forced convict labour during the industrialisation of the 1930s has been overestimated in much of the Western literature. For better data on the role of Gulag prisoners and special settlements in the Urals, cf. Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as Civilization, Berkeley, CA, & London: University of California Press 1995, pp. 230–235;
James Harris, The Great Urals: Regionalism and the Evolution of the Soviet System, Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press 1999, pp. 105–122. For details of the camps and special settlements that were essential during the construction of the metal works and other factories in Nizhnii Tagil and the northern Urals,
see Viktor Kirillov, Kniga pamiati. Posviashchaetsia Tagilchanam — zhertvam repressii 1917–1980-kh godov, Ekateringburg: UIF Nauka 1994; idem, Istoriia repressii v Nizhnetagil’skom regione Urala, 1920–1950 gody, vols 1–2, Nizhnii Tagil: n.p. 1996; idem, Zhertvy repressii: Nizhnii Tagil 1920–1980-e gody, Ekaterinburg: n.p. 1999.
On recruitment outside the Soviet Union of qualified workers and specialists, see Elena Osokina, Za fasadom ‘stalinskogo izobiliia’. Raspredelenie i rynok v snabzhenii naseleniia v gody industrializatsii, 1927–1941, Moscow: Rosspen 1999, pp. 105–110.
See also Vincent E. Baker, ‘American Workers in the Soviet Union Between the Two World Wars: From Dream to Disillusionment’, master’s thesis, West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV 1998.
Richard Cartwright Austin, Building Utopia: Erecting Russia’s First Modern City, 1930, Kent & London: Kent State University Press 2004.
Sergej Shurawljow, Ich bitte um Arbeit in der Sowjetunion Das Schicksal deutsche Facharbeiter im Moskau der 30er Jahre (Berlin: Ch. Links 2003) described the fate of German workers at an electric lamp factory in Moscow. For generalisations on foreign workers, compare Sergei Zhuravlëv, ‘Inostrantsy v sovetskom obshchestve 1920–1930-kh godov’, Trudy Instituta rossiiskoi istorii RAN, 1999–2000, Vypusk 3, Moscow 2002, pp. 186–209, and the ensuing discussion among Russian historians on a new domain for archival research in a comparative perspective.
See A.V. Karpenko, Obozrenie otechestvennoi bronetankovoi tekhniki (1905– 1995gg.), St Petersburg: Nevskii Bastion 1996.
Mary R. Habeck, Storm of Steel: The Development of Armor Doctrine in Germany and the Soviet Union, 1919–1939, Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press 2003;
see also: Sergei Gorlov, Sovershenno sekretno. Al’ians Moskva-Berlin 1920–1933 gg. (Voenno-politicheskie otnosheniia SSSR-Germaniia), Moscow: Olma-Press 2001.
Compare Vladimir K. Triandafillov, The Nature of the Operations of Modern Armies, [1929], edited with a foreword by Jacob W. Kipp, London: Frank Cass 1994.
For a detailed analysis of how Russian army theoreticians consolidated the experience from the Russo-Japanese War 1904–1905, World War I and the Russian Civil War see the survey by the former US military attaché to Moscow, Richard W. Harrison, The Russian Way of War. Operational Art, 1904–1940, Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas 2001.
On the technological arms race between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany concerning tanks, see Daniial P. Ibraimov, Protivoborstvo: Istoriia sozdaniia voennoi tekniki v SSSR i Germanii, Moscow: DOSAAF 1989.
On Soviet military support to the Chinese Nationalist government, code-named ‘Operation Z’, see Youli Sun, China and the Origins of the Pacific War 1931–1941, London: Macmillan 1993, pp. 109–130.
For the support from the Soviet Union and the Red Army for the legitimate Spanish government in the civil war of 1936–1938, internally called ‘Operation X’, see Komintern i grazhdanskaia voina v Ispanii. Dokumenty, eds. P.P. Pozharskii & A.I. Saplin, Moscow: Nauka 2001;
Gerald Howson, Arms for Spain: The Untold Story of the Spanish Civil War, London: John Murray 1998;
Jurij Rybalkin, Operatsiia ‘X’: Sovetskaia voennaia pomoshch respublikanskoi Ispanii (1936–1939), Moscow: AIRO-XX 2000.
D.V. Gavrilov, ‘Rol’ malykh voin v razvitii voennoi promyshlennosti Urala pered Pervoi i Vtoroi mirovymi voinami’, in Ural v strategii Vtoroi Mirovoi voiny, Ekaterinburg 2002, pp. 81–84.
See, Paul A.C. Koistinen, Planning War, Pursuing Peace: The Political Economy of American Warfare, 1920–1939, Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas 1998.
See Lennart Samuelson, Plans for Stalin’s War-Machine: Tukhachevskii and Military-Economic Planning, 1925–1941, London & New York: Macmillan & St. Martins 1999.
Ivan Vernidub, Boepripasy Pobedy. Ocherki, Moscow: TsNIINTIKPK 1998, p. 36.
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© 2011 Lennart Samuelson
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Samuelson, L. (2011). The Tractor Factory’s Civilian Production and Military Potential. In: Tankograd. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230316669_4
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