In the previous part of the cycle on the formation of the tank industry, we only partially touched on the issue of using repressive organs in this area. However, this topic is worth a separate consideration.
Already in 1929, the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks adopted a decree on the military industry, in which most of the blame for the numerous disruptions of the production plan was placed on various "sabotage" organizations. In particular, among the "ringleaders" was the assistant to the head of the Main Military-Industrial Directorate (GVPU) Vadim Sergeevich Mikhailov, who was eventually shot. Also, the decree states that part of the blame, of course, lies with the leadership of the Main Military Directorate. This was almost a direct accusation by the head of the Directorate Alexander Fedorovich Tolokontsev - he was charged with "insufficient vigilance for many years and obvious sabotage and omissions in the military industry." It must be said that Tolokontsev, at the beginning of the trial of the "saboteurs", tried to convince Stalin of the innocence of his subordinates, but was not heard. In the spring of 1929, he was removed from his post and transferred to the head of the Main Directorate of the Machine-Building and Metal-Working Industry - this was an actual demotion. On April 27 of the same year, the former head of the Main Military Directorate, at a meeting of the Politburo, among other things, said:
“I am not submitting and I am not going to ask for resignation from the current work, but if Comrade Pavlunovsky is right that the military industry is hanging by a thread, then the conclusion should be the immediate removal of me from the leadership of machine building as head of the military industry for 2, 5 years. I cannot but inform the Presidium of the Supreme Council of the National Economy and the Politburo that the incriminated me is a monstrous accusation, completely undeserved and extremely painful for me. The description of the main points of the work of the military industry, presented in my report, leads to completely opposite conclusions, since the military industry has had a number of significant achievements in recent years."
In 1937, Tolokontsev was shot.
In his report, the former head of the military sector of industry mentioned Ivan Petrovich Pavlunovsky, who at that time was the deputy people's commissar of the Workers 'and Peasants' Inspection. It was he who was put in charge of the commission to correct the situation with catastrophic delays in mastering the production of new tanks. In particular, the decree commanded "as soon as possible to purge the entire personnel of the military industry, including factories." It was clear that with his excessive zeal, Pavlunovsky, who, by the way, was also shot in 1937, would chop wood, leaving the tank industry without the last qualified personnel. Therefore, within a month, at least a hundred experienced engineers with an unblemished reputation were mobilized into the military industry. They also decided to organize technical retraining courses to strengthen, as they would say now, the key competencies of the industry's engineering staff. But this did not help much, and an acute shortage of personnel in tank building was still felt. But on the front of the fight against "pests" things were going well …
It turned out that "sabotage not only undermined the supply base of the Red Army, but also caused direct damage to the improvement of military equipment, slowed down the rearmament of the Red Army and worsened the quality of military reserves." These are the words from the Resolution of the Politburo of February 25, 1930 "On the course of eliminating sabotage at the enterprises of the military industry." In particular, on the basis of this document, it was understood that it would not be possible to make up for lost time on our own and would have to buy equipment abroad. They allocated 500 thousand rubles for these purposes and equipped the purchasing commission, which was discussed in the first part of the story.
The calm before the storm
The mastery of new foreign technology at the beginning of the 30s at the factories of the USSR was very dramatic at first, but the repressions somehow bypassed this process. It was necessary to solve a whole mass of the most difficult tasks and, quite likely, the country's leadership briefly tempered its ardor of exposing numerous "pests" and "enemies of the people." One of these problems was the development of the assembly of engines for high-speed vehicles of the BT series, requiring powerful motors. Initially, there were enough Liberty power plants purchased in the United States and domestic aircraft M-5s, which were brought back to life after being used in the Air Force at the Krasny Oktyabr and Aviaremtrest factories. At the same time, it was even necessary to repair the M-5s (which were also copies of the Liberty), collecting one or two workers from several worn out engines - they could not yet produce spare parts on their own. Serious difficulties were created by the chronic shortage of bearings, which had to be purchased abroad. Two domestic factories could provide the tank building program with bearings by only 10-15%! For T-26 out of 29 types of bearings in the USSR, 6 items were not produced, and for BT - 6 out of 22. Starters, generators, turret rotation motors and even simple fans were also imported in Soviet tanks.
In 1933, Kliment Voroshilov reported that out of 710 BT tanks produced, only 90 had guns - the rest simply did not get them. When mastering new brands of armored steel, the enterprises again did not keep up with deliveries to factories No. 37 and Kharkov steam locomotive building. By 1934 the Yaroslavl rubber and asbestos plant was unable to provide tank production with Ferrado belts, rollers, disks and other technical rubber. Because of this, tank enterprises had to independently master the production of such components. The overwhelm was the M-17 aircraft engine - it was required for the BT, the T-28, and even the heavy T-35. And Rybinsk Aviation Engine Plant # 26 could produce only 300 engines per year. It was here that the most important flaw of the Soviet strategists manifested itself, when the tank industry was created without regard to the capabilities of allies. Tank factories were under construction, but motor production, for example, was not even in the plans. The purely tank and legendary B-2 will appear just before the war itself, in 1939. By the way, by that time the BT series will have time to become morally and technically obsolete. This tank, more precisely, its wheeled-tracked propeller, undoubtedly had a negative impact on the development of the domestic tank industry. The idea of J. Christie was pushed into the industry by the leadership of the Red Army, ignoring the complexity of production and the huge costs of finalizing this type of propulsion device. The most unpleasant thing is that with a chronic shortage of qualified specialists in design bureaus and at factories, dead-end work with a wheel-caterpillar propeller took a lot of time. In November 1936, the director of the Kirov plant, Karl Martovich Ots, was barely able to abandon the production of the T-29 tank. This tank with a combined propulsion system was supposed to replace the average classic T-28. One of Ots's arguments in a memo to Stalin himself was the development of a new modification of the T-28A with reinforced tracks, so "you can guarantee long high-speed runs without damaging the tracks."
By the end of the 30s, the government planned to produce 35 thousand tanks annually, and for this grandiose goal, additional armored production was laid in Taganrog and Stalingrad. However, these enterprises did not have time to go into operation, and the production volumes, even several years after the launch, seriously lagged behind the planned ones. Obviously, this, as well as the stalling pace of production of armored vehicles, became the last straw of patience in the Politburo, and the leadership once again let down the watchdogs. Ezhov in 1936 "uncovered" the conspiracy at the Bolshevik plant, while unraveling a whole tangle of complex counter-revolutionary and fascist forces. It turned out that at the Kirov pilot plant, at the Voroshilov tank plant, and at the gun plant No. 17, and even at the Artillery Scientific Research Marine Institute, whole gangs of "saboteurs" are wielding. It was they who were to blame for the disruptions to work on the T-43-1 wheeled-tracked amphibious tank, as well as the T-29 with the T-46-1. Karl Ots recalled his stubbornness with the T-29 tank and attributed the leadership of the Trotskyite-Zinoviev group at his plant in Leningrad. On October 15, 1937, the People's Commissar of the Defense Industry Moisei Lvovich Rukhimovich was arrested, who managed to work in office for less than a year. In 1938 he was shot. How both Innokenty Khalepsky and Mikhail Siegel, who stood at the very origins of Soviet tank building, were shot. Dozens of mid-level designers were sent to the camps.
The 1936-1937 purge was the last major military action against the engineering and management elite of the tank industry. After two waves of repressions (the first was in the late 1920s), the party leadership gradually realized that the exsanguination of tank building would lead to the inevitable collapse of the country's defense in the face of growing fascism in Europe.
