The adaptation of line-conveyor principles to local conditions continued until the end of the 30s.
During the Great Patriotic War, among all the tank factories of the USSR, the highest productivity was shown by the Ural Tank Plant No. 183 located in the shops of the pre-war Uralvagonzavod (25,266 medium T-34 tanks by the end of May 1945), the Gorky Automobile Plant (17,333 light tanks and self-propelled guns) and the Chelyabinsk Kirovsky, also known as the Chelyabinsk Tractor Plant (16,832 heavy and medium tanks and heavy self-propelled guns). Together, this accounted for more than 62 percent of all tracked armored vehicles. GAZ, in addition, produced 8174 armored vehicles, or 91 percent of vehicles of this type.
With a clear difference in the initial purpose of the carriage, automobile and tractor plants, they all had two very important common features. First, the production process on them was initially organized in accordance with the flow-conveyor principle, the most progressive for mechanical engineering of the first half of the twentieth century. Secondly, these factories were designed and built on the model of the best American enterprises, and with the most active participation of overseas specialists.
Imaginary reality …
As often happens, false conclusions immediately arose around these real events, and then myths. Already at the beginning of "Stalin's industrialization" both in the USSR and abroad, new auto-tractor plants were considered as dual-purpose enterprises, designed to produce both civilian and military equipment. Thus, in 1931, the American journalist G. R. Soviet government: "The production of tanks and tractors have a lot in common …" According to the firm conviction of the Bolshevik pessimists, the tractor factory under construction in Chelyabinsk can almost instantly be reoriented to military purposes to repel the expected attack of the capitalist world. The planned production of 50,000 10-ton 60-horsepower tracked tractors per year, very much like tanks, means that we are talking about the production of "one of the types of tanks."
The statement of the foreign journalist is also confirmed by some Soviet documents. It is known that already in the fall of 1930, when the foundations of future buildings were barely visible at Chelyabtraktorostroy, drawings of the T-24 medium tank developed in Kharkov were sent to the capital of the Southern Urals for review and the alleged production in wartime. In May 1931, at a meeting of the tank building commission chaired by M. N. Tukhachevsky, it was stated in relation to ChTZ: on a medium tank for 8000 pcs. in the year of war and for the production of an infantry transporter in the amount of 10,000 pieces. in the year of war, starting in the spring of 1933”. The type of tank is not indicated here, since the T-24 has already been abandoned, and the replacement was still being designed. Later, at the end of 1934, the T-29 medium wheeled-tracked tank was declared a mobilization vehicle for the ChTZ, in the spring of 1935 they even began to prepare for the production of three experimental vehicles of the T-29-5 type.
At the same time, ChTZ was no exception. Another new tractor plant - Stalingrad in the mid-30s was seriously preparing for the production of light T-26 tanks.
From the above and many other similar facts, a number of modern historians of a certain orientation have drawn far-reaching conclusions. Here is what, for example, one of the active supporters of the notorious V. Rezun-Suvorov Dmitry Khmelnitsky writes:, and Stalin would not have had the determination to conclude a pact with Hitler in 1939 in order to jointly start a world war for the redivision of the world."
This is also the source of the current straightforward logic of Western sanctions against Russia. The US and EU leaders are confident that the refusal to supply modern technologies will cause a quick and effective impact on the domestic industry.
… And the reality of the fact
A closer look at historical facts proves that the initial calculations of the Soviet leadership and the modern ideologized conclusions from them are very far from reality. It makes no sense to deny the American role in the introduction in the USSR of the most advanced for the 30s methods of flow-conveyor production at the newly built auto-tractor and carriage-building plants. But only they themselves, until the beginning of 1940, made an almost imperceptible contribution to the creation of Soviet armored power.
Recall that in 1932, to organize the serial production of modern tanks at that time, designed on the basis of American and British prototypes (respectively BT, T-26 and floating T-37A and T-38), the first organizational form of the tank industry was established in the form All-Union Trust for Special Engineering. In 1937-1939, the association underwent several reforms, which is not of great importance in this case, since the composition of the main tank enterprises did not change.
So, light infantry support tanks of the T-26 type were produced by the Voroshilov Leningrad Plant (later - No. 174), that is, the tank unit of the Bolshevik plant, which was also Obukhovsky in the past, separated into an independent enterprise.
Tankettes T-27, amphibious tanks T-37A, T-38 and light partially armored tractors T-20 were assembled in Moscow at plant number 37 - previously the 2nd automobile plant of the All-Union Automobile and Tractor Association.
High-speed wheeled-tracked tanks of the BT series and heavy breakthrough tanks T-35 were produced by the Kharkov Steam Locomotive Plant named after the Comintern (No. 183).
All of these enterprises, upon joining Spetsmashtrest, were freed from most of the other tasks and had the opportunity to concentrate their forces on tank building. But what is curious: both the Leningrad, and Kharkov, and the Moscow factories had a qualified team, received new imported equipment, although due to the structure and layout that had developed historically at the end of the 19th century or in the first decades of the 20th century, they could not fully apply in-line production methods. The same can be said about the manufacturer of T-28 medium tanks, which failed at Spetsmashtrest, that is, about the Kirovsky (formerly Putilovsky) plant.
A natural question arises: why the Spetsmashtrest did not include the newest factories, which in the first half of the 30s were either already in operation or were preparing for launch?
The answer is obvious: the foreigners designed exactly what was listed in the specification: tractor plants suitable for the production of peaceful products or, at best, dual-use products like tracked tractors.
True, at the very beginning of the 30s, the Red Army equipment programs also included "tanks of the second echelon of infantry escort," which were armored and armed civilian tracked vehicles. In 1931, the Experimental Design Bureau of the Department of Mechanization and Motorization of the Red Army was instructed to design two such machines: one based on the Kommunar tractor already mastered at the Kharkov steam locomotive plant and the second based on the American 60-horsepower Caterpillar tractor, a prototype of the Chelyabinsk St. 60. Both armored tractors were built at the Moscow plant "MOZHEREZ" and sent for testing. Despite the very powerful armament at that time (76, 2-mm assault cannon and four DT machine guns), the military did not like the equipment. In mobility, security and ease of use of weapons, it was frankly inferior to tanks of special construction. The experiments were terminated as unpromising.
During the period of the most acute shortage of armored vehicles - in the fall of 1941, the Kharkov and Stalingrad Tractor Plants produced a small batch (about 90 pieces) of 45-mm fully armored self-propelled guns KhTZ-16 based on the STZ-3 tractor. Another 50 or so combat vehicles of the "NI" type (which meant "Fright") based on STZ-5 were built in besieged Odessa. Both in the first and in the second case, it was about desperate attempts to make up for the lack of normal armored vehicles.
It turned out to be impossible to make full-fledged tanks and self-propelled guns on the production lines and conveyor lines of tractor plants - the materials used and the requirements for the design of civil and combat tracked vehicles were too different. This applied not only to the USSR: not a single country in the world possessed the technologies of in-line production of tanks and self-propelled guns in the 30s. Of course, there were some groundwork, especially in France and Great Britain, but no one was going to share them. The materials and technologies for the mass production of tanks had to be created by Soviet specialists themselves. This will be discussed in the next article.
The art of adaptation
The second reason for the removal of the newest factories from tank building was the difficulty of mastering the flow-conveyor principles of production and their adaptation to local conditions. This work continued until the end of the 30s.
To begin with, the North American United States' sanctions attitude against the USSR at the turn of the 1920s and 1930s was much sharper than today. Therefore, from overseas, mainly paper of construction and technological projects came to our country. The equipment had to be purchased from more loyal states, in connection with which both ChTZ and Uralvagonzavod were equipped with machines, furnaces and devices of mainly German origin. The adaptation of American projects to European and Soviet equipment was more or less successfully carried out by young Soviet industrial technological institutes.
Another problem required an incomparably large and prolonged effort. The "heart" of ChTZ, GAZ, UVZ and many other factories built in the 30s were assembly lines designed according to the best American models. However, the conveyor is just the tip of the iceberg in in-line production. Materials, components, hardware, various units and parts must be supplied to it with mathematical precision in time and volume. The slightest failure - and the conveyor must either be stopped, or incomplete products must be produced, driven into sedimentation tanks and then manually, spending a lot of effort and money, equipped with the missing units and parts.
Meanwhile, the Soviet economy, although it was considered planned, but in its essence more deserved the name "deficit". The absolute non-obligation of supplies was caused by both bad planning and intersectoral contradictions, and an elementary shortage of available capacities. Stops of many enterprises could have been caused by accidents not only in workshops and production facilities, but even in individual machines and units that existed in the USSR in single copies.
In the United States, tractor, automobile and carriage factories were engaged only in mechanical processing of the most critical parts and conveyor assembly of final products. Shaped casting, forgings and stampings, and sometimes individual units were produced by narrow-profile factories, which had considerable advantages. Specialization helped to gain production experience faster and made technological control more efficient. The basis for the discipline of deliveries was not only a perfect planning system and the strictest financial sanctions, but also the presence of excess capacity, due to which any failures and unforeseen situations were covered. Incidentally, he noted the merits of the American organization during a trip to the United States in August - December 1936 and then tried to propagandize (not for long, until the arrest in 1937) by the director of the Uralmash plant, L. S. Vladimirov.
In the USSR, even when designing new large machine-building plants, metallurgical departments flatly refused to take specialized work with materials under their wing. And in those cases when such separate industries were created (for example, hardware), one could only dream about the regularity of deliveries. Therefore, machine builders were forced to build gigantic plants, which included not only machining shops and assembly conveyors, but also a full set of metallurgical and procurement industries, plus energy divisions for self-sufficiency in electricity, steam, compressed air, oxygen, etc. repair units. Such plants were Uralvagonzavod, GAZ, ChTZ, and STZ.
For example, at UVZ, in addition to workshops for assembling car units and cars themselves, by the beginning of 1941 were operating:
- iron foundry of Griffin wheels;
- large steel casting shop with open-hearth furnaces, molding and casting lines;
-shop for small steel casting with electric arc furnaces, molding and casting lines;
-spring shop;
-sealing shop;
-press shop;
-preparation shop.
And this is not counting the powerful instrumental departments and numerous workshops of the departments of the chief mechanic and the chief power engineer.
The construction of such enterprises, and especially their bringing them to their design capacity, required immeasurably higher costs, efforts and time than individual specialized plants. This process was not fully completed even by the beginning of 1941. However, when put into operation, the plants turned out to be very resistant to external influences and viable. This property became salutary during the Great Patriotic War, when, as a result of the German invasion, the previously existing system of inter-sectoral cooperation was violated, and the tank productions newly created on the basis of Uralvagonzavod or ChTZ could rely mainly on their own forces and means.
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