The arguments that the Chekists indiscriminately imprisoned the "defense workers" are at least groundless.
The question of the scale of repression first arose publicly in the USSR at the beginning of 1938. On January 19, No. 19 of Pravda published an informational message about the ended Plenum of the Central Committee and the resolution "On the mistakes of party organizations when expelling communists from the party, on the formal bureaucratic attitude towards appeals of those expelled from the CPSU (b) and on measures to eliminate these shortcomings." Then it was recognized that the repressions of 1937, with their forced necessity, were generally partly excessive. Since the spring of 1956, after the 20th Congress of the CPSU, the topic of repression has acquired an unhealthy character, and since then interest in it has either subsided or deliberately inflated. At the same time, an objective look makes its way with difficulty.
To take up the pen of the author was prompted by an old article by Professor Alexander Shcherba “Prologue of the Great Terror. Repressions in the military industry in the 20s”. It was mainly about the defense industry of Leningrad, but not only.
Four years have passed, and attempts to whitewash pre-revolutionary Russia and, as a result, denigrate Soviet Russia are being made more and more actively.
The wretched legacy of tsarism
Doubt was raised by the first thesis of Professor Shcherba that military production in Russia "due to its strategic importance" allegedly "was always under close scrutiny and control of the state authorities." From the context it followed that the author had in mind the power institutions of the Russian Empire. It was about them that he already wrote at the beginning of the article that "they invariably tried to ensure the stability of the release of weapons by various measures."
Was it really so?
The real history of military development in tsarist Russia in the 18th – 19th and early 20th centuries shows that the periods when it proceeded with the attentive attitude of the state were short-lived and did not set the trends in tsarist Russia. Yes, Peter the Great laid such a solid foundation for the Russian military machine that it lasted for decades. The second such period was under Catherine the Great in the best years of Rumyantsev, Potemkin and Suvorov. But already Russia of Alexander I did not fail militarily, primarily thanks to the efforts of the reformer of Russian artillery, Count Arakcheev, an active figure and, presumably, for this very reason slandered.
Even without deeply studying the history of the military industry in the "first Nikolaev" Russia, which collapsed in the Crimean War, it is enough to recall the anxiety of Leskovsky Lefty, who at the time of his death begged to inform the sovereign that the guns were being cleaned with bricks and this could not be a target.
Disregard for the production side of military problems was especially pronounced by the beginning of the twentieth century. Firstly, the autocracy did not accept any of the technical challenges of the time - neither the imminent transformation of armed struggle into a war of engines, nor the role of radio communications (Popov's discoveries made us the leaders, but the authorities gave everything abroad in advance), nor the significance of massive small arms fire (machine guns, machine guns) … Domestic work on tanks and aviation was not supported. The famous heavy bomber "Ilya Muromets" became obsolete during the First World War. And tsarist Russia did not have fighters of its own design at all, as well as anything significant in the aviation industry.
Already at the beginning of the twentieth century, neglect of R&D (in particular, in the production of effective shells for naval artillery) and the interests of military production doomed Tsarist Russia to the disgrace of Tsushima, despite the fact that Russian sailors showed courage and valor.
With the outbreak of the First World War, a new shameful detail became clear: Russia simply did not have enough rifles. On the eve of the war, the state order for rifles for our largest arms factory - Tula - was as follows: in January 1914 - five pieces, in February - the same amount, in March - six, in April - again five, in May, June, July - one by one (!). I just can't believe it, but the source of information is quite authoritative, this is the tsarist, and later Soviet general Vladimir Grigorievich Fedorov, a member of the weapons department of the Artillery Committee. In his memoirs, he wrote: “A few days before the declaration of war, the largest plant produces one training rifle a month! This is how the War Ministry was preparing for an armed conflict. And Fedorov in 1914 had to go to negotiate the supply of rifles to Japan - to a recent former enemy, and now a fragile ally.
Depressing for us was the ratio with the Germans in artillery, machine guns and other types of weapons. The thesis about the allegedly exemplary attitude of the tsarist government to military production does not stand up to the facts.
And many were against
After the Civil War, the entire economy of the country was in a deplorable state. And although in December 1922 the Russian state received the name of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, it is only a stretch to speak of life in the first half of the 1920s as Soviet. In the collection of documents “Stalin and Lubyanka. 1922-1936”a letter to Dzerzhinsky from the chairman of the All-Ukrainian GPU Vasily Mantsev about the situation in his department by the summer of 1922 was published. The Chekists were in poverty, starving, committing suicide, unable to feed their families, leaving the party - the percentage of communists in the GPU dropped from 60 to 15. Dozens were convicted of raids and robbery, GPU employees wrote to Mantsev that they were forced to engage in prostitution, and the only the cause was hunger and poverty. These were the starting conditions for the new system after the devastating Civil War - even in such a delicate area as state security. And they were created not by the Bolsheviks, but by the tsarist government, which for two centuries neglected the pressing problems of the development of Russia, including in the military-technical respect.
At the same time, a significant part of the defense industry specialists were even more hostile to the new regime than the old officers. This was explained by the fact that the work of military engineers was always well paid, and they had nothing to rejoice in the establishment of Soviet power. Accordingly, deliberate sabotage and sabotage became one of the features of economic and industrial life in the USSR from the 1920s until almost the beginning of the war, when they, as significant phenomena, were eliminated not only through repression and purges, but also thanks to the education of a new - Soviet scientific and technical intelligentsia.
For an objective understanding of the situation in the 1920s and 1930s, I refer the reader to the aforementioned collection of documents. It contains interesting information, for example, about the Donugol case, about Shakhtinsky and other similar ones, relating precisely to the period analyzed by Professor Shcherba.
In the military production of Leningrad and in the defense industry in general in the 20s and 30s, it was necessary to fight not with the pests invented by the OGPU-NKVD organs, but with the very real subversive work of old specialists - either purely ideological enemies of the Soviet state, or malicious inhabitants, or paid agents West. However, combinations of these three motives were not uncommon.
Nevertheless, the repressions were not significant enough to leave the military factories without competent and experienced specialists at all. Of course, at that time, the loss of any qualified employee could not but affect the normal work, however, not a single enterprise in the USSR - both defense and general industrial - did not stop after the arrest of certain specialists. Quite often the opposite happened - the work improved for obvious reasons. In addition, some of the arrests were actually of a preventive nature, and such "prevention" gave results. One of the leaders of the actually existing Industrial Party, Professor Ramzin, after his conviction, developed his famous once-through boiler, became an order-bearer, director of the Thermal Engineering Institute.
Professor Shcherba writes about those years as if everything had already been established in the country, and malicious chekists and party organs, wishing to curry favor, invented mythical conspiracies. A modern reader, especially a young one, may decide that the authorities in the 1930s thought of only one thing - how to weaken the defense industry more sensibly, expelling experienced old specialists from it.
Alas, the repressions were forced, they were caused not by a passion for punitive measures, but by a dull hostility to socialism on the part of the old technical intelligentsia, especially those of its representatives who, under the old regime, were not only engineers at their enterprises, but also their shareholders, shareholders. There were other attendant factors, but none of them was the malice of the Stalinist leadership. But, speaking about repressions, including in the defense sphere, we must not forget about Trotskyism as a factor not anti-Stalinist, but antisocial, anti-state.
Despite sabotage, objective and subjective difficulties, military production in the USSR was constantly developing and improving. For the first time since the time of Peter and Catherine, the supreme state power directly and with interest directed all aspects of military production. This is one of the reasons why the new government could not do without one or another repression objectively, if it was interested in a strong military rear. The old, not wanting to go to the grave, now and then dragged the country back. I had to defend myself.
Unconvincing "extras"
Repression in military production is a fact. But were they massive and disastrous for Soviet military production?
Professor Shcherba refers to many normative documents of the Soviet era, but he is very stingy in the factual side of the matter. He argues that in the 1920s, "the dismissals from military enterprises of specialists who had once received an education and who worked a lot under the" accursed tsarism "took on a mass character."
Since the historian makes such a statement, then one can expect that further numbers, percentages, names will follow. However, with the facts, everything is very modest. And if something is concretized, it looks unconvincing. For example, a conflict is described with the director of the Krasny Pilotchik plant, NA Afanasyev, who was removed from management in the mid-1920s. The plant itself, as of 1925, is certified by Professor Shcherba as "a large and modern enterprise of the military industry." But at that time, not a single aircraft enterprise of the USSR could be certified in such a flattering way, since the first major successes of Soviet aircraft construction were achieved later.
Or it is reported about the decree of the USSR People's Commissariat of Labor of April 7, 1930, No. 11/8 "On the temporary secondment of engineers from civil industry and government agencies to military industry enterprises", and the appearance of such a document is explained by repression. But first, the need for such a measure is obvious due to the objective expansion of defense technical work. Secondly, the author of the article himself reports that "110 people were subject to secondment to the military enterprises of Leningrad."Even if we accept that all of them were sent to replace the repressed (which, of course, is not the case), the number, given the scale of the Leningrad defense industry in 1930, does not look impressive.
Moreover, I would venture to say that even at the end of the 30s, repressions in the defense industry did not have catastrophic consequences for the defense. For various reasons, then several hundred specialists out of many thousands were imprisoned, and they worked in the system of the Special Technical Bureau of the NKVD and almost all were later released.
On the one hand, the fact that repression in the defense industry did not have a particularly significant impact is confirmed by the history of pre-war R&D, and on the other, by the level and volume of defense production, which ensured the repulsion of the first German strike and the subsequent turning point in the war. The Soviet Union accepted the challenge of German minds and technologies. As a result, he won this war and not at all thanks to the notorious "sharashki".
For example, only after the arrest of the chief engineer of the GUAP NKTP USSR Tupolev (it is indicative that his first deputy for the Arkhangelsky Design Bureau remained at large and took part in meetings with Stalin) did we begin urgent work on modern combat aircraft. Then separate design bureaus of Tupolev, Petlyakov, Myasishchev, Sukhoi were formed, design bureaus of Ermolaev, Ilyushin, Yakovlev, Lavochkin, Mikoyan and Gurevich quickly gained momentum … We won on their planes.
How they drove empty
The problem of sabotage and sabotage was, unfortunately, significant even before the war itself. Extract from a note by the NKVD Beria dated January 17, 1941 to Stalin, Molotov and Kaganovich: “At construction number 56 in the western regions of Ukraine, not a single task of the government and the People's Commissariat for Railways has been fulfilled … The head of construction Skripkin during 1940, ignoring the instructions of the People's Commissariat for Railways, sprayed funds and … did not ensure the completion on time of the most decisive sections of the construction. Meanwhile, Skripkin repeatedly informed the NKPS about the successful course of construction … In the mobilization stock of roads, instead of the 30,700 cars required according to the plan, there are only 18,000.
And here are the results of the USSR NPO inspection in the Air Force of the Moscow Military District in March 1941 - three months before the war. Under the noses of the "victim of Beria", the commander of the air force of the Moscow Military District, General Pumpur, and two more "victims", generals Smushkevich and Rychagov, 23 percent of the pilots did not sit at the controls of combat aircraft at all. In the 24th Air Defense Division, not a single alarm was announced with the departure of fighters. Almost all units of the Air Force of the Moscow Military District were incapable of combat, machine guns were not targeted, bomb racks were not adjusted, alert readiness was not worked out.
On March 3, 1941, the People's Commissar of Ammunition Sergeev was removed (shot in 1942). And on November 11, 1940, the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) considered the results of an inspection of its People's Commissariat by a joint commission of the NK State Control and the NKVD of 55 people. Only part of the revealed: "For nine months of 1940, the NKB did not give the Red Army and the Navy 4, 2 million sets of ground artillery rounds, 3 million mines, 2 million aerial bombs and 205 thousand naval artillery rounds." With an unfinished technical process, the NKB began mass production of iron sleeves instead of brass ones, as a result of which 963,000 out of one million 117 thousand iron sleeves were scrapped … All this and much more had to be opened by the military themselves, but the Chekists and civilian state inspectors revealed. But under Sergeev, the NKB received 1400 incoming letters every day and sent 800. With a shortage of engineers, the People's Commissariat for the seven months of 1940 dismissed 1226 graduates from the factories. Among the workers of the People's Commissariat there were 14 former tsarist officers, 70 immigrants from the nobility, landowners and kulaks, 31 previously convicted, 17 expelled from the CPSU (b), 28 with relatives abroad, 69 relatives of the repressed, etc. At the same time, in 1940, 166 engineering and technical workers, 171 members of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks were dismissed from the central office "by way of staff reduction."
This was the situation a year before the war in one of the industrial defense commissariats. Putting order in the NKB immediately affected the security of the troops, although the results of sabotage and sabotage, of course, hiccuped.
Only the outbreak of war, in which the work of the rear was also provided by the old, pre-revolutionary training specialists, quickly and finally outlived sabotage as a feature of the country's economic and social life. Under the conditions of an enemy invasion, even internally disloyal old specialists were imbued with patriotic feelings and honestly worked together with everyone in the name of the future Victory.
Front and rear did not bleed
An objective study of the scale of repression in the leadership of the military economy in 1941-1945 would be interesting. I would like to know how many were dismissed from work, put on trial, sent to prison, or even executed by defense industry specialists at the level of shop managers, chief specialists, plant directors, chiefs of central administrations, people's commissars, their deputies, etc. I think an objective researcher will be amazed by the small, both absolute and especially relative, number of repressed commanders of the military economy in one way or another. Personally, I do not know any of the people who were shot by the People's Commissar, except for the aforementioned Sergeev, who himself predetermined his fate.
Regarding the army generals, we have such statistics today - three solid reference books have been published: "Commanders", "Komkory" and "Divisional commander". They contain detailed biographies of the commanders of all types of armies of the Red Army, corps and divisions in the period from June 22, 1941 to May 9, 1945.
Eight strictly designed thick books give us a completely adequate generalized portrait of the top generals of the wartime, and I must say that the typical commander, corps commander and divisional commander of the Red Army look worthy. Even in that surprisingly very small part of them, which ended up under the tribunal at different times, the majority of those who were fined managed to pass the test. Many not only regained their general's shoulder straps, but were even promoted. And some, after a conviction, which was usually removed from a general who continued to fight with a demotion of one or two steps, was awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union. Only a few of the military leaders fell under the real terms.
And if the level of military repression was extremely low even at the front, it was unlikely that it was seriously significant for the leaders of military production. Stalin and Beria often threatened, but only in case of malicious sloppiness did they punish the guilty in reality, giving them to court. And an objective - complete roll-call, as well as generalized digital analysis could confirm this fact.
It is worth preparing, following the example of the "general's" reference book on the Red Army, the same major biographical set on the top leaders of the military economy - from the level of at least deputy directors, chief technologists, chief engineers of defense plants and above.