Об освоении производства и налаживании выпуска пистолета-пулемета Шпагина на Вятскополянском машиностроительном заводе «Молот» в годы Великой Отечественной войны

Abstract

The 125th birthday anniversary of Georgy Semyonovich Shpagin, the famous weapon constructor, who invented the PPSh submachine gun, “the Weapon of the Great Victory” will be celebrated in 2022. During the Great Patriotic War it was produced over 5 million PPSh submachine guns and about 2,5 million units were made at Vyatskopolyansky machinery plant “Molot” under the personal leadership of constructor. It was a significant contribution to the provision of the Red Army with the small arms. The production engineering of the PPSh became the beginning of the new period in the development of Vyatskie Polyany which turned from a small workers’ settlement into a town where the machinery plant “Molot” manufactures defense products up to the present. All these facts determine the life of the town residents as far as each of them is involved in weapons production. The main goal of the research is the reconstruction of the production engineering and output of the PPSh submachine guns at Vyatskopolyansky machinery plant “Molot”. For this purpose it is necessary to trace the process of PPSh production engineering, to analyze the difficulties which arise in this process and characterize its modernization. The research made possible to evaluate the contribution of weapon constructor G.S. Shpagin and the employees of the enterprise in the victory. Until now the personality of the designer, the process of creating the PPSh and its production did not attract the attention of researchers; so, there were not published any special works devoted to the life of Shpagin and the production of a submachine gun. In the course of the work archival sources have been used, a significant part of which is being introduced into scientific circulation for the first time. Published memoirs of military leaders and representatives of defense enterprises produced small arms and statistical information from the plant “Molot” have also been applied. To achieve the task of the research both general scientific methods and special scientific methods were used: historical-genetic, chronological and historical-biographical ones. The use of these methods made possible to approach the achievement of the research goal comprehensively. The result of the work is a full reconstruction of the process of production engineering of the Shpagin submachine guns at Vyatskopolyansky machinery plant "Molot".