Урал и Украина в системе межрегиональных противоречий 1920-х — 1930-х гг. (продолжение)

Abstract

The study continues a series of articles devoted to the problem of interregional economic contradictions between the Urals and the Ukraine in the USSR during the interwar period. In the second part of the work, the author examines the trends in the territorial organization of the Soviet ferrous metallurgy around the Urals and the Ukraine in the context of changes in the economic, political and social conjuncture occurred in the wake of the October Revolution. These trends were expressed in a shift in the location of the productive forces of the Soviet ferrous metallurgy to the western borders of the USSR, with their predominant concentration in the Ukraine. At the same time, in comparison with pre-revolutionary times, this shift was more pronounced, which was caused by the crisis phenomena accompanying the restoration of the Ural industry in the 1920s. The latter were caused by the inability to preserve the technology of charcoal metallurgy in the region in a pre-revolutionary volume and form. Attempts to adapt the Ural metallurgy to the existing conditions without structural technological changes proved unsuccessful and led to the threat of its actual absorption by the Ukrainian production through the organization of a union-wide metallurgical syndicate dominated by Ukrainian trusts. This led to the intensification of regionalism tendencies in the Urals, aggravated by its economic contradictions with Siberia and manifested during the mineralization of the Ural fuel balance with coal from the Kuznetsk basin. Against the background of the «metal famine» unfolding in the country, the tendency to concentrate metallurgical production in the Ukraine predetermined the opposition not only of the industrial Urals, but also of the central government, which would soon lead to a surge of regionalism tendencies in the Ukraine as well.