TANK CONSTRUCTION AND «SABOTEURS»: ATTEMPTS TO CREATE IN THE USSR SOVIET TANK PRODUCTION IN THE LATE 1920-IES

Abstract

In the article the analysis of the process of formation of a domestic tank industry and the fight against «sabotage» in the late 1920s-ies is carried out. Soviet industry was trying to establish the production of tanks in military factories in Leningrad, Stalingrad, Motovilikha and Kharkov. But all attempts to establish their own tank production were not wealthy. It forced to buy foreign equipment. In late 1929, the USSR began to buy foreign tanks to create its own serial production. The government was looking for reasons for the failure of the Red Army rearmament program. There is a criminal case where the main defendants were «a group of former generals and colonels of the tsarist army» headed by assistant chief of the main military-industrial management USSR Mikhailov. In total, the case was more than 90 people, most of them were engineers. In 1929, Mikhailov and four people were sentenced to death, the rest received a prison sentence. The article shows that the development of criminal case and subsequent events changed the career of two leaders of the military industry of the Secular Union. Tolokontsev headed the military-industrial management until the completion of the investigation. Then he lost his job, but he wasn’t convicted. Pavlovski was a representative of the worker-peasant inspection, and an active participant in the criminal trial of engineers from the investigation. He subsequently took over the leadership of the entire Soviet military industry.