The practice of borrowing foreign projection and technological solutions in the design of electrical machines in Ukraine in the second half of the 1930s

Abstract

This article, based on the problem-chronological, comparative-historical, historiographical, and source-research methods, as well as the method of actualization, identifies the extent of borrowing foreign design and technological solutions in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic for projecting electrical machines in the second half of the 1930s, as well as the reasons for the absence of unambiguous information in historiography regarding the existence of this phenomenon in the republic at this chronological stage. The publication provides a general assessment of the quality of scientific support for the processes of creating electrical machines, establishes the ways of fulfilling the scientific-technical borrowings that were studied and the dynamics of their development, analyzes their role in the growth of the technical level of products of the Ukrainian electrical machine-building branch. It was found that the level of a scientific escort for electrical machine-building production in Ukraine during the considered period was insufficient for arranging a completely independent design of the entire range of sectoral industrial products, therefore, scientific and technical borrowings remained the only way to maintain the necessary rates of development in the design and production of new types of electrical machines across the entire latitude spectrum of their application. According to the archival documents, it was found that because of the rapid growth of the Soviet Union’s needs at the turn of the 1930s–1940s for electric power equipment, on the one hand, and the improvement of the possibility of organizing its mass production in Ukraine, on the other, the scale of such borrowings grew like an avalanche. At the same time, because of the growth of the scientific-technical potential of the republican electrical machine-building, the nature of the procedure for their fulfillment at the end of the 1930s changed and allowed their mimicry as the exclusively independent achievements of domestic designers. This is how the achievements of Ukrainian electric machine builders were presented to the entire Soviet society during the considered period, which subsequently allowed them to gain a foothold in the relevant historiography, however, the facts and arguments in this publication completely refute this established opinion.