Great construction projects of the Stalin era. Three great construction projects of the era of the USSR

The great construction sites of communism - this is what all global projects were called Soviet government: highways, canals, stations, reservoirs.
One can argue about the degree of their “greatness”, but there is no doubt that these were grandiose projects of their time.

"Magnitogorsk"

Russia's largest Magnitogorsk Iron and Steel Works was designed in the late spring of 1925 by the Soviet institute UralGipromez. According to another version - the design was carried out American company from Clinwood, and the US Steel plant in Gary, Indiana, became the prototype of Magnitogorsk. All three "heroes" who stood at the "helm" of the construction of the plant - the manager Gugel, the builder Maryasin and the head of the trust Valerius - were shot in the 30s. January 31, 1932 - the first blast furnace is launched. The construction of the plant took place in the most difficult conditions, while most of the work was carried out manually. Despite this, thousands of people from all over the Union hurried to Magnitogorsk. Foreign specialists, primarily Americans, were also actively involved.

Belomorkanal

The White Sea-Baltic Canal was supposed to connect the White Sea and Lake Onega and provide access to the Baltic Sea and the Volga-Baltic waterway. The canal was built by the forces of Gulag prisoners in record time - less than two years (1931-1933). The length of the canal is 227 kilometers. It was the first construction in the Soviet Union, implemented exclusively by prisoners, which may be why the Belomorkanal is not always ranked among the "great construction projects of communism." Each builder of the White Sea Canal was called a "prisoned canal soldier" or abbreviated as "ze-ka", from which the slang word "zek" came from. Campaign posters of that time read: “Your term will melt from hot work!” Indeed, many of those who made it to the end of construction alive had their deadlines reduced. On average, the death rate reached 700 people a day. “Hot work” also influenced nutrition: the more the “ze-ka” worked out, the more impressive the “rations” received. Standard - 500 gr. bread and seaweed gruel.

Baikal-Amur Mainline

One of the largest railway lines in the world was built with huge interruptions, starting from 1938 and ending in 1984. The most difficult section - the North-Musky Tunnel - was put into permanent operation and only in 2003. The initiator of the construction was Stalin. Songs were composed about BAM, laudatory articles were published in newspapers, films were made. The construction was positioned as a feat of youth and, of course, no one knew that prisoners who had survived after the construction of the White Sea Canal were sent to the construction site in 1934. In the 1950s, about 50 thousand prisoners worked at BAM. Each meter of BAM is worth one human life.

Volga-Don Canal

An attempt to connect the Don and the Volga was made by Peter the Great in 1696. In the 30s of the last century, a construction project was created, but the war prevented its implementation. Work resumed in 1943 immediately after the end of the Battle of Stalingrad. However, the date of commencement of construction should still be considered 1948, when the first earthworks began. In addition to volunteers and military builders, 236,000 prisoners and 100,000 prisoners of war took part in the construction of the canal route and its facilities. In journalism one can find descriptions of the most terrible conditions in which prisoners lived. Dirty and lousy from the lack of the opportunity to wash regularly (there was one bath for everyone), half-starved and sick - this is how the disenfranchised "builders of communism" actually looked. The canal was built in 4.5 years - and this is a unique period in the world history of the construction of hydraulic structures.

Plan for the transformation of nature

The plan was adopted at the initiative of Stalin in 1948 after a drought and a raging famine of 46-47. The plan included the creation of forest belts, which were supposed to block the hot southeast winds - dry winds, which would change the climate. Forest belts were planned to be located on an area of ​​​​120 million hectares - that's how much England, Italy, France, the Netherlands and Belgium occupy together. The plan also included the construction of an irrigation system, during which 4,000 reservoirs appeared. It was planned to complete the project before 1965. More than 4 million hectares of forest were planted, and the total length of forest belts was 5,300 km. The state solved the country's food problem, while part of the bread began to be exported. After Stalin's death in 1953, the program was curtailed, and in 1962 the USSR was again shaken by a food crisis - bread and flour disappeared from the shelves, and there were shortages of sugar and butter.

Volzhskaya HPP

The construction of the largest hydroelectric power plant in Europe began in the summer of 1953. Next to the construction site, in the tradition of that time, the Gulag was deployed - the Akhtubinsky ITL, which employed more than 25 thousand prisoners. They were engaged in laying roads, laying power lines and general preparatory work. They, of course, were not allowed to directly work on the construction of a hydroelectric power station. Sappers also worked at the facility, who were engaged in clearing the site for future construction and the bottom of the Volga - the proximity to Stalingrad made itself felt. About 40 thousand people and 19 thousand various mechanisms and cars. In 1961, having turned from the "Stalingrad HPP" into the "Volzhskaya HPP named after the 21st Congress of the CPSU", the station was put into operation. It was solemnly opened by Khrushchev himself. The HPP was a gift for the 21st Congress, at which Nikita Sergeevich, by the way, announced his intention to build communism by 1980.

Bratsk HPP

The construction of a hydroelectric power station began in 1954 on the Angara River. The small village of Bratsk soon grew into a large city. The construction of the hydroelectric power station was positioned as a shock Komsomol construction site. Hundreds of thousands of Komsomol members from all over the Union came to the development of Siberia. Until 1971, the Bratsk Hydroelectric Power Plant was the largest in the world, and the Bratsk Reservoir became the world's largest artificial reservoir. When it was filled, about 100 villages were flooded. The tragedy of "Angara Atlantis", in particular, is dedicated to the penetrating work of Valentin Rasputin "Farewell to Matyora".

Cthe construction of grandiose structures is always associated with huge material costs and human losses. But many of the great construction projects of the Soviet Union were bloody in the full sense of the word. And if almost everyone knows about the construction of the White Sea Canal, then the word "Algemba" can only say a lot to historians. And the Baikal-Amur Mainline (BAM), which is still called the “Komsomol construction site” in many textbooks, was built by no means only by Komsomol members.

Algemba: About 35,000 people died!

The most cruel ruler of the Soviet Union is traditionally considered Stalin, who violated the precepts of Ilyich. It is he who is credited with the creation of a network of camps (GULAG), it was he who initiated the construction of the White Sea Canal by the forces of prisoners. The fact that one of the first construction projects took place under the direct supervision of Lenin is somehow forgotten. And no wonder: all the materials related to Algemba - the first attempt of the young Soviet government to acquire its own oil pipeline - were classified for a long time.

In December 1919, the Frunze army captured the Emba oil fields in northern Kazakhstan. By that time, more than 14 million poods of oil had accumulated there. This oil could be a salvation for the Soviet republic. On December 24, 1919, the Council of the Workers' and Peasants' Defense decided to start construction of a railway through which oil could be transported from Kazakhstan to the center, and ordered: "Recognize the construction of the Alexandrov Gai-Emba broad-gauge line as an operational task." The city of Alexandrov Gai, located 300 km from Saratov, was the last railway point. The distance from it to the oil fields was about 500 versts. Most of the way ran through waterless saline steppes. It was decided to build the highway from both ends at the same time and meet on the Ural River near the village of Grebenshchikovo.

Frunze's army was the first to be thrown into the construction of the railway (despite his protests). There was no transport, no fuel, no sufficient food. In the conditions of the waterless steppe, there was nowhere even to place soldiers. Endemic diseases began, which developed into an epidemic. The local population was forcibly involved in the construction: about forty-five thousand residents of Saratov and Samara. People practically manually created an embankment along which the rails were to be laid later.

In March 1920, the task became even more complicated: it was decided to pull the pipeline in parallel with the railway. It was then that the word "Algemba" was first heard (from the first letters of Aleksandrov Gai and the name of the deposit - Emba). There were no pipes, like everything else. The only plant that once produced them has long been standing. The remains were collected from warehouses, they were enough for 15 versts at best (and it was necessary to lay 500!). Lenin began to look for an alternative solution. At first it was proposed to produce wooden pipes. Specialists just shrugged their shoulders: firstly, it is impossible to maintain the necessary pressure in them, and secondly, Kazakhstan does not have its own forests, there is nowhere to get wood. Then it was decided to dismantle sections of existing pipelines. The pipes varied greatly in length and diameter, but this did not bother the Bolsheviks. Another thing was embarrassing: the collected "spare parts" were still not enough even for half of the pipeline! However, work continued.

By the end of 1920, construction began to suffocate. Typhus claimed several hundred people a day. Guards were posted along the highway, because local residents began to pull apart the sleepers. Workers generally refused to go to work. Food rations were extremely low (especially in the Kazakh sector). Lenin demanded to understand the causes of sabotage. But there was no sabotage in sight. Hunger, cold and disease collected a terrible tribute among the builders. In 1921, cholera came to the construction site. Despite the courage of the doctors who voluntarily arrived at Algemba, the mortality rate was appalling. But the worst thing was different: four months after the start of the construction of Algemba, already in April 1920, Baku and Grozny were liberated. The Emba oil was no longer needed. Thousands of lives sacrificed to the construction site turned out to be in vain.

It was possible even then to stop the senseless activity of laying the Algemba. But Lenin stubbornly insisted on the continuation of construction, which cost the state fabulously expensive. In 1920, the government allocated a billion rubles in cash for this construction. No one has ever received a full report, but there is an assumption that the funds settled in foreign accounts. Neither railway, nor the pipeline was built: on October 6, 1921, the construction was stopped by Lenin's directive. A year and a half of Algemba cost thirty-five thousand human lives.

Belomorkanal: 700 deaths a day!

The initiator of the construction of the White Sea Canal was Joseph Stalin. The country needed labor victories, global achievements. And preferably without extra costs, insofar as Soviet Union experienced an economic crisis. The White Sea Canal was supposed to connect the White Sea with the Baltic Sea and open a passage for ships that previously had to go around the entire Scandinavian Peninsula. The idea of ​​creating an artificial passage between the seas was known as early as the time of Peter the Great (and the Russians have been using the portage system along the entire length of the future White Sea Canal for a long time). But the method of implementing the project (and Naftaly Frenkel was appointed head of the canal construction) turned out to be so cruel that it forced historians and publicists to look for parallels in the slave-owning states.

The total length of the canal is 227 kilometers. There are 19 locks (13 of which are two-chamber), 15 dams, 49 dams, 12 spillways on this waterway. The scale of construction is amazing, especially considering that all this was built in an incredibly short time: 20 months and 10 days. For comparison: the 80-kilometer Panama Canal took 28 years to build, and the 160-kilometer Suez Canal took ten.

The White Sea Canal was built from beginning to end by the forces of prisoners. Convicted designers created drawings, found extraordinary technical solutions (dictated by the lack of machines and materials). Those who did not have an education suitable for designing spent day and night digging a canal, waist-deep in liquid mud, driven not only by overseers, but also by members of their brigade: those who did not fulfill the norm were reduced to an already meager diet. This was one road: into concrete (the dead were not buried on the White Sea Canal, but simply fell asleep at random in pits, which were then filled with concrete and served as the bottom of the canal).

The main tools of labor in the construction were a wheelbarrow, a sledgehammer, a shovel, an ax and a wooden crane for moving boulders. The prisoners, unable to withstand the unbearable conditions of detention and overwork, died by the hundreds. At times, the death rate reached 700 people a day. Meanwhile, the newspapers printed editorials devoted to the "reforging by labor" of hardened recidivists and political criminals. Of course, it was not without postscripts and eyewash. The canal bed was made shallower than it was calculated in the project, and the start of construction was retroactively postponed to 1932 (in fact, work began a year earlier).

About 280 thousand prisoners took part in the construction of the canal, of which about 100 thousand died. The remaining survivors (every sixth) had their sentences reduced, and some were even awarded the Order of the Baltic-White Sea Canal. The heads of the OGPU in full force were awarded orders. Stalin, who visited the opened canal at the end of July 1933, was pleased. The system has shown its effectiveness. There was only one snag: the most physically strong and hard-working prisoners earned a reduction in terms.

In 1938, at a meeting of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, Stalin raised the question: “Did you correctly propose a list for the release of these prisoners? They leave their jobs… We are doing a bad job of disrupting the work of the camps. The release of these people, of course, is necessary, but from the point of view of the state economy, this is bad ... They will be released the best people and stay the worst. Is it possible to turn things around in a different way so that these people stay at work - give awards, orders, maybe? .. ”But, fortunately for the prisoners, such a decision was not made: a prisoner with a government award on a robe would look too strange …

BAM: 1 meter - 1 human life!

In 1948, with the start of the construction of the subsequent “great construction projects of communism” (Volga-Don Canal, Volga-Baltic waterway, Kuibyshev and Stalingrad hydroelectric power stations and other facilities), the authorities used an already proven method: they built large forced labor camps serving construction sites. And it was easy to find those who would fill the vacancies of the slaves. Only by the decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Council of June 4, 1947 “On criminal liability for theft of state and public property”, hundreds of thousands of people got into the zone. The labor of convicts was used in the most labor-intensive and "harmful" industries.

In 1951, the Minister of Internal Affairs of the USSR S.N. Kruglov reported at the meeting: “I must say that in a number of industries National economy The Ministry of Internal Affairs occupies a monopoly position, for example, the gold mining industry - it is all concentrated in our country; the production of diamonds, silver, platinum - all this is entirely concentrated in the Ministry of Internal Affairs; asbestos and apatite mining - entirely in the Ministry of Internal Affairs. We are 100% involved in the production of tin, 80% specific gravity occupies the Ministry of Internal Affairs for non-ferrous metals…” The Minister did not mention only one thing: 100% of the radium in the country was also produced by prisoners.

The greatest Komsomol construction project in the world - BAM, about which songs were composed, films were made, enthusiastic articles were written - did not begin at all with a call to youth. The construction of the railway, which was supposed to connect Taishet on the Trans-Siberian Railway with Komsomolsk-on-Amur, was sent in 1934 to the prisoners who built the White Sea Canal. According to Jacques Rossi's Guide to the Gulag (and this is the most objective this moment book about the camp system) about 50,000 prisoners worked at BAM in the 1950s.

Especially for the needs of the construction site, a new camp for prisoners was created - BAMlag, the zone of which stretched from Chita to Khabarovsk. The daily ration was traditionally meager: a loaf of bread and a stew of frozen fish. There were not enough barracks for everyone. People died from cold and scurvy (in order to delay the approach of this terrible disease for a while, they chewed pine needles). For several years, more than 2.5 thousand kilometers of the railway were built. Historians have calculated: each meter of BAM is paid for by one human life.

The official history of the construction of the Baikal-Amur Mainline began in 1974, during the Brezhnev era. Echelons with young people were drawn to BAM. The prisoners continued to work, but their participation in the "construction of the century" was hushed up. And ten years later, in 1984, a “golden crutch” was driven in, symbolizing the end of another gigantic construction site, which is still associated with smiling young romantics who are not afraid of difficulties.

These construction projects have a lot in common: and the fact that the projects were difficult to implement (in particular, the BAM and the Belomorkanal were conceived back in Tsarist Russia, but due to the lack budget funds lay down "under the cloth"), and the fact that the work was carried out with minimal technical support, and the fact that slaves were used instead of workers (otherwise it is difficult to name the position of the builders). But perhaps the most terrible common feature is that all these roads (both land and water) are many kilometers of mass graves. When you read dry statistical calculations, Nekrasov's words come to mind: “But on the sides, all the bones are Russian. How many of them, Vanechka, do you know?” www.stroyplanerka.ru/AuxView.aspx

KOMSOMOL CONSTRUCTIONS in the USSR,

1) one of the ways to organize construction and redistribution work force in the national economy.

2) National economic facilities, the responsibility for the construction of which was assumed by the Komsomol. They also had an ideological significance: they were supposed to serve as an example of a communist attitude to work. The status of a Komsomol construction site was given construction sites to ensure timely and high-quality completion of their construction at the lowest cost. The most significant national economic objects received the status of All-Union shock Komsomol construction projects. They were mainly located in remote and sparsely populated areas. The list of Komsomol construction projects was approved by the Bureau of the Central Committee of the All-Union Leninist Young Communist League on the basis of proposals from party, trade union and Komsomol bodies, ministries and departments and in agreement with the State Planning Committee of the USSR and the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions. Komsomol construction projects were completed labor force through the so-called public appeals of young people and military personnel transferred to the reserve, carried out by the Central Committee of the Komsomol, as well as through temporary voluntary Komsomol youth construction teams. Komsomol construction sites practiced their own methods of labor organization. There were Komsomol headquarters (they worked under the leadership of the Komsomol construction committee), which included young workers, foremen and specialists, representatives of economic and trade union bodies, Komsomol activists of assembly and specialized organizations, subcontracting units. Headquarters together with trade union organizations held a competition among the Komsomol youth teams. In brigades, at construction sites, posts of the "Komsomol searchlight" were created to fight for strengthening labor discipline, saving building materials effective use of technology. The "Chronicle of shock construction" was conducted, in which the names of young workers and specialists, Komsomol and youth groups who made a significant contribution to the implementation of construction plans were entered.

The first Komsomol construction project was the construction of the Volkhov hydroelectric power station. In the 1920s and 30s, Selmashstroy (Rostov-on-Don), Traktorostroy (Stalingrad), Uralmashstroy, the construction of the Ural-Kuznetsk Metallurgical Plant, Komsomolsk-on-Amur, the first stage of the Moscow Metro, the Akmolinsk-Kartala railway line were declared Komsomol construction projects. , development of oil fields in the Volga-Ural oil and gas province, etc. In the 1950-70s, the All-Union shock Komsomol construction projects included the construction of the Bratsk, Dneprodzerzhinsk, Krasnoyarsk hydroelectric power plants, nuclear power plants, the Ufa-Omsk, Omsk-Irkutsk oil pipeline, Bukhara-Ural gas pipelines , Saratov - Gorky, the railway line Abakan - Taishet, the Baikal-Amur railway, the first stages of a number of plants (Krasnoyarsk, Irkutsk and Pavlodar aluminum, Angarsk and Omsk oil refineries, West Siberian and Karaganda metallurgical) and others. All-Union shock Komsomol construction projects in 1959 year was the construction of 114 enterprises ty industry and transport (154 in 1962, 135 in 1982, 63 in 1987). The principles of labor organization adopted at Komsomol construction sites were also applied in the development of virgin lands in Kazakhstan, Altai, and the Novosibirsk region. In connection with the dissolution of the Komsomol in September 1991, the organization of Komsomol construction projects ceased.

V. K. Krivoruchenko.

Part 1

In December, while turning the map in Google Earth, I came across a strange object. In general, I didn’t specifically look for it, somehow it happened by chance that I singled it out among the surrounding area. Among the steppe expanses of the left bank of the Volga, a strange ribbon of structures incomprehensible at first glance stretches. It is a broken line, consisting of 4 green segments parallel to each other. I immediately thought of ordinary forest plantations along fields and roads, but this did not fit into the category of ordinary ones. The width of the structure is about a kilometer, each individual link is completely straight, does not repeat the folds of the terrain and ignores the roads. There are no roads at all along this line, occasionally small roads only cross it. I will not torment with naked text, I will show what I saw.

It somewhat resembles a system of trenches, only the scale is cyclopean. When I tried to find the ends of this tape, I was even more amazed. The tape stretches from north to south, starting at the city of Chapaevsk near Samara, and ends at the village of Vodyanka exactly on the border of the Saratov and Volgograd regions. With all the elbows, the length is over 600 km and almost nowhere the tape is interrupted and does not change its thickness! I found only one gap in 7 km. In the above image, the camera height is 36.6 km, but the line is visible from a height of 100 km. What is it?

In general, I lost my peace and began to collect information. Perhaps you all know about this, and will laugh at my denseness. But among my friends and colleagues, no one could tell me anything about this structure. Maybe among the readers of this post there will be people who did not know anything about this, like me, I am writing for them.
For me, it was all the more interesting because I had driven many times on the roads through this strip and taken many photographs in the immediate vicinity of it, but I never paid attention to a strange object, in comparison with which the Great Wall of China looks like a light fence.

What I found on the map turned out to be a state protective forest belt in the direction of Chapaevsk - Vladimirovka. Was built as part of the implementation Decree of the Council of Ministers of the USSR and the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks of October 20, 1948 No. 3960 “On the plan for field-protective afforestation, the introduction of grass-field crop rotations, the construction of ponds and reservoirs to ensure high and stable yields in the steppe and forest-steppe regions of the European part of the USSR”.
The plan itself was adopted at the initiative and signed by I.V. Stalin and went down in history as "Stalin's plan for the transformation of nature."
As Wikipedia says about it: “The plan had no precedents in world experience in terms of scale. In accordance with this plan, forest strips were to be planted to block the road from dry winds and change the climate on an area of ​​​​120 million hectares, equal to the territories of England, France, Italy, Belgium and the Netherlands combined. Field-protective afforestation and irrigation occupied a central place in the plan.

According to this plan, it was planned “to create during 1950-1965 the following large state forest belts:
- State protective forest belt from Saratov to Astrakhan on both banks of the Volga River, 100 meters wide and 900 kilometers long;
- State protective forest belt in the direction of Penza - Yekaterinovka - Veshenskaya - Kamensk on the Northern Donets, on the watersheds of the rivers Khopra and Medveditsa, Kalitva and Berezovaya, consisting of three strips 60 meters wide each with a distance between strips of 300 meters and a length of 600 kilometers;
- State protective forest strip in the direction of Kamyshin - Stalingrad, on the watershed of the Volga and Ilovlya rivers, consisting of three strips 60 meters wide each with a distance between strips of 300 meters and a length of 170 kilometers;
- State protective forest strip in the direction of Chapaevsk - Vladimirovka, consisting of four strips 60 meters wide each with a distance between strips of 300 meters and a length of 580 kilometers;
- State protective forest strip in the direction of Stalingrad - Stepnoy - Cherkessk, consisting of four strips 60 meters wide each with a distance between strips of 300 meters and a length of 570 kilometers;
- State protective forest strip in the direction of Mount Vishnevaya - Chkalov - Uralsk - Caspian Sea along the banks of the Ural River, consisting of six strips (3 along the right and 3 along the left bank) 60 meters wide each with a distance between strips of 100 - 200 meters and a length 1080 kilometers;
- State protective forest strip Voronezh - Rostov-on-Don on both banks of the Don River, 60 meters wide and 920 kilometers long; State protective forest belt on both banks of the Northern Donets River from the mountains. Belgorod to the Don River, 30 meters wide and 500 kilometers long.

And this is only part of the plan. After the implementation of the plan, the territory of the USSR was supposed to look like this:

In the development of this plan, a number of special resolutions were adopted to stimulate the construction and modernization of hydraulic structures. These include the construction of a cascade of hydroelectric power stations on the Volga, the main Turkmen canal Amu-Darya - Krasnovodsk, the creation of the "Siberian Sea" - connecting the Ob with the Irtysh, Tobol and Ishim using a reservoir of 260 thousand square meters. km ("eight Netherlands"). Then, within the framework of the same plan, it was planned to build a water supply canal to Aral Sea or rivers flowing into it. By the way, by Siberian Sea work began in 1950, but already in 1951 they were suspended: Stalin questioned the ecological safety of the project, requesting the relevant details. He did not wait until his death...

These global projects were called by the propaganda "Great construction sites of communism" and were visually depicted as follows:

If you followed the link and got acquainted with the resolution, you probably noticed how detailed this plan was. Species of trees and shrubs are recommended for each section of each of the protective belts. For example, for the strip that I came across in Google Earth, the following are selected: the main ones are oak, birch, ash and small-leaved elm; accompanying - common elm, Tatar maple; shrubs - yellow acacia, steppe cherry, tamarix, narrow-leaved sucker, Tatar honeysuckle and golden currant. The deadlines for completion, the forces involved for this, and those responsible are indicated.

Incentives for the implementation of this plan are prescribed as a separate item. For example: for the survival rate in the first year after planting at least 80 percent of the number of planted trees and shrubs in the entire area assigned to the link, charge an additional 10 workdays for each hectare of forest plantations;

To develop and implement the plan, the Agrolesproekt Institute (now the Rosgiproles Institute) was created. According to his projects, four large watersheds of the basins of the Dnieper, Don, Volga, Urals, and the European south of Russia were covered with forests. The first state forest belt designed by Agrolesproekt stretched out from Ural mountain Cherry to the Caspian coast, the length is more than a thousand kilometers. The total length of large state shelterbelts exceeded 5,300 km. 2.3 million hectares of forest were planted in these strips.

Once again, nowhere in the world have such large-scale projects to change the landscape and microclimate been carried out, and perhaps never will be carried out. Even in the USSR, where the main burden of fulfilling this plan fell on the collective farmers, who were paid with workdays, it turned out to be impossible to fulfill all this. But what has been done is amazing.

Actually, the idea was not new. The great Russian soil scientist V.V. Dokuchaev. He is credited with creating the Russian-Soviet school of soil science, thanks to which the words "podzol" and "chernozem" have become as common as "sputnik", and which should be proud of no less than astronautics. Dokuchaev's idea was to create a new landscape structure consciously created by man, which would increase the overall fertility of the territory and ensure sustainable agricultural yields. It was proposed to create a continuous network of wide forest belts, dividing the treeless steppe into isolated fields. Forest belts would provide an improvement in the microclimate and a significant increase in soil moisture during dry periods compared to the open steppe.
The first ever strategic plan for optimizing steppe environmental management, the Dokuchaev plan for combating drought, is already over 100 years old. This is the first plan for the conscious design of the steppe landscape, developed and began to be implemented in the 80-90s of the 19th century by the "Special Expedition for Testing and Accounting various ways and methods of forestry and water management in the steppes of Russia”, on the initiative of the Free Economic Society. In 1892, the book of the head of the "Special Expedition" V.V. Dokuchaev "Our steppes before and now" was published, in which a plan was laid out for the transformation of nature and agriculture of the steppe for a complete victory over the drought.
The Dokuchaev plan was agricultural and was aimed at obtaining sustainable yields and maintaining soil fertility through mass strip afforestation - the creation of a continuous network of forest belts of various ranks, structure and a certain orientation, dividing the territory into rectangular sections and delineating beams and ravines, mass construction of reservoirs and the introduction of a grass field system agriculture. Forest belts were supposed to occupy 10-20% of the total area of ​​the steppe territories.

The need to create a large-regional program of ecological optimization for the southern forest-steppe, steppe and dry-steppe regions was realized by Soviet scientists for the second time (after Dokuchaev's attempts) in the 30s of the XX century after another series of signs indicating the ecological imbalance of the territory - terrible dust storms, which literally during For several hours, crops were destroyed on hundreds of thousands of hectares, and moreover, the basis of the foundations - the soil, tearing off the entire arable horizon in some places.

Actually, the resolution of the Council of Ministers of the USSR of October 20, 1948 "On the plan for field-protective afforestation ..." was dictated by the consequences of the drought in 1946. Western Siberia and in Kazakhstan it led to the famine of 1947. According to various estimates, from 0.5 to 1 million people died from the famine.
It was then that it was decided to extend Dokuchaev's farming methods to the entire drought-prone zone of the USSR, and thereby put an end to the instability of crops, and hence to famine. The ideologists of this plan were V.R. Williams and L.I. Prasolov. But authorship, of course, was attributed to whom it was necessary.

As the name of the resolution implies, the plan was not limited to the creation of forest belts. Along with them, the resolution provided for the creation of field-protective forest plantations on the fields of collective farms and state farms on a total area of ​​5709 thousand hectares. At the same time, grass-field crop rotations were introduced on the fields of collective farms and state farms, ensuring the restoration of soil fertility, and the construction of 44 thousand ponds and reservoirs was envisaged. Such is the volume of work outlined by the Stalinist plan for the alteration of the nature of the arid steppes.

One of the main objectives of this plan is to transform and improve the water regime of soils by changing the conditions for the runoff of melt and rainwater, as well as evaporation from the surface of agricultural fields. Forest strips, creating additional roughness, reduce wind speed and contribute to a more even distribution of snow and an increase in snow reserves in open spaces.

In the spring, during the snowmelt period, and in some cases in the summer, during the rains, the forest belts will retain surface runoff and transfer it to subsoil runoff, which contributes to the replenishment ground water and raise their level. Reducing wind speeds, as well as the cloddy structure of soils, will help reduce unproductive evaporation from the soil surface. As a result, the water regime of agricultural fields will change; they will receive significant additional nutrition, due to which an increase in productivity will be achieved.

V in general terms the impact of forest plantations and agrotechnical measures on the water regime of the rivers of the steppe and forest-steppe zones will be expressed as follows:

1. The spring flood in the rivers will be more extended due to the deceleration of the runoff of melt water by forest belts. The duration of floods will increase, the size of maximum discharges will decrease, and the volume of meltwater runoff will decrease.
2. The groundwater supply of rivers will increase and, accordingly, their water content will increase during low water periods.
3. Water erosion and the damage caused by it will decrease sharply: planar soil erosion will decrease and ravine erosion will stop.
4. The removal of chemically dissolved substances will decrease.

As happened with all the great construction projects in the USSR, the people began to put the plan into action with great enthusiasm. In a matter of years, trees and shrubs were planted on millions of hectares of steppes. Dozens of new forest nurseries grew more planting material. The upper reaches of the ravines and gullies were planted with trees, the mouths of the ravines were fixed with wattle fences and hedges, and ponds lined with trees were built in natural hollows. In addition to collective farmers, schoolchildren were widely involved. It turned out by chance that my mother also took part in these events in her childhood. The kids collected bags of ripe acorns in oak forests, planted seedlings in future forest belts.

Simultaneously with the establishment of a system of field-protective afforestations, a large program was launched to create irrigation systems. To support the life of small rivers, dams with water mills and power plants were built. To solve the problems associated with the implementation of the five-year plan for land reclamation, the Institute of Water Management Engineers named after V.R. Williams.

The plan envisaged not only the absolute food self-sufficiency of the Soviet Union, but also an increase in the export of domestic grain and meat products from the second half of the 1960s. The created forest belts and reservoirs were supposed to significantly diversify the flora and fauna of the USSR. Thus, the plan combined the tasks of protecting environment and obtaining high sustainable yields.

The concept of the plan not only preceded modern constructions on sustainable ecological development of territories, but also surpassed them. “The world gasped at the grandeur and grandeur of this plan,” noted writer Vladimir Chivilikhin. It was the world's largest environmental program.

It seemed that a few more years, and the plan would be fully implemented, and the country would finally come to abundance. But why is this Great construction of communism not at the hearing now? And we know that instead of exporting grain in the 60s, our country began to import it. What happened?

You can’t describe this in a nutshell, the post turned out to be quite long, so I suggest that you familiarize yourself with the answers to these questions in Part 2.

Part 2. Collapse.

As I wrote in a previous post, the Stalinist plan for the transformation of nature was rushing by leaps and bounds to a victorious conclusion. But suddenly the implementation of the plan was suspended, then completely curtailed and forgotten. Even the idiologeme "Great construction projects of communism" began to be used in relation to completely different projects, such as the Belomorkanal, DneproGES, Magnitka ...

The curtailment of the Stalinist plan began almost immediately after the death of I.V. Stalin. The chronology of events is fairly well traced. Already in the 20th of April 1953, the Council of Ministers of the USSR issued a decree No. 1144, according to which all work on protective afforestation was suspended. In order to implement this legislative act, forest protection stations were liquidated, the positions of agro-ameliorators were reduced, plans for artificial forest plantations were excluded from the general reporting of all organizations, and the forest belts themselves were transferred to the land use of collective farms and state farms.
Many forest belts were cut down, several thousand ponds and reservoirs that were intended for fish breeding were abandoned, 570 forest protection stations were liquidated.
By the way, in the same spring, such “Great construction projects of communism” as the Salekhard-Igarka railway, the Baikal-Amur Mainline, the Krasnoyarsk-Yeniseisk tunnel, the Main Turkmen Canal and the Volga-Baltic waterway ceased to exist.

What caused such an inglorious end to a grandiose plan? And this is where sources of information usually stumble. That is, many articles have been written about state forest belts, their benefits and the scale of their construction project. But the explanation of the refusal to build them is everywhere crumpled. The general meaning of the statements: “N.S. Khrushchev is a fool, he ruined good plan purely out of stupidity."

Khrushchev is a fool or not, a topic for a separate discussion, but this argument seemed weak to me. There must be clear reasons for refusing to transform nature in the USSR. Despite the fact that I could not find a detailed criticism of this plan. That is, everyone was FOR under Stalin, and so far everyone is FOR, but the plan was curtailed.

But what intelligible posters were drawn

As a result, the answers had to be collected bit by bit, sifting through dozens of articles on the net.

Departure from the plan in connection with the fight against the cult of personality I.V. Stalin does not stand up to criticism. In the spring of 1953, even such words were not used - the "cult of personality" in relation to the beloved leader, who rested in the mausoleum.

Stupidity N.S. Khrushchev also does not explain these events at all. The fact is that after the death of Stalin, Khrushchev did not immediately become the sole leader. The events of the spring of 1953 are generally full of dark spots, the details of what actually happened in Moscow during these months are little known. In any case, in the days when the decision was made to curtail the plan for the transformation of nature, at the helm of the USSR was a triumvirate - Beria, Malenkov, Khrushchev.
The decision to terminate the series large-scale construction projects, including hydraulic engineering, received L.P. Beria. By the way, after his arrest, G.M. Malenkov, and during his reign the plan was finally buried. N.S. Khrushchev began to come out on top and fight for sole leadership in 1955, when the deed was already done.

The Stalinist plan for the transformation of nature had to be abandoned because it did not justify hopes. There was no abundance. Moreover, the continuation of this plan threatened economic and environmental disasters. Here is such a paradox. Yes, the construction of protective forest belts was an effective protection against dry winds, and the events in the United States, where in the 1930s such events, albeit carried out on a smaller scale, clearly proved this. But in practice, the implementation of the plan revealed difficulties that could not be overcome.

Firstly, there was an all-Union template for planting trees, which was far from suitable for all conditions. The result of this approach was the poor survival of trees and large losses of timber. Secondly, there was a directive from the Ministry of Agriculture forbidding the creation of fields inside forest belts with an area of ​​less than 100 hectares. This norm was also not suitable for any steppe conditions.

The creation of industrial oak forests in general was the most adventurous part of the Stalinist plan. In fact, the experience of creating forest areas, especially in the conditions of the south and southeast, was very limited. However, in June 1949, on the proposal of the Main Directorate of Protective Afforestation and the USSR Ministry of Forestry, a decision was made to create industrial oak forests in the Astrakhan, Volgograd and Rostov regions on an area of ​​100, 137 and 170 thousand hectares, respectively (subsequently, industrial oak forests were created in the Stavropol Territory).
It soon became clear that the economic effect of creating industrial oak forests can only be achieved on chernozems, and in other conditions oaks do not take root well. By 1956, slightly more than 15% of oak crops were preserved.

In general, even now a heated discussion about the role of Academician T.D. Lysenko with his nesting way of planting trees in the failure of the plan. Many defend him, many blame him. Since I am a complete amateur in this matter, I will not take sides and I suggest that those who are interested turn to specialists whose articles are full on the net.

Crop rotations on farms were often arranged in such a way that the protective forest belt planned along the arrow of the axial direction of the winds turned into a corridor, “along which the wind begins to blow with great force ... dry wind will walk as it pleases.”

Newspapers at the beginning of 1953 cheerfully reported: ... The Soviet people called the grandiose plan for the transformation of the nature of our Motherland after the name of its creator - Stalin. The strip crosses five districts of the Stalingrad region. The offensive against the drought in these areas began with the planting of a protective forest belt - the first of eight huge green barriers, the planting of which is provided for by Stalin's grandiose plan for the transformation of nature.
Five years have passed since then. And now the first green bastion already exists. It was created by the hands of Komsomol members and youth of the Stalingrad region. Komsomol members of the tractor plant in Stalingrad, and then the youth of Kamyshin, Gorodishchensky, Dubovsky and Balykleysky districts took patronage over the creation of a state protective forest belt. They called it "the track of youth". The young patriots gave their word to complete the planting of the green barrier not in 15 years, as envisaged by the plan, but in three and a half years! ...
Even before the start of the main work, the boys and girls of Stalingrad and Kamyshin produced more than 30 thousand different tools, 30 tractor trailers for the sponsored forest protection stations. A large army of pioneers responded to the call of the Komsomol members. Schoolchildren collected and handed over dozens of tons of tree and shrub seeds to forest protection stations.

But you will not be fed up with children's and youthful enthusiasm. In 1953, a poor harvest brought the country to the brink of starvation. The grain production reserves were almost exhausted. The new leaders of the USSR agreed that the food situation was critical. This problem should have been solved first. Something needed to be done. Therefore, it was decided to start new reforms.

Life in the countryside was extremely difficult. By the beginning of the 50s. flight from the countryside, despite the presence of a passport regime in the cities, has become a mass phenomenon: in just four years - from 1949 to 1953, the number of able-bodied collective farmers in collective farms (excluding western regions) decreased by 3.3 million people. The situation in the countryside was so catastrophic that the prepared project for increasing the agricultural tax in 1952 to 40 billion rubles. was not accepted.
The situation was very bad, taking into account grain collections. For example, in October 1952, Malenkov, speaking at the XIX Congress of the CPSU, announced that the grain problem in the USSR had been solved, since the harvest had reached 130 million tons. In August 1953, the same Malenkov stated that this figure was overestimated, since it was based on biological statistics.

This lively statistics still pleases the eyes of gullible readers. Here is what the History of the Socialist Economy of the USSR says: The measures taken led to an increase in grain yields by 25-30%, vegetables - by 50-75%, herbs - by 100-200%...
... Managed to create a solid feed base for the development of animal husbandry. The production of meat and lard in 1951 compared with 1948 increased by 1.8 times, including pork by 2 times, milk production by 1.65, eggs by 3.4, wool by 1.5. ".

So, they planted acorns in the ground, and two years later pork production doubled. Not forest belts, but some kind of cornucopia.

The reality was sadder. As we have seen, this plan, and most importantly, its practical implementation, had shortcomings. Their main reason was insufficient consideration and understanding of the characteristics of steppe ecosystems and the steppe biome. In fact, the premise that afforestation guarantees the stability of the steppe landscape turned out to be erroneous. Ecology, on the other hand, was not sufficiently developed and could not seriously affect the implementation of the plan. Also, a negative role was played by the fact that the plan developed mainly for the European steppes was implemented without any changes throughout the steppe zone, i.e. in other conditions.
The result was a certain stabilization of the ecological situation, but this could not stop the transition of the entire steppe ecosystem, so to speak, to the "lower stage". For example, it was not possible to restore the former fertility of the soil. In other words, the steppe nature began to function at a lower level, which does not make it possible to receive such generous products as before.

But the remnants of the forest belts, which have survived to this day, continue to play their field-protective role.
A much bigger problem was created by the irrigation component of the plan for the transformation of nature. For its implementation, gigantic funds were thrown out, which the peasants so needed, and the effect turned out to be negative. Miscalculations in planning, stereotyped decisions, low qualifications at all levels of execution led to very serious consequences, as a result of which the actual yield decreased.

Since we are talking about forest belts, I will not touch on irrigation systems. I propose to get acquainted separately with how things were, for example, in Tambov region.

The fate of the Karakum Canal is also indicative in this respect. Such large-scale hydraulic structures really transform nature. Residents of Volgograd, for example, can observe the Volga becoming shallower every year, and residents of Saratov - sterlets, which remain only on the coat of arms of the city.

In general, the grandiose project, certainly necessary in essence, contained a number of voluntaristic decisions related to the neglect of natural laws.
The reasons for the failure of the plan, among which dominated, on the one hand, resource insecurity, on the other hand, the unacceptably low quality of work, which is determined by its unfeasibility at the level of socio-economic and scientific and technological development at which the country was in the 1930s-50s .

The post again came out voluminous, so I'll have to write another one to finish the topic. In it, I plan to talk about the current life of state protective forest belts and, in general, about what mark the Stalinist plan for transforming nature left in the history of our country.

Part 3

Part 3. Legacy.

Finishing a series of posts about state protective forest belts, I want to talk today about what remains today from the Stalinist plan for the transformation of nature.
While looking for material on the topic, I suddenly discovered a curious fact. Residents and guests of Moscow can see a kind of monument to this plan. The design of the metro station Paveletskaya (ring) is dedicated to him. Apparently, this monument is now becoming an artifact, since few people know about it (I judge by myself: I often get on the subway to this station, and never paid attention to it). Wikipedia bewilderedly reports that the banners with the names of the cities of the Volga region are depicted on the panel of the station. Mosaics on this theme are located in the ground lobby. And above the escalator there is a huge panel framed by banners on which the cities are written, between which the lanes were planned.

That is, each banner is dedicated to a specific band. You can find out more about this either at the station itself.

Now let's move on to the stripes.

1. State protective forest belt from Saratov to Astrakhan on both banks of the Volga River, 100 meters wide and 900 kilometers long;
On the left bank of the Volga, this strip now runs from the city of Engels to the south to the border Saratov region from Volgograd. This section of the strip is in good condition.


This strip passes right through the city of Engels. In the photo below, it's the green wall in the background.

Nothing remarkable in appearance, not felt close global scope project.
Unfortunately, the preserved strip is only about 120 km long, and nowhere south of the Saratov region. not viewed.

As for the right bank of the Volga, there is no strip here as such. You can find fragments of it between Saratov and Volgograd. It looks like the strip has been cut down.

2. State protective forest belt in the direction of Penza - Yekaterinovka - Veshenskaya - Kamensk on the Northern Donets, on the watersheds of the rivers Khopra and Medveditsa, Kalitva and Berezovaya, consisting of three strips 60 meters wide each with a distance between strips of 300 meters and a length of 600 kilometers;

The band has been preserved in its entirety and is in excellent condition. Today it is even longer than planned.

Departing from the Paveletsky railway station by train, you will cross this lane near the station. Yekaterinovka, Saratov region.
But, most likely, this strip will not impress you either - it looks like ordinary forest plantations.

In this photo you can see this band in the background, extending beyond the horizon.

3. State protective forest strip in the direction of Kamyshin - Stalingrad, on the watershed of the Volga and Ilovlya rivers, consisting of three strips 60 meters wide each with a distance between strips of 300 meters and a length of 170 kilometers;

The same “route of youth”, planted by the Komsomol members, about which the newspapers wrote in 1953, has been preserved throughout. Condition - Kamyshin is good, the closer to Volgograd, the more unimportant,. In some places there are traces of deforestation by geeks, but for the most part trees bend themselves, drying out.

4. State protective forest belt in the direction of Chapaevsk - Vladimirovka, consisting of four lanes 60 meters wide each with a distance between lanes of 300 meters and a length of 580 kilometers;

I found this band in the pictures from space at the very beginning. The strip is well preserved. Moreover, the Saratov people overfulfilled the plan, continuing it to the borders of the region for another 50 kilometers.

In the photo below, the stripe runs in the background. In the distance to the left you can see the beginning of 4 forest lanes after the break of the railway.

I apologize for such ugly photos. I didn’t shoot stripes at all and they fell into the frame along the way.

5. State protective forest belt in the direction of Stalingrad - Stepnoy - Cherkessk, consisting of four strips 60 meters wide each with a distance between strips of 300 meters and a length of 570 kilometers;

There is only a southern section of this strip from the river. Manych to Cherkessk. This area is in average condition. I did not find traces of this band either in Kalmykia or in the Volgograd region.

6. The state protective forest belt in the direction of Mount Vishnevaya - Chkalov - Uralsk - the Caspian Sea along the banks of the Ural River, consisting of six strips (3 along the right and 3 along the left bank) 60 meters wide each with a distance between the strips of 100 - 200 meters and 1080 kilometers long;

Today, little remains of this protective zone. By territory Orenburg region the stripes are still visible, but there are many bald spots and empty areas. And on the territory of Kazakhstan, especially to the south of Uralsk, the bands are disappearing. The sight is sad.

7. State protective forest strip Voronezh - Rostov-on-Don on both banks of the Don River, 60 meters wide and 920 kilometers long;

8. State protective forest belt on both banks of the Northern Donets River from the mountains. Belgorod to the Don River, 30 meters wide and 500 kilometers long.

It is difficult to trace these bands in the images, they are small and merge with the landscape. So it is difficult for me to judge their condition today.

That's how it is with stripes today. It appears that the forest belts are the worst preserved in the south-east of the region. That area is too little adapted for forest plantings.
Nevertheless, these forest belts have played their positive role. When the USSR was carried away by the next global project - the plowing of virgin lands, they defended the European part of Russia from dust storms as best they could. Otherwise, the arable layer from the mutilated steppes would have covered many cities.

Separately, I would like to say about those who cut down forest belts today for building cottages. Here good example people who can't see beyond their own noses. Who will need their fucking houses when the water leaves these places, everything around will be covered with dust and the area will turn into a desert.

Of course, forest belts cannot be abandoned. There are projects for their restoration and development, for example, the Green Wall of Russia project. But in fact, a lot depends on each of us. In the comments on the first post of this series, people wrote about the mass planting of forests by the people of China. The Chinese are great, I want to be happy for them.

But I would like our land to be alive and flourishing, and not a lifeless desert. If, of course, we want prosperity for our Motherland. And so that our children remember us with gratitude for the preserved and restored nature, and not curse for the disregard for their land. We don't have another one.
So I suggest getting out into nature in the spring, and not cutting down trees for firewood for barbecues, but planting new ones for the joy of yourself and your descendants.

One of the most hidden and vile myths in the USSR, now being praised by admirers, was the glorification of the supposed participation of free and ideological communist Komsomol members in industrialization or another, most often unnecessary "great building of communism", in fact, millions of armies of slaves were used on them - ZeKa: on the construction of any object - civil, military, cultural, on which the tasks of the Communist Party were carried out without sparing the free labor and lives of prisoners.

At the construction site of Moscow State University. Photo:pastvu.com

The "cheap labor" of prisoners was widely used in the first half of the last century - during the Gulag.

O skyscraper on Kotelnicheskaya embankment there are many stories and legends. One of the stories says that in the apartment of the writer Vasily Aksyonov there is a scrawled inscription "convicts built". It is also said that the prisoners posed for the sculptors who sculpted the bas-reliefs. The convicts did build a skyscraper on Kotelnicheskaya embankment, as well as Moscow State University building. The scale of attracting labor from correctional institutions was such that it allowed the use of convicts for the construction of not only industrial and military, but also civilian facilities.

Since 1934, all corrective labor camps and colonies were transferred to the jurisdiction of the main department of camps for labor settlements and places of detention of the NKVD of the USSR. In the GULAG system, central offices were created with specific economic tasks: the main directorate of the camp forestry industry (GULLP), the main directorate of camps for mining and metallurgical enterprises (GULGMP), the main directorate of railway construction camps (GULZhDS), the main directorate of airfield construction (GUAS), the main directorate of camps industrial construction (Glavpromstroy), the main department of hydrotechnical construction camps (Glavgidrostroy) and so on.

One of the activities of Glavpromstroy was housing and cultural construction. It was the forces of the prisoners of the camps of Glavpromstroy who erected skyscrapers on the Kotelnicheskaya embankment and Sparrow Hills. Finishing work the main building of the Moscow State University were made by the prisoners of the camp "Vysotny" - these are 368 people, of which 208 are women.

* * * * *
One of the many terrible pages carefully hidden by the communists for all 70 years of their brief history of the Union:

Nizhny Tagil Drama Theater them. Mamin-Sibiryak on the avenue, of course, Lenin. By whom was it built? Conscious Komsomol members? Of course, the architect and part of the builders were builders, but how many Zeks died there on it and other construction sites?

“This inscription was walled up on March 15, 1954, not to the thunder of orchestras and the noise of the crowd, but it will tell posterity that this theater was not built by the forces of the Komsomol brigades, as chronicles will claim, but was created on the blood and bones of prisoners - slaves of the twentieth century. Hey! to the coming generation, and may your life and your era not know the slavery and humiliation of man by man.

hello prisoners
I. L. Kozhin
R. G. Sharipov,
Yu. N. Nigmatulin.
March 15, 1954

According to Lev Samuilovich Liebenshtein, who in the 1950s worked at a house-building plant and supervised the construction of buildings on Theater Square, prisoners deprived of the right to correspond were immured bottles with their letters under one of the columns. What is written in them, no one knows ...

P.S. This link with the photo "suddenly disappeared", we took care of it: source:http://tagildrama.ru/hidden-partition/127-poslanie-potomkam
Nothing, this letter and the description of the use of ZEK slaves are widely known, the communists will not be able to hush up their crimes:

"When Vera Avgustovna Lotar-Shevchenko worked in the drama theater, its building was still under construction. It was built by Tagillaga prisoners, who were brought to work every morning and taken back in the evening. The construction site, as it was supposed to, was fenced with barbed wire, and there were towers, on which sentries with rifles carefully observed the movements of prisoners.

However, in March 1954, builders-prisoners managed to wall up a sheet of iron with a message to the “coming generation”.

Two years later, it was found during the repair of the floors, but times were already different - the 20th Congress of the CPSU was held, so the text of the message has been preserved. Here is what the prisoners wrote:

“This inscription was walled up on March 15, 1954, not under the thunder of orchestras and the noise of the crowd. But she will tell posterity that this theater was not built by the forces of the Komsomol brigades, ...

Did Vera Avgustovna see this construction site? Of course I saw it. And this and other construction projects in Nizhny Tagil. The labor of prisoners, "slaves of the twentieth century" was widely used in Nizhny Tagil, and in Sverdlovsk, and in hundreds of other cities of the USSR.

It was also used in Akademgorodok in the early years, from 1959 until the mid-60s, when foreigners began to visit us, incl. and dignitaries. Therefore, Academician Lavrentiev began to ask Colonel Ivanov, head of the Sibacademstroy Construction Department, to refuse to use prisoners in construction, or at least use them at such construction sites where foreigners could not see them.

Nikolai Markelovich Ivanov, in response, always said that he had a huge shortage of workers, he could not do without prisoners, and if Academician Lavrentiev put a spoke in his wheels, he would not be able to guarantee the fulfillment of the plan.

It came to trial in the district committee of the CPSU, where, of course, Academician Lavrentiev did not come, but his deputy B.V. Belyanin and head of UKS Kargaltsev. The conversation was usually on a high tone. I myself was present a couple of times at this, since it was the implementation of construction plans that was discussed.

At the same time, the position of the secretary of the district committee was very unenviable. He could not ignore the opinion of Academician Lavrentiev, but he could not force Colonel Ivanov to refuse free labor - prisoners. Let me remind you that the objects of the Minsredmash in those years were built with the massive use of the labor of prisoners, and the Sibakademstroy Construction Department was subordinate to this particular ministry ... "http://www.proza.ru/2014/01/23/152

Photo from the construction of the Drama Theater in Nizhny Tagil

Construction of the Drama Theatre. Photo taken in 1953. The first work on the construction of the drama theater began in 1951. On December 3, 1951, the laying of the walls of the Drama Theater began. By the spring of 1952 ground floor was ready.

Behind the Drama Theatre. View from the current DPP on Lenin Ave. To the right is part of the fire tower building behind the dramatic
theater. Photo taken in 1953. http://historyntagil.ru/cards/9_old_tagil_50_open.htm

One of the largest camp formations on the territory of the Urals of war and post-war times, Tagillag NKVD is dozens of camp sites with terrible working and living conditions for prisoners, terrible penal camps at Vinnovka and Serebryanka, numerous mass graves, thousands of unknown victims of hunger, disease, physical violence; these are the fates of Russians, Poles, Latvians, Soviet Germans, residents of the Central Asian republics, prisoners of war from special camps No. 153 and 245. Typhus raged in the camps, people died of beriberi, scurvy, dysentery, and froze from the terrible cold in dugouts and barracks. Prisoners of Tagillag, despite hunger, cold, illness, moral and physical humiliation, built the city and its industrial facilities, restoring the country. Here is just a short list of construction sites where the labor of prisoners ranged from 50 to 100%: NTMZ open-hearth furnaces No. 4 and 5, blast furnace No. 3, shaped-casting and rolling shops, blooming; sinter plant, Verkhne-Vyiskaya dam, Severo-Lebyazhinsky quarry, VZhR club, mine management building; coke batteries No. 3 and 4, distillation shop and other objects of coke production; cement, slate and brick factories; Hoffmann furnaces No. 3 and 4 at a refractory plant; streets of residential buildings in the city; tankodrome and access roads to Uralvagonstroy; Chernoistochinsky dam; the second stage of the Goroblagodatsky mine and much more.

And now Stalin was gone, but the prisoners remained, and slave labor was in demand during the construction of the drama theater, they tried to erase their memory from our history altogether, and the labor exploits of the slave prisoners were recorded at the expense of Komsomol members and communists, glorifying and strengthening ideological dogmas totalitarian regime.

Tagillag ceased to exist in 1953, but did not leave the city, leaving behind a "rich legacy" - more than a dozen labor camps and many special commandant's offices. Nizhny Tagil has become a gloomy symbol of the entire totalitarian regime - a city of prisons and camps, populated by people with a crushed past, deprived of a future. http://kp74.ru/nizhnetagilskij-teatr-dramy.html

Do you remember very well the huge map of Soviet concentration camps that covered the Land of the Soviets? Not? Already "forgotten" or did not know at all and did not suspect?

Frunze's army was the first to be thrown into the construction of the railway (despite his protests). There was no transport, no fuel, no sufficient food. In the conditions of the waterless steppe, there was nowhere even to place soldiers. Endemic diseases began, which developed into an epidemic. The local population was forcibly involved in the construction: about forty-five thousand residents of Saratov and Samara. People practically manually created an embankment along which the rails were to be laid later.

In March 1920, the task became even more complicated: it was decided to pull the pipeline in parallel with the railway. It was then that the word "Algemba" was first heard (from the first letters of Aleksandrov Gai and the name of the deposit - Emba). There were no pipes, like everything else. The only plant that once produced them has long been standing. The remains were collected from warehouses, they were enough for 15 versts at best (and it was necessary to lay 500!).

Lenin began to look for an alternative solution. At first it was proposed to produce wooden pipes. Specialists just shrugged their shoulders: firstly, it is impossible to maintain the necessary pressure in them, and secondly, Kazakhstan does not have its own forests, there is nowhere to get wood. Then it was decided to dismantle sections of existing pipelines. The pipes varied greatly in length and diameter, but this did not bother the Bolsheviks. Another thing was embarrassing: the collected "spare parts" were still not enough even for half of the pipeline! However, work continued.

By the end of 1920, construction began to suffocate. Typhus claimed several hundred people a day. Guards were posted along the highway, because local residents began to pull apart the sleepers. Workers generally refused to go to work. Food rations were extremely low (especially in the Kazakh sector).

Lenin demanded to understand the causes of sabotage. But there was no sabotage in sight. Hunger, cold and disease collected a terrible tribute among the builders. In 1921, cholera came to the construction site. Despite the courage of the doctors who voluntarily arrived at Algemba, the mortality rate was appalling. But the worst thing was different: four months after the start of the construction of Algemba, already in April 1920, Baku and Grozny were liberated. The Emba oil was no longer needed. Thousands of lives sacrificed to the construction site turned out to be in vain.

It was possible even then to stop the senseless activity of laying the Algemba. But Lenin stubbornly insisted on the continuation of construction, which cost the state fabulously expensive. In 1920, the government allocated a billion rubles in cash for this construction. No one has ever received a full report, but there is an assumption that the funds settled in foreign accounts. Neither the railway nor the pipeline was built: on October 6, 1921, the construction was stopped by Lenin's directive. A year and a half of Algemba cost thirty-five thousand human lives.

The use of free labor was welcomed and encouraged by caring communist rulers, remember, a valiant page from the aircraft industry, sharashki for scientists appeared much earlier in 1928-29. - the legendary Soviet fighter "Ishachok", created, of course, by ZeKa.
The leaders of the OGPU came up with a brilliant idea: why, instead of sending those arrested to Solovki, not force them to build airplanes and engines in prison conditions, under the watchful eye of state security guards? "... Only working conditions in a militarized environment are able to ensure the effective activity of specialists as opposed to the corrupting environment of civilian institutions", - Yagoda, deputy chairman of the OGPU, later wrote in a letter to Molotov.
The first prison design bureau in the history of aviation was organized in December 1929. It was located "at the place of residence" of the prisoners - in the Butyrka prison. Two work rooms were equipped with drawing boards and other necessary drawing utensils. The new organization was given a high-profile title - the Special Design Bureau.

In November 1929, the Special Design Bureau (OKB) was created in the Butyrskaya prison. In January of the following year, the Design Bureau was transferred to aircraft factory No. 39, where they began to create the Central Design Bureau (TsKB). On the territory of the plant there was a wooden one-story hangar No. 7, adapted for housing for prisoners. 20 prisoners lived and worked in it under guard. The team was small, but very highly qualified. The backbone of the designers was made up of employees of the Marine Experimental Aircraft Building Department (OMOS, previously headed by D.P. Grigorovich), who shared the fate of their boss: A.N. Sedelnikov (former deputy head of the department), V.L. Korvin (head of production) and N .G.Mikhelson (head of the drawing bureau). Together with Polikarpov, his colleagues E.I. Mayoranov and V.A. Tisov got to the Central Clinical Hospital. In addition to them, a prominent specialist in small arms A.V. Nadashkevich (the creator of the PV-1 aircraft machine gun), a former director of experimental plant No. 25 B.F. Goncharov, statistical testing engineer P.M. Kreyson, assistant director of plant no. 1 I.M. Kostkin and others. Grigorovich was appointed chief designer of the design bureau, but in fact all the main design issues were decided collectively. The connection of the prisoners with the production units of the plant was provided by a free engineer S.M. Dansker. The "pests" were given a difficult task - to urgently design a single-seat fighter of a mixed design with an air-cooled engine. - "If you don't do it in a month, we'll shoot you"

In less than two months, a small OKB team designed a new fighter. The prison administration forbade purging models and other types of tests in the laboratories of TsAGI (which was controlled by A. Tupolev, who later became a “prisoned specialist” of TsKB-29), Moscow Higher Technical School, and the Air Force Academy. The designers could only rely on their experience and the materials that they were allowed to receive from some organizations ...

The total length of the canal is 227 kilometers. On this waterway there are 19 locks (13 of which are two-chamber), 15 dams, 49 dams, 12 spillways. The scale of construction is amazing, especially considering that all this was built in an incredibly short time: 20 months and 10 days. For comparison: the 80-kilometer Panama Canal took 28 years to build, and the 160-kilometer Suez Canal took ten.

The White Sea Canal was built from beginning to end by the forces of prisoners. Convicted designers created drawings, found extraordinary technical solutions (dictated by the lack of machines and materials). Those who did not have an education suitable for designing spent day and night digging a canal, waist-deep in liquid mud, driven not only by overseers, but also by members of their brigade: those who did not fulfill the norm were reduced to an already meager diet. This was one road: into concrete (the dead were not buried on the White Sea Canal, but simply fell asleep at random in pits, which were then filled with concrete and served as the bottom of the canal).

The main tools of labor in the construction were a wheelbarrow, a sledgehammer, a shovel, an ax and a wooden crane for moving boulders. The prisoners, unable to withstand the unbearable conditions of detention and overwork, died by the hundreds. At times, the death rate reached 700 people a day. Meanwhile, the newspapers printed editorials devoted to the "reforging by labor" of hardened recidivists and political criminals. Of course, it was not without postscripts and eyewash. The canal bed was made shallower than it was calculated in the project, and the start of construction was retroactively postponed to 1932 (in fact, work began a year earlier).

About 280 thousand prisoners took part in the construction of the canal, of which about 100 thousand died. The remaining survivors (every sixth) had their sentences reduced, and some were even awarded the Order of the Baltic-White Sea Canal. The heads of the OGPU in full force were awarded orders. Stalin, who visited the opened canal at the end of July 1933, was pleased. The system has shown its effectiveness. There was only one snag: the most physically strong and hard-working prisoners earned a reduction in terms.

In 1938, at a meeting of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, Stalin raised the question: “Did you correctly propose a list for the release of these prisoners? They leave their jobs… We are doing a bad job of disrupting the work of the camps. The release of these people, of course, is necessary, but from the point of view of the state economy, this is bad ... The best people will be released, and the worst will remain. Is it possible to turn things around in a different way so that these people stay at work - give awards, orders, maybe? .. ”But, fortunately for the prisoners, such a decision was not made: a prisoner with a government award on a robe would look too strange …
"Slaughter buildings of the XX century" http://arman71.livejournal.com/65154.html, photo from "Death Channel" https://mexanic2.livejournal.com/445955.html
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Immediately after the death of the mass murderer Stalin, all the "great construction projects of communism" had to be curtailed,

A bit from allin777 in Unfinished construction of Stalinism.
Draft Decree of the Council of Ministers of the USSR "On changing the construction program of 1953"
21.03.1953
Top secret
Project On changing the construction program of 1953

Taking into account that the construction of a number of hydraulic structures, railways, highways and enterprises, provided for by earlier adopted government decrees, is not caused by urgent needs of the national economy, the Council of Ministers of the USSR decides:

1. Stop the construction of the following facilities:

B) railways and roads -

Railway Chum—Salekhard—Igarka , ship repair shops, a port and a settlement in the Igarka region ;

From a letter to L.P. Beria to the Presidium of the Council of Ministers of the USSR on the change in the construction program of 1953

Work completed on 1 January 1953 in millions of rubles:

Railway Chum—Salekhard—Igarka, ship repair workshops, a port and a settlement in the Igarka region - 3724.0

GARF. F. 9401. Op. 2. D. 416. Ll. 14-16. Certified copy.

TOTAL: Liquidated construction, which was invested6 billion 293 million rubles and thousands of livesSoviet prisoners.
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In one material it is impossible to list all the countless construction projects and the sacrifices of Soviet prisoners incurred on them in the name of achieving the mythical and never built communism.