Local communists lobbied for state investment in the metallurgical sector and in 1930 put forward a Great Urals plan that would have had the Urals, and Sverdlovsk within it, displace the south of Ukraine as the powerhouse of Soviet heavy industry.3 The plan as such was never adopted, but its showpiece, the processing of Urals metals by means of coking coal transported from west Siberia and Kazakhstan, did come about. Joseph Stalin’s five-year plans stimulated growth. “It didn’t matter where you went,” Leonid Brezhnev, who was in those days a bureaucrat in Sverdlovsk province, was to recall, “all around you rose factory chimneys and plumes of smoke pouring out of them.”4 Up-to-date blast furnaces transformed the eighteenth-century Upper Iset Works in Sverdlovsk and the Demidov Works in Nizhnii Tagil, the province’s second city, into throbbing combines putting out pig iron and steel. New plants smelted copper, nickel, aluminum, and titanium. Uralmash, the Urals Heavy Machinery Works, opened in Sverdlovsk in 1933, was the largest of its kind in the USSR, a “factory of factories” making equipment for mining, oil extraction, manufacturing, and construction. The Urals Wagon Works in Nizhnii Tagil, opened in 1936, led the Soviet Union in the assembly of rolling stock. By the late 1930s, plants like Uralmash were changing over to the production of matériel for the armed forces. An influx of factories evacuated eastward from front-line cities in 1941–42 raised Sverdlovsk’s profile and gave its economy a more militarized cast.5 Urals Wagon, merged with an enterprise from Kharkov, Ukraine, was the top maker of tanks on Soviet territory, and Uralmash converted to tanks, howitzers, and self-propelled artillery. Urals Wagon, Uralmash, and the Tankograd Works in Chelyabinsk, south of Sverdlovsk oblast, made all of the Red Army’s heavy tanks in 1942–45 and 60 percent of the medium tanks. Conversion back to civilian uses after 1945 was halting. In the Cold War, branches of the military-industrial complex based on high technology, such as atomic energy and rocketry, took root, shielded from foreign eyes.
The population of the oblast capital, powered by the boom in smokestack industry and armaments, roared from 150,000 in 1929 to 426,000 in 1939 and 600,000 by midcentury. The deracinated peasants who were the majority of Sverdlovskers lived in factory housing toward the city limits, as higgledy-piggledy as Berezniki’s. Downtown was a different sliver of Soviet reality. An Australian-born American historian who visited as it was opening up to Westerners in 1990 said that, never mind the industrial wasteland in the outlying areas, the center of Sverdlovsk was citified and a lot like Victorian Melbourne—“solid, civic, self-respecting.”6 When Yeltsin detrained in 1949, he saw landmarks from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, avant-garde Constructivist creations from the 1920s, pompous government buildings, and the accessories of urbanity—an opera and ballet house, a philharmonic hall, a movie studio, Urals State University, a unit of the USSR Academy of Sciences. A clutter of cultural and research establishments from central Russia sat out the war in Sverdlovsk. Many artists, performers, and scientists settled there, and partly for that reason the Jewish community was one of the largest in Russia.7 For a country lad a few years out of the barracks on the Zhdanovo Fields, it was a far richer environment than any he had known.
Created in 1920 and with 5,000 undergraduates in 1949, UPI was the best school of its type in the Urals and one of the better ones in the Soviet Union. It educated specialists for civilian and for classified, defense-related tasks.8 The construction division was located in the institute’s Stalin-Gothic headquarters on Lenin Prospect, on a hilly campus, Vtuzgorodok (Technical College Town), in the east end of Sverdlovsk. The division prepared construction engineers, architects, and town planners. The students into the 1930s were manual workers selected by party cells and trade unions without regard for educational attainment; some were unversed in arithmetic. During the war, many UPI men and women were rushed to the front or to munitions factories without graduating, and a clinic and quarters for army wounded took up part of the main dormitory. Come the postwar years, entrants were chosen by examination, were required to have passed high school mathematics and science, and completed their diplomas without interruption. Professors were encouraged to take up scientific research and supervise postgraduate dissertations. Several hundred students from the new Soviet bloc in Europe and East Asia were in each UPI cohort.9
