Machine-Tool Construction of the Ukrainian SSR in the State Industrial Policy of the first half of the 1920s: Soviet Historiography and Real Events

Abstract

The machine-tool industry is fundamental for the industrialization of the industry since it produces the means of production of those machines and mechanisms by which the above-mentioned process is carried out. It means that the level of development of the machine-tool industry directly affects the ability of the community to build an industrial society. Therefore, special attention is paid to this sector of production in the research works on the history of industry, engineering and machine-tool construction. Meanwhile, the corresponding historiography of the Soviet period contains certain facts that do not always correlate in various sources of historiographical material and contradict information from archival sources. Thus, all researchers who in one way or another studied the development of machine-tool construction on the territory of Ukraine were unanimous in the fact that the branch of metal-cutting equipment manufacturing was formed undoubtedly at the stage of industrialization, and during the pre-Soviet period, it did not exist here. At the same time, Soviet historians disagree only in the issue of when and by whom that formation was started: a republican government in the second half of the 1920s or a Union government in the early 1930s.

However, according to archival documents, by the time of the establishment of Soviet power, material and technical basis had been already formed in Ukraine, and the creation of a staffing component of the scientific and technical potential of regional machine-tool construction had been started. Although at the same time, it should be admitted that during that period, the Ukrainian sphere of metal-cutting equipment manufacturing had not yet received an effective organizational order, and its scientific and technical support was absent at all. Moreover, at the beginning of the 1920s, the mentioned problems were not only far from being overcome, but in general, almost complete destruction of the branch scientific and technical potential took place. Therefore, the author comes to the conclusion that the situation took such turn due to an absolute absence at that time of any conceptual views of the governments of the USSR and Ukrainian SSR about the place of Ukrainian machine-tool construction in the development of the Union or Republic machinery-producing complexes. The suppression of specified circumstances by Soviet historiography can just be explained by the political and ideological conditions in which the researchers lived during their studies.