Factories on wheels
The Urals and Siberia
- factories were moved east in the summer and autumn of 1941
- 1,523
- factories were moved east in the summer and autumn of 1941
- people were evacuated in 1941–1942
- ≈ 17 million
- people were evacuated in 1941–1942
In the summer and autumn of 1941, more than 1,500 factories were moved east, machines and workers together. Some workshops restarted under the open sky, in freezing cold. Chelyabinsk became “Tankograd”, building tanks for the whole army.
Machines were loaded onto flatcars under bombing, and at the new site there were often not even walls. Workers set the machines on frozen ground, started work and built the workshop around themselves.
Millions of people travelled east with the factories: workers' families, children from orphanages, scientists, artists. The towns of the Urals, Siberia and Central Asia took them in like family. In Tashkent the blacksmith Shaakhmed Shamakhmudov and his wife Bahri adopted 15 orphaned children of different nationalities.
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