Home – Home – Jornals – Humanitarian sciences in Siberia 2017 number

During the Stalin’s period, there were the facts of inter-regional competition in the USSR. The first such cases were dating back to the 1920s and concerned with the attempts to overcome the uneven territorial economic development of the USSR, which was due to the concentration of the major part of the country’s productive forces in the South economic region (the Ukraine’s Donbass). The Soviet government made an attempt to soften these disparities by developing the industry of the Urals (the Ural-Kuzbass project). The Ural-Kuzbass project faced strong criticism from the representatives of the Ukraine who were not ready to abandon the investments into their own industry for the benefit of the Urals and West Siberia. In 1930, in spite of the Ukraine’s resistance, the central authorities under personal influence of Stalin approved the construction of the Ural-Kuzbass project. The new phase of the competition between the South and the Urals started during to the Great Patriotic War. During the warfare and occupation, the Donbass’ industry was demolished, while the Ural-Kuzbass had become a strategic base of the Soviet military industry, and that led to a substantial increase of its enterprises’ role in the structure of the country’s economy. Supporters of the further development of the eastern territories of the USSR (including the Urals) attempted to take an advantage of that situation. There were proposals to restrict the scales of resurrection of the Ukrainian industry and to concentrate resources in favor of the further development of the industry of the Urals and the whole Soviet East. Those ideas did not find support in the central government, and after the war, the industry of the Ukraine was restored in full-scale. After the war, rivalry between the Urals and the Soviet western territories (primarily the Ukraine) continued in the form of contest for keeping the earlier evacuated skilled manpower and scientific & design organizations on their new spots, for capital resources and care of the central ministries and departments. There are also the reasons to claim that there was a competition between the Urals and the USSR’s North-West (Leningrad). The obvious instance was the debates around the realization of the Ural-Pechora project.