Tankograd—The Formation of a Soviet Company Town: Cheliabinsk, 1900s-1950s

Tankograd depicts the daily life and strivings of the people in the Urals, ordinary workers, peasants, engineers and managers who transformed a slumbering provincial city to a central element in Russia’s defence industry. It combines social, economic, and cultural history with military analyses of the Urals’ importance for the Soviet war efforts.

LENNART SAMUELSON has, since 1992, done archival research in Moscow, Cheliabinsk and other cities on the origins of the Soviet military-industrial complex, on the collectivization of the countryside and on the Great Terror in the 1930s. His Plans for Stalin’s War-Machine (Macmillan 1999) was rewarded with the General Hugo Raab Prize by the Swedish National Defence College and was later translated into Russian.