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From the Personal File of I.A. Makhanov, Chief Designer of the Artillery Design Bureau of the Kirov Plant
Authors: Andrey M. Ryabkov, Igor O. Tyumentsev
Number of views: 48
In 2017–2018, fragments of memoirs of Ivan Abramovich Makhanov, head of the artillery design bureau of the Leningrad Kirov Plant, were published in “Russian Archive”. This publication, which continues to cover the stages of the designer's life path, presents the documents from the personal file of the communist I.A. Makhanov and from his family archive, covering the period from 1929 to 1975.
I.A. Makhanov was an energetic person, ready to go to his goal, not being shy about the means, while he replaced the lack of deep professional knowledge and the ability to get along with people with “Bolshevist” pressure. He took part in the Civil War on the side of the Reds as a sixteen-year-old teenager, and his future fate fully illustrated the well-known thesis: “the revolution devours its children”. Despite the efforts made by the designer, both of a technical and administrative nature, Makhanov's final contribution to the formation of the pre-war USSR military-industrial complex turned out to be very limited, and in some cases his activities even went against the intentions of the country's top leadership for the speedy rearmament of the Red Army.