2 - “There Was No Real Battle Against Illegal Entry”: Resettlement from Fall 1944 to Fall 1946
Summary
From Sverdlovsk Oblast (RSFSR) in the heart of the Ural Mountains, thirteen employees of Kyiv's evacuated Gorky Textile Factory wrote these lines to Nikita Khrushchev in September 1944:
During the time of our residence in Kizel’, the factory collective has lost a number of highly qualified workers due to difficult climatic and material conditions. Some of these people have become invalids; others have been transferred on orders of the People's Commissariat to other factories to save their lives. The rest of the remaining collective, when it comes down to it, has been weakened. Many workers and technicians are sick with tuberculosis and dystrophy. To save the lives of their families, a number of them have sent their children, mothers and fathers, and wives, back to the homeland, to Ukraine, and naturally aspire to return there themselves.
The workers’ alarm made sense: the All-Union NKVD's Main Directorate of the Militia had just noted a “significant rise in the death rate” in the Urals compared to the year before. In response, Khrushchev pressed Moscow for the workers’ reevacuation just as unorganized return was becoming the rule in the Soviet Union's rear.
On October 21, 1944, however, the All-Union People's Commissariat of Machine Building replied to Khrushchev that such a reevacuation was impossible. According to the commissariat, the workers in Kizel’ were now part of a highly successful factory collective. The rebuilding of the Gorky Textile Factory would have to be done “on account of the transfer of a certain number of qualified workers and technicians from other machine-building factories and the mobilization of workers from the local population.” Conditions in the Urals, though, were not improving. By 1944's end, the All-Union NKVD noted again a rising death rate there from dystrophy, pellagra, and “exhaustion.”
The Ukrainian Communists’ understanding of Kyiv's place within the Soviet state improved once they learned that the reevacuation of skilled workers was so difficult. But what did they learn after all those mobilized rural Ukrainians discussed in chapter 1 reported to their construction sites? The Stalin regime's choice to settle German POWs in Kyiv certainly did not lead to housing reconstruction there.
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- Information
- Kyiv as Regime CityThe Return of Soviet Power after Nazi Occupation, pp. 46 - 70Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2016