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:

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.