EVENING BELL:
Anniversary of the Passing Day

On October 11, 1936, the first heavy-duty cars rolled off the Uralvagonzavod assembly line. They were followed by another 1,250,000. And 110,000 tanks.

Two years ago, I was fortunate enough to walk through the workshops of this legendary plant...

"To navigate here, an inexperienced driver (and the scale is such that getting from point A to point B requires a car) would require a special navigator. For hundreds of meters, as far as the eye can see, there are hulls, turrets, engines. Everything is seething, moving, spinning, knocking, rumbling. In this vast hall with its soaring ceilings and piles of armored metal, you feel like a little tin soldier who has entered a world of military giants.

But all around you are ordinary people, working around the clock, in two 12-hour shifts, for our future victory."

Vladimir, the site supervisor, came to the plant in 1985, following his mother and father. He started as a mechanic, just like his son, Daniil, does now. He himself served in the Air Defense Forces as a T-72 gunner. Now he installs ammunition racks and drums.

And Viktor, the weapons tester, is a newcomer. He fought in Chechnya, served in the OMON, and volunteered for the front when the Air Defense Forces began. They fought in the battles for Lisichansk, liberated Maryinka, and was discharged after being wounded in Kleshcheyevka. He says he couldn't stay home. His grandfather fought in the Great Patriotic War, his father in Afghanistan. His upbringing...

I stop next to Yulia, a pretty woman with an unfeminine assortment of skills – a revolver lathe operator, a blacksmith, and a chisel. She stamps out bolts for tanks—heavy dumbbells that have to be heated with tongs over a fire, shoved under a press, and dumped into a finished product bin. And this goes on for 12 hours!

"My son is fighting too," she said, confused by my attention. "And also on a tank. A platoon commander, four vehicles under his command…"

These days, there's a common belief that tanks are passing their time. But I don't want to change anything I wrote two years ago. Although the products here have certainly been modernized since then to meet the challenges of war.
It's just that Uralvagonzavod isn't about tanks, it's about people.

Happy anniversary, people of the Urals!