The formation of a high-tech industrial order, which had both technological and social aspects, was an important aspect of the historical development of the Soviet Union in the 1920s–1950s. Moreover, the scale of innovations in both aspects mentioned was so great that, I think, it would not be an exaggeration to say that in this case we were talking about a special phenomenon, an “industrial revolution,” during which the entire Soviet society underwent a profound transformation. Roughly speaking, the Soviet leadership was forced to focus on the implementation of these large-scale technological and social transformations, since without them it was not possible to ensure the survival of the Soviet Union. The industrial revolution mentioned above became a key element in the implementation of the entire Soviet project as a whole.

The aircraft industry of prerevolutionary Russia was a complex of a few small enterprises and its production had a semi-handicraft character. Although during the First World War, aircraft production was revived for obvious reasons, nevertheless, the domestic aircraft industry managed to meet only 9% of the demand for aircraft and 5% of the demand for engines generated by the Russian army in 1914–1917. During the Great Russian Revolution of 1917–1920, the aviation industry, like the entire Russian industry, actually went through a stage of deindustrialization: a significant amount of equipment was lost or became unusable, and the personnel of aviation enterprises were sharply reduced. The total number of workers in Moscow aircraft factories fell from 3700 in 1917 to 1900 in 1918.

The scale of the loss of equipment can be judged by the following quote: “Under the ([Tsarist regime] M.M.), quite significant reserves were accumulated, which Glavkoavia used during 1919 and part of 1920, making demands on the War Industry Council only for what was missing. However, the reserves were eventually used up. Over time, Glavkoavia was faced with the task of supplementing its production with those semifinished products that there was no hope of receiving from abroad. Glavkoavia was then forced to start producing some kinds of equipment and arrange the intersection of files, etс.”

Obviously, at that time, the problem for the aviation industry was to provide not only a machine park, but even the simplest tool such as files. The situation was so deplorable that in the early 1920s, a significant part of the Soviet establishment doubted the technical feasibility of organizing its own aircraft production in Soviet Russia: “Aircraft and engine building requires such a high level of technical skills and a supply of high-grade material that a pessimistic attitude towards attempts to build our own aviation industry has long been dominant in our own ranks of business executives and the military.”

Formally, the Soviet economy completed the recovery period by 1925–1926; however, the example of the aircraft industry suggests that this thesis, although true for the economic sphere of the USSR as a whole, is somewhat conditional in relation to high-tech industries. Let us say, even on October 1, 1925 (that is, in fact, by the end of the recovery period) out of the 2886 machines installed at aviation enterprises, only 1938 (i.e., 67%) were actually involved in production. In the 1925/1926 business year, as a result of interruptions in the supply of materials, semifinished products, and energy, only 55.5% of the production capacities of aircraft factories were used.

Not only was the aircraft production volume extremely limited, but even more significantly, what was much worse was the fact that they were of an unacceptably low quality. During the first half of the 1920s, in Soviet Russia and the USSR, replicas of Western European models of aircraft and aircraft engines from the First World War were produced, and the low qualification of workers in the aviation industry, as well as the poor organization of labor, led to a significant increase in cost. For example, the Ron aircraft engine cost almost 7000 rubles in the USSR in 1923/1924, while a similar engine cost only 60 rubles abroad.

The first domestically aircraft engine (M-11) in the USSR was put into mass production in 1929, while all the other Soviet aircraft engines were reproductions of foreign models. Moreover, the Soviet aviation industry simply could not keep up with the requirements of the military; therefore, by 1928, 70% of the engines installed on the aircraft of the Red Army Air Force were imported. In fact, the formation of the Soviet aircraft industry as a full-fledged complex of high-tech industries began only in the years of forced industrialization.

Of course, the creation of related industries was important for this process.

The aircraft industry of the 1930s was almost unthinkable without the widespread use of aluminum and alloys based on it. It is obvious that basing the aviation industry on imported critical structural material would be extremely short-sighted. Therefore, one of the prerequisites for the formation of the aircraft building complex was the creation of a light metals industry. In the first half of the 1920s, the USSR launched the production of chain-aluminum, an aluminum-based alloy, from which it was possible to manufacture aircraft fuselage elements. However, aluminum itself at that time was not yet produced in the Soviet Union.

In 1929, the Moscow Regional Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks convened a meeting on the situation with nonferrous metals, at which the speaker bleakly admitted that the USSR’s annual demand for this metal was 17 000 tons, the planned smelting was 5 000 tons, but that aluminum was still mined through excavations in factory dumps. Only the launch of the Volkhov, Dneprovsk, and Uralsk aluminum smelters made it possible to solve the problem of primary aluminum.

The second aspect of the formation of the aircraft industry as a high-tech industry was quantitative expansion. Obviously, a science-intensive industry cannot be represented by a few enterprises with a small number of employees. The need for the introduction of advanced technologies and the allocation of specialized enterprises naturally dictates the need to create a large complex of industries in which it is possible to establish cooperation, and in which the introduction of the latest technologies will give a visible synergistic effect. However, the reverse side of such expansion inevitably becomes a personnel problem. To train several dozen master craftsmen in two or three semihandicraft factories is very different from organizing the mass training of qualified personnel for a vast industry.

The Soviet aircraft industry faced this issue almost immediately after the start of intensive expansion. From 1930 to 1931, the number of people employed in the aircraft industry increased by 230%. As a result, the number of defects increased from 4.2% of the total output in 1930 to 7.8% in 1931, while labor productivity fell by 14.5%. This is hardly surprising, as the expansion of the aircraft industry in the 1920s–1930s led to a sharp decrease in the proportion of skilled workers. The growth of production capacity led to an increase in the number of personnel, and since there was no place to quickly get skilled workers, the share of skilled workers fell sharply. The shares of highly skilled and medium-skilled workers in the aviation industry fell from 8.5% on average and 48% in 1929 to 2 and 28%, respectively, in 1931.

In the first half of the 1930s, the aviation industry of the USSR achieved visible and indisputable successes. Firstly, domestically designed aircraft began to form the base of aircraft production, and some of them (heavy bombers TB-1 and TB-3) could be considered technologically innovative even against the backdrop of the global level of aircraft design ideas of those years. Secondly, the volume of aviation output increased sharply, which enabled the Soviet Union to practically stop importing aircraft. Moreover, the USSR produced more aircraft than the United States, Great Britain, Japan, and Germany combined in 1933. At the same time, it should be taken into account that the quality of the products of the Soviet aviation industry, for the most part, continued to be significantly inferior to foreign analogs during this period. According to Ya.I. Alksnis reported to the Commissar of Defense of the USSR K.E. Voroshilov in 1934 as follows:

Comparing the data on the accident rate in the British Air Force in 1934. … verified in the Intelligence Directorate of the Headquarters of the Red Army with similar data on the Armed Forces of the Red Army, we get the following figures (Table 1).

Table 1

 

Armed forces of Britain

Armed forces

of the Red Army

Total number of active aircraft

1500

4473

Total flight hours

372 000

699 651

Average speed of aircraft (km/h)

204.3

160

Average annual flight time for 1 active aircraft

248 h

156 h

Total distance flown

72 000 000 km

111 900 000 km

Number of hours of operation of the engine until the first service

400–500

200–300

Number of hours of aircraft operation before the first repairs

1000

400–750

Number of accidents

68

61

Number of deaths in accidents

59

94

From a comparison of the data in Table 1, the following conclusions can be drawn:

1. The British fly much more intensively than us, as can be seen from the average annual flight time of 248 h compared to 156 h in the Armed Forces of the Red Army.

Attention is drawn to the fact that the average annual flight time per aircraft from the British has increased by a factor of 3.5 since 1921; in our country, during the same period, the flight time per aircraft has increased by a factor of about 1.5.

2. We are far behind them in terms of the average speed of our aircraft. The British have an average speed of 204.3 km/h per plane compared to 160 km/h for our aircraft, a difference of 44.3 km/h.

With the adoption of new high-speed aircraft in the Armed Forces of the Red Army, the difference in speed should undoubtedly decrease; therefore, we need to strive for a decisive increase in the speeds of both combat and training aircraft.

3. The Armed Forces of the Red Army continue to lag behind the British in terms of the quality of the equipment of engines and aircraft and in terms of their service life, not to mention the frequent breakdown of equipment, mainly due to manufacturing and design flaws, and, in part, due to the poorer quality of fuels and lubricants. The production shortcomings in the aircraft industry are particularly striking since the materials used in the construction of engines and aircraft construction are, in general, not worse than those used by the British …. .”

As we can see, the growth in the first half of the 1930s was predominantly quantitative rather than qualitative. The situation began to change in the second half of the decade. It was in the mid1930s that Soviet aviation enterprises mastered the serial production of aircraft, which, in terms of their performance characteristics, approximately corresponded to the best foreign models. The appearance in the skies of Spain and China of Soviet I-15 and I-16 fighters, as well as SB front-line bombers, demonstrated that there a new country had joined the ranks of the great aviation powers in the world. Although we can argue whether the I-16 was better or worse than, say, the earlier Bf-109 models, there is no doubt that these aircraft were already comparable. For example, the vast majority of Soviet cars produced in the first half of the 1930s were clearly not comparable with the foreign models. At the same time, we should not lose sight of the fact that, although it is impossible to deny the undoubted growth in the quality of Soviet aircraft production, in relation to engine construction (one of the most science-intensive subsectors of aircraft manufacturing), the USSR was still heavily dependent on technological imports. Almost all serial Soviet aircraft engines manufactured in those years (with the exception of the M-11) were either licensed reproductions of Western engines, or the result of a more-or-less fundamental modernization and development of engines, whose production license was acquired from abroad. The production of the M-82 aircraft engine and aircraft diesel engine in the 1930s–1940s was the first time that the USSR manufactured an engine designed domestically, rather than being based in some way on a foreign design.

However, progress was evidently being made before the M-82. What made it possible to achieve such a result? This question should be considered in more detail. Without exaggerating, we can say that it was a period of massive development of new technologies—not new equipment or new design machines, but new technological solutions, or a new methodology for aircraft construction. Moreover, in the search of the optimal method for the production of aircraft, Soviet leaders did not hesitate to turn to foreign experience.

Head of the logistics department of the Red Army I.P. Belov on September 13, 1936 submitted a report “On the state of the US aviation industry” to the Defense Commission of the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR, in which, among other things, he noted the following points: “Freed from labor-intensive machine-tool work, Americans widely use stamping of various sheet metal parts, press riveters for assembly, various welding methods, and anodize aluminum alloy parts, which greatly increases their durability … The organization of the production, technological process, and mechanization at Soviet aircraft factories (the most powerful in the world) is far behind the modern advanced aircraft technology. As a result of this, there is a dangerous gap between the ability to design an aircraft well and produce it very poorly and take a long time to do so.” In conclusion, “the technology used by us, the French and, apparently, the British for the production of aircraft … is in many respects inferior to the technology adopted in the United States. It is extremely important for us to study and implement the technology for the production of aircraft ([adopted in] M.M.) the United States, as it is especially effective in large-scale production and requires a less skilled workforce.

In December 1936, the head of TsAGI N.M. Kharlamov specified Belov’s proposal in his report “On the Directions and Prospects of the US Aviation Industry in the Field of Production Technology.” Among the most important methodological approaches that it considered should be adopted from American aircraft manufacturers, Kharlamov singled out the following approaches: “… mechanization of labor-intensive manual processes at aircraft manufacturing plants, that is, the widespread use of cold and hot stamping for drawing, bending, notching, and punching; maximum mechanization of riveting works, replacement of riveting by welding … mechanization of woodworking at factories manufacturing wooden and semiwooden machines … The transfer of metal work and free forging to stamping occupies a central place in the mechanization of aircraft factories.” Especially important was the conclusion that the radical change in the technology of aircraft construction, carried out in the United States, eliminates the need for the presence of highly skilled workers at the enterprises. However, the Soviet experts proposed not only copying overseas solutions but also improving them: “Based on the number of orders we have for the same type of machines, we have taken the liberty of introducing flow-through and conveyor assembly methods that are not used even by the Americans.” However, the prospect of adopting the new technology naturally raised the question of the logistics of such technological innovations: “When introducing new technologies, we are faced with the fact that none of the equipment at our aircraft factories meets the requirements of the new technical processes, especially in terms of equipment for stamping and manufacturing dies and fixtures.” As a result, the second half of the 1930s became a time not so much for the extensive expansion of the Soviet aviation industry as for its qualitative renewal. At the same time, the most important feature of the new technology, which was being intensively mastered at Soviet aircraft factories, eased the requirements on the qualifications of the workforce. The production of aircraft according to the new method, which was referred to as “lofting-template technology,” made it possible to use workers of even average qualification. As a result of the massive use of medium-skilled workers, the share of wages of personnel at aircraft production enterprises in the cost of aircraft production significantly decreased (Table 2).

Table 2. Reduction of the share of staff salaries in the cost of aircraft production (rubles)
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It is obvious that, for example, the share of wages in the cost of the I-16 fighter fell from 30 to 19% over three years.

In addition, the second half of the 1930s was marked by the beginning of the introduction of conveyor production in the Soviet aircraft industry. This method of production had been sufficiently tested by that time in the USSR in the automotive and machine-building industries; however, for aircraft manufacturers, it was new. It should be noted that the first steps to master this technology were clearly successful. At aircraft engine plant no. 24, the conveyor was launched in September 1936, which relatively quickly led to a significant increase in the monthly output (Table 3).

Table 3. Monthly production at aircraft engine plant no. 24 in 1936 before and after the transition to conveyor production
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Compared to February 1936, by the summer of 1937, the time spent on the production of the AM-34RNB engine was reduced by 51.9%; on the AM-34NB, by 48.4%; and AM34GB, by 24.7%. At the same time, the average category of workers employed in the assembly of engines could be reduced from 4 to 3.5. As a result of the orientation towards new technology in the Soviet aircraft industry, production increased sharply (Table 4).

Table 4. Output per worker in aircraft and engine construction
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Characteristically, synchronously with the growth of production, the relative losses from defects decreased. Of course, in view of the growth in the cost of aircraft production due to the introduction of new models of aircraft with a higher sales price, the amount of losses from defects in absolute terms grew, but every year in the second half of the 1930s, the share of these losses steadily decreased (Table 5).

Table 5. Losses due to defects in the work of the aviation industry
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However, we must acknowledge that the introduction of new technologies, of course, changed the technological technique of aircraft construction. However, in terms of social engineering, industrial relations remained the same. As in the first half of the 1930s, relatively few highly skilled workers continued to play a key role in production. Of course, the development of the lofting-template technology and conveyor production significantly reduced the master craftsmen, but did not completely break their dominance. Here is how the management of plant no. 22 describes the procedure for fulfilling the plan in 1938.

Until the 15th, the assembly was working. For 15 days we followed the Program, then in the Final build we did nothing, and then we had people leaving for downtime. In such an environment, of course, some workers just hung around doing nothing, because when on the 20th day it was clear that there would be no Program, the plant manager went to the shop floor, talked to the foremen, and after that, when he saw that nothing was working, he said ‘Here’s so many rubles for you, you must hurry up and do the work.’ And they did the work quickly … .

On the one hand, the management of the factories was forced to consider the opinion of the master craftsmen, capable of quickly doing the work if necessary; and on the other hand, it should be noted that it was the master craftsmen who benefited the most from this state of affairs. In addition to the honor and respect received from the management, their benefit was also material in nature, since overtime work was paid at an increased rate.

However, in 1939 the situation started to change. With the beginning of the Second World War, the Soviet leadership was forced to increase the capacity of the aviation industry. As a result, in this new period, the collision of the early 1930s was repeated: aircraft factories were overwhelmed by a wave of newly hired workers who did not have the necessary qualifications. Of course, against this background, the role and importance of the masters, who were ready to do the work quickly, was largely reduced (Table 6).

Table 6. Distribution of workers and engineers in aviation enterprises as of November 1, 1939
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As follows from the Table 6, over half of the workers of the people’s commissariat of the aviation industry had worked at aviation enterprises for not more than 2 years, and less than a third had worked for more than 3 years. Of course, it was impossible to train these workers by traditional methods in such a short time. Therefore, Soviet managers developed a new methodology for training workers. First, a newly hired employee at the plant underwent initial training. At this stage, the novice was assigned to a highly qualified worker-instructor. As a rule, the remuneration of such an instructor depended on the time spent on and quality of the training. The instructor introduced the student to the basic safety rules, taught them how to operate the machine, and explained how to measure parts, prepare a tool, etc. Then, at the second stage, the student improved their skills on the job. To do this, new workers were grouped in teams of 2 to 4 people or in groups of 5–10 people, in which they mastered a certain set of operations, after which the qualification commission, which consisted, as a rule, of a shop manager, the foreman, and representative of the party organization, examined the worker, and assigned him a certain grade. Such a system of personnel training made it possible to train a person with virtually no idea about working in the aviation industry directly at the enterprise in a limited time frame. It must be admitted that this method of self-training medium-skilled workers was developed just in time. The massive influx of new workers to aircraft factories, which began in 1939, turned into an avalanche in 1940. There were cases where production groups doubled due to newcomers; i.e., there was a trainee for every experienced worker. To the heads of workshops who refused to take on newcomers and demanded to be sent a trained workforce, the director of plant no. 22 forlornly answered that “No one will give us trained assemblers, riveters, and welders.” The situation was somewhat mitigated only over time. In January 1941, out of the 439 000 graduates of the Labor Reserve system, the Council of People’s Commissars sent 50 000 to the people’s commissariats of the defense industry (aerospace, ammunition, and weapons) and to defense construction projects.

One of the consequences of the influx of new workers, who still had to be trained on the job, was a decrease in labor productivity and, first of all, a decrease in the actual hours worked. A typical case is given by the “photograph of a working day” of the milling machine operator Milekhin, taken in February 1941 at Gorbunov plant no. 22. For 1.5 shifts, Milekhin worked only 262 out of 660 min. The rest of the time was wasted: machine installation (35 min), getting tools (35 min), downtime 30 min, started cleaning the workplace 27 min before the actual end of work. What the rest of the time was spent on is not indicated. Milekhin is an exceptional case; however, he draws attention to the fact that out of 6 people whose working day was timed, no one worked more than 494 min, and the downtime reached 200–300 min.

Perhaps, over time, the managers of the Soviet aviation industry would have coped with these difficulties, but on June 22, 1941, Nazi Germany and its allies invaded the USSR and the Great Patriotic War began. One of the factors that ultimately determined the victory of the Soviet Union in that great war was the successful evacuation of about 1500 industrial facilities. However, it should be borne in mind that, contrary to a fairly widespread belief, this cyclopean shift of industry to the east was carried out in an improvised manner with little or no prearranged planning. Therefore, having relatively successfully evacuated industrial equipment, only about a third of the personnel of the evacuated plants and factories managed to be evacuated to the east. And since the front demanded an increasing number of aircraft products, there was no time to train the streams of high school students, housewives and farmers who rushed into the aircraft factories.

During the Great Patriotic War, Soviet officials made no secret of the fact that the shortage of labor at aircraft factories, as a rule, was covered by securing workers and employees at factories, as well as by mobilizing the urban and rural population, and only partly by training qualified personnel in the professional technical school system and vocational schools. At the same time, mobilization for industrial enterprises was interpreted as a necessary and almost decisive method for solving the shortage of personnel. Later this point of view was shared by Voznesensky. In fact, the work of training the labor force of the aviation industry had to be started anew. It must be said that in terms of sources of manpower acquisition, the aircraft industry barely differed from other sectors of the Soviet wartime industry. For example, the electric plants evacuated in the Novosibirsk region were replenished by schoolchildren aged 14–17, housewives, and prisoners of the forced labor camps of the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs.

It should be noted that, by and large, during the hard wartime period, the prewar order of the practice of training new workers in two stages, as a whole, was preserved. However, during the war years, the first stage was significantly shortened. Previously the training of a machine operator, milling machinist, or toolmaker lasted from 6 months to 2 years; however, with the onset of war, it was shortened to one-and-a-half to two months. In order to ensure such a sharp acceleration of the learning process, the production process was simplified in every possible way by dividing operations into several elementary actions. Of course, mastering this extremely simplified program was much easier. The argument that the speed of personnel training increased due to a significant increase in the educational level in the country as a whole appears tempting. However, the facts show that according to the 1939 census, the proportion of people educated above class 6 among metalworkers was only 15.2%, while in other industrial groups of workers it was significantly lower. Therefore, the argument that the skill level of new workers was improved quickly due to the radically increased educational level of the new workers has to be rejected. There was clearly a lack of educated workers in the country, and the newly graduated high school students and former housewives clearly did not have even the minimal experience in production.

Indeed, the maximally simplified system of individual-team training made it possible to solve the problem of manpower in the aviation industry in a matter of months. However, together with the obvious advantages, this system also had a number of fundamentally negative features. To begin with, an important factor limiting the scale of its application was the limited number of regular workers who were able to act as instructors for newcomers. Therefore, at the first stage (individual training), a huge flow of new workers who needed urgent training had to be pushed literally through the bottleneck of a small number of mentors. For example, in the first quarter of 1942, out of the 9278 new workers at factory no. 1, only 314 people were trained. The second circumstance, which should not be overlooked, was that even after the successful solution of this problem, the aircraft factory received a workforce of a rather peculiar quality. Workers who have completed a forced course of individual apprenticeship, as a rule, had mastered a certain number of production activities, rigidly linked to certain equipment. Transferring such an employee to a new model of the machine or entrusting them with a new operation caused difficulties. Thus, the workforce turned out to be extremely inflexible: it was not easy to quickly switch it to a new production task, which almost always required additional organizational and technical efforts. To solve this problem, the leadership of the People’s Commissariat of the aviation industry launched a movement to create the so-called Stakhanov schools, in which workers who were no longer students were trained. These advanced training courses became a kind of third stage in the training of a new worker, and allowed partially solving the problem of qualified personnel.

The dominance of the individual-team form of education continued until 1943, after which training at various advanced training courses began to prevail. In relation to this, the situation at Novosibirsk aircraft plant no. 153 can be considered as typical (Table 7).

Table 7. Training and advanced training of workers at aircraft factory no. 153
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The materials of the Table 7 show that, although the bulk of the work to improve the level of qualifications at this plant occurred in 1943–1944, this breakthrough would not have been possible without the formation of a fairly wide layer of employees at a certain basic level in 1941–1942. Moreover, this layer was prepared by various forms of apprenticeship and forced industrial training that prevailed in 1941–1942. As a first approximation, this conclusion can be extended to the entire aircraft industry of the USSR in those years. It is characteristic that the sharp increase in labor productivity, which ensured the increase in production in the aviation industry, was achieved in 1942, based on theindividual brigade form of training (Table 8).

Table 8. Average monthly output from 1000 machines
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As we can see from Table 8, the output from 1000 machine tools, both in physical and in monetary terms, increased sharply in 1942.

We wrote above that the introduction of conveyor methods into the aviation industry became one of the main ways of restructuring the methods of aircraft construction in the second half of the 1930s. During the Great Patriotic War, this direction of intensifying the work of aviation enterprises came to the fore and became dominant. The flow-through method was quite clearly formulated in the review of the State Planning Commission “On the restructuring and development of the national economy of the USSR during the Great Patriotic War”: “… As for the organization of mass flow-through production, its main condition is the fragmentation of the technological process into many small successively performed operations, which, without requiring high qualifications from the worker, in general, reduce the consumption of materials and the time of production of the finished product.” Thus, it is obvious that in this case we see an interdependent technical policy of the People’s Commissariat of the Aviation Industry: it was these technologies that were most actively introduced into production that corresponded to the qualifications of the available workforce.

This prevalence of conveyor (and their varieties, flow-through) methods in the aircraft industry became especially visible and evident since 1943. Moreover, although conveyors were initially used mainly for assembly work, later on they were used in almost all areas of production (Table 9).

Table 9. Growth in the number of production lines at the most important aircraft factories
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The flow-through method was widely used in engine-construction plants. By 1945, 35 production lines were operating at plant no. 16, and 28 each at plant nos. 19 and 24.

What were the results of such a policy to prepare a workforce for the aviation industry? The most graphic picture is provided by a comparison of the share of workers of various qualifications, determined by the wage scale, throughout the war (Table 10).

Table 10. Distribution of aircraft construction workers according to the pay scale (% of the total number)
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In relation to this, the level of 1937 is a type of starting point from which the course for the accelerated training of aviation industry personnel began. It was a time when master craftsmen, who could be handed a pack of banknotes and told to do the work quickly, were still dominant in production. Workers of categories VII and VIII accounted for more than 6% of all workers, and it was this “golden 6 percent” that determined the situation in the industry. The state of affairs in 1942 shows a picture in the midst of works on the accelerated training of the workforce by the individual-team method. Moreover, the conclusions from this picture are quite unexpected.

Of course, the factories were overwhelmed by the stream of completely unprepared workers, some of whom had to first be taught not even how to work on machines, but the Russian language, so that they could understand the instructor. Therefore, 11% of workers belonged to a unique category that the prewar aviation industry simply did not contain: workers without a category.

However, the low-skilled labor force of categories I and II accounted for 27.8% of workers in the aviation industry in 1937, and only 18% in 1942. At the same time, the share of highly skilled workers also decreased from 6.1 to 4.2%. At the factories in the aircraft industry (and, probably, not just the aircraft industry) there was a radical “averaging” of the workforce: the share of workers in categories III and IV increased sharply.

The share of workers in categories V and VI also increased, but not so radically. The system of individual-brigade mentoring was not able to provide enterprises with highly qualified specialists, but the advanced training from the zero level to categories III and IV was literally placed on an industrial base. However, after 1943, Stakhanov schools and other forms of additional training for workers began to be widely used. As a result, by the end of the war, the proportion of unskilled workers at aviation enterprises was lower than in 1937.

Particularly important changes took place among the higher paid workers. The additional training of workers of categories III and IV led to the fact that in 1943–1945 the number of employees of categories V and VI grew most dynamically, and the increase in workers of categories III and IV was not very large. Moreover, the flow of workers into the group of highly qualified specialists of categories VII and VIII began, and while it was still not very large, it was taking place, and by the end of the war the proportion of highly qualified workers differed little from the indicators of 1937.

However, the share of workers of average (categories III and VI) qualifications was about 66% in 1937, and in 1945, it was 90%. Figuratively speaking, by the beginning of the prewar expansion of the aviation industry, the layer of highly skilled workers was a spire on top of a relatively narrow tower in an open field; and in 1945 it became the top of a huge squat pyramid with a wide base. In 1945, the situation in industry was determined by this pyramid: a huge mass of workers with average qualifications.

As for the quality of the aircraft production, it must be admitted that it had not improved significantly. Throughout the Great Patriotic War, the Soviet aircraft industry produced aircraft and aircraft engines of fairly average quality. These aircraft roughly corresponded to the realities of the middle of the 20th century, and lagged their foreign counterparts only by a few percentage points. Nevertheless, they were of a lower quality. The Yak-3 and La-7 fighter planes, which in almost all respects corresponded to German fighter planes, and in some ways even surpassed them, started being produced only in 1944.

In addition, it should be borne in mind that the USSR was practically the only major aviation power that did not base its aircraft production on all-metal aircraft during the Second World War. Even in Italy and Japan, the lion’s share of manufactured airplanes was all-metal, while in the Soviet Union, in contrast, aircraft with wooden or composite (wood + metal) fuselages and wings prevailed. Thus, Soviet aircraft manufacturers sought to increase the number of aircraft produced at the cost of a certain decrease in quality.

In addition, it must be admitted that, focusing on the problems of serial aircraft production, the Soviet aircraft industry sharply reduced its attention on development work. As a result, by the end of the war, when Germany was using turbojet aircraft on the front, and in the United States and Britain similar planes were being tested, in the USSR there was no all-metal turbojet engine at all. Therefore, in an attempt to catch up with the rapidly improving foreign competitors, Soviet aircraft designers were forced to experiment with rocket planes, combined propulsion systems, and compressor-type air-jet engines.

The problem of the qualitative improvement of air production was solved only in the first postwar decade. The Soviet aircraft industry switched to the production of exclusively all-metal aircraft in the late 1940s.

The next step was the transition to jet aircraft construction. With the cessation of the production of the La-9 model, the production of front-line fighters with piston engines was stopped in the USSR in 1949, and the production of the last Soviet propeller escort fighter with piston engines, La-11, was stopped in 1951. The production of the last Soviet bomber with internal combustion engines, the Tu-4, was discontinued in 1953; with the end of the production of the Il-10, the production of Soviet piston attack aircraft ended in 1955; the production of the last Soviet antisubmarine flying boat with piston engines Be-6 was phased out in 1957; and after the production of the Il-14 passenger aircraft was completed in 1958, piston engines remained only in training and multipurpose light-engine aviation.

Almost all combat aircraft in the USSR were produced exclusively with jet engines by 1953. However, it should be borne in mind that, as in the 1930s, for quite a long time, Soviet turbojet engines were either a reproduction of captured German models, or licensed copies of British aircraft engines. The first large-scale Soviet turbojet engine designed domestically (AM-3) was launched in production only in 1953.

Moreover, these results were achieved, first of all, due to the continuation of the established policy of gradually increasing the level of qualification of the personnel involved (Table 11).

Table 11. Distribution of aircraft construction workers according to the pay scale (% of the total number)
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As can be seen, the process reached its logical conclusion toward 1950: the share of low-skilled labor in the Soviet aviation industry shrank to near-zero values, while the share of highly skilled workers already significantly exceeded the level of 1937, and most importantly, this layer relied on a huge a monolith of medium-skilled workers, which made it possible to significantly increase the complexity of the technological tasks being solved. In relation to this, the dynamics of the distribution of enterprises in the aircraft industry according to the categories of workers most characteristic of them during the first five years after the war is quite illustrative (Table 12).

Table 12. Distribution of factories according to the prevalent average category of workers
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As can be seen, factories with a predominance of relatively unskilled (categories II and III categories) labor force accounted for 71% of all aircraft factories in 1945, while the share of such enterprises decreased to 45% in 1948, and by the end of the five-year period, it had dropped to 36%. At this time, the face of the aviation industry was determined by enterprises dominated by employees of categories IV and V.

Thus, in conclusion, the Soviet aircraft industry emerged as a high-tech industry in the course of a very complex and rather lengthy process that began in the late 1920s and ended only in the first half of the 1950s. During these decades, related industries were created in the USSR (light alloy industry, aluminum industry, engine building), without which the formation of the aviation industry as an independent aircraft building complex that was not critically dependent on foreign supplies was unthinkable.

More importantly, during the period under review, the Soviet aircraft industry managed to solve the problem of skilled labor. It was a very intense process, which included several interconnected components at the same time. On the one hand, a special system of mass training of personnel was developed, which ensured a gradual increase in the average level of qualification in the industry as a whole. On the other hand, a completely conscious and thought out course was taken to introduce those technological solutions that were available to the available workforce. Gradually, step-by-step, the Soviet aircraft industry raised the level of its aircraft production.

In the 1920s, the priority was to “produce at least something and get rid of the need to import aircraft and their engines.” In the 1930s, the formulation of the problem changed: it was required to produce a lot of aircraft (in order to saturate the air force) and their performance characteristics had to correspond to the realities of the 1930s. In the first half of the 1940s, during the Great Patriotic War, the same problem had to be solved in the conditions of evacuation and the influx of untrained labor. Finally, in the second half of the 1940s and the first half of the 1950s, the Soviet aircraft industry was faced with the task of producing, firstly, a lot of aircraft, secondly, to produce aircraft with characteristics that were not worse than those of foreign analogs, and thirdly, to produce aircraft based on purely domestic developments in order to free the country of technical dependence on foreign aircraft technology.

All these tasks were steadily accomplished. It was a grandiose industrial revolution, stretching for about a quarter of a century, during which a gigantic aircraft construction complex arose in place of a handful of semihandicraft factories. To what extent this process was typical for the entire Soviet Union as a whole, and whether the conclusions of our study can be extended to the entire Soviet period is a question that still needs a thorough and in-depth study. However, in the field of aircraft construction, the formation of a high-tech industrial cluster took place in this way.