Nizhny Novgorod Machine-Building Plant (NMZ) was a defense-oriented machine-building enterprise that operated in Nizhny Novgorod from 1932. It was located at 21 Sormovskoe Highway. The legal entity was liquidated on December 31, 2020, through reorganization in the form of a merger into JSC "Nizhny Novgorod 70th Anniversary of Victory Plant."[1]
History and Military Production
The plant was commissioned on January 1, 1932, as Gorky Artillery Plant No. 92, named after Stalin.[2] The plant's design bureau was headed by the artillery designer Vasily Grabin, who developed specialized systems — field, anti-aircraft, and anti-tank guns. Even the first tests of the F-22 divisional gun brought success: the weapon was recognized as the best in its class.[2]
A later development, the F-34 tank gun, became the most widely produced tank gun of World War II and was mounted on the T-34 tank. The ZIS-2 anti-tank gun, created at the Gorky plant, was almost eight times more powerful than the German 37 mm gun, more than five times more powerful than the American one, and one and a half times more powerful than the British 57 mm gun.[2] During the Great Patriotic War, Plant No. 92 supplied the front with 100,000 guns — about a third of all the artillery pieces produced in the USSR during the war years.[2]
The Plant During the War
When the war began, the enterprise was carefully camouflaged as a residential settlement, and Moscow architects were brought in for the purpose. Window openings were bricked up or pasted over with black paper, street lighting was banned, and where it was necessary, blue lamps were used that were invisible from the air. Trees and poles were painted white so that workers could find their way in the dark. The first air raid on the city took place on November 4, 1941; Plant No. 92 was not damaged at that time.[2]
Workers switched to a two-shift schedule of 12 hours each, and a shift often stretched to 18 hours. A "two-hundreders" movement developed at the plant: a young worker, Fyodor Bukin, fulfilled his daily quota at 200 percent and pledged to repeat this every day. In August 1941 there were about 200 such shock workers in Gorky Region; by January 1945 there were already 10,318.[2] After the men left for the front, teenagers took their place: 15-year-old Anya Pekosina loaded heavy workpieces for parts into machines, and 14-year-old Galya Chugrina operated the printing press of the plant newspaper "For Shock Tempos."[2]
Activity in the Post-Soviet Period and Liquidation
After 1991, the enterprise was converted into a joint-stock company; it was entered in the register of legal entities on February 15, 1994, under the name AO "NMZ," later renamed PAO "NMZ," and then back to AO "NMZ."[1] Its main line of business remained the production of weapons and ammunition (OKVED 25.40); other activities included the manufacture of nuclear installations and their components for vehicles, pipeline fittings, agricultural and forestry machinery, as well as scientific research and development.[1] The authorized capital at the time of liquidation was 26,692,025 rubles. Vasily Nikolayevich Shupranov had served as general director since October 5, 2011.[1]
In the early 1990s, the plant was the main partner of the Nizhny Novgorod Training Center for the Retraining of Industrial Personnel, which later became the basis for the Nizhny Novgorod campus of the Higher School of Economics.[1] On December 31, 2020, NMZ ceased to exist as an independent legal entity, merging into AO "Nizhny Novgorod Plant of the 70th Anniversary of Victory."[1]
Sources
- checko.ru — AO "NMZ" — Nizhny Novgorod — INN 5259008768 — General Director V. N. Shupranov (archive)
- Nizhegorodskaya Pravda — The Rear Side of the War: How the Guns of the Gorky Plant Became the Terror of the "Tigers" (archive)
- mapy.com