M.A. Dlugach – A Forgotten General of Industry

Moses Abramovich Dlugach is one of those wartime leaders who are called Generals of Industry: a metallurgical engineer, director of the largest machine-building enterprises, and a highranking party organizer. Despite the bright mark left by M.A. Dlugach in Leningrad (1940-42) and the Urals (1943), the available information about his career is very fragmentary, and some data are false. The purpose of the publication is to reconstruct the life and work path of the honored industry figure, evaluate his contribution to the cause of Victory, and show the features of the USSR industry management in the 1940s using the work of M.A. Dlugach as an example.. The publication is based on materials from the Central State Archive of Historical and Political Documents of St. Petersburg: personal files of leaders, memos on the organization of production and evacuation from Leningrad, and transcripts of speeches. For five years M.A. Dlugach worked his way up from a foundry technician to the sectoral secretary of the Leningrad City Communist Party Committee. With the outbreak of the war, a significant share of responsibility for organizing the production of new types of weapons fell on his shoulders. After the evacuation of the tank and artillery production of the Kirov Plant, carried out under his leadership, M.A. Dlugach headed the remaining dispersed in the city workshops of the enterprise, being the Kirov Plant Director from the end of 1941 to the beginning of 1943. In 1943, he headed the Chelyabinsk Kirov Plant for about six months, and was later transferred to Chirchik. As the Director of the Chirchik plant Sredazkhimmash, he took part in the implementation of the Nuclear Project. Upon returning to Leningrad in 1948, he no longer held high positions, returning to the profession of a metallurgical engineer. At the peak of his career, M.A. Dlugach invariably found himself in the most important areas of work - he was responsible for the Leningrad mechanical engineering, for the production of tanks in the Urals and of heavy water for nuclear reactors. Contribution of M.A. Dlugach to maintaining the defense capability of the USSR should not be forgotten.