Site Selection for Large-Scale Industrial Construction in the USSR in the 1930s (Using the Example of the Bakalsky Metallurgical Plant)

The article examines the procedure of selecting and approving the construction site for the Bakalsky Metallurgical Plant, an unrealized industrial construction project from the era of the first five-year plans. The author concludes that the site near the village of Alekseyevka in the mining zone of the Southern Urals, which was optimal in terms of economic indicators, expressed the pragmatics of spatial dispersion of industry, which met the economic and managerial interests of the highest party and regional leadership. A different strategy – the concentration of industrial enterprises in large industrial centers – was followed by the Main Directorate of the Metallurgical Industry of the Supreme Council of the National Economy of the USSR, which lobbied for the choice of a "risky" site near the city of Chelyabinsk. The approval of the latter as the location for the plant was determined not by the objective merits of the option, but by the priority status of the city in the industrialization program of Ural. The acquisition of this status was accompanied by the implementation of a comprehensive physical-geographical and economic examination of the city's territory, the fact of which (and not its results) predetermined the placement of the plant in Chelyabinsk. The acceleration of the decision to place the plant on a "risky" site was due to the desire of economic agents to comply with the directive deadlines for the deployment of construction in the context of the center's fluid ideas about the raw material base and the territorial nature of the project as intra- or interregional. In conclusion, the author assumes about the "freezing" of large industrial construction projects because of economic departments occupying sites suitable for large-scale industrial construction with the aim of reactivating them at an appropriate time in accordance with current instructions from the center.