THE ROLE OF THE TRANS-SIBERIAN IN THE FIRST FIVE YEAR PLAN:
Beginning in 1928 with the first [G 08 / Five Year Plan], the Soviet government devoted all its energies to the massive expansion of industry, agricultural production and mineral extraction. Stalin was determined to transform the mainly agrarian country into a self-sufficient industrial power "capable of producing on a mass scale all modern means of defense and of equipping its army with them in the event of an attack from abroad."
With the first Five Year Plan, work began on two Siberian industrial complexes for the exploitation of mineral reserves that would make Russia independent of the militarily vulnerable Ukraine. These were known collectively as the Ural-Kuznetsk Combine. As the Combine took shape, Trans-Siberian hopper cars hauled iron ore from the Urals east to Novokuznetsk where the first of several big blast furnaces had been built in 1932. The cars returned to the Urals with coking coal for the monolithic iron foundries and steel mills erected at Magnitogorsk. These fed an immense tractor plant constructed at Chelyabinsk, a machine-building works at Yekaterinburg (Sverdlovsk), and the Soviet Union's largest railway-car factory at Nizhni Tagil.
The influx of free workers, peasants and masses of slave laborers created a population explosion in the newly industrialized centers. Between 1926 and 1939, the population more than tripled in Novosibirsk and Yekaterinburg (Sverdlovsk), quadrupled in Chelyabinsk, and the combined population of Irkutsk, Ulan Ude, Chita, and Khabarovsk increased by 269 percent. The [L3 209 / boom] imposed a staggering burden on the Trans-Siberian.
