This year our university celebrates its anniversary. For 80 years now, it has been training talented students in various programmes and under the guidance of outstanding mentors. Our university was established under the name of Chelyabinsk Mechanical Engineering Institute (CMEI), later was renamed into Chelyabinsk Polytechnic Institute (CPI), then into Chelyabinsk State Technical University (CSTU), and finally into South Ural State University (SUSU). From this series of articles about the university history you will learn why our country needed such an educational institution, what kind of knowledge was taught to students and by whom over the years, and what we have managed to achieve. In addition, we have collected 80 interesting facts or highlights about our university to celebrate this remarkable date.
SUSU highlights
1. Our university was established in 1943 in order to improve the training of engineering and technical specialists for tank industry enterprises.
2. Back then the university was known as Chelyabinsk Mechanical Engineering Institute (CMEI).
3. More than 300 students were obtaining their education at CMEI during its first academic year.
4. In the first years of the institute’s functioning its buildings were located in different parts of our city.
5. Initially there were only two faculties in the institute.
6. The first faculty engineering measurements laboratory was located in a shed with furnace heating, and the first welding laboratory was in the storeroom of a school building.
Establishment of the university and foundation of university traditions
You can read more about the first stage of the university establishment here.
The Great Patriotic War became a severe trial for our country. The Soviet scientists, like all our people, have suddenly found themselves in very harsh circumstances. Some of those researchers had to leave their scientific centres and move to different cities to work there in new universities and scientific institutions. To quickly solve multiple issues, there was a need for a big group of highly qualified engineers. Some of such engineers had already been trained in the course of construction and the first years of operation of the Chelyabinsk Tractor Plant (ChTZ), and some came to the South Ural region with the evacuated part of the population. But the main bulk of specialists had to be trained right during the war.
On November 2, 1943, the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR adopted Decree No. 1201-361c “On Measures to Improve the Training of Engineering and Technical Specialists for Tank Industry Enterprises” and following which the Chelyabinsk Mechanical Engineering Institute (CMEI) was established. By inheritance, from the Stalingrad Mechanical Institute (evacuated to Chelyabinsk), CMEI received a few study rooms and senior students. Later they were joined by graduates of Chelyabinsk schools and Chelyabinsk residents, who had returned from the front line. In March 1944, a little more than 300 students were studying at the institute.
The research work organized at the institute departments, first and foremost, served the interests of the military production. For instance, the staff members of the Department of Chemistry (headed by Associate Professor A.G. Elkenbard) performed over a hundred analyses of metals and alloys used in the salvaged equipment in order to find out their composition, and the researchers from the Department of the Metal Cutting Theory “developed the optimal modes of cutting, geometry and the compete technology of thermal treatment of cutting tools for production of missiles for М-10 machine” for the plants of Chelyabinsk. This department was headed by Associate Professor Petr Grishin, who later became the first Director of CMEI.
The academic staff members from the Stalingrad Mechanical Institute were a very important element in that wave of intellectual migration that came to the South Ural region during the years of the Great Patriotic War. However, already very early in 1944, when a decision was made on the revival of the institute directly in Stalingrad, the overwhelming majority of the teaching staff returned to their home city. Very few of the great number of the research fellows from the re-evacuated institute stayed in Chelyabinsk. Another element of the “war-time” intellectual migration were scientists from Leningrad and Kharkov, who came to South Urals in the course of the evacuation of big industrial enterprises from these cities at the very early stages of the war. Most of them stayed to work in “Tankograd”, but some were involved in the organization of the educational process already directly at CMEI. Here, just like their colleagues from Stalingrad who stayed to work at the new institute, they used their skills, ideas, and teaching technologies, which they formed during their years in different educational institutions in Leningrad and Ukraine.
The majority of these educational institutions had been established already back in the 19th century. They had had a rich history of the traditions of organizing the educational process and research work. Also, strong scientific schools had formed there, acknowledged not only within our country, but at the international arena as well. People managed to preserve many of the traditions, and some of these were introduced into the work of CMEI by the alumni of the educational institutions from Leningrad and Ukraine.
Already in 1944 the first collected scientific papers consisting of 12 printed pages was prepared by the institute. In 1945 seven postgraduate students were taking training at CMEI. At the same time, as many as 70 engineers from Chelyabinsk’s leading plants were taking their qualifying examinations for the Candidate degree and writing their dissertations under the general guidance from the institute’s Associate Professors and Professors. The institute leadership ordered to create eleven groups for studying foreign language for those people. They were included into the seminar on Philosophy for postgraduates.
The institute’s library included 9612 books in 1945. Nevertheless, there was only one copy of each textbook on Hydraulics, Machine Parts, and of Theoretical Mechanics problem book, and no textbooks on the Theory of Mechanics or Mechanical Engineering at all. This considerably complicated the organization of lectures and practice classes (with more than 600 full-time and 130 part-time students taking training at that time) – and notably increased the role of the teaching staff members at each stage of the educational process.
It were namely the most bright and talented CMEI academic staff members who began to form the foundations of the first research-production engineering schools of the institute. They differed from classical scientific schools for their focus on production processes, which played a crucial role not only in the organization of research studies, but also in testing of their final results.
During the war years, Chelyabinsk Mechanical Engineering Institute managed to solve the main task, which our government had set before it. Despite all the difficulties, the institute organized the process of training of highly qualified engineers. The academic staff members assisted many South Ural industrial enterprises and solved complicated technological problems. The institute laid the foundation required for the formation of the new South Ural engineering schools, the first of which would emerge already in the 50s of the 20th century.
From 1944 to 1947, Nikolai Dukhov worked at CMEI. He was Doctor of Technical Sciences, chief engineer of armoured vehicles, nuclear and thermonuclear weapons, three times Hero of Socialist Labor, awardee of the Lenin and State Prizes, and the first head of the Department of Armored Fighting Vehicles (1944-1947). Over the years of working at ChTZ, he set up a line-conveyor production of KV series (“Klim Voroshilov”) tanks, led the development of self-propelled artillery systems and heavy tanks IS (“Iosef Stalin”), modified T-34 tanks, developed a new tractor ChTZ “Stalinets-80” with enclosed cabin. Dukhov was appointed head of the State Examination Commission of CMEI.
Scientific staff of the university provided diligent assistance to various enterprises: the Kirov plant, the Miass automobile plant, the Chelyabinsk abrasive, electrode, and metallurgical plants. In turn, enterprises supplied the university with specialists. Kirov Plant of People’s Commissariat of Armored Manufacture by order of its director Isaak Moiseevich Zaltsman supplied the institute with qualified engineering teachers, and students – with laboratories and workshops for practical and laboratory work, and also provided two dormitories (according to Protocol No. 306 of the Meeting of the Bureau of the Chelyabinsk Regional Committee of the AUCP (b.) as of February 19, 1944). The leaders of Kirov Tank Plant (I.M. Zaltsman, I.Ya. Kotin, N.L. Dukhov) were fully included into the Academic Council of CMEI in 1945.
During the first years since its establishment the institute did not have a building of its own and was located in different parts of the city: in the building of school No. 4 near the railway station, in one of the schools of Traktorozavodsky District. Later, when the re-evacuation began, the institute was located in a three-story building of the store in Spartak Street (today, Lenin Prospekt), where the “Detskiy Mir” store is located now. In 1945, with the help of the Kirov Plant and the Chelyabinsk Regional Committee of the AUCP (b), the institute received a new building (today, Lyceum No. 11) on Timiryazev Street, but this did not solve the problem of the lack of training areas.
Initially, there were only two faculties in the Institute: the Faculty of Mechanics and Technology (with such specialties as “Technology of Mechanical Engineering”, “Compression Type Machines”, “Pressure Metal Treatment”, “Welding Machines”, “Welding Production”); and the Faculty of Armored Fighting Vehicles (with specialties of “Tank Production”, “Cars and Tractors”, “Engines of Internal Combustion”). In 1944, the Faculty of Armored Fighting Vehicles was renamed as the Faculty of Wheeled-Track Machines, in October 14, 1947 – as the Faculty of Automotive and Agricultural Machinery, and in 1949 it would finally become the Faculty of Automotive Engineering.
The tradition of holding scientific conferences is one of the first in the university. In May of 1947 the first institute scientific and technical conference for teachers and employees was held at the CMEI, and in April of 1948 the first student scientific and technical conference was organized.
From September 28, 1948 to April of 1951, Mitrofan Balyk, Candidate of Technical Sciences, Assistant Professor of the Aircraft Production Department of the Moscow Aviation Institute (directed to Chelyabinsk by the order of the Minister of Higher Education) performed the duties of the CMEI Director. On his initiative, the works on overhaul of educational building and dormitories were carried out.
In the years of the post-war reconstruction of the national economy, our country required specialists of a new profile: mechanical engineers, metallurgists, power engineers and builders. This affected the structure of the university: new faculties opened, and the reorganization of CMEI started, which marked the beginning of a new stage in the development of our university.
Based on the report on the “Intellectual Migration as the Victory Factor: Some Peculiarities of Training Engineers at the South Ural Institutions of Higher Education during the Years of the Great Patriotic War” by Igor SIBIRYAKOV, Doctor of Sciences (History), senior lecturer of the SUSU Department of Russian and International History.