The Design Engineer’s M.I. Koshkin Memorandum on the Progress of Work of New Artillery Systems Creation in the Kirov’s Plant Design Bureau (From the Funds of the Central State Archive of Historical and Political Documents of Saint Petersburg)

Introduction. The publication is devoted to an urgent topic: the history of the creation of artillery weapons systems in the pre-war USSR (1930s). Until recently, in Soviet and Russian historiography, the work of design bureaus of those years was judged by the memoirs of Colonel-General and designer of artillery weapons Vasiliy Grabin and his employees, who on the eve of the war won the fight for the right to transfer new artillery guns to mass production. Grabins main competitor, Ivan Makhanov, was remembered only as “a talented engineer who was unjustly convicted and perished in Stalins dungeons”. Materials. In the process of preparing for the publication of Makhanovs memoirs one of the authors of this article, Andrei Riabkov, identified among the recently declassified documents and prepared for publication a memo from design engineer Mikhail Koshkin, which contains a thorough analysis of the progress of creating new artillery systems at the Kirov plant. This note allows us to critically comprehend the memoirs of both Makhanov and Grabin. Analysis. Ivan Makhanov was prone to technical risk, but due to the lack of managerial experience and the desire to take on “everything”, he rarely managed to bring his ideas to implementation in reliably working structures. Results. By the end of the 30s of the twentieth century, he acquired the necessary knowledge and experience, several tools of his development were put into a series, but the arrest and imprisonment of Makhanov and some of his subordinates in the ITL on charges of “conscious sabotage and espionage” ultimately put an end to these developments. The published document can also be used in a special biographical study to assess the human qualities of Mikhail Koshkin.