Avraami Pavlovich Zavenyagin

By the decision of the Council of People's Commissars of 23 June 1935 (No. 1275-198ss), construction of the Norilsk nickel combine was ordered and the Norilsk corrective-labour camp (Norillag) was established. Zavenyagin headed that construction from 8 April 1938 to 29 March 1941. About 8,000 prisoners worked there at the start, and by the end of 1939 more than 19,000. The first industrial heat took place on 6 March 1939, and on 29 April 1942 Norilsk produced its first metallic nickel. He advocated a full metallurgical cycle at Norilsk, whereas the plant design limited the process to matte smelting. At Norilsk he set down for himself and his subordinates the "laws of Zavenyagin": maximum work in inhuman circumstances; salvation (one's own included) lies in extraordinary decisions; youth is rather an advantage than a defect.

Norilsk, however, was built on camp labour. During the Second World War 7,223 people died in Norillag, the main cause being that prisoners were barely fed; across the Gulag ITL system in the worst year of the war, 1942, nearly every fourth prisoner died. In relation to this record the sources diverge in their assessments. The Hungarian writer and former Norillag prisoner József Lengyel portrays him as the Norilsk chief who was "humane", fed prisoners well, and under whom anyone could approach and speak to him without guards, and a guard who bound and kicked a prisoner was sentenced to a term of imprisonment. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who never met him, called him a "legendary camp guard" and inferred from Beria's favour for him and a guardsman's praise that "the beast was excellent".

These conflicting testimonies should be presented not as settled fact but as attributed recollections and claims. What is documented is the camp labour and its mortality record; Lengyel's humane portrait and Solzhenitsyn's hostile inference stand alongside it as competing assessments.

Zavenyagin became involved in the uranium problem from 1943, and in December 1944 a State Defense Committee decree placed him in charge of uranium prospecting throughout the USSR and occupied territories, for which the NKVD's 9th Chief Directorate was deployed. When the Special Committee was formed in August 1945, he was appointed first deputy head of the First Main Directorate (PGU), responsible for managing special-contingent labor, constructing mining, milling, and metallurgical facilities, and recruiting scientific and engineering personnel. That same year, under his command, some 70 German nuclear physicists, chemists, and metallurgists, including Nikolaus Riehl and Manfred von Ardenne, were brought to the USSR; by 1948 their number exceeded 300, and they worked in "German laboratories" developing technologies for enriched uranium and metallic plutonium production. Simultaneously, a special commission scoured the Soviet zone of control for uranium ore and semi-processed stocks, securing the equivalent of 220 tonnes of pure uranium by mid-1946.

Zavenyagin personally directed the selection of sites and construction of closed cities and plants: Mayak (Chelyabinsk-40), Arzamas-16, Krasnoyarsk-26, and others. In June–July 1948, he and Igor Kurchatov supervised the liquidation of two accidents at the A-1 reactor on site, spending extended time in the reactor hall and receiving substantial radiation exposure. On 19 August 1949 he was designated responsible for transporting the RDS-1 device from KB-11 to the Semipalatinsk test range and for its final assembly; on the night of 29 August, the neutron initiator was inserted into the core in his presence. Immediately after the test, he drove toward ground zero. The car became stuck in radioactive dust and he had to walk back, absorbing a dangerous dose of radiation.