The NKVD construction general who built the Mayak plutonium complex
At Tomsk-7 the first thing he got under way was not the reactor but the bread factory. 'I'll find you a mason,' he told the construction chief, and personally brought back a bricklayer from among the prisoners.
A Cheka cavalryman turned NKVD construction general, he commanded the building of Chelyabinsk-40 (Mayak), the plutonium production complex at the heart of the Soviet atomic project. From 1947 he integrated ITL No. 859 prison camp and military engineer units under a single command, and by 1948 the construction workforce reached 45,000: the industrial reactor and radiochemical plant were brought into operation within three years, delivering the plutonium for the first Soviet bomb test of 1949. He went on to build key nuclear sites at Krasnoyarsk-26, Tomsk-7, Dubna, and Protvino, and was awarded Hero of Socialist Labor (1949) and the Stalin Prize (1951).
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1915–1924Imperial cavalry medic → Bolshevik (1917) → Cheka cavalry in Civil War, special cavalry battalion commander
- 1925–1936Balakhna paper mill → Gorky Auto Plant → Nizhny Tagil auto plant construction chief, Tagilstroy trust head
- 1937–1941NKVD: Kolstroy trust head, Monchegorsk nickel combine, Severnikel ITL chief
- 1941–1943Northern Front defensive works → 2nd Sapper Army commander → Aktyubinsk ferroalloy plant construction chief
- 1943–1946Tagilstroy-Tagillag NKVD chief, Major General (Feb 1943)
- 1946–1950Combine No. 7 (Estonia) → Combine No. 817 Mayak (Chelyabinsk-40) construction chief & ITL No. 859 head
- 1950–19621st Deputy Chief of Glavpromstroy → directed construction at Krasnoyarsk-26, Tomsk-7, Dubna, Protvino
Related historical events
- 1918–1922The Civil War and Foreign InterventionCheka special cavalry battalion commanderHe served in the Cheka cavalry and commanded a special cavalry battalion in the Civil War.
- 1943–1949The Soviet Atomic ProjectMVD Major General who led Mayak constructionFrom autumn 1946 he commanded the prisoner camps and engineering units at the construction site of Chelyabinsk-40 (Mayak); by 1948 the workforce reached 45,000.
Tagillag chief and wartime defence construction (1943–1946)
In April 1943 Tsarevsky took on two posts at Nizhny Tagil at once: chief of Tagillag, the NKVD forced-labour camp, and head of the Tagilstroy construction administration. This double appointment was typical of the NKVD construction system of the period, in which prisoner labour and the building programme were placed under a single command. He held the position until 1946.
The task was expanding the Urals steel base. Two coke batteries and No. 3 blast furnace were built, the furnace completed in nine months and blown in on 26 April 1944. Workshops, plant units and a firing range for testing tanks were also constructed. As a result, Nizhny Tagil's capacity doubled for coke, rose by a third for pig iron, by 3.6 times for steel and by four times for rolled products.
This phase occupies a distinctive place among the construction projects he directed, because he handled metallurgical plant tied directly to the war effort while also serving as the administrative head of a forced-labour camp: wartime mobilisation and the camp system were combined within one man's authority. Unlike the nuclear complex years, the results here survive in the sources as production figures, and the shortening of a completion deadline became the measure of the achievement itself. In May 1945 he received a fourth Order of Lenin, and in January of that year the Medal for Battle Merit.