A defence-industry technocrat who rose from arms-plant floor to head of state planning
On 3 June 1942 the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet issued a decree: for 'outstanding services in organizing production, mastering new types of artillery and small arms, and skilful management of factories,' Vladimir Novikov — alongside Boris Vannikov and Dmitry Ustinov — was awarded the title Hero of Socialist Labor. He was thirty-four.
A defence-industry technocrat who began as a technician at the Izhevsk arms plant and became a Hero of Socialist Labor at 34 for organizing wartime weapons production. After chairing the Leningrad Sovnarkhoz and RSFSR Gosplan, he was appointed by Khrushchev in 1960 as chairman of the USSR State Planning Committee and deputy premier (a post he held only two years, undone by the chaos of the sovnarkhoz-decentralized economy), then served another fifteen years as deputy premier under Brezhnev, a durable military-industrial functionary who quietly outlasted most of his peers.
Career Timeline
- 1928–1939Izhevsk defence plants: technician, designer, chief technologist, chief engineer
- 1939–1941Director, Plant No. 74 (People's Commissariat of Armaments), Izhevsk
- 1941–1948Deputy People's Commissar / Minister of Armaments, USSR; Major-General (1944)
- 1948–1957Radar Committee, Ministry of Defence Industry, Ministry of General Machine-Building
- 1957–1960Chairman, Leningrad Sovnarkhoz; First Deputy Chair RSFSR Council of Ministers & RSFSR Gosplan Chair
- 1960–1962Deputy Chairman, USSR Council of Ministers; Chairman, USSR Gosplan
- 1962–1965USSR representative to Comecon; Chairman, VSNKh USSR
- 1965–1980Deputy Chairman, USSR Council of Ministers
Related historical events
Wartime Armaments Work (1941–1948)
A week after Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union, on 7 July 1941, Novikov was appointed deputy commissar in the People's Commissariat of Armaments (Narkomvooruzheniya), headed by Dmitry Ustinov. His portfolio covered the production of infantry weapons (rifles, machine guns) and aircraft cannons, as well as the frontline deployment of new weapons systems. The appointment came amid the frantic evacuation of major defence plants from the western USSR to the east, and Novikov was expected to apply the production-engineering innovations he had pioneered at the Izhevsk plant on a national scale.
His most critical contribution was establishing the system of resuming production 'on wheels', restarting output at evacuation sites even before the factory buildings were complete, and driving a steep increase in rifle and machine-gun output within the first year of the war. The barrel-rifling method he had developed with engineer N.A. Safronov at the Izhevsk plant laboratory before the war slashed barrel production time to one-fiftieth of the previous norm, a decisive advantage once mass production was underway.
On 3 June 1942, a decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet awarded Novikov the title Hero of Socialist Labor alongside Boris Vannikov and Dmitry Ustinov. He was thirty-four. The decree cited 'outstanding services in organizing production, mastering new types of artillery and small arms, and skilful management of factories.' On 18 November 1944 he was promoted to Major-General of the Engineer-Artillery Service.
In his 1988 memoirs On the Eve and in the Days of Trial, Novikov observed that the armaments industry 'had been built up over centuries and was therefore the best prepared for war,' and testified that without Stalin's pre-war industrialization, the wartime surge in weapons output would have been impossible. After the war Novikov remained deputy minister of armaments until 1948, overseeing postwar reconstruction and the peacetime conversion of the military-industrial system.