The industrial architect who mass-produced the T-34 and shaped Soviet tank power
“Since 1941 we have increased tank production more than fivefold — this we owe to the enormous creative labour of the entire collective.” — speech at a party activists’ meeting, Pravda, December 1944
As director of the Kharkov and Ural tank plants, he built the mass-production system for the T-34; under his leadership a single factory turned out some 35,000 T-34s during the war, forming the backbone of Soviet tank power. After serving as USSR Minister of Transport Machine Building (1950–1953), he chaired the State Scientific-Technical Committee and later the Committee for Inventions and Discoveries, bringing the Soviet patent system into alignment with international standards over nearly two decades. Appointed to Kharkov in 1938 after his predecessor was purged, he stabilized the plant and gave full backing to the Koshkin–Morozov design bureau, making the T-34 a reality.
Career Timeline
- 1930–1938Kirov Plant: foreman, shop chief, head of tank department
- 1938–1941Director, Kharkov Tank Plant No. 183
- 1941–1942Director, Plant No. 183 in Nizhny Tagil (removed Feb 1942)
- 1942–1946Director, Ural Tank Plant No. 183 named for Stalin
- 1946–1949Deputy Minister of Transport Machine Building, USSR
- 1950–1953Minister of Transport Machine Building, USSR
- 1957–1959Chairman, State Scientific-Technical Committee, USSR Council of Ministers
- 1961–1978Chairman, Committee for Inventions and Discoveries, USSR Council of Ministers
Related historical events
Bringing Soviet Patent Law into the International System
For seventeen years (1961–1978) Maksarev chaired the USSR Committee for Inventions and Discoveries, the body that would become the institutional forerunner of today's Russian Patent Office (Rospatent). Under his leadership the USSR acceded to the major international intellectual property conventions (the Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property, the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT), the Madrid Agreement on the International Registration of Marks, and the Nice Agreement on the International Classification of Goods and Services) and transposed them into domestic law. His committee overhauled Soviet patent and copyright legislation, built a national system for the registration and examination of inventions and discoveries, and created the sectoral regulatory framework that underpinned Soviet intellectual property for decades. That the industrial organizer who had directed tank plants during the war then spent nearly twenty years aligning the Soviet IP system with international norms is one of the most striking turns in his career. The Federal Institute of Industrial Property (FIPS), the research arm of Rospatent, commemorates his name in its institutional history, and in 2003 an annual prize in his name was established for the best dissertation in intellectual property law.