August 15, 2014. Several South Urals-based TV companies joined a youth-oriented educational project called They Created Chelyabinsk Region with their stories about lives of the legendary heads of Chelyabinsk Tractor Plant (ChTZ) Kazimir Lovin and Isaac Saltzman. The project involves most of local media, museums, libraries, and social organizations. The main idea behind the project is to tell the youth about the people thanks to whom the South Urals could grow and develop and to eliminate the blind spots in the young people’s knowledge of local history.

It is nearly impossible to overestimate the part that ChTZ Director Kazimir Lovin and ‘The Tank King’ and Director of Chelyabinsk Kirovsky Plant Isaac Saltzman played in the thirties and during the Great Patriotic War, respectively.

Lovin, who came from a family of many generations of peasants, became a qualified energy engineer and arrived in Chelyabinsk upon Joseph Stalin’s personal request to prove a talented manager and administrator. In just two years, he managed to set up the construction of the world’s largest tank-making facility. Exactly eighty years ago this year, he was awarded with the Order of Lenin for the construction of ChTZ. As for Isaac Saltzman, he was the son of a tailor, with two years of schooling, who both managed the tank production process in the hard wartime period and was the People’s Commissar for Tank Industry as well as coordinated the plant’s amateur performers club and Tractor hockey team.

Chelyabinsk Region State Archive and ChTZ Museum were very helpful in the creation of video features on the legendary directors. The program on the ‘Tank King’ contains a story by a local writer and former employee of the tank sector Boris Boguslavsky, who knew Isaac Saltzman personally. In the fall, all the published and filmed materials will be compiled into a single volume. The stories of ChTZ directors Saltzman and Lovin will be given a good place there.