Tsarist Russia left an extremely backward machine-building industry as a legacy to the Soviet state. In 1913, mechanical engineering accounted for only 7 % of the country's large-scale industrial output .1 G. K. Ordzhonikidze said on this occasion at the XVII Party Congress: "Agricultural engineering produced exclusively horse-drawn equipment... It was built to serve the individual, to provide the kind of machine, the kind of plow that one good or bad horse can pull. " 2 But even in the second half of the 19th century, a talented Russian mechanic, serf of the village of Nikolsky, Saratov province, F. A. Blinov built and tested the first tracked tractor with two steam engines . The successor of Blinov's ideas, his student Ya. V. Mamin, created in 1897-1899 the world's first turbocharged high-compression internal combustion tractor engine running on heavy liquid fuel. He also produced the first Russian wheeled tractor 4 in 1915 . In Russian agriculture, tractors with experimental purposes began to be used already in the late 1900s. In 1913, there were only 165 of them, including 75 steam and 90 kerosene engines with internal combustion engines. During the First World War, several hundred tracked vehicles were brought to Russia for military purposes. All of them made up the country's tractor fleet until 1921. Even in the first years of Soviet power, V. I. Lenin put forward the creation of conditions for the widespread use of machinery in agriculture as a major task. In a speech at the First All-Russian Congress of Land Departments, Committees of the Poor and Communes on December 11, 1918, he said: "The wonders of technology must go first to the transformation of the most popular, most people - occupied, most backward production-agricultural production." 5 It is no accident that in March of the same year Lenin invited Ya. V. Mamin to Moscow for a talk. Shortly after this meeting, work began on the first Soviet tractors at the Vozrozhdenie plant in Saratov Province. In 1 ... Читать далее