Russian Expo Arms. Nizhni Tagil 2011
A farewell to arms? Well, certainly not in the Urals. The region has always been a large industrial centre and it’s due to many defence plants that the Urals had been closed to foreigners until 1991.
Russian Expo Arms is held every year in Staratel tank training field in Nizhni Tagil, Sverdlovskaya oblast
VII International Exhibition of Armament, Military Equipment and Ammunition ‘Russian Expo Arms’ was traditionally held in Nizhni Tagil in 8-11 September. Nizhni Tagil (140 north of Yekaterinburg) is known in Russia as a homeland for tanks. UralVagonZavod is the factory that started producing T-34 tanks in 1941. The latest model T-90C was shown in action on the training field. It was impressive and very loud, just what the public likes.
Highlight this year: T-90C aka 'flying tank'
Prime Minister Putin, who visited Expo Arms and checked out the T-90 tank, said that the exhibition should draw attention of international specialists and promote development of the international military-technical cooperation. The countries especially drawn to big machines were Vietnam, India, Zambia and Uganda. There were also producers from Ukraine, Belarus, France and Italy this year.
There's something sexy about military machines especially if they are from Ukraine
Russian Expo Arms is an open event – no passport controls for foreigners. Tickets cost 300-500R and it was easy to get free VIP tickets especially if you know someone in Nizhni Tagil. As I was leaving the premises, a TV reporter was interviewing visitors asking what they thought about event. A local man’s reply was obvious yet very absurd: “I feel so proud of my country, I’m proud of how strong Russia is”. Surely, there is nothing wrong about being proud of the country that can make a big toy able to destroy hundreds of people at a time. But it was said on September, 11, that’s why his comment sounded bizarre to me…
However, there was something for pacifists too – KAMAZ and Ural trucks were my favourite: they can work at -50 and +55C, climb steep hills and swim in lakes. This car is worth buying for those who dream of traveling from Moscow to Vladivostok and back!
Ural truck
Unlike Mr. Putin I visited Russian Expo Arms on the last day and missed a demonstration of air weapons – launches and bombing from helicopters and planes (not that I really regret it). The weather on that day was gloomy so my photos are a bit dark but it adds to the ambience of Russian military pride. There are also sunny photos by Benjamin Gaillard, a French expat in Yekaterinburg. Enjoy!
Innoprom 2011- Yekaterinburg goes innovative
Innoprom 2011 is an international Ural exhibition and forum of industry and innovations held in July 14-17 in a newly built Yekaterinburg Expo near Koltsovo Airport
Total area of Expo is more than 200 thousand sq.m.
President Medvedev stated in May at the Skolkovo innovation centre that innovative infrastructure should be applied in other regions. Sverdlovskaya oblast is one of these regions. The list of participants includes Russian Railways, Ltd. "Gazprom Transgaz Ekaterinburg" and the Swiss Association of Mechanical Engineers Swissmem, as well as collective expositions of Germany, Israel, China, Poland, Canada, Austria and Vietnam.
Russian RZD and Siemens signed an agreement to produce high-speed trains Desiro in the Urals
Apart from industrial objects there is an interesting exhibition of Contepmporary Art
and a must-see for families with kids TechnoDrom - a project of a scientific museum for children which, I really hope, will be opened in the Urals one day...
Innoprom is opened daily 9-19. There are free shuttle buses running every 20 min from the main train station and from the metro station Ploschad 1905
American Spy in the Urals
It looks like history is repeating itself. This year a few Russian spies were detected by CIA and exchanged for a couple of spies who had worked for the USA in Russian territories. The Russian failed spies, by the way, were heartily greeted by the authorities in their Motherland and the new Mata Hari - red-haired spy Anna Chapman is even starting a modelling career in Moscow.
This incident is not the first and I suspect not the last in the history of Russian-American espionage. The Ural region with numerous nuclear factories has always been largely involved. It's not that we are told about everything but one incident that happened in 1960 is well known and remembered by the senior citizens of Yekaterinburg (those days it was Sverdlovsk). On May 1 - Labour Day in the USSR there was an annual parade of the Soviet workers on the main city square. The Communist leaders received the workers' salutes from the granite tribune next to the monument of Lenin. It was a bright sunny day that's why the citizens spotted two white clouds that suddenly appeared in the clear sky.
S-75 missile in the Military History Museum in Yekaterinburg
That was CIA's U-2 aircraft on a mission piloted by Francis Gary Powers. Powers was able to take high-resolution photos of the military sites. U-2 had been invulnerable to Soviet anti-aircraft weapons for good four years causing the KGB's considerable dismay until in 1960 Russian S-75 missile hit the aircraft over Sverdlovsk. The American aircraft wasn't the only one hit by the missile that morning. The Russians also brought down their own MIG-19 jet that had been sent to intercept the U-2. The Soviet pilot Sergey Safronov crashed his plane in the woods and died. Colonel Powers was lucky. He parachuted to the field and was greeted by the local villagers. The villagers were happy to see the survived pilot in the first place but because the pilot didn't speak Russian (a big mistake for a spy) they sent him straight to the KGB.
Soviet intelligence couldn't be happier: the brought down U-2 turned out to be intact. For some reasons Francis Powers didn't activate the aircraft self-destruct mechanism and didn't have time to destroy the camera and films. Besides the KGB was able to extensively interrogate the American spy of a high rank who was actually expected to have taken a CIA suicide pin but he didn't. Powers was sentenced to three years of imprisonment in Moscow and seven years of hard labour in Gulag. Once again he was lucky - in 1961 Powers was exchanged for Soviet KGB colonel Rudolf Abel.
A Soviet 1968 spy film Dead Season features a scene of that exchange on Glienicke Bridge in Berlin. Power's biography also became an American television movie in 1976: Francis Gary Powers: The True Story of the U-2 Spy Incident
The story is not finished yet. In 2010 the released CIA documents revealed that the US Government never believed in Power's account and thought the story had been cooked by the Russians. Garry Powers Jr, who visited Lubyanka quarters in Moscow on May 1, 2010, said that it had taken the US Government 50 years to set the record straight about his father and the record still has kinks in it.
Secret towns in the Urals
My dad was a military man in the Soviet era. He worked for the Russian rail in Sverdlovsk then got a promotion and we moved to Nizhni Tagil. Tanks made in the plant of Nizhni Tagil were and still are transported by rail. So my dad was making timetables for the cargo trains with military equipment. When my dad retired he couldn't by rule leave the country and travel abroad for 5 years, so you can assume there weren't only tanks involved..
If you take a train from Yekaterinburg to the north you will inevitably pass one of the secret towns or closed towns as they are not a secret anymore in the Ural region - Novouralsk. You won't miss it because the town lies behind the barbed wire fence that resembles prison walls. The citizens of Novouralsk have special passes to enter. To visit your relatives there you need a special invitation from them for certain dates. I know a girl from a closed town who studies in Yekaterinburg, she happened to lose her pass and her Russian passport once and couldn't get back home to her parents for 5 weeks until her documents were renewed by the authorities. Of course, you may ask why on earth people live behind the wall. The answer is simple - good salaries at the secret factories, a tax free area, zero unemployment rate, zero crime - sounds like a paradise except for low life expectancy.
In the USSR when Yekaterinburg was called Sverdlovsk the secret towns weren't on the maps. They didn't even have names only numbers: Sverdlovsk 45, 16, etc. I remember when I was little and the news about American enemies was still on TV, my dad taught me a lesson on geopolitics. He brought the world map, showed me where the USA was and pointed at the Ural Mountains. We were equally far away from both sides. My dad explained that if the Americans had sent their rockets to Russia from the east coast, the rockets would have dropped somewhere around Moscow, sent from the west coast they would have reached Siberia but had no power to fly up to the Urals. Thus we lived in the safest place in the world. I was pretty satisfied with this explanation and have never cared for the Cold War since that.
Ironically, some time ago I was telling an American tourist about the closed towns in the Urals. The tourist and now my friend Harlow Ingalls happened to be a veteran of three International Wars including the Cold War conflict. He told me that the US government has always known about our secret factories and the secret towns were not a secret to them. On the contrary, the Urals would have been the first and the main target if the Cold War had turned into hot and their rockets would have dropped in the right place, to be sure...
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About the Project
AskUral.com is the blog dedicated to my lovely region known as the Urals or the Ural Mountains in Russia.
My name is Luba Suslyakova. I am based in Yekaterinburg (Russia), and I would love to share useful information about my area as much as possible and be your travel adviser.
Just keep asking me via the contact form and I will come back to you with answers!