Leningrad Skorokhod Footwear Association

Leningrad Skorokhod Footwear Association 

a production amalgamation organized in 1962.

The association consists of several factories, including Skorokhod (the main works), Proletarskaia Pobeda No. 1, Proletarskaia Pobeda No. 2, Voskhod, and Zaria; a sports footwear factory; and plants in Leningrad, Vyborg, Gatchina, Luga, Nevel’, and Cherepovets. It produces various kinds of footwear.

The Skorokhod Factory was established in 1882 as the St. Petersburg Company for the Mechanical Production of Footwear. In 1910 it became Skorokhod (Footman). Before the October Revolution of 1917 the company was one of the major industrial establishments in Russia. The workers of the factory were active in the revolutionary movement. In October 1915 a large strike at the factory resulted in a significant pay increase for the workers. On Feb. 27, 1917, they took part in the armed uprising. To repel the Kornilov mutiny a detachment of the Red Guards was organized in the district, led by the worker N. A. Miliutin. During the October armed uprising the Red Guard detachment of the factory guarded the approaches to Petrograd and took part in the storming of the Winter Palace. In December 1917, 106 workers left to fight Kaledin and Kornilov near the Don River. In all, 1,000 workers of the factory joined the Red Army. In 1919 the Skorokhod Factory made 600,000 pairs of boots for the front. In 1922 the factory was renamed the Ia. A. Kalinin Skorokhod Factory; Kalinin, the leader of the factory’s Communists, had been killed by members of the Socialist Revolutionary Party in 1919.

During the first five-year plans, the factory was reequipped. In terms of the quality of technical equipment and the basic criteria of engineering economics, the Skorokhod Factory is considered to be one of the most advanced Soviet establishments for footwear manufacture. N. S. Smetanin, the initiator of the Stakhanov movement in the footwear industry, worked there. During the Great Patriotic War the factory made such products as footwear, artillery shells, and machine-gun cartridge belts for the war front. During the blockade approximately 50,000 sq m of the factory production area was destroyed by artillery bombardment and aerial bombing. Other factories of the association were also partially destroyed.

From 1944 to 1947 the Leningrad footwear enterprises were restored and reconstructed. The Skorokhod Factory was the first in the world to utilize the process of hot vulcanization, to introduce injection moulding of rubber, and to establish semiautomatic production lines for manufacturing footwear. In 1972 the association introduced about 500 new footwear models, with 77 percent of the then current assortment of footwear being replaced by new models. The first four domestically made semiautomatic production lines for the sewing of footwear went into operation there. In the Leningrad Skorokhod Footwear Association a movement of production innovators is developing, including the cutter O. Ia. Mushtukova (1950) and the forewoman N. A. Evdokimova. The association has been awarded the Order of Lenin (1940) and the Order of the Red Banner of Labor (1947).

I. F. BOL’SHESHAL’SKII