Scientists of St. Petersburg State University of Industrial Technology and Design found a document of 1942 in the papers of the artillery department of the Northern Front. “We inform you that the S. M. Kirov Leningrad Textile Institute was evacuated to the city of. Ivanovo. On the issue raised regarding the invention of Comrade Bashkirov, it is not possible to provide assistance,” the document reads. It was signed by Nikolai Truevtsev, Director of the Kirov Leningrad Textile Institute. Rimma Timofeeva, Associate Professor of the Department of History and Theory of Art at St. Petersburg State University of Textile Arts, decided to find out what kind of document had turned up in the archives.
Rimma Alexandrovna found out that in 1941 the Leningrad textile institute named after S.M. Kirov. S.M. Kirov Leningrad Textile Institute graduates Matvey Bashkirov, who then during the war worked as a senior designer-researcher on defense inventions. We managed to find out what invention the graduate was working on. As a student, Matvey Bashkirov developed a design for silencing the sound of a live cartridge fired from a rifle or machine gun.
On March 18, 1942 Lieutenant Colonel Vasily Shebanin, deputy chief of artillery of the Lenfront, addressed the Institute with a request to assist Bashkirov and to produce a sample of such a silencer in the Institute's experimental workshops. But at that time the university was in evacuation in Ivanovo, it was not possible to assist the army, about what Shabanin in response to his request the director of the Leningrad textile institute named after S.M. Kirov Nikolai Trukov answered. S.M. Kirov Nikolai Truevtsev.
For the University, such finds, and the search process itself, are a replenishment of what has been lost, replenishment of the pages of history, preservation of memory, and an opportunity to walk in the footsteps of the war.
