Reconstruction of the fleet composition employed by enterprises in the Sarapul district of the Udmurt ASSR during the Great Patriotic War

Due to the limited availability of primary sources, the history of Russian river transport is still sketchy and lacks a systematic description. Existing historical accounts are based on the results from the analysis of the activities of individual steamship enterprises that have been extrapolated to the entire water transport system of the region. In order to verify the validity of such generalizations, this study undertakes a comprehensive two-stage reconstruction of the fleet composition in Udmurtia’s Kama enterprises: at the first stage, the fleet composition and its evolution are reconstructed using the archival records of local enterprises; at the second stage, the completeness and reliability of the obtained dataset are verified against the records provided by the Udmurt Statistical Office. The proposed approach is found to be effective for the period of the Great Patriotic War, also when applied to the reconstruction of the fleet of enterprises not represented in the archival records (the Sarapul Distillery and the Sarapul Timber Depot). However, it is methodologically unsound to extrapolate the results obtained for the Kama steamships to the full scope of river transport in the region. In addition, the workflow of Udmurt enterprises during the wartime is considered. They were engaged into fulfilling critical defense orders and, with the loss of the Donbass, were forced to switch to alternative energy sources (firewood and peat), which had to be transported over 30–40 km, thus increasing the strategic value of the fleet. As a result, the vessels used by Udmurt enterprises were not mobilized, and the regional fleet even slightly expanded by the end of the war. To further optimize available resources, the vessels were redistributed between different people’s commissariats.