Kremenchug Tartak (Magazine Universe 1928)

Down the Dnieper, 300 versts from Kyiv, the district city of Kremenchuk has grown since ancient times. Before reaching Kremenchuk, you are greeted by factory chimneys looming from afar and growing to their full size. These are chimneys of tobacco factories in Kremenchuk.
Clouding the sky with smoke, poisoning the air with the spirit of simple tobacco, the Kremenchug factories spread out, and among them, as if lost, stands the VUPLU sawmill, ashamed in front of its neighbors for its inconspicuousness.
Long years of construction have written good pages in the history of the woodworking industry of Ukraine at the VUPLU sawmill in Kremenchuk. A powerful sawmill has grown from a small artisan-type enterprise, which has more than 200 workers in its production.
Food for the sawmill, driftwood, arrives every year from the upper reaches of the Dnieper. Standing on the shore near the sawmill, you can fondly watch the arrival of rafts of tied logs and freshly cut wood. In your mind, you drift several hundred versts to where the workers, felling the mighty trees of the forest areas, cut off their branches, weave them into rafts and let them down the Dnieper. Hundreds of versts of waterways are crossed by these rafts on the tow of any steamship. Finally they reached their goal. Now they have reached the city pier and the burlaks are pulling them to the sawmill with lines. Looking at them, at their tanned faces, admiring their enormous strength, one remembers the Volga burlaks with bulging healthy breasts, where calluses from rope, hardened by the power of the Dnieper current, are visible. The journey of the wooden logs is over, they are being dragged from the pier to the shore by horses. Here they are piled up, waiting to be processed into boards and other sawdust.
You have walked a few steps along the shore – and the noise of the sawmill beckons you, you go by inertia to the place where the saw cuts, the logs groan, the machines make noise, forming a symphony characteristic of the sawmill. As soon as you enter the sawmill, you will be blown away by the fresh spirit of sawn boards and sawdust. A trolley with logs moves smoothly under the machine, sharp saws are cutting the tree correctly, scattering wooden sawdust in all directions. A few seconds and you see how a ten-pound log turned into fifteen-pound boards. Further logs are immediately pulled up, that the same fate awaits them. Eight hours of unceasing labor in the symphony of sounds of sawmills, in the smoky wood sawdust, the worker-woodworker contributes his labor ration to the common cause of socialist construction. After all, this saw material, i.e. boards, is not intended for many places, for fixing mines, building bridges, houses, alloys, factories – but can you remember everything that this lumber is used for. The common cause of our construction was able to appreciate this unit and allowed it to grow every year. Some of the workers from the first day of construction of the sawmill connected their fate with its fate. After getting acquainted with the history of the sawmill, you will hear how an old worker proudly and excitedly tells about the life of the VUPL sawmill.
“We inherited a dilapidated sawmill with one workbench. With the smallest amount of money, we had to start everything from the beginning: repair the house, look for saws on the market and buy them, arrange an uninterrupted supply of wood, raise some products, because people who were not familiar with the work came to us for production. Here they first understood what wood is, here they practically learned this work and now they talk about the sawmill as if it were their child. All this is said for the year 1923. Since then, we have moved from reconstruction to the gradual growth and spread of the sawmill.”
With a happy face, the worker-extruder shows the new sawmills, the mechanical attachment of logs to the machines, shows how the boards are taken away from them, notes how to improve the workers’ life.
We have achieved all this in recent years through our work.
This is how the workers themselves helped to improve their sawmill. Not sparing their free hours, their rest, they came here, to the sawmill, to production meetings, pointed out the flaws in the factory, made their suggestions, and at the same time did not forget about themselves. Raising their cultural level, implementing proletarian discipline in production, surviving frequent absenteeism, they thereby increased their well-being. Many workers during this time managed to prove themselves as valuable workers and now they have been promoted to administrative and economic positions. The VUPL sawmill gave a lot of valuable union assets to the proletarian organizations that now manage the backward layers of the working class, drawing them into our everyday construction.
Leaving the sawmill, you have to go through the corridor that connects the sawmill with the red corner and the office. In this corridor, 50 workers work, knocking specially cut boards into tobacco boxes. The consumers of these boxes are Kremenchug and surrounding tobacco factories. For a long time you will be haunted by the picture of everything you saw and the noise of the sawmill, which is new to you, until the streets of the small town lead you to the Dnipro with the pleasant spirit of acacia.

Author: L. Nodland