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The Kharkov Locomotive Factory (KhPZ) built about 20% of the Russian Empire's railway engines. After the Russian Revolution and the establishment of the Soviet government in Ukraine, the factory was put to work designing and building tractors, then tanks after 1927. The Bolshevik Factory in Leningrad and the KhPZ were the first two Soviet tank factories, modernized in 1929 with German assistance under the Treaty of Rapallo, 1922.
In 1928, a tank design bureau was established in the factory; it would be responsible for the some of the most successful tanks ever built, and eventually become the Morozov Design Bureau. The KhPZ designed and produced twenty-five T-24 tanks, then nearly eight thousand BT fast tanks. It also built a handful of multi-turreted T-35 tanks.
Shortly before the German invasion of the Soviet Union the KhPZ started series production of the T-34, the most-produced and arguably the best tank of World War II. Series production began in June 1940 in Kharkov, and later in the Stalingrad Tractor Plant and Sormovo Shipbuilding Plant. In 1941, due to German advances, the factory and design shops were evacuated to the Ural mountains. The plant was combined with Uralvagonzavod Plant in Nizhny Tagil into one enterprise called the Uralskiy Tank Plant, Factory 183.
After Kharkov was recaptured, the design bureau and factory gradually transferred all operations back to Ukraine. The factory, now called Factory 75, began production of the new T-44 tank from October 1944, having completed prototypes back in Nizhny Tagil. T-54 production was started in the Urals and Kharkov in 1947–48, and the move was completed with the 1951 re-establishment of the Design Bureau, now called KB-60M, in Kharkov. The factory was renamed ‘Malyshev Factory’ in 1957 and took up production of the T-55 in 1958, then the T-64 in 1967 (the T-64 was also built in the Leningrad Kirov Plant and Uralvagonzavod Plant). In the 1960s the bureau designed OT-54 and TO-55 flame-thrower tanks, for production at the Omsk Transport Machine Construction Plant. The T-80 tank, with a high-performance gas turbine engine, was produced at Malyshev from 1983, and the T-80UD, with a conventional diesel engine, from 1985.
The Malyshev Factory remains a state-owned manufacturer of heavy equipment, including diesel engines, farm machinery, coal mining, sugar refining, and wind farm equipment, plus the Ukrainian T-84 tank.
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