OREANDA-NEWS. October 26, 2011. In 2011 Mosmetrostroy celebrates its 80th anniversary. It’s hard to believe, that our engineering experience and hard work of our staff have crystallized into transport constructions, that have been serving both the city and the country for already 8 decades. Since the 1930s first projects, taken on by The Young Communist League, the image of the company has changed a lot, as well as the image of Russia has changed since the pre-war years. Together with the country we’ve come through the first five-year plans, the War, the Khrushchev Thaw and the 1980s, when the construction rates were peaked. Our staff suffered difficult years of the market reforms and then we took a strong position in the new competitive conditions. We recovered our potential in the 2000s, which time was a period of stabilization for the country. The metro is being constructed, which means the baton from our predecessors has been picked up towards the XXI century.

The underground construction is not only a municipal priority, but also one of the main state missions. The welfare level of a country in the modern world hinges not only on the financial prosperity of the people, but also on the high-tech industries development, such as: space exploration, shipbuilding, air transport and power industries, information technologies, education and healthcare. It also refers to the rapid transit systems development, including the metro construction. The key ready metro construction is exactly one of the most difficult, capital- and technology-intensive tasks, because it combines both technologies and manual labour. Nowadays the metro doesn’t only provide the dwellers with a modern high-speed means of public transport, but also lets the world community judge high engineering level of Russian construction and industrial schools. Russia has always been and remains the member of the “metro engineering club”, implementing this feature both within the country and advancing in the international market.

Have we gone far from the first Metrostroy workers, tens of thousands of former peasants, blue collar workers and Red Army men, who were real enthusiasts of the underground construction? Undoubtedly, there’s a great distance of the technique, engineering qualifications and experience between us and the metro construction pioneers. I mean precisely a distance, not a gap, because the eagerness to work, the enthusiasm and the ability to concentrate all our efforts before the tasks that we have, have remained the same. Not knowing the subsoil of Moscow, our predecessors were probably self-confident, and only having researched the soils that Moscow stands on we learned how to “listen” to the soil and pay attention to productive capacity and workplace safety. The years have shown that a human remains the key factor of a successful underground construction, and not a concentration of the state will, financing and equipment. A human being, with his confidence in the team, in the next day and in the demand of his work. And it doesn’t matter if you are a chief or an engineer, a mine surveyor or a shield operator, a laboring man or an assembler. Only due to the competent working management with constant training provided, with taking into account the interests of our colleagues we manage to construct not less than our predecessors did, even being less in quantity than they were. The constant improving of technical equipment, construction processes mechanization, accumulating experiences, that we share with the world, let us be confident towards the future goals which are great and undelayable, as always. Moscow is in need of the metro development, highways and the other infrastructure facilities as never before.

Probably, through the decades the same distance of technical equipment and engineering qualifications will lie between us and the future Metrostroy workers, those, who will face our 100th anniversary and all other future celebrations. Today we need to say thanks to everybody who assists us in the metro construction. These are the state, Moscow and the Moscow Region authorities, because the metro has already passed though the city boundaries. These are our partners: master building, planning, research and manufacturing organizations. The profession of the Metrostroy worker counts eighty years. Each first-constructor biography is a page in the Metrostroy chronicle. We want to say special thanks to our veterans, who have devoted their life for the hardest job and who have trained today’s generation to be real professionals.

Today we have an ability of choosing commissions: in Moscow or in regions, in Russia or abroad. We deal not only with the underground facilities, but also with the other transit systems: tunnels, roads and bridges. And we are excited about the fact that a tremendous breakthrough in the metro construction, which is the principal direction of our activity, involving tens of kilometers of new lines has been set as an objective by the government. We are confident about the future, because making the future is our common work.