ABSTRACT
Antonina Aleksandrovna Berezhnaia made her home in the Ural mountains, in the city of Ekaterinburg, formerly called Sverdlovsk. During her interview, Berezhnaia described in great detail her work in the administration of the metallurgical industry of the Urals region, providing a valuable portrait of the inner workings of socialist industry. Berezhnaia initiated a number of technological innovations in the factories she administered, including rotary furnaces. Berezhnaia’s interview also reveals the difficulty of being a woman in a man’s world and the obstacles that kept many other women from advancing in the labor force. In the process of adjusting to the new order, Berezhnaia turned her back on the painful aspects of her past. In general, Berezhnaia provided very few personal details, and those that she gave all conformed to the ideal that emerged in the mid-1930s, of the socialist family as the source of stability for the nation.
