Czechoslovakia’s defense industry collapsed when the Cold War ended. Now companies are reviving plants that once supplied the Warsaw Pact.
(Bloomberg) — Silence blankets the town of Prakovce. Once part of Czechoslovakia’s network of arms manufacturing, it was home to a factory specializing in tracks for tanks and armored vehicles. Then came the end of the Cold War.
Now Europe’s latest conflict is offering a flicker of hope to a place seemingly in terminal decline. The desperation to ramp up weapons production to help Ukraine repel Russia is about to reach a town that had been left to its empty isolation long ago.
A NATO and European Union member, Slovakia’s outgoing government has backed Ukraine, but the war effort has entered a new stage: the scramble to ensure supplies of weapons and ammunition. Along with companies such as Germany’s Rheinmetall AG, Slovak producers are expanding capacity.
A handful of towns in Slovakia’s poorer regions want to revive once vast plants that back in the day supplied the Warsaw Pact, even if that means overcoming local skepticism in a country where polls show a sizeable chunk of the population would be happy if Vladimir Putin won the war.
State-owned Konstrukta, which makes Zuzana 2 howitzers, is opening two new construction halls at Prakovce’s half-empty industrial park and hiring 50 workers. The company has also opened a new assembly hall and training center in the nearby town of Moldava nad Bodvou. Order books are full, according to Alexander Gursky, Konstrukta’s general director.
In the city of Snina closer to the border with Ukraine, ZVS Holding said late last year it would invest 15 million euros ($16.1 million) to boost its 155 millimeter artillery ammunition production to 100,000 shells per year from 19,000.
“Our production capacities can be vital in a crisis like this war,” said Tibor Straka, president of the country’s defense industry association. “The tradition of the defense industry managed to survive in Slovakia despite all the burdens of the past.”
The collapse of communism and the disintegration of the Warsaw Pact delivered a major blow to the eastern part of then Czechoslovakia that housed the biggest arms producers. Unlike Slovakia’s car production, which is located in the west of the country and underpins the national economy, markets for arms weren’t replaced.
As orders disappeared in the early 1990s, production dropped 90%, leaving tens of thousands of people jobless and sprawling complexes to their demise.
In Prakovce, 100 kilometers (62 miles) from Ukraine, that fired the starting gun on the transition from a thriving industrial hub to what can feel like a ghost town in the tail end of winter. It’s home to 3,000 people, roughly the same number of employees making armaments in its heyday.
During communism, workers at such facilities were given new apartments, stars of the era were brought to perform for them at the local cultural center. The town was so well off that its local soccer club brought a coach from Bratislava, now the Slovak capital, and climbed the leagues. Locals sunbathed at a new outdoor swimming pool.
The pool is now just a devastated concrete basin whose use is hard to tell. The soccer team has dropped to the seventh tier of Slovak football and the town hall is still trying to reconstruct the dilapidated cultural center with EU aid.
Jozef Komora spent almost 30 years producing tracks at the plant. He then watched his town crumble as he was unable to find work, eventually finding a job in the neighboring Czech Republic.
“It’s good that 50 people will find work,” said Komora, 74, now a pensioner. “Life once flourished here. Now, I hardly meet someone when I cross the town. Everything has started to decay.”
As the war in Ukraine enters its second year, the arms companies that managed to stay in business are hoping that the legacy of a skilled work force will get their plans moving quickly. DMD, the biggest Slovak state-owned arms holding company, plans to increase the number of employees to over 860 this year from 600, many of them in the region.
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They’re also betting that the jump in demand will last, given the shift in geopolitics, said Straka at the industry association. “The potential for arms production growth is quite high,” he said. “Rearming and modernization of forces in many countries, given their needs and the economic development, will continue for another 10 years.”
Many citizens remain to be convinced, given the past experience and an increasing embrace of Putin’s propaganda over the war in Ukraine.
When the industry collapsed, locals blamed the central government and nationalist forces gained traction after Czechoslovakia split into two nations. While the Czech Republic joined NATO in 1999, Slovakia’s path to the alliance was slower under populist strongman Vladimir Meciar. It joined five years later when the country also became a member of the EU.
The Slovak government has backed all anti-Russian sanctions and helps Ukraine with military equipment. The country, though, holds one of the strongest pro-Russian positions in the EU.
A fifth of the population prefers Russia to win the war and 37% of Slovaks still consider Russia to be a strategic partner, according to opinion polls. Opposition parties that speak favorably of Putin have overtaken the governing parties in popularity with early elections due in September after the collapse of the ruling coalition.
That’s echoed in Prakovce, where locals spoke in favor of Putin, even as the industry they pin their hopes on aims to supply Ukraine and its allies. Some were concerned the rebirth of the arms industry brings risks, such as making the town a possible missile target.
Marek Pisko, 36, an engineer from the town, blamed the US for sparking the conflict and was wary of the plan for the defense industry. “NATO has been constantly expanding,” he said. “Russia was forced to defend itself.”
But in a place where more than 10% of people who remain are unemployed, and almost 20% of the population are pensioners, even a glimmer of better prospects is something.
The municipality in Prakovce is keen because the creation of jobs in one of the country’s least developed regions might persuade younger people to stay, even if the town will never see a repeat of its best years.
“A lot of people here link the development and progress of our town with socialism,” said Robert Weisz, Prakovce’s mayor. “The decline and everything negative that happened here came afterwards.”
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