The Ural (pronounced Oral)

In a bleak September in 1939, five German BMW R71 motorbikes were

smuggled into the Soviet Union
BMW R71 via Sweden.

The Russians needed a military

motorbike and it appeared that the
BMW was the strongest
contender, being the best sidecar
motorcycle of the time. A rugged,
all terrain motorcycle, capable of
carrying three people and heavy loads, it was ideal for mobile troops.

Shortly before, in August 1939 Molotov and Ribbentrop had signed a

historic non aggression treaty between Russia and Germany

The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, named after

the Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov and
the Nazi German foreign minister Joachim von
Ribbentrop, was officially the Treaty of Non-
Stalin and aggression between Germany and the Union of Soviet
Ribbontrop Socialist Republics, and was signed in Moscow in the
late hours of 23 August
1939.
The pact's publicly stated intentions were
a guarantee of non-belligerence by either
party towards the other, and a
Russian troops and
commitment that neither party would
M72’s
ally with or aid an enemy of the other
party. This latter provision ensured that Germany would not support
Japan in its undeclared war against the Soviet Union. In addition, the
treaty included a secret protocol that divided territories of Romania,
Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Finland into Nazi and Soviet
"spheres of influence", anticipating potential "territorial and political
rearrangements" of these countries. Thereafter, Germany
invaded Poland on 1 September 1939.
The Soviet-Japanese ceasefire
agreement took effect on 16 September.
The pact remained in force until the
German government broke it
by invading the Soviet Union on 22 June
1941.
 Even though they had signed the pact, the Russians continued their war
preparations as they knew at some point they would be at odds with
Hitler’s war machine and they had to build their defenses against
the blitzkrieg tactics including
the Panzer tanks and Stuker dive Irbit
bombers.

URAL M72
The treaty was strictly over
territories and did not include
technology so, in the case of
motorcycles and many other
areas the Russians had to reengineer the bikes brought over from
Sweden. The Ural motorbike was key
in the defense of Russia as it allowed
Harley XA swift movement of troops and
equipment over rugged terrain.

The result of the reengineering was the

Ural M72 and so the brand of Ural was
born in early 1941. The BMW based
design with twin horizontally opposed cylinders remains the
predominate design in the BMW range and the Ural today and so
successful were the early designs that they were copied, not only by the
Russians but the Americans with the wartime Harley XA.

The factory in Moscow was soon producing hundreds of Russian M-72

sidecar motorcycles enabling the Soviets to maintain fast
communications across severe climate and geography, and some 10,000
were manufactured. The Nazi Blitzkrieg was so fast and effective that
Soviet strategists worried that the Moscow factory was within easy
range of German bombers, so it was decided to move the motorcycle
plant further east, out of bombing range, into the middle of the resource
rich Ural Mountain region.
It was a brutally cold November of 1941. The Nazis were at the outskirts
of Moscow, preparing for the all-in assault on the Soviet capital. At the
same moment, in a small town of Irbit, located on the eastern slopes of
the Ural Mountains, 2000kms away from
Moscow, a freight train arrived with the
machinery, materials, and drawing boards.
With this train came people with an
impossible task to build a factory in the
middle of a Siberian winter and produce
combat sidecar motorcycles for the Red
Army.

Irbit, located on the fringe of the vast Siberian steppes in the Ural
Mountains, had, before the Revolution
of 1917, been an important Trade and
Fair center in Russia. The only
substantial building in town was a
brewery. It was soon converted into
research and development
headquarters, where long hours were
spent preparing for the construction of
a massive new production complex
for the M-72. In February, 1942, the first M-72s were sent into battle.
Over the course of World War II, 9,799 M-72 motorcycles were
delivered to the front for reconnaissance detachments and mobile troops,
and were also used to evacuate the wounded from battle fields during the
War. The history of Ural began with the glory of helping to defeat the
terror of Hitler’s armies on the Russian and European battlefields. The
Nazis were to be beaten with their own weapon and their use proved
decisive in the bloody battle of Stalingrad.
 Stalingrad

The Battle of Stalingrad (August 23,

1942 – February 2, 1943) was the
major battle of World War II in
which Nazi Germany and its allies
fought the Soviet Union for control of
the city of Stalingrad (now Volgograd) in the southwestern Soviet
Union. Marked by constant close quarters combat and lack of regard for
military and civilian casualties, it is among the bloodiest battles in the
history of warfare. The heavy losses inflicted on the Wehrmacht make it
arguably the most strategically decisive battle of the whole war. It was a
turning point in the European theatre of World
War II - the German forces never regained the
initiative in the East and withdrew a vast
military force from the West to reinforce their
losses.

On Christmas Day 1942, Radio Moscow

broadcast a simple message to the members of
General Friedrich Paulus’s 6th Army besieged
in the city of Stalingrad. To the background
sound of a ticking
clock came the
message: “Every
seven seconds a German soldier dies in
Russia. Stalingrad is a mass grave.”
With a relentlessness, that mirrored the battle which had begun four
months earlier and had brought the German advance into the Soviet
Union to a grinding halt, the message was repeated throughout the day.
As temperatures dropped to minus 25C, encircled by an ever more
confident Red Army, with their supplies and weapons rapidly
diminishing, the same troops who had victoriously goosestepped down
the Champs Élysées in Paris fewer than 30 months earlier were now on
the brink of utter collapse.
A day that many had speculated would see them victorious, perhaps
even safely returned to Germany, had become instead the stuff of their
darkest nightmares.
Those few of you that remember the war will be familiar with the
Eastern front and those that don’t remember will probably have seen the
movie ‘Stalingrad’ or ‘Enemy at the Gates’ both depicting the most
bloody siege of the second world war.

The film ‘Enemy at the Gates’ featured Jude Law as Vasily Zaitsev: The
legendary Sniper of Stalingrad. He was a Hero of the Soviet
Union during World War II, notable particularly for his activities
between 10 November and 17 December 1942, during the Battle of
Stalingrad. During this five-week period he killed 225soldiers and
officers of the Wehrmacht and other Axis armies, including 11
enemy snipers.
Prior to 10 November, he killed 32 Axis soldiers with the standard-issue
Mosin–Nagant rifle (effective range of 900 metres). Between October
1942 and January 1943, Zaytsev made an estimated 400 kills, some of
which were over 1,000 metres. Vasily’s motorbike was of course, a Ural
M72.

After World War II the Ural factory was renovated, and in 1950, the
factory produced its 30,000th motorcycle. In the late 1950s, a plant in
the Ukraine took over the manufacture of Urals for military use, and the
Irbit Motorcycle Works (IMZ) began to build Urals for domestic,
civilian consumption. The popularity of the outfits grew steadily among
Russians, and in the 1960s, the plant was turned over to full non-military
production.

The factory continued producing motorcycles with sidecars and built

over 3 million outfits. People who laid the foundation of the factory
would have never imagined that 70 years later this factory would remain
the only sidecar motorcycle manufacturer in the world and Ural would
become a cult motorcycle.

Current Ural Solo