Lysva Metallurgical Plant, founded in 1785 by Varvara Aleksandrovna Shakhovskaya, is one of the oldest enterprises in the Urals. The plant began with the production of cast iron and products made from it; in subsequent periods, new workshops and factories were built where forged, rolled, and other metal products were manufactured.
By 1929, the plant produced 43% of all chrome-plated tinplate in the entire Union output.
In 1934, for the first time in the USSR, the plant mastered the production of automotive sheet metal. The plant constantly developed and expanded. New labor was required, which led to an increase in the population of the workers' settlement of Lysva. People came to work at the LMZ not only from neighboring districts but also from nearby regions. Population growth stimulated the construction of residential buildings. Clinics, schools, kindergartens, and shops appeared.
A class-based approach played a negative role in the development of cooperation and in improving the efficiency of cooperative production, since the most skilled and well-prepared small producers turned out to be "class-alien elements" and, in the course of various "purges," "inspections," "self-purges," and then repressions, were removed from the sphere of production. In the Irkutsk Okrug at the end of 1930, the number of expelled members in some artels reached 40%.
In the 1930s, state regulation of cooperative production intensified, and enterprises of craft cooperation were increasingly drawn into the system of command-administrative management, planned production, and distribution. This led to a distortion of the production structure. Priority development was given to sectors using local, non-scarce raw materials (production of building materials, woodworking, forest-chemical production), while output in leather, footwear, felt-boot making, and other industries that relied on scarce raw materials declined.
From the end of the first Five-Year Plan, craft cooperation was oriented toward the production of mass-consumption goods. Increasing the output of these goods became the defining direction of its further productive activity. The cooperative system substantially complemented state production. The range of industries and products of cooperative enterprises was very broad and diverse: from mining to the production of consumer goods and food products, from transport services to household services for the population. More than 50% consisted of products from the food and garment sectors.
An important role in the industrial development of the Angara region was played by the labor of special settlers (dekulakized), exiles, and prisoners. By 1932, the Cheremkhovo commandant's office counted 10 settlements and 12,978 special settlers; the Tayshet commandant's office, 17 settlements and 7,370 special settlers; the Kirensk commandant's office, 6 settlements and 892 special settlers, etc. Special settlers were forcibly assigned to logging for the trust "Vostsibles" and to coal mining. In addition, in 1932–1933, the OGPU was engaged in building a system of mobilization grain and hay storage facilities in the East Siberian Krai.
In the late 1930s, the Tayshet Corrective Labor Camp (ITL) of the NKVD Main Administration of Camps for the Timber Industry was established for logging and mica mining, for 14,000–17,000 prisoners. For railway construction in the Tayshet area, the Western ITL, the Tayshet camp division, and the Southern ITL of the Administration of Railway Construction Camps in the Far East were also created, with a combined total in 1938 of 32,500 prisoners. In addition, up to 10,000 prisoners were held in corrective labor institutions of the NKVD Directorate for Irkutsk Oblast: a furniture factory in Irkutsk, Colony No. 3, an agricultural colony, and the "1 May" state farm.