In the USSR of the 1920s, the main expert in the development of world and domestic motor transport was Obolensky Valerian Valerianovich, better known in the country and the party by his party nickname Nikolai Osinsky. A revolutionary, an associate of Lenin, he was a colorful representative of intellectual Bolshevism. Osinsky managed to combine scientific work with an active social life. In the late 1920s, he headed Avtodor (Society for the Promotion of Motorism and Improvement of Roads of the USSR), and also became the editor-in-chief of the new Soviet magazine "Driving" ("Za Rulem").
Just like Bukharin until the end of the 1920s, he sometimes expressed his personal point of view, which could differ from the opinion of the majority in the Central Committee and Stalin himself. In addition, Osinsky successfully managed to combine speculative scientific work in leading institutions of the Academy of Sciences and Gosplan with practical activist activity in public organizations — in the late 1920s he headed Avtodor.
By the beginning of 1927, there were 12 thousand cars in the entire USSR. With these indicators, the Soviet Union was ranked 40th in the world. In 1927, in the August issue of the newspaper "The Truth" ("Pravda"), Osinsky's article "An American car or a Russian cart" was published. The author of the article pointed to the very modest place of the USSR in the world automotive industry and stressed that building a new society without a car is impossible. As for our region, here the car (it was called "motor") was often a curiosity, although back in 1907 the first car appeared on the streets of Tyumen.
Siberians also knew about another new type of transport – airplanes. On June 19, 1912, in Tyumen, at the city hippodrome, demonstration flights took place on a French Bleriot airplane. They were conducted by one of the first Russian pilots, Alexander Vasiliev. Thus, Tyumen residents got acquainted with the technical novelty of the century – aviation. This flight was not the only one. In the book "Essays of old Tyumen", one of the Tyumen old-timers Nikolai Kalugin tells about the flight of Mr. Utochkin on an airplane in the summer of 1914. In Tobolsk , the first demonstration flight of an airplane took place in August 1914 . on Panin Hill in honor of Russia's entry into the World War.
Special attention was paid to the construction of aircraft in the young Soviet state, thanks to which, in the late 1930s, the USSR turned into a leading aviation power.