The history of the "URAL®" brand motorcycle begins with the
Russian pre W.W.II planning. Russia knew it would soon be going
to war against the Third Reich, and Hitler. The military was
ordered to gear up in all areas, including the ground forces
that would be defending the Russian "motherland" from the
invading German Panzer, ground troops, and German special
forces. The German special forces had thousands of the BMW
sidecars that the German Army loved for their maneuverability,
reliability, economy and ease of maintenance. Carrying a machine
gun and soldier plus supplies, the sidecar "weapon" was feared
by the otherwise "fixed" Russian ground troops. The usefulness
of the sidecar motorcycle was beginning its legend.
Back in the old USSR, in 1939, the Russian engineers in Moscow
were busily dismantling 5 BMWs purchased from Germany through
some Swedish intermediaries. The engineers copied the BMW design
in all details and made molds and dies to produce their own
engines and gearboxes in Moscow. (Incidentally, Harley-Davidson
also copied the BMW and delivered about 1,000 Harley-Davidson
model XA flat-twin shaft drive motorcycles to the US Army during
World War II.) Soon a factory was set up in Moscow producing
hundreds of Russian sidecar motorcycles. At this point the rig
had no name. As the demand and function for the Russian sidecar
rig spread in the military, the top Russian
strategists worried that the factory in Moscow was within
easy range of German bombers. The decision was made to move the
motorcycle plant further east, out of bombing range and into the
middle of the resource rich "URAL" mountain region.
A site was chosen in the small trading town of Irbit, located on
the fringe of the Siberian plains. The only building on the site
was a brewery and it soon was converted into the first R & D
building to prepare for the construction of a massive new
production complex to build the "URAL" motorcycle. Over 5,000 "URALs"
as they came to be known in the military, (they still had no
official name) were produced for the Russian Army during W.W.II.
They fought against the Germans in many sectors and battles and
must have mightily surprised the German sidecar gunners when
they came up against Russians riding the "look alike" and even
stronger sidecar BMW clones!
The history of the URAL® had begun with the glory of helping to
defeat the terror of Hitler's armies on the Russian and European
battlegrounds.
The URAL® was built for the military only, up until the late
1950's when another plant in the Ukraine was built to take on
that job and the Irbit Motorcycle Works (IMZ) began to
concentrate on bikes for domestic consumption. The popularity of
the rigs grew steadily with the Russian people and in the 1960's
the full production of the plant was turned over to non-military
production.
A similar model is the Soviet (now Ukrainian) Dnepr
motorcycle. Both Ural and Dnepr motorcycles are sometimes known
by the generic name, "Cossack motorcycles," which was used
between 1973 and 1979 by SATRA in the United Kingdom.