The history of the organization of domestic trolleybus transport: from the engineering experiments of the Russian Empire to the establishment of regular work in the USSR

The purpose of this article is to reconstruct the appearance of the first prototypes of trolleybus passenger transport in the Russian Empire at the beginning of the 20th century and the development of its regular operation in the USSR during the 1930s. The publication analyzes the evolution of the state approach to the development of domestic passenger electric transport and the impact on this process of the socio-economic formation on which our country was located. The article examines the attempts of pre-revolutionary Russian engineers to create a trolleybus service in the Russian Empire, but they were never implemented at that time. The lack of government support and, in general, economic policy, which did not contribute to the development of domestic innovations in the field of urban transport, did not allow the implementation of trolleybus projects by domestic engineers. It was only during the height of industrialization, in the 1930s, that the Soviet Union was able to provide itself with domestically produced parts, which made it possible to establish regular trolleybuses.