Maxim Ovodenko

Maxim Borisovich Ovodenko was born on 11 August 1930 in Cherkasy, then part of the Ukrainian SSR. After finishing school he entered the Ural Polytechnic Institute named after S. M. Kirov in Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinburg) and graduated in 1955 as a metallurgical engineer.

His first industrial postings were in the Urals. From 1955 to 1972 he worked at the Kamensk-Uralsky Metallurgical Plant, moving step by step from shift foreman through technical bureau chief and deputy shop head to head of production. That apprenticeship in aluminium and aviation metals set the path for the rest of his career.

In 1972 Ovodenko became chief engineer of the Krasnoyarsk Metallurgical Plant named after V. I. Lenin. Twelve years later, in 1984, he was appointed director of the Kuibyshev Metallurgical Plant. After reorganisation he served as general director of the Kuibyshev Metallurgical Production Association of the USSR Ministry of Aviation Industry, and from 1993 of OJSC Samara Metallurgical Company (Sameko), remaining in the top post until 1996.

His early years in Samara coincided with a full reconstruction of rolling, casting and pressing capacity and of tool, mechanical and power shops. He raised the mass of rolled ingots from two to six tonnes, more than doubled output, and in 1988 oversaw production of 600,000 tonnes of rolled metal. The works also introduced lacquered can strip and large aerospace stampings that were new for the country.

He organised a plant training centre linking a vocational school, a technical college and a chair at Kuibyshev Aviation Institute. After 1996 he stayed with Sameko as president and then consultant to the general director, taught rolling and pressing technology as a professor at Samara State Aerospace University, published scientific papers and held dozens of inventor certificates, and served as president of the Samara aviation enterprises association Polyot.

On 15 August 1990 a presidential decree of the USSR named him Hero of Socialist Labor for outstanding results in aviation metallurgy.

Ovodenko made Samara his home for the later decades of his life. Public biographies emphasise his work rather than private detail, and family names were not listed in the first official notices of his death.

Around the metallurgical works he was known for social building as much as for tonnage figures: housing for workers, kindergartens and schools, reconstruction of the Metallurgists' Palace of Culture and Metallurg stadium, the children's centre Utyonok, and a mercy and health fund for plant veterans. Samara Gymnasium No. 133 later took his name.

Maxim Ovodenko died early on the morning of 26 September 2026 in Samara. He was 96. No medical cause was given in the first official statements.

Samara Region governor Vyacheslav Fedorishchev announced the death the same day on his MAX channel, describing Ovodenko as a Hero of Socialist Labor and an honorary citizen of Samara and of Samara Region. Regional outlets including 450media.ru, RIA Novosti, Volga News, TV Samara and 63.ru carried the news.

Farewell was set for Monday 28 September 2026 from 10:00 to 12:00 at the Metallurg Palace of Culture, with a funeral service at 13:00 in the church at Rubezhnoye cemetery and burial at 13:45 on the cemetery's central avenue.

In Samara Ovodenko is remembered as the manager who modernised the city's aluminium rolling plant, opened new aerospace product lines, and tied factory growth to housing, schools and cultural buildings for the metallurgists' district. His Hero of Socialist Labor title, Orders of Lenin and of Merit to the Fatherland, and dual honorary citizenship mark the official recognition of that work.

The gymnasium that bears his name, the social facilities he helped create, and the continuing memory of Sameko's late-Soviet production peak are the local traces of a career spent between the shop floor, the design office and civic life in the Volga industrial city.