In the 1950s, a handball team "Trud" was created at the Vulcan plant in Leningrad by the initiative of Nikolai Vishnyakov and Yuri Romanov. This team was the first in the history of Leningrad to receive the right to compete in the USSR championship, but it was not possible to achieve serious success, as the team was amateur and could not fight on an equal footing with the grandees of domestic handball.
