each square. On December 31, 1804, after reviewing the plan and the report of Platov and De Wollant, Tsar Alexander personally inscribed: "To be according to this. Alexander". The construction of the city was slow, primarily because of the reluctance of most Don Cossacks to leave their homes in Cherkassk, and the new capital being from the River Don, with which the Cossacks were closely connected throughout its history. To compensate, there were even plans to deepen the Aksay River (a distributary of the Don) where the new city was located to eventually alter the course of the Don through the city. This plan was abandoned due to lack of funds, and for more than three decades the question of the place of the capital of the Don Cossack remained unresolved, while growth of Novocherkassk stagnated. By 1837, an alternative to transfer the capital to the village of Aksayskoy, which was also on a hill and near the Don, gained popularity. However, Tsar Nicholas I personally inspected Novocherkassk and the village of Aksayskoy that same year, and after returning to Saint Petersburg ordered the Don Cossacks to keep the capital in Cherkassk because of the difficulties and uselessness of the transfer. In the first half of the 19th century, Novocherkassk was built only as an army center, administrative buildings, guest yards, taverns, wine cellars, hotels, and generals and noblemen's houses. In the 1850s, industrialization reached Novocherkassk and industrial enterprises were formed, however only one-thousand of the city's twenty-thousand residents worked in them. Soviet era On the eve of the February Revolution, Novocherkassk had a population of about sixty thousand people, about twenty-five thousand of whom were serving Cossacks and their families, three thousand were noblemen, and about five hundred were clergymen. Novocherkassk, unlike many Russian cities at the time, had almost no permanent merchants or peasants. During the Russian Civil War from 1917 to 1922, Novocherkassk was the center of the Don Army counter-revolution and came under the command of General Alexey Kaledin. The Red Army eventually defeated ousted the White-aligned Don Army from Novocherkassk on January 7, 1920. During World War II, the Wehrmacht of Nazi Germany occupied Novocherkassk between July 24, 1942 and February 13, 1943. On June 1–2, 1962, events known as the Novocherkassk massacre occurred when food riots and workers rights protests broke out following a labor strike at the locomotive factory, the Novocherkassk Electric Locomotive