Ww2 and the Soviet Economy

War never seems to be presented as a good thing. At best, it is marketed by those wishing to engage in it as a necessary evil. War destroys. It destroys villages, cities, buildings, communities, and most importantly it destroys human life and families and on a larger scale can destroy nations. War does not build. It is not constructive. War is destructive. The Russian people had enough war. They were weary of an unpopular war just decades earlier, and the result of the people’s resolve led to an absolution of the Tsarist government. With profound changes to their government and their way of life, and a relatively stable economy, the Soviet people were beginning to believe in their government once again. Their agriculture was starting to grow, the investments in railroad were paying off as transportation to the interior was greatly advanced, and most importantly, the collectivization of the work force was driving industry to new levels. It is this new economic organization of a resolute people focussed on a common goal that was instrumental in the defeat of the Germans and thus the Allied victory of World War II. It can be impossible to gauge how a population will respond to war. “There was a sharp contrast between the degree of wartime national unity and popular support upon which the two regimes, tsarist and Soviet, could draw. During World War I, the initial enthusiasm of the educated elite for war against Germans rapidly turned to despair and anger...By contrast, the Soviet regime encountered little overt popular dissatisfaction with the war effort.”1 The trust between the government and the governed was being restored, and the people were willing to trust Stalin to victory, in a way that they could not trust the leadership during World War I. Comrade Semyanov, the director of the Kirov Works recalls the resolve of the people to Alexander Werth, “...though [the German bombing] frightened people, it also aroused their frantic anger against the Germans. When they started bombing us in a big way in October 1941 our workers fought for the factory more than they did for their own houses...And yet, somehow-we didn’t stop. A kind of instinct told us we mustn’t- that it would be worse than suicide, and a little like treason.”2 Martin McCauley notes the same thing, “This war was not between the Soviet and German armies but one between the whole Soviet people and Germany. Millions volunteered to fight the fascists.”3 With popular support behind the war, it then fell to the leadership to guide the people to the victory that they fought for so tenaciously. Stalin had no doubt that war was coming, and he was making preparations for that war. Retrospectively, it is easy to determine that his preparations were perhaps too little, too late as he “placed exaggerated hopes on the Nazi-Soviet pact...Despite the very greatest efforts and sacrifices in the preceding decade, the Soviet Union found itself economically as well as militarily at a disadvantage.”4 Because Stalin was holding out for this glorious union of Russia and Germany, he had not placed war preparations on the top of his priority lists. Most of the Soviet industry and agriculture were situated in the west, unguarded and within easy access of German forces. Stalin never thought that Germany would penetrate so deeply, and thus was not building defenses deep in the interior. “The result was that the adoption of modern weapons was so delayed that good-quality tanks and aircraft, which were a real match for the Germans’, were not yet fully in mass production when the war began.”5 The Germans, as planned, marched relatively easily into the U.S.S.R.; this put Stalin on high alert, and brought his brilliant ability to organize and plan into full effect. As Gatrell and Harrison note, “Most of the war was fought on Soviet territory. This released positive forces of national resistance, stimulating Soviet resource mobilization, which outweighed the negative forces of demoralization and disruption.”6 The people and the industry of Russia were subsequently organized and mobilized for “intensive Soviet use of available resources for war purposes.”7 The people were mobilized either to the battlefield, as most able-bodied men were; or else to the factories. In the case of the Kirov Works, it is noted that “...sixty-nine percent of our workers are female. Hardly any women worked here before the war.”8 And while the people were certainly mobilized (estimates of 10 million people were mobilized)9, it was not only the people who were moved. “Everything possible was done to send eastwards truckloads of fuel, equipment, grain, cattle, amid tremendous difficulties and inevitable hardship.”10 All of Soviet productive capacity was moved eastward, out of reach of the Germans. Not only were the people and industry moved east, but factories themselves shifted gears from making peace-time machinery, to making contributions to the war effort. Because of earlier economic planning, the Soviet’s had a definite advantage over the German’s in this transition. “In the 1920’s the Soviets had adopted an American mobilization model which gave priority to dual purpose technology in arms production and supplies. They built, with U.S. help, huge state of the art tractor and motor plants while the tractors and motors were so designed that their key parts could be used in the production of tanks and aircraft.”11 In addition to productive economic planning, it was also the backwards nature of the Soviet economy that assisted in their victory. It is ironic that planning for war had helped the Soviets so tremendously with weapon production to give them advantage over the Germans, and at the same time the poor planning of their backward motor-vehicle transportation system also served to give them advantage. The entire German war plan centered on a quick victory. They did not have the resources to get bogged down in a long fight. They could not feed their people for an extended war, nor could they clothe the army through the winter. “The Soviets had to be defeated by winter 1941. Equipping a huge invasion force meant that weapons and vehicles had to be assembled from all over Europe. What happened when they broke down? The vehicles were built only to travel on good roads, not the roadless Russian terrain.”12 “The Wehrmacht made little progress in August. By 1 September, the Germans suffered 410,000 casualties (dead and wounded) our of the 3.78 million soldiers at the beginning of the invasion. There were not enough reserves to replace them. About half of the panzers were out of commission. This testifies to the tenaciousness of Soviet resistance.”13 With the German army dependent on a quick victory, it was the tenacious resolve of the Russian people that prevented the Germans from reaching that goal. Furthermore, “the scale of Soviet mobilization, when combined with the overwhelming economic superiority of the Allies, was sufficient to destroy Germany completely as a military power.”14 World War II saw a very different people group living inside the land now-called Russia. The people were not the angry, disenfranchised mob that threw their leader out at the end of the first world war. The Germans expected a quick victory, but they could neither have been prepared for the resolve of the Soviet people to fight for their country, nor for the economic collective organization that the new Socialist government was able to employ so readily and effectively. Thus, the people and the economy of the Soviet Union were instrumental in the Allied victory of World War II.

1 Peter Gatrell and Mark Harrison, “The Russian and Soviet Economies in Two World Wars: A Comparative View,” Economic History Review, vol. 46, no. 3 (1993), p. 429.2 Comrade Semyanov quoted in Alexander Werth, Russia at War, 1941-1945. (New York: Dutton, 1964.), p. 341.3 Martin McCauley, The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Union. (London: Pearson Longman, 2008). p. 235.4 Alec Nove, An Economic History of the U.S.S.R. (London: Penguin Books, 1989). p. 260.5 Nove, p. 261.6 Gatrell and Harrison, p. 449.7 Gatrell and Harrison, p. 449.8 Werth, p. 344.9 Nove, p. 263.10 Nove, P. 263.11 McCauley, p. 237.12 McCauley, p. 237.13 McCauley, p. 239.14 Gatrell and Harrison, p. 438.