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