Harrison:

*This paper appeared in German as “Barbarossa: die sowjetische
Antwort, 1941,” in Zwei Wege nach Moskau. Vom Hitler-Stalin Pakt
bis zum Unternehmen Barbarossa, pp. 443-63, edited by Bernd
Wegner (Munich: Piper, 1992); and in an English version of the same
book: From Peace to War: Germany, Soviet Russia and the World,
1939-1941, pp. 431-48, edited by Bernd Wegner (Providence, RI:
Berghahn Books, 1997).


5. "In factories and cities contingency plans were drawn up for war production in the event of war, but the most obvious preparations for a defensive campaign were neglected. Specialised defence factories were concentrated in vulnerable territories to the south and west. There was talk of dispersing capacity into the interior regions, but nothing was done; it was always cheaper to expand output where production was already concentrated. Nothing was done to prepare vital industrial assets for defence against air attack, or for possible evacuation, since the idea that an invader might penetrate Soviet territory had become treasonous.9"

(9) Mark Harrison, Soviet Planning in Peace and War, 1938-1945 (Cambridge 1985), pp. 53-63.

6. What happened now was that informal leadership took over and carried out the essential tasks of war mobilisation. In the economy, the most important measures were a crash programme to evacuate the big munitions factories in the war zones to the remote interior of the country, and the all-out conversion of civilian industry to war production. The evacuation, carried out without any planning beforehand, was an act of inspired improvisation in which the key roles fell to individual leaders - Kaganovich, Kosygin, Shvernik. Other individual leaders - Beriya, Malenkov, Malyshev, Mikoyan, Molotov, Voznesensky - armed with unlimited personal responsibility, took on key tasks of industrial mobilisation and conversion.13

(13) Sanford R Lieberman, “The evacuation of industry in the Soviet Union in World War II,” in Soviet Studies, vol 35, no 1 (1983); Sanford R Lieberman, “Crisis management in the USSR: The wartime system of administration and control,” in Susan J Linz, ed, The Impact of World War II on the Soviet Union (Totowa, NJ 1985); Harrison, Soviet Planning in Peace and War, pp. 63-100.

11  The response from below extended to massive participation in organised programmes such as the emergency tasks of industrial evacuation and conversion, and the industrial movements of “socialist emulation” - individuals and groups pledged to double and triple fulfilment of low peacetime work norms.23

(23) L. S. Rogachevskaya, Sotsialisticheskoe sorevnovanie v SSSR. Istoricheskie ocherki. 1917-1970 gg. (Moscow 1977), pp. 175-212.

15-16. Uncontrolled mobilisation had saved the country’s immediate military-economic capacities, but at the same time stored up huge problems. The heart of the war economy had been shifted bodily hundreds of  kilometres to the east, and now lay in the Urals and western Siberia where the western and southern factories for making tanks, guns, shells and aircraft had been relocated. This in itself had cost huge resources of civilian transport and construction. Moreover, the remote regions of the interior were utterly unready for such accelerated exploitation. They lacked most things necessary for recommissioning the evacuatedwar factories - additional workers, housing and food supplies, transport links, electric power, sources of metal products and components, and any kind of commercial and financial infrastructure.