The management of the Soviet war economy was no easy task, especially in view of the army’s ravenous appetite for fresh manpower. The Soviet Union would eventually draft 16 per cent of its population into the armed forces during the war, thus permitting the Red Army at its height to maintain 11.2 million people under arms. Such unprecedented military conscription stripped the factories and farms of able-bodied men, thereby creating a labour shortage of staggering proportions. The release of prisoners from GULAG (the net outflow was 1.1 million people during the war) provided scant relief. Women, children, and the elderly had to substitute for the absent soldiers. By the end of the summer of 1941 women comprised 70 per cent of the industrial labour force in Moscow.
Matters were still worse in the countryside, as agriculture was feminized, demechanized, and deprived of draft animals. The proportion of women in the rural labour force increased from 40 per cent on the eve of the war to 70 per cent in 1943 and 82 per cent in 1944. The Red Army also requisitioned machines and horses in vast numbers—some 400,000 by the end of 1942, and almost half the horses from the collective farms by the end of the war. Peasant women experimented with harnessing cows to till the fields; others pulled the ploughs themselves. All of this had dire implications for food production, as agricultural yields in the uninvaded zone plummeted in 1943 to less than 50 per cent of the pre-war level. And this paltry stock of food had to sustain a population swollen by twenty-five million refugees.
Despite the severity of the labour and food problems, and despite clumsy inefficiencies in balancing the needs of the army and the needs of the economy, the Soviet Union was clearly winning the industrial war against Nazi Germany even as early as 1942. Although in that year Russia’s supply of steel and coal was only one-third that of Germany, it nevertheless manufactured twice the number of weapons. Simply put, the Soviets outproduced the Germans. All types of new armaments from aircraft and tanks down to automatic pistols were designed, machined, and delivered to the front. New industrial plants were built from scratch and operated twenty-four hours a day. Some of them were gigantic, such as the tank factory in Cheliabinsk, which boasted sixty-four separate assembly lines. Between 1943 and 1945 Soviet factories turned out over 73,000 tanks and self-propelled guns, 82,000 aircraft, and 324,000 artillery pieces.
The USSR thus acquired the wherewithal to fight, and the government deserves some credit for this achievement. Munitions do not, however, win wars all by themselves: skilful generalship is also necessary. Once the rank incompetence of figures such as S. M. Budennyi and K. E. Voroshilov had been amply demonstrated, Stalin’s regime was in fact successful in identifying and promoting dozens of talented commanders; G. K. Zhukov, I. S. Konev, K. K. Rokos-sovskii, N. F. Vatutin, A. M. Vasilevskii, and B. M. Shaposhnikov—to name but a few—were instrumental in planning campaigns and leading Soviet armies to victory. The Soviet High Command improved throughout the war and in its later phases Soviet generals were responsible for numerous advances in tactics and operational art. Soviet generals also became adept at ‘combined arms’ warfare—that is, the integrated and mutually supportive employment of artillery, armour, infantry, and air power. They evinced brilliance in the use of reconnaissance, camouflage, and deception. And they perfected the mobile force structure that was the hallmark of Soviet offensives from 1943–5.
We come to Stalin himself. What role did his leadership play in the Soviet war effort? That Stalin was a despotic butcher is beyond dispute; he also bears direct responsibility for the catastrophic losses in the first months of the war. Deceived by Hitler, guilty of issuing the inept orders that disorganized the Red Army’s defences, Stalin also sought to divert blame from himself by executing scapegoats. When the western front crumbled under the German onslaught, its commander—General D. G. Pavlov—was arrested in July and shot for treason. (His real crime, it now appears, was to have courageously protested against the military purges in 1938.) Firing-squads claimed the lives of twenty-nine other Soviet generals in 1941 and 1942; Stalin personally signed many of the death warrants.
