The defense industry and its contribution to victory
The Great Victory in that bloody war could not have come had the army and navy not had powerful and effective weaponry, and in sufficient amounts. It was a practical test of the effectiveness of State decisions in the running the country’s economy as a whole and its defense industrial complex as its principal component in particular. The credit for this should go, above all, to the defense sectors of industry. The present article is concerned with the general analysis of the evolution and development of the defense industrial complex during the prewar years, the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945, and in the postwar period.
The Beginnings of Victory
“We are 50 to 100 years behind the advanced capitalist countries. We have to cover this distance within a space of a decade. Either we do it or we will be crushed.” This was how J. Stalin formulated the country’s economic development strategy in 1931.
This assessment was not at all an exaggeration. As is known, before the (1917) Revolution, Russia was very far behind the advanced states in the production of arms and ammunition. This is why the period between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of the Great Patriotic War, when Russia, in W. Churchill’s expression, emerged from a “bast shoe” country into an industrial power, is one of the most significant stages in modern history. Experience shows that, in so doing, the country chose the most rational course of industrialization–i.e., via the advancement of the defense industry, especially since the military threats at the time required its rapid development. As a result, the demand for advanced military technology expedited the development of defense production. At that time, the defense industry became a real “engine” not only for industry but also for the country’s economy as a whole.
The circumstance in which the defense industry was built and developed left their imprint on all the events of the country’s pre-war history, especially since the defense sector gradually emerged as a vast branch of industry that, according to some estimates, accounted for 9 percent to 10 percent of GDP in the late 1920s-early 1930s and up to 30 percent by the late 1930s.
For their part, the high economic growth rates made it possible to put forward increasingly complex and challenging tasks whose fulfillment stimulated the further development of the defense sectors of industry. That helped put in place an effective mechanism for the reproduction of not only advanced technology but also of scientific, design, and engineering cadres.
The war was preceded by the Third Five-Year Plan period (1938 through 1942) that was built on the successfully fulfilled previous plans. This period saw a rapid creation of new research centers and design bureaus with 2,900 new plants, factories, electric power stations, mines, ore fields, and other industrial installations put into operation, including such industry giants as the Novosibirsk V.P. Chkalov Aviation Production Association (at that time known as Plant #153), Uralmash, the Stalingrad Tractor Plant, etc. At the same time, the vast Siberian expanses were being developed intensively; three-quarters of all new blast furnaces were built in the east of the country; metallurgical plants were built in the Trans-Baykal and Ural region and on the Amur; major non-ferrous metallurgic enterprises in Central Asia; heavy industry plants in the Far East, as well as motor assembly and tube rolling enterprises and hydro electric power stations. All of that was geared directly toward the defense industry.
As a result of the amalgamation of existing plants and the building of new ones, the defense industry became a major economic sector. Whereas annual production growth in industry as a whole was on average 13 percent, in the defense sectors of industry it was 39 percent. The most dynamic and intensively developing sectors in the prewar period was the aviation industry, whose aggregate output accounted for more than 40 percent of the gross defense industry product.
Not surprisingly, intensive development of the defense sectors of industry required the establishment of special administration and management agencies. Under the December 4, 1925 resolution of the VSNKh (#164), the Military-Industrial Directorate and the Military Industry Production Association (Voyenprom) were created on the basis of industrial mobilization and demobilization and military procurement committees, designed to exercise general supervision of the military industry. Then, in the mid-1930s, the People’s Commissariat for the Defense Industry was established which was subsequently, under the January 11, 1939 decree of the USSR Supreme Soviet Presidium, divided up into five separate commissariats. Furthermore, the People’s Commissariat for the Machine Building Industry spun off the People’s Commissariat for Medium Machine Building supervising all tank building enterprises.
Thus, after a series of reorganizations, the Soviet military industry entered the Great Patriotic War with branch commissariats whose enterprises, in the prewar period, created many new weapons for the future victory.