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Patriotic War, 1941-1945
Abstract
Standing squarely in the middle of the Soviet Union's timeline is the Great Patriotic War, the Russian name for the eastern front of the Second World War. In recent years historians have tended to give this war less importance than it deserves. One reason may be that we are particularly interested in Stalin and Stalinism. This has led us to pay more attention to the changes following the death of one man, Stalin, in March 1953, than to those that flowed from an event involving the deaths of 25 million. The war was more than just an interlude between the ‘pre-war’ and ‘post-war’ periods. It changed the lives of hundreds of millions of individuals. For the survivors, it also changed the world in which they lived. Why, on Sunday, 22 June 1941, did the Soviet Union find itself suddenly at war all the Great Powers over the preceding forty years. During the nineteenth century international trade, lending and migration developed without much restriction. Great empires arose but did not much impede the movement of goods or people. By the twentieth century, however, several newly industrialising countries were turning to economic stabilisation by controlling and diverting trade to secure economic self-sufficiency within colonial boundaries. German leaders wanted to insulate Germany from the world by creating a closed trading bloc based on a new empire. To get an empire they launched a naval arms race that ended in Germany's military and diplomatic encirclement by Britain, France and Russia.
This paper highlights three overlooked aspects of Huizu) culture: kinship patterns, community interactions, and an understudied subgroup in Zarya Vostoka, Almaty. Traditionally, they settle based on their Chinese provinces of origin, primarily Gansu and Shaanxi, preserving group cohesion since their arrival in the Russian Empire. Over time, their kinship patterns have remained essentially unchanged. Furnivall's 2 concept of "mix but don't combine" at the marketplace helps explain these dynamics, where they engage economically at Barakholka but deliberately avoid closer social ties in daily life.
File: WWIintroduction7 PREFACE During the twentieth century the world experienced two deadly global wars followed by a "cold war" of unparalleled expense and danger. World War I opened this brutal epoch. To many who took part the experience was little less than apocalyptic; it seemed like an end, not a beginning. They saw it as putting a stop to history, progress, and civilisation. They called it the "Great War". They did not know that it would be followed twenty years later by World War II and that the second war would be greater and more dreadful than the first. This book brings together eight country studies of the economics of World War I: four Allies, three Central Powers, and a neutral country. Our book is the first, we believe, to offer such a systematic comparison of economies at war between 1914 and 1918, and it is certainly the first to include the Ottoman Empire in such a collection. These investigations suggest two themes that link economics with the study of war. One theme is the contribution of economic factors to the outcome of the war. Our book suggests that the outcome of global war was primarily a matter of the levels of economic development of each side and the scale of resources that it wielded; in this respect our conclusion is similar to that of our previous study of World War II (Harrison, 1998). How well the resources were organised mattered greatly, but rich countries could usually organise themselves more efficiently than poor ones. The human factor mattered too: how well the people were motivated. Generally we find that, given superior resources, the richer countries could solve the motivation problems that defeated the poorer ones. Thus, organisation and motivation tended to be endogenous; to this extent they did not independently influence the outcome.
Michael Haynes has pointed out that the conventional methodology for estimating the number of Soviet war deaths provides only a lower limit. It calculates wartime “excess” deaths, assuming that no one was killed by the war who would normally have died anyway; this sets a lower bound on the number of real war deaths that may have resulted directly or indirectly from enemy action. Where is the upper limit? Haynes proposes the 16 million total of “normal” deaths as a measure of the maximum possible downward error when real Soviet war deaths are estimated by the excess mortality method. The possible margin of downward error arising from this method can be calculated and is not 16 million but approximately 1.9 million.
In our paper we aim to show the changing economic significance of defence outlays in the period of the second five-year plan (1933-7).1 This period emerges as a time of transition. Rapid rearmament had been begun during the first five-year plan (1928-32), but from a very low base. In terms of the rising volume of activity, the following period was less hectic. However, it was a period of exceptionally rapid change in military technology and the technological level of defence industry products. It was followed by a third period (the third five-year plan of 1938-42, interrupted by war) in which the pace of rearmament was again exceptionally rapid and from a much higher initial base than before. Moreover the renewed acceleration of defence mobilisation began in 1936, when the second five-year plan was still under way. Central to our conventional picture of the Soviet economy in the second fiveyear plan are what Naum Jasny called the ‘three good years’ of 1934-6. These were years of good harvests, rapidly rising production, de-rationing of consumer markets, and rising wages and farm incomes. For the defence sector, in contrast, these emerge as years of struggle and tribulation.
The authors attempt a synthesis of recent research in the USSR and post-Soviet Russia on Soviet mortality during World War II. They conclude that the official estimate adopted since 1990 of 26 to 27 million deaths is probably accurate, and note that most of the Soviet citizens who died were civilians.
Soviet Workers and Late Stalinism is a study of labour and labour policy during the critical period of the Soviet Union's postwar recovery and the last years of Stalin. It is also a detailed social history of the Soviet Union in these years, for non-Russian readers. Using previously inaccessible archival sources, Donald Filtzer describes the tragic hardships faced by workers and their families right after the war; conditions in housing and health care; the special problems of young workers; working conditions within industry; and the tremendous strains which regime policy placed not just on the mass of the population, but on the cohesion and commitment of key institutions within the Stalinist political system, most notably the trade unions and the procuracy. Donald Filtzer's subtle and compelling book will interest all historians of the Soviet Union and of socialism.
In the period from the end of World War II until his death, Stalin became an increasingly distrustful despot. He habitually picked on and humiliated members of his inner circle, had them guarded around the clock, had their correspondence decoded by secret police, bugged the lines of even his most senior deputies, and even drove several to the point of publicly betraying their spouses in order to prove their allegiance. This book argues that Stalin's behavior was not entirely paranoid and erratic but followed a clear political logic. This book contends that his system of leadership was at once both modern — Stalin vested authority in committees, elevated younger specialists, and made key institutional innovations — and patrimonial-repressive, informal, and based on personal loyalty. Always, Stalin's goal was to make the USSR a global power and, though the country teetered on the edge of violence during this period of acute domestic and international pressure, he succeeded in achieving superpower status and in holding on to power despite his old age and ill health.
The mass repression in the Soviet Union in 1937–8, variously referred to as the Great Terror or the ‘Ezhovshchina’, has produced a volume of monographs, articles and memoirs, which have examined the phenomena from a diversity of viewpoints.1 However, many of the circumstances surrounding this tragedy remain obscure. In particular there is little information concerning the mechanism whereby the repression was organised and carried out. Most of the NKVD’s documents for this period remain in the KGB’s archives and are not available for researchers. In the still closed Presidential archives there is a large volume of material concerning the activities of the Politburo and Stalin in 1937–8. In republican, provincial and local archives there is a wealth of material on how central directives were implemented in the localities.
Historians have had a great deal of difficulty accounting for the debacle wrought by Operation Barbarossa. How could the Red Army, a large and heavily equipped force, be so thoroughly decimated by the Wehrmacht, especially when evidence of the impending attack was plentiful? Most commonly, explanations have focused on the unexpectedly rapid success of the Blitzkrieg in western Europe, the impact of the Great Purges on the Soviet officer corps, the problems of reequipping the Red Army with modern weaponry and protecting newly expanded borders, the lack of adequate training for the rapidly growing Soviet armed forces, the confusing nature of available intelligence, and, most of all, the nearly fatal self-delusion of Iosif Stalin, which prevented the implementation of proper defensive measures. Although Stalin certainly realized that the Nazi-Soviet Pact was no more than a temporary truce and that a German attack was ultimately inevitable, he deluded himself that Adolf Hitler could be appeased until Soviet forces had grown strong enough to meet the Nazi assault. Soviet shipments of petroleum products, various raw materials, and foodstuffs were critically important to the German war machine and, thus, the key element in Stalin's strategy of appeasing Hitler.
Crisis Management in the USSR: Wartime System of Administration and Control
- Sanford R Lieberman
Red Army Battlefield Performance, 1941-1945: The System and the Soldier
- John Erickson
Istoriko-biograficheskii spravochnik (St Petersburg: Filologicheskii fakul’tet Sankt-Peterburgskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta
- V A Torchinov
- A M Leontiuk
- Vokrug Stalina
Trends in Soviet Labour Productivity
- Mark Harrison
Wartime Mobilisation: A German Comparison
- Mark Harrison
Ryadom so Stalinym: otkrovennye svidetel’stva
- Georgii A Kumanev
Estimated Jewish Losses in the Holocaust
- Israel Gutman
- Robert Rozett