Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Preface
- Introduction: The regimes and their dictators: perspectives of comparison
- 1 Stalin and his Stalinism: power and authority in the Soviet Union, 1930–53
- 2 Bureaucracy and the Stalinist state
- 3 Cumulative radicalisation and progressive self-destruction as structural determinants of the Nazi dictatorship
- 4 ‘Working towards the Führer’: reflections on the nature of the Hitler dictatorship
- 5 Stalin in the mirror of the other
- 6 The contradictions of continuous revolution
- 7 From Blitzkrieg to total war: controversial links between image and reality
- 8 Stalin, the Red Army, and the ‘Great Patriotic War’
- 9 The economics of war in the Soviet Union during World War II
- 10 From ‘Great Fatherland War’ to the Second World War: new perspectives and future prospects
- 11 German exceptionalism and the origins of Nazism: the career of a concept
- 12 Stalinism and the politics of post-Soviet history
- 13 Work, gender and everyday life: reflections on continuity, normality and agency in twentieth-century Germany
- Afterthoughts
- Index
9 - The economics of war in the Soviet Union during World War II
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Preface
- Introduction: The regimes and their dictators: perspectives of comparison
- 1 Stalin and his Stalinism: power and authority in the Soviet Union, 1930–53
- 2 Bureaucracy and the Stalinist state
- 3 Cumulative radicalisation and progressive self-destruction as structural determinants of the Nazi dictatorship
- 4 ‘Working towards the Führer’: reflections on the nature of the Hitler dictatorship
- 5 Stalin in the mirror of the other
- 6 The contradictions of continuous revolution
- 7 From Blitzkrieg to total war: controversial links between image and reality
- 8 Stalin, the Red Army, and the ‘Great Patriotic War’
- 9 The economics of war in the Soviet Union during World War II
- 10 From ‘Great Fatherland War’ to the Second World War: new perspectives and future prospects
- 11 German exceptionalism and the origins of Nazism: the career of a concept
- 12 Stalinism and the politics of post-Soviet history
- 13 Work, gender and everyday life: reflections on continuity, normality and agency in twentieth-century Germany
- Afterthoughts
- Index
Summary
It is not surprising that the functioning of the Soviet economy during the Second World War has long fascinated historians. A large literature has arisen on this topic, aimed mainly at showing how the USSR mustered the resources necessary to defeat the German war machine. The primary aim of the present chapter is not to compete with this literature, but rather to analyse the relationship between the war and the economy from the other direction – namely, to elucidate how the evolution of Soviet military doctrine helped to shape the economic system. Thus posed, the topic inevitably raises far-reaching questions concerning the flexibility of the economic system over the whole of the Stalin period. For, while the Soviets began earnestly to prepare for the war early in the 1930s, creating a central planning system that has been called a war economy sui generis, the roller-coaster evolution of Soviet military doctrine shortly before and during the war combined with the dislocations attendant upon the territorial losses of 1941–2 prompted major transformations in the economic system. Did wartime changes amount to a continuation and deepening of pre-war practices, or did they represent new departures and transformations? Were the wartime transformations harbingers of a radical reform towards a version of market socialism, a reform that could only be thwarted by virulent Stalinist reaction in the immediate post-war years?
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- Stalinism and NazismDictatorships in Comparison, pp. 208 - 236Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1997
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