How did the USSR - a country considered a second-rate industrial power, economically inferior to Germany, the USA and the UK - shape its victory over the armies of Hitler's regime, and secure its place among the winners?
While protagonists, witnesses and historians recognize the value of the Red Army, it is much more uncommon to focus on the achievements of the Soviet economy, often a symbol of mismanagement and inefficiency. And yet, while the 1945 victory was a military one, it was also, and perhaps above all, an economic and industrial one. It is this little-known paradox that we intend to shed light on. Between 1941 and 1945, the country wavered, set itself in motion and restructured itself: politically, economically, industrially and socially.
Archives - of combat, of propaganda, of civilians - and historians will analyze the economic strategy deployed by the USSR to defeat Nazi Germany, explaining how the USSR, which was expected to lose, succeeded in mobilizing its people and its resources as no nation had yet done, to the point of halting the inexorable advance of Hitler's troops.
While protagonists, witnesses and historians recognize the value of the Red Army, it is much more uncommon to focus on the achievements of the Soviet economy, often a symbol of mismanagement and inefficiency. And yet, while the 1945 victory was a military one, it was also, and perhaps above all, an economic and industrial one. It is this little-known paradox that we intend to shed light on. Between 1941 and 1945, the country wavered, set itself in motion and restructured itself: politically, economically, industrially and socially.
Archives - of combat, of propaganda, of civilians - and historians will analyze the economic strategy deployed by the USSR to defeat Nazi Germany, explaining how the USSR, which was expected to lose, succeeded in mobilizing its people and its resources as no nation had yet done, to the point of halting the inexorable advance of Hitler's troops.
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00:00Factories on trains.
00:15On June 22, 1941, the Soviet Union was attacked by the army of the Third Reich.
00:24Tens of trains loaded with machines and workers made their way east, far from the fighting.
00:37The Nazi invasion, Operation Barbarossa, relied on surprise and speed, what the Germans called
00:45blitzkrieg or lightning war.
00:49The Red Army was crushed.
00:53Berlin and Belarus, the wealthiest industrial and agricultural states in the USSR, were
00:59under threat from German troops.
01:05Most of the USSR's economy lay in the western part of the country.
01:10The Soviet Union was fighting for its survival.
01:18How could it hope to keep fighting when the plants that made artillery, tanks, and munitions
01:23risked falling into enemy hands?
01:37Stalin took a bold and radical decision.
01:40To dismantle, evacuate, and reinstall his war industries away from the front.
01:46To stop them from falling into Nazi hands.
01:49It was both an amazing feat and a mystery.
01:53How in a matter of months were they able to uproot and move weapons manufacturers, steel
01:59works, and stocks of raw materials?
02:01How was the Soviet war economy able to reorganize and rebuild itself to finally produce more
02:08arms than Germany?
02:13In a matter of weeks, the Soviet people, laborers, engineers, technicians, women, youngsters,
02:20and children were mobilized in factories for the war effort.
02:31In late 1941, six months after the start of the German invasion and the evacuated plants,
02:37production resumed.
02:52So the good news for the Red Army is that we're most of the way up Table Mountain in
02:59terms of reaching that high plateau of war production.
03:04Tens of aircraft and tanks a month.
03:08Tens of thousands of guns.
03:12Millions of rifles and shells are becoming available.
03:15And so the acute shortage of military equipment has gone.
03:24In June 1942, a year after the start of their offensive, the Germans launched a second blitzkrieg
03:31southwards in the direction of Baku and its oil fields.
03:40The Red Army was pushed back 400 kilometers.
03:44The important cities of Sebastopol, Voronezh, and Rostov fell into enemy hands.
03:52Once again, armaments plants were evacuated, some for the second time.
04:00The German army set its sights on Stalingrad, but still the USSR refused to collapse.
04:11And by the time you get into the summer and autumn of 1942, I mean, the Soviet army is
04:17still retreating.
04:19It's still being carved up by the German army, especially in the south, but it's no longer
04:25desperately short of munitions.
04:29The remarkable thing about the Soviet economy after the impact of Barbarossa is that in
04:341942, it began to revive, or at least certainly the war economic part began to revive to an
04:42extraordinary degree, so that by the end of the year, the Soviets were outproducing the
04:47Germans in aircraft, in tanks, in other weapons.
04:55It was on the playing field of production that the USSR would earn its first victory
05:00against Germany.
05:01The Third Reich seemed like an industrial Goliath, but the Soviet David proved to be
05:07more than a match.
05:09Engineer versus engineer, factory versus factory.
05:13Different methods made all the difference.
05:35One of the critical things for the Soviet war was mass production.
06:03The process of production had to be broken down and simplified, partly because much of
06:08the workforce was basically semi-skilled.
06:12They had to be told what to do, and this had to be relatively simple.
06:17Quite a lot of the workforce couldn't even read instructions, so it had to be simplified.
06:22That meant conveyor belt production, it meant flow production, things which they had learned
06:29engineers who'd been invited to the Soviet Union in the 1920s and early 30s to help with
06:35the development of Soviet industry.
06:38Now they adopted, if you like, a kind of Soviet version of Fordism.
06:51So if you look at war production around the world in World War II, the two countries that
06:56really cracked mass production were Russia and America.
07:02And in Britain and Germany, you have elements of this, but it's still not really fully developed.
07:11And one of the things that mass production enabled was enormous increases in productivity.
07:18There's no question that the mass production of Soviet equipment in 1942 and 1943 was a
07:29key factor in turning the tide against the German invaders.
07:38In July 1942, the build-up to the Battle of Stalingrad began as German troops approached
07:44the city.
07:49The Soviet writer and journalist Vassily Grossman was an eyewitness.
07:53He wrote in his novel Life and Fate.
07:57Two hammers, one to the north, one to the south, each composed of millions of tonnes
08:03of metal and flesh awaited the signal.
08:28Mass production.
08:31Mass destruction.
08:33Stalin refused to evacuate the population.
08:37Terrain was fought over, house by house, for months.
08:43Soviet industry was now able to supply the Red Army with arms, munitions and tanks.
08:50The soldiers of the German army lacked weapons, fuel and food.
08:57The military and industrial balance of power between the Third Reich and the USSR had reversed.
09:07Now the Soviets are producing very large quantities of equipment.
09:11It means that they can actually build up very large reserve forces, as they do.
09:16And without that, the encirclement of Stalingrad, the defeat of the German army in Stalingrad
09:23might not have happened.
09:25The price of munitions, the ruble cost of making a gun or a tank or a plane, it fell
09:34by multiples, at the same time as the price of food was rising by multiples.
09:42So if you think of the divergence, there you have those two streams again.
09:49And it's an enormous change in relative prices and costs.
09:54By 1942, a loaf of bread, its value to a starving population is immense, whereas weapons
10:04had become cheap and abundant.
10:07The downside was that to produce the bread, they had to keep millions of workers in very
10:12low productivity agriculture, whereas a much smaller number of workers could produce much
10:20larger quantities of munitions.
10:22It's like two completely different economic systems that work in the same country.
10:32On the regime's propaganda posters, faces hollowed.
10:38All for the front.
10:40Never had a slogan been so close to reality.
10:45The war ate up all resources, money, raw materials, labour and food.
10:52A two-headed economic monster reared its head.
11:06On one side, the war economy, which reached record heights of production.
11:11On the other, the civilian economy, totally devastated and getting by on the leftovers.
11:20A strict focus on the war effort caused famine on the home front.
12:21At Plant 20 in Chelyabinsk, the trade union leader, who was also the plant's doctor, wrote.
12:33We have an increase in the number of vitamin deficiencies and edemas caused by lack of
12:39protein, resulting in a high death rate, notably among single workers living in dormitories.
12:48If steps are not taken rapidly to improve the food of isolated workers and people with
12:54serious deficiencies, the labour situation will be disastrous.
13:07Starvation became a problem with the food supply.
13:14Became a problem with the impossibility of collecting the harvest in the western borderlands
13:21in the autumn of 1941.
13:24And then in 1942, having to run agriculture in a reduced territory, having lost some of
13:31the most important grain surplus areas, using a farming population that then consisted largely
13:39of women and old people.
13:42Without chemical fertilizers, it was a really disastrous situation.
13:46I mean, agricultural production fell by two thirds from 1940 to 1942.
13:54Istanbul, 1941
14:12Who makes this mess? Why are you making people eat?
14:15Dmitry Pavlovich, I told you.
14:18We have a cook, he does it his way, but we cannot fire him.
14:21Why?
14:22of one cook. People eat, but they don't say a word.
14:29They don't say a word.
14:31For many Soviet civilians during the war, the factory, the place they worked at, became
14:58more than just a factory. It became, for many of them, a way of life. It was where they
15:04got their food. It's where they got company. It's where they often slept. And it separated
15:11them off, really, from the civilians around them, many of whom were very badly hit by
15:16the collapse of food supply and the shortage of civilian goods. You know, the factory became
15:22for Soviet workers a real hub.
15:28When you look at the Soviet economy in this period, in 1942, I think is the danger time.
15:47It's an economy where the army is retreating, the capital stock is shrinking, not only because
15:54of the invasion, but because it's not being replaced. Even in the territory that the
15:58Soviets still control, there is zero net investment. And that's because, although some factories
16:08are being built and rebuilt, stocks are continually dwindling, and people are starving. The population
16:16is shrinking again, not only because of the invasion, but because people are dying faster
16:20than they're being replaced. And so, if you put those things together, I think then you
16:27can say this was an economy that was genuinely close to collapse. And then the question becomes,
16:34well, what was it that kept it going? And here, I think you do have to switch away from
16:39the economics of production and crude numbers and think about motivations. After all, the
16:54Soviet economy and the German economy, particularly in industry, were about roughly the same size.
16:59You have these two great military forces opposing each other. What makes the difference that
17:03accounts for victory on one side and defeat on the other? It has at some point to be a
17:08question of psychological and moral factors and feelings.
17:14One of the real puzzles about the Soviet war economy is how the Soviet people put up with
17:42it. I mean, they put up with the conditions that nobody in Germany or in Britain or the United
17:47States would have put up with for a minute.
18:13For example, for the kolkhoz economy, it was several million hectares of land that the
18:21kolkhozians reappropriated by increasing their share of the lopin. And we also know that it
18:29developed a parallel market, a black market, which allowed, let's say, to ensure a larger share of
18:36the supply, for example, of small towns.
18:56In the countryside, farmers began dreaming about a return to working their land for themselves.
19:07Religion was no longer banned. Religious weddings were once again authorised.
19:14Stalin relied on the Orthodox Church to revive Russian patriotism.
19:26For artists like the poetess Anna Akhmatova and the composer Dmitri Shostakovich, censure was relaxed.
19:37Leonid Trauberg and Grigory Kosentsev, future directors of the film Simple People,
19:42could write their screenplay with a temporary breath of individual freedom.
20:06The strongest wind and the bombing of the enemy. Girls, all the details are mixed up.
20:12It's a terrible thing. They need to be picked up and sorted out. Maybe we'll start, eh?
20:18Yes, let's start!
20:21The situation of the war, the shortages, the dispersion, the distance from the centres of power,
20:27allowed the filmmakers, but also the writers, in general, the world of culture and production,
20:34let's say, the media, to find, if not flaws, at least spaces in which they could express,
20:43not counter-stories, but in any case, different ways of seeing the official narrative.
20:50The historian Mikhail Gervtar, one of the great Russian historians of the perestroika era,
20:58even put forward this idea of a kind of spontaneous de-Stalinisation of the minds,
21:10centred on the idea that the fighters, but also those behind it,
21:18have become aware, deep down, of their own responsibility and their own role in the future, deep down in the country.
21:28In February 1943, at Stalingrad, the German army found itself surrounded, and surrendered to the Red Army.
21:44Alexander Worth was there to witness it.
21:48At the bottom of the trenches, there still lay frozen green Germans, and frozen grey Russians,
21:57and frozen fragments of human shapes. And there were helmets, Russian and German,
22:03lying among the frozen bodies.
22:06Soviet troops began a march westwards to recapture land lost to the Germans.
22:19The Germans had been in the trenches for a long time.
22:23The Germans had been in the trenches for a long time.
22:27The Germans had been in the trenches for a long time.
22:32The Second World War
22:36One of the problems about waging total war on a huge scale,
22:40and the Second World War was a total war waged on a huge scale, with armies in millions and millions,
22:46a critical factor is making sure that they are supplied,
22:49that they have adequate food, adequate weapons, adequate ammunition, adequate explosives and so on.
22:55You had to be able to move things from the factory to the front line.
22:58You had to be able to feed armies and to make sure that they would keep fighting.
23:05Logistics was at the core of that.
23:10Stalingrad was a particular example, I think, of logistics.
23:13For the German side, it became increasingly difficult, as the weather got worse,
23:17to take things all the way to the Stalingrad front.
23:21The Soviets made sure that the railways went up to the Stalingrad front.
23:27At the end, they were sending 50% more trains and supplies through to the Stalingrad front than the Germans.
23:43After Stalingrad, the USSR dominated Germany both industrially and militarily.
23:50It counted twice as many soldiers, four times as many guns and six times more tanks than the Third Reich.
23:59This reversal of the situation was down to the sacrifice of its soldiers,
24:03the endurance of its civilian population and the talent of its engineers.
24:10But Stalin's great patriotic war was also a world war.
24:15The Soviet Union could also count on material aid from its allies,
24:19Great Britain and, more importantly, the United States.
24:30In November 1941, Washington promised Moscow it would give aid for free.
24:36Deliveries began immediately.
24:39Supply convoys took the northern route via the Arctic Ocean and Arkhangelsk,
24:44the southern route via Iran and the Caspian Sea,
24:48or via Vladivostok in the Russian Far East.
24:53The aid program was called Lend-Lease and would continue until the end of the war.
25:01Lend-Lease added to the resources available,
25:05something like 5% in 1942, 10% in 1943 and 1944.
25:13And I'm not sure whether these percentages sound large or small.
25:19To me they're quite large in the sense of an increment of national resources arriving from outside in a year.
25:28But also, at a moment when the margin of survival was very small,
25:34they added to that margin.
25:37So just the sheer volume of Allied aid was important
25:42and it took some of the pressure off the Soviet war effort.
25:47U.S. aid completed the Red Army's military material.
25:52The renowned Katyusha rocket launchers, nicknamed Stalin's Organ by German troops,
25:58were often mounted on American Studebaker trucks.
26:05After the tanks and aircraft delivered in 1944,
26:09came trucks, jeeps, fuel, clothing, machines,
26:14and concentrated and canned foodstuffs in 1943.
26:19On the front, we wouldn't have held out without the Red Army.
26:24We'd have held out, and we'd have held out in the end.
26:29We'd have held out even if we were the last one standing.
26:35We'd have held out, there was no way we could have held out.
26:40We were the last to be left behind.
26:44At the front, we wouldn't have held on without the cornet de bif,
26:48which was actually pork, the touch of pork,
26:51in American boxes with Cyrillic labels.
26:54And at a certain point, the number of these boxes
26:59is so large that the soldiers are even able to feed the rear.
27:05You don't fight a war with money, you fight a war with resources.
27:08So when we look at the Soviet war economy,
27:11we can see where the resources came from.
27:14They came out of the war factories,
27:17bred from farms, army rations from lend-lease,
27:23soldiers came from the factory and from the bench,
27:27put on uniform and went out to fight.
27:30But all these things have a monetary counterpart,
27:34which has to be controlled in order to keep the war economy
27:38from breaking down.
27:47So if you look at the Soviet budget that paid for the war,
27:52some of it came from the normal taxes that were levered in peacetime,
27:57but the problem was that in wartime,
28:00civilian economic activity was lower, so fewer taxes were raised.
28:04So they also borrowed money from their own population.
28:10You should think of that as borrowing in quote marks,
28:14because borrowing really was no different from taxes.
28:17It just meant that the Soviet worker, at the end of the week,
28:21picking up wages was told,
28:23we're keeping back part of your wages
28:25because that's your subscription to the war loan.
28:28Congratulations, you've acquired a war loan.
28:35In 1943, resources were readily available.
28:39The Soviet war economy reached its peak.
28:45In 1943, at Kursk in July, then Kharkiv in August,
28:49the Red Army was able to gather together
28:51huge concentrations of tanks and claim victory.
29:05Soviet generals could now launch vast combined operations
29:09with armour divisions, artillery and aviation.
29:16The influx of guns and shells helped artillery divisions
29:20to break defences, destroy resistance points
29:23and support ground troops.
29:29The Red Army's victories were very costly.
29:32The Red Army's victories were very costly in human lives and material.
29:37But material remained simple
29:39and could easily be repaired and reconditioned.
30:02One medium tank and up to 300 enemy soldiers and officers.
30:10A merciless attack on the enemy.
30:18What you didn't really need was what the Germans had,
30:21you know, the Tiger tank, which was huge and expensive,
30:24demanding and skilled labour,
30:26and too complex, really, to operate on the battlefield.
30:29You needed simple, standard T-34 tanks,
30:32which did what you wanted them to do.
30:40The T-34 was a robust, simple, agile, yet strongly armoured tank.
30:48Its engine had limited reliability,
30:50but that suited the lifetime of a tank in active service.
31:00The key to mass production, of course, is to have standard models,
31:04you know, not to have 10 different aircrafts or 15 different tanks.
31:08By 1943-44, you know, the Germans had 40 or 50 different makes of aircraft,
31:14whereas in the Soviet Union, you know,
31:17they concentrated just on a standard range of three or four aircraft
31:21and produced those in very large quantities.
31:24And it's quantity production that allows you
31:28to organise your factory in a particular way,
31:31to simplify the processes of production,
31:34just as the Americans did during the Second World War.
31:58SPEAKING RUSSIAN
32:14Kharkiv, Mariupol, Smolensk, Kiev.
32:20By late 1943, the Soviets had recaptured
32:23two-thirds of their territory lost to the Germans.
32:28SPEAKING FRENCH
32:58SPEAKING FRENCH
33:02SPEAKING FRENCH
33:25Some evacuated plants remained where they were
33:28in Siberia, Kazakhstan or the Urals.
33:33Their equipment was worn out, but they would contribute
33:36to the economic rise of these Soviet republics
33:39in remote areas and cut off from greater Russia.
33:46Workers and their families, nonetheless,
33:48made their way back to their home regions.
33:52TRAFFIC RUMBLES
33:56Of course, when victory was finally in sight,
33:59I think a great many Soviet citizens who'd willingly worked and fought,
34:04wanted to win this war,
34:07thought that, you know, they would be rewarded in some way
34:12for the fighting and the working that they'd done.
34:15Somewhere or other, the system would relax,
34:17the Communism would be less terroristic.
34:20Somewhere or other, there'd be a better future, more consumer goods.
34:24Somehow or other, you know, they would be treated better by the regime
34:30because of what they'd contributed.
34:33And they were wrong.
34:39Society was once again in Stalin's hands,
34:42putting an end to dreams of freedom.
34:46The regime resumed its systematic, centralised brutality.
34:59Once again, all decisions on the production volumes of wheat fields,
35:03armaments plants and toothbrush factories were made in Moscow
35:08and included in five-year plans.
35:11Once again, the individual vanished into the masses.
35:17The End
35:39The touching and joyful singularity of Simple People
35:42annoyed the powers that be, who decided to ban the movie.
36:12Maybe it could have happened in 1943, but in 1945 it was perceived as something totally impossible.
36:18It's contrary to ideological injunctions.
36:21That's the problem, it doesn't meet ideological expectations,
36:25and we therefore consider that it's a sufficient reproach,
36:29not only to ask for the movie to be resumed,
36:33but it's one of the major reproaches that will lead to the complete ban of the movie.
36:43Society is not supposed to mix with politics.
36:49Politics is entrusted to those who manage it and those who control it,
36:55it's the party, and it's the party that must lead the country.
36:59So it's the party that leads, society must obey and follow.
37:13In half an hour our plane will take off.
37:17It will go there, to the front.
37:20And when it enters the battle, we will feel it.
37:25And it will be our holiday.
37:28In the meantime, we give you a day off.
37:32Go, sleep, for two months.
37:35Tomorrow there will be work, even more difficult.
37:51The title is absolutely magnificent.
37:53Ordinary people, we could also say simple people,
37:55but in French it has a different meaning.
37:57That's why we call them ordinary people,
37:59but in fact that's it, in Russian it's simple people.
38:02And these ordinary people, it's thanks to them,
38:05thanks to their courage, thanks to their enthusiasm,
38:07thanks to their resilience, thanks to their solidarity,
38:10that the victory is achieved,
38:12which in 1945 goes completely against the official discourse.
38:18Because at that moment, it is also that moment
38:21where Stalin also attributes all the merits of victory.
38:34The last battle was fought in Berlin in April 1945.
38:41The Red Army had liberated Romania, Poland and Bulgaria.
38:49The disproportion of ground forces was staggering.
38:55The USSR could boast 2.5 million soldiers,
38:596,250 tanks and 41,000 guns,
39:03compared to one million soldiers,
39:061,500 tanks and 9,300 guns for the Germans.
39:16The Third Reich collapsed.
39:19The United States, the Soviet Union and Great Britain
39:22would divide up the world.
39:25At the end of the war, for Stalin,
39:28and of course for other communist leaders in the Soviet Union,
39:32the war had been clearly a test of the communist system,
39:36and it had come through.
39:38If the Soviet Union had defeated in 1941, 1942,
39:41the communist system would have been undone
39:43and that would have been the end of it.
39:45But they do, the Soviet Union and the Soviet Union
39:48are the only countries in the world
39:51that would have been undone and that would have been the end of it.
39:54But they do reach victory in 1945,
39:57comprehensive victory in 1945,
39:59and I think for Stalin it seems to prove his point.
40:02In the end, the Soviet system was resilient.
40:05In the end, a proletarian state can defeat a capitalist state.
40:14Stalin was the big winner of the Great Patriotic War.
40:19The USSR extended its grip on the countries of Eastern Europe.
40:23The regime was stronger than ever
40:26and entirely focused on the personality of its dictator.
40:33The victory was massive.
40:36The figures mind-boggling.
40:38The units were counted in millions.
40:41Millions of tons of armaments produced.
40:44Millions of square kilometres gained.
40:47Millions dead.
40:51The people of the USSR were the biggest losers of World War II.
40:58The Soviet victory in World War II was extremely costly.
41:0526, 27 million war dead.
41:08That's roughly one in eight of the pre-war population.
41:18We also have 11 million direct civilian casualties
41:24and 5 million indirect civilian casualties,
41:28that is, either by over-mortality at the rear
41:34or by birth defects.
41:37So it's a global figure when we talk about 26, 27 million.
41:41But the number of direct victims is 21 million.
41:4710 million soldiers, 11 million civilians.
41:53One can't explain courage.
41:56That of the Soviet people was immense.
42:01But victory wasn't theirs.
42:05In 1945, the simple people who had survived still went hungry,
42:11still lived in inhuman conditions
42:14and still worked under the yoke of a regime
42:18that had no pity for its people.
42:23If you start the clock in 1905,
42:26there's the trauma of the 1905 revolution,
42:29which was a real trauma for Russia,
42:32the trauma of World War I, of the Civil War,
42:35which in many ways was worse than World War I,
42:40a famine at the end of the Civil War.
42:43Then there's Stalinist industrialisation, a famine in 1932
42:48as a direct consequence of Stalin's agricultural policies
42:51and the all-out modernisation
42:55that Stalin imposed upon the Soviet Union.
42:58In 1937, there's more bloodletting with the Great Terror.
43:03So the more weight you place upon the pre-war traumas,
43:08the less value you place on the trauma of World War II.
43:13There is a kind of balancing act there.
43:15You know that in 1945 things were terrible.
43:20But they were terrible as a product of all of these multiple shocks.
43:31I have learned how faces fall.
43:35How terror can escape from lowered eyes.
43:39How suffering can etch cruel pages of cuneiform marks upon the cheeks.
43:47I know how dark or ash-blonde strands of hair can suddenly turn white.
43:54I've learned to recognise the fading smiles on submissive lips.
44:09I have learned to recognise the fading smiles on submissive lips.
44:15I have learnt to recognise the fading smiles on submissive lips.
44:21I have learnt to recognise the fading smiles on submissive lips.
44:27I have learnt to recognise the fading smiles on submissive lips.
44:33I have learnt to recognise the fading smiles on submissive lips.
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