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  • 23/05/2025
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.

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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.
00:25Tens 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
00:44blitzkrieg 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.
01:47To stop them from falling into Nazi hands.
01:50It 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?
02:02How was the Soviet war economy able to reorganize and rebuild itself to finally produce more
02:08arms than Germany?
02:12It was the Soviet people who would save the country.
02:16The soldiers at the front, of course, but also the workers behind the lines.
02:22Laborers, engineers, technicians, men and women fled eastwards with their factories.
02:30An army of simple people who, far from the front, would fight inside the factories to
02:37win the war for their homeland.
02:54The German offensive caught Stalin by surprise, but he refused to lose his cool.
03:00On the day after the first assault, June 23rd, he decided to move critical industries
03:05to safety.
03:09No leader or country had ever shifted its entire economy overnight.
03:15But it was a matter of rescuing the main components of the future war effort.
03:19Steel works, iron works, tank and aircraft assembly lines, munitions plants, power stations,
03:28along with stocks of coal, minerals, and grain.
03:33Beneath the batteries from the German army, the Soviets had to find trains and trucks,
03:38dismantle the plants, and transport the workers.
03:41The people of the USSR were forced to improvise.
03:48The Germans advanced hour by hour.
03:52The economic heartland of the Soviet Union would soon be occupied and destroyed.
03:57Irreparable damage.
04:00The Baltic states, Belarus, and Ukraine accounted for a third of Soviet industrial production,
04:07half of farm produce, and two-thirds of steel production.
04:15The first plant to be moved, from Mariupol in Ukraine, produced steel plating to armor
04:21tanks.
04:24The decision was taken on June 24th, two days after the German invasion.
04:31They also had to find new locations for the plants.
04:37A delegation from the tank factory in the vast Kirov complex was sent from Leningrad
04:41to the Urals, to look for a site where its workshops would be sheltered.
04:52Once again, Moscow hoped that the immensity of its territory would be able to absorb the
04:56violence of the enemy attack.
05:00Well, for the Soviet people, the Barbarossa invasion was also a shock, and they didn't
05:09know how to react.
05:11They didn't know what to expect.
05:13They were told everywhere that the fascist invader had finally arrived, and so on, and
05:17they would have to do something.
05:19But when Stalin gave his speech on the radio on July the 3rd, it was a call to the Soviet
05:25people.
05:26Now you have to stand together, you have to repel the fascist invader.
05:31Brothers and sisters, he called them.
05:32It was almost the only time that Stalin actually addressed his people in familiar terms.
05:38And people listened everywhere to his speech.
05:40It made them realize that this was a fight they would have to engage in, and that they
05:45would all be involved.
06:09The Nazi project was predatory and colonial.
06:16On crossing the border, Hitler wanted to plunder everything that was missing in Germany.
06:22Raw materials for the Reich's industries, wheat for the people's bread, and land for
06:27German settlers.
06:31It also laid out the annihilation of the populations of Ukraine and Belarus.
06:36Jews would be exterminated, and Slavs doomed to slavery or famine.
06:44Minsk, Smolensk, Kiev, Kharkov.
06:52Within three months, the Germans had captured the main economic hubs.
06:58Whenever Nazi troops approached a city, the factories shut down.
07:04The giants crucial to the Soviet war effort moved out.
07:11Steelworks and aircraft, tank and artillery plants were dismantled.
07:18They went on producing until the last instant.
07:21Then the machines were loaded onto trains.
07:26For a large plant, up to 10,000 freight wagons were needed, spread over several hundred rail
07:31convoys.
07:34The workers often left on the same trains.
08:01In charge of evacuating the plants was Lazar Kaganovich, the People's Commissar for Transport.
08:23He wrote in his memoirs...
08:27There was utter panic, as there was no mobilization plan.
08:32And the calendar didn't provide for more transport, which would be needed for such a massive evacuation
08:38in such a short space of time.
08:43In July 1941, we had already mobilized 300,000 freight cars.
08:59You can imagine the starting point, which is, you know, the moment when the factory
09:04director says, stop production, start the dismantling.
09:10And, you know, the sound of gunfire is already in the air at this point.
09:14And then let's assume the existence of a train and wagons and the workers start to put the
09:22machinery on wheels.
09:30For the USSR, it was a war of time and space.
09:34Its outcome would be played out on the front, in the blood and fury of combat.
09:39But also on the railroads.
09:43The evacuated plants would find refuge in the south, east and north, deep within the
09:49Soviet Empire, 22 million square kilometers, by far the world's largest country.
10:02Trains go out, people scramble around, ordering trains, lorries and so on to load everything
10:10on, move it away, dump it somewhere in Kazakhstan or Siberia.
10:15It was, you know, a procedure that the Soviets were not expecting to perform.
10:22And the fact that they actually did it, I think, was quite remarkable.
10:26Several things could happen along the way.
10:29One is trains got mixed up, or they got misrouted, or they got lost, because there was no schedule
10:39for this.
10:46Something else could happen, which is that some local commissar who sees the approaching
10:52front line thinks, there's this train stopped in the siding with fuel, with machinery that
10:59we could use, nobody's in charge, but we need it now.
11:03So they raided these trains.
11:08Stuff was appropriated.
11:12The moving of the plants was a disorderly retreat which relied on the Soviet talent
11:17for resourcefulness and improvisation.
11:21A huge mess which Stalin's propaganda machine failed to mention.
11:26The USSR was invincible.
11:29The Soviet hero would die at the front and would never retreat.
11:38Among all the propaganda that Soviet power fed its people, only the fictional movie Simple
11:44People told the story of the industrial evacuation.
11:51The screenplay was written in 1943 and the movie shot in 1944.
11:59It tells of the experience of millions of Soviets who were transferred to the Urals,
12:04or Siberia, with their machines.
12:12It features Comrade Yeremen, the director of the Chekalov aircraft manufacturing plant
12:17in Leningrad.
12:20Yeremen delivers one last fighter plane which immediately flies off to the front.
12:27Then he moves his plant to Central Asia.
12:31There he reconstructs his workshops and relaunches aircraft production.
12:36That's it.
12:38Take the last machine of the Chekalov factory.
12:41Sorry for the test.
12:43We'll test it there.
12:45Thank you, Comrade Director.
12:47Thank you, comrades.
12:49Remember this day for a long time.
12:51Saving the plants was just the first step.
13:07The entire economy needed reorganizing.
13:11Nikolai Voznesensky, Stalin's favorite economist, was in charge of the remobilization of industry.
13:20Voznesensky was the head of Gosplan, the agency responsible for the USSR's economic
13:30planning.
13:33He summoned engineers and technicians to the Kremlin.
13:42Metallurgy engineer Sergei Emelianov attended one of the meetings and described it in his
13:46diary.
13:51When I reached the Kremlin, the meeting had already begun.
13:55Voznesensky started speaking.
13:59From now on, nickel is reserved for armor plating and steel for artillery.
14:06We need 30,000 tons of nickel.
14:09Where can we find it?
14:11You're all experts and communists.
14:14Tell me what I have to do.
14:20At the heart of this monolithic and centralized system, chief economic planner Voznesensky
14:25asked what he should do.
14:29He spoke directly to engineers, bypassing the numerous layers of bureaucracy.
14:35Importance had shifted.
14:37This was a time of emergency.
14:42Technology focused the entire Soviet economy on a single aim, the war.
15:05You can imagine a powerful river that suddenly took two courses.
15:12And one course was the course of mobilization.
15:15So immediately, hundreds of thousands of young men were called up and taken into the armed
15:21forces, many of them from the countryside, from agriculture.
15:26And at the same time, the leaders knew that they had to immediately ramp up the production
15:31of weapons.
15:45And so all around the country, you get civilian enterprises stopping making sewing machines
15:51and bicycles and so on and converting to various branches of war production.
15:58And so on one side, you get the immediate increase in the size of the armed forces and
16:03a surge of war production.
16:06And then on the other side, you find other branches of the economy that simply dropped
16:12away.
16:37Orders rained down from above.
16:41Like thousands of plant directors, engineers and workers, Yereman would need to rely on
16:46resourcefulness to work miracles.
17:04Simple People lived up to its title.
17:08The film doesn't show high-ranking party dignitaries, model workers or heroic soldiers.
17:21It tells us that the displacing of industry depended on the people, their capacity to
17:27survive and their talents for improvisation.
17:49By late July 1941, in less than a month, German troops had advanced 300 kilometers inside
17:56the Soviet border.
17:58The front now stretched from the Baltic states in the north to the Black Sea in the south.
18:09The evacuations race against time continued beneath the shells of the German artillery
18:14and the bombs of the Luftwaffe.
18:29Finally you get to a railhead in somewhere in the remote interior.
18:33And then you have a greenfield site.
18:36It's a site that lacks worker accommodation.
18:40It doesn't have electric power.
18:43There might not be enough workers.
18:44The workers might have peeled off on the way, you know, somebody might have conscripted
18:47them for some other project.
18:49So it's kind of greenfield industrialization has to take place.
18:58I protested, I argued, I demanded, but I didn't do anything.
19:15Well, let's start marking the workshop.
19:17What has been done for the meeting of the echelon?
19:19It's not decided yet.
19:20It's decided now.
19:21Contact the city, find out if there is any transport from the premises.
19:25On the ground, the evacuation became a massive headache.
19:51Each plant had its own story.
19:54In late August 1941, the production lines of the Kirov tank factory in Leningrad finally
20:01found a new home.
20:04They were transferred to Nizhny Tagil, 500 kilometers away.
20:09In September 1941, the front reached dangerously close to the precious locomotives plant in
20:14Kharkiv.
20:16The only site capable of receiving it was Nizhny Tagil.
20:22The Kirov tank factory had to move again, this time to Chelyabinsk, where it merged
20:29with a tractor factory to continue manufacturing tanks.
20:40The fall rains began on October 8th.
20:44The roads became treacherous.
20:52In early November, the Germans closed in on Moscow.
20:56500 companies left the city, and with them, almost half of its 4.5 million inhabitants.
21:16On December 5th, German troops came to a halt a few kilometers from the Kremlin.
21:25Winter set in.
21:26As 1941 came to an end, the USSR had not collapsed.
21:35The Red Army counted its dead in hundreds of thousands.
21:41The renowned Russian poetess Anna Akhmatova wrote...
21:47Life is for others, not for you.
21:49Cold in the snow you lie.
21:51Bayonets made 28 wounds, bullets another five.
21:56A garment of new grief I made, I sewed it for my love.
22:00Oh, Russian earth, it loves the taste, it loves the taste of blood.
22:15After six months of blitzkrieg, the toll on human life was terrifying.
22:20And economic toll, too.
22:25Hitler's troops controlled the regions that produced half of the USSR's steel, and half
22:31of its farm produce.
22:36Heady with the sweeping success of their blitzkrieg, the Nazis failed to notice that the Soviets
22:41had opened another front.
22:44220 plants had been reinstalled in the Caucasus.
22:48660 in the Urals, 240 in Western Siberia, 80 in Eastern Siberia, and 300 in Kazakhstan
22:58and Central Asia.
23:01The Soviets had managed to relocate more than 1,500 plants, equivalent to 13% of the country's
23:08entire industrial production.
23:13On some shop floors, production had already started up again.
23:19The Red Army began receiving the tanks, aircraft, and heavy artillery it required.
23:33The graph of war production during the war is very impressive.
23:37It's a bit like, you know, Table Mountain in South Africa.
23:39It just goes up to a plateau and then stays there for most of the rest of the war.
23:44But in the winter of 1941, that ascent hesitates.
23:48And it's hesitating partly because all the other branches of the economy are falling
23:53away, and partly because a lot of the capacity of the economy that was in the Western regions,
23:59if it's not being captured, it's on railway trucks.
24:09The Soviet Union owed the rescuing of its war factories to the courage of its people.
24:22Alexander Wirth, one of the few Western journalists present in the USSR in 1941, was an eyewitness.
24:31I had the opportunity of talking to many workers, both men and women, who had been evacuated
24:37to the Urals or Siberia during the grim autumn or early winter months of 1941.
24:46The story of how whole industries and millions of people had been moved to the East, of how
24:51industries were set up in a minimum of time, in appallingly difficult conditions, and of
24:59how these industries managed to increase production to an enormous extent, was, above all, a story
25:06of incredible human endurance.
25:11In most places, living conditions were fearful.
25:16In many places, food was very short, too.
25:22People worked because they knew that it was absolutely necessary.
25:27They worked 12, 13, sometimes 14 or 15 hours a day.
25:32They lived on their nerves.
25:35They knew that never was their work more urgently needed than now.
25:40Many died in the process.
26:05We know why we survive, that it is not the state that attacks its people, but a foreign state,
26:11a foreign army that brings fire and blood to the Soviet territory.
26:16Basically, war, for civilians in any case, is only the extension, is only the extension
26:26of a society, of an economy, of de facto war conditions that already existed in the 1930s.
26:34This explains, of course, both the endurance, but also a lack of protest, and quite simply
26:42a habit of deprivation that has taken place over the decades before the war.
26:49In the late 1920s, Stalin imposed a series of five-year plans to industrialize the Soviet Union.
27:09Within a few years, industrial giants sprang up like mushrooms in Magnitogorsk,
27:18Chelyabinsk and Denipropetrovsk.
27:30The Stalinist economy was planned and centralized. Its implementation was violent and brutal.
27:42The plans didn't forecast. They were primarily instruments of mobilization and constraint.
27:48Across the country, they imposed outsized targets.
27:56In every workshop, factory, office, kolkhoz, street and store,
28:01workspace was invaded by injunctions. You must do better. You must outdo the goals of the plan.
28:09Stalin wanted to create a new society, an army of workers who, in factories and fields,
28:16were obliged to produce always more and around the clock.
28:38When you go to work in a hurry, there are millions of people with you.
28:48If the big Motherland were not an obscure mine, a labor, a war, an indomitable family.
29:02What characterizes the political and economic life of the 1930s is the omnipresent horizon of war.
29:16War not only in the classical sense of the term, that is, military confrontation,
29:24but all the mobilization of society is a war mobilization.
29:33We only talk about labor front, industrialization soldiers.
29:39When a worker, for example, leaves an unauthorized factory, we talk about the desertion of labor.
29:47The USSR is a fortress of socialism, besieged by the enemy, by a hostile environment,
30:00and therefore all economic development is first and foremost a development of military power,
30:09so that we are respected on the military level. The two are absolutely linked.
30:17The regime's parades exalted war and industry.
30:26In the 1930s, Soviet society was already mobilized against capitalism and imperialism from the outside
30:50and against the enemies of the regime on the inside,
30:54and the powers were at war with the people who needed transforming and purging.
31:06Agricultural land was collectivized in 1929.
31:12Farmers were obliged to give their harvest to the state to feed the new population of workers
31:17who were tolling away, by will or by force, in Soviet factories.
31:24Collectivization and industrialization killed millions of people and profoundly reshaped society.
31:47It is a feeling that a new world is being built, a world called socialism.
31:54This does not mean that they absolutely adhere to all the values of the regime,
32:00but rather to the idea of a world of progress or of certain construction,
32:08which is really at the heart of this consent and this social consensus.
32:18The men and women who lived through the Stalinist 30s had learned the very hardest way.
32:26Between June and December of 1941, the Soviet people, now used to enduring the worst
32:49and getting by on little, were ready to handle the chaos of industrial evacuation.
32:54Protests were rare, but they did exist.
33:00At the locomotives plant in Kharkiv, Ukraine, 7,000 out of 12,000 workers refused to leave for the Urals,
33:07preferring to stay put.
33:14In Ivanovo, a city specialized in the textiles industry, 200 kilometers northeast of Moscow,
33:20reports by local officials bear traces of the revolt of simple people.
33:29Report dated November 2, 1941, on anti-Soviet disorder in the Ivanovo region.
33:36Strictly confidential.
33:40In the weaving workshop, groups of workers began to form,
33:43shouting, if you take our machines, we'll be left without work.
33:47All the managers have left the city and have abandoned us.
33:50We will not let you dismantle our machines.
33:56Worker Kulikova stated, Hitler isn't stealing our bread.
34:00Our managers are sending it to him.
34:03Our managers have stopped giving us bread.
34:05Are they keeping it for themselves?
34:07Worker Lebovo stated, we're hungry.
34:10We cannot work anymore.
34:18Expressing anger or resentment was risky business in a world fueled by heroics and enthusiasm.
34:28Trouble was rare and didn't last long.
34:37But a large part of the population was dismayed,
34:41shocked by the repeated defeats of the Red Army,
34:43lost in the incredible confusion that reigned across the entire country.
34:52The propaganda machine had its work cut out in trying to quell doubts
34:56and to convince the Soviet people to mobilize at the front and at the rear.
35:06The propaganda machine was a tool for the press, for art, for literature, for posters and, of course, for cinema.
35:27And in this propaganda system, cinema had an absolutely special place, a privileged place from the start.
35:36The film industry was made a priority.
35:52Movies continued to be shown at the front and behind the lines.
36:07In the summer of 1941, the first injunctions came to the filmmakers.
36:11They were asked to produce films to mobilize the population.
36:15And at the same time, very quickly,
36:17this happened at the end of 1941,
36:20to account for the crimes of the enemy.
36:36Movie studios left most of their work to the Red Army.
36:40The Red Army was the only one in the world that had the capacity to mobilize the population.
36:44The Red Army was the only one in the world that had the capacity to mobilize the population.
36:48The Red Army was the only one in the world that had the capacity to mobilize the population.
36:52The Red Army was the only one in the world that had the capacity to mobilize the population.
36:56The Red Army was the only one in the world that had the capacity to mobilize the population.
37:00The Red Army was the only one in the world that had the capacity to mobilize the population.
37:04The Red Army was the only one in the world that had the capacity to mobilize the population.
37:06The movie studios left Moscow and Leningrad, and were evacuated, just like the factories.
37:10The movie studios left Moscow and Leningrad, and were evacuated, just like the factories.
37:18The director Sergei Eisenstein, his actors and technicians,
37:22found themselves in Alma-Ata, the capital of Kazakhstan,
37:26in makeshift studios hastily put together by Mosfilm,
37:30for the shoot of the second half of Ivan the Terrible.
37:36for the shoot of the second half of Ivan the Terrible.
37:40With Ivan the Terrible, we are going to look for a figure
37:44that belongs to a distant past,
37:48that has been described throughout the first part of the history of the Soviet Union.
37:52that has been described throughout the first part of the history of the Soviet Union.
37:56We are going to look for this figure because it is a major figure,
38:00it is a figure that brought Russia together,
38:04a victorious military force in the battles,
38:08which was at the head of the West,
38:12and which is one of the data of the Soviet patriotism
38:16that emerged during the Second World War.
38:20Stalingrad, 1941
38:30Rather than expressing this war in Marxist terms,
38:34Stalin had the political genius,
38:38from his great speech of July 3, 1941,
38:42to inscribe this war
38:46in the line of all the great patriotic wars
38:50led by eternal Russia
38:54against all the invaders.
39:16In the Soviet Union, World War II became known as
39:20the Great Patriotic War.
39:32Propaganda's conjuring trick had worked.
39:36Whether it was for the USSR, for Holy Russia,
39:40or the Motherland, the Soviet people would fight.
39:44And their resistance was extraordinary.
39:58In late 1941, the country was in chaos.
40:08But that didn't stop Stalin from launching the construction
40:12of the First Railroad to open up Stalingrad and its surrounds.
40:28Compared with the urgency of the Blitzkrieg,
40:32another, much longer time frame began.
40:36Stalinist time was applied to a vast territory,
40:40with many states and numerous peoples.
40:48A stock of space and human lives
40:52which allowed the USSR to withstand the German invasion.
41:00The Nazis were playing poker.
41:04They unfurled their Blitzkrieg in search of the decisive moment,
41:08the collapse of the enemy.
41:12While the Soviets were playing chess,
41:16in the face of the speed of the lightning war,
41:20they set up their defenses, behind which was progressive
41:24and lasting industrial intensification.
41:38I gave the order to start production.
41:42We don't have roofs, we don't have workshops,
41:46we don't have machines under the open sky, we don't have people.
41:50It will be invisible, difficult, and that's enough.
41:54The word difficult will have to be forgotten.
41:58We will start working without walls.
42:02We will build walls around the machines,
42:06we will build a wall with our own hands.
42:10There will be no other way.
42:14We will start production.
42:18We will build a wall.
42:22We will build a wall.
42:26We will build a wall.
42:30We will build a wall.
42:34Yes, we have to teach them. And we will teach them. And together with them, we will give them a plane in two months.
43:05The problem with the workforce, of course, is that a great many workers have been mobilised into the armed forces.
43:11And many of them lost, of course, with the huge number of prisoners that the Germans seized.
43:16You had to have a core of skilled workers to be able to cope with the demands of war production.
43:23But a huge proportion of the other workers were women. Women who were hastily drafted into war work, if necessary,
43:31given very short training courses and so on.
43:35Or even young people, people of 14, 15, 16, were there in the factories working ten-hour shifts and so on.
43:49Everywhere they worked an average of nine hours a day, six days a week.
43:55Work was closely watched and run like in the military.
44:02Absenteeism, lateness and negligence were punished.
44:10A decree dated December 26, 1941 foresaw five to eight years in the Gulag for leaving one's post without permission.
44:23There was also forced labour, much of it carried out by Gulag prisoners.
44:29Political opponents, common law detainees, potato thieves, workers who clumsily let out a joke about Stalin, Catholics, Protestants and Muslims.
44:38The inmates of the Gulag made up an exploitable workforce for the dirtiest, toughest jobs,
44:45like extracting raw minerals, coal mining, logging and construction.
44:58And this forced mobilization of labour bore fruit.
45:08By will or by force, the Soviets produced.
45:12In the mines and the armaments factories, tomorrow's victories were forged in the workshops.
45:29The Soviet Union was forced to leave the Gulag.
45:33The Soviet Union was forced to leave the Gulag.
45:36The Soviet Union was forced to leave the Gulag.
45:39The Soviet Union was forced to leave the Gulag.
45:42The Soviet Union was forced to leave the Gulag.
45:45The Soviet Union was forced to leave the Gulag.
45:48The Soviet Union was forced to leave the Gulag.
45:51The Soviet Union was forced to leave the Gulag.
45:54The Soviet Union was forced to leave the Gulag.
45:57The Soviet Union was forced to leave the Gulag.
46:00The Soviet Union was forced to leave the Gulag.
46:03The Soviet Union was forced to leave the Gulag.
46:06The Soviet Union was forced to leave the Gulag.
46:09The Soviet Union was forced to leave the Gulag.
46:12The Soviet Union was forced to leave the Gulag.
46:15The Soviet Union was forced to leave the Gulag.
46:18The Soviet Union was forced to leave the Gulag.
46:21The End

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