- 06/07/2025
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.
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.
00:24Hundreds 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 Blitzkrieg or Lightning War.
00:49The Red Army was crushed.
00:53Ukraine and Belarus, the wealthiest industrial and agricultural states in the USSR, were under threat from German troops.
01:04Most of the USSR's economy lay in the western part of the country.
01:10The Soviet Union was fighting for its survival.
01:17How could it hope to keep fighting when the plants that made artillery, tanks and munitions risked falling into enemy hands?
01:25Stalin 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 works and stocks of raw materials?
02:01How was the Soviet war economy able to reorganize and rebuild itself to finally produce more arms than Germany?
02:12It was the Soviet people who would save the country.
02:15The soldiers at the front, of course, but also the workers behind the lines.
02:23The soldiers, laborers, 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 win the war for their homeland.
02:40The German offensive caught Stalin by surprise, but he refused to lose his cool.
02:59On the day after the first assault, June 23rd, he decided to move critical industries to safety.
03:06No leader or country had ever shifted its entire economy overnight.
03:14But 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, uniform makers, along with stocks of coal, minerals and grain.
03:33Beneath the batteries from the German army, the Soviets had to find trains and trucks, dismantle the plants and transport the workers.
03:41The people of the USSR were forced to improvise.
03:48The Germans advanced hour by hour.
03:51The economic heartland of the Soviet Union would soon be occupied and destroyed.
03:56Irreparable damage.
03:58The Baltic states, Belarus and Ukraine accounted for a third of Soviet industrial production.
04:06Half of farm produce and two thirds of steel production.
04:10The first plant to be moved, from Mariupol in Ukraine, produced steel plating to armor tanks.
04:25The decision was taken on June 24th, two days after the German invasion.
04:31They also had to find new locations for the plants.
04:34A delegation from the tank factory in the vast Kirov complex was sent from Leningrad to the Urals to look for a site where its workshops would be sheltered.
04:50Once again, Moscow hoped that the immensity of its territory would be able to absorb the violence of the enemy attack.
05:05Well, for the Soviet people, the Barbarossa invasion was also a shock.
05:09They didn't know how to react.
05:11They didn't know what to expect.
05:13They were told everywhere that the fascist invaders finally arrived and so on and they 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 people.
05:26Now you have to stand together.
05:28You have to repel the fascist invader.
05:30Brothers and sisters, he called them.
05:33Almost the only time that Stalin actually addressed his people in familiar terms.
05:37And 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 would all be involved.
06:10The 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.
06:24Wheat for the people's bread.
06:26And land for German settlers.
06:30It also laid out the annihilation of the populations of Ukraine and Belarus.
06:35Jews would be exterminated and Slavs doomed to slavery or famine.
06:47Minsk.
06:48Smolensk.
06:49Kiev.
06:50Kharkov.
06:51Within three months the Germans had captured the main economic hubs.
06:56Whenever Nazi troops approached a city, the factories shut down.
07:03Industrial giants crucial to the Soviet war effort moved out.
07:11Steelworks.
07:13And 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 convoys.
07:34The workers often left on the same trains.
07:37It overloaded the transport system, which was also needed to supply troops at the front.
07:52And then there was the question of the evacuation of Kiev.
07:56How long could they leave the plants in Kiev to contribute to the war effort and the defense of the city?
08:02And when should they move the plants in order to save national production?
08:08And it was these very small decisions, sometimes to the nearest day, which would determine the success of the operation.
08:17In charge of evacuating the plants was Lazar Kaganovich, the people's commissar for transport.
08:23He wrote in his memoirs,
08:26There was utter panic, as there was no mobilization plan.
08:31And the calendar didn't provide for more transport, which would be needed for such a massive evacuation in such a short space of time.
08:42In July 1941, we had already mobilized 300,000 freight cars.
08:48So, you can imagine the starting point which is, you know, the moment when the factory director says,
09:05Stop production, start the dismantling.
09:08And, 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
09:18and the workers start to put the machinery on wheels.
09:29For the USSR, it was a war of time and space.
09:33Its outcome would be played out on the front,
09:36in the blood and fury of combat,
09:39but also on the railroads.
09:42The evacuated plants would find refuge in the south,
09:45east and north, deep within the Soviet Empire,
09:5022 million square kilometers,
09:53by far the world's largest country.
10:01Orders go out, people scramble around,
10:05ordering trains, lorries and so on to load everything on,
10:10move it away, dump it somewhere in Kazakhstan or Siberia.
10:14It 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.
10:32Or they got misrooted.
10:35Or they got lost, because there was no schedule for this.
10:39Something else could happen, which is that some local commissar,
10:51who sees the approaching front line, thinks,
10:53there's this train stopped in the siding,
10:56with fuel, with machinery that we could use.
11:00Nobody's in charge, but we need it now.
11:03So they raided these trains.
11:05Um, stuff was appropriated.
11:12The moving of the plants was a disorderly retreat
11:15which relied on the Soviet talent for resourcefulness and improvisation.
11:19A 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,
11:41only the fictional movie, Simple People,
11:44told the story of the industrial evacuation.
11:50The screenplay was written in 1943 and the movie shot in 1944.
11:59It tells of the experience of millions of Soviets
12:02who were transferred to the Urals, or Siberia, with their machines.
12:12It features comrade Yeremen,
12:14the director of the Chekhalov aircraft manufacturing plant in Leningrad.
12:19Yeremen delivers one last fighter plane,
12:22which immediately flies off to the front.
12:26Then he moves his plant to Central Asia.
12:31There he reconstructs his workshops
12:33and relaunches aircraft production.
12:36All right.
12:37Take the last car from the factory in Leningrad.
12:41Excuse me.
12:43We will try it there.
12:45Thank you, Mr. Director.
12:47Thank you, Mr. President.
12:49I will remember this day long.
12:51Saving the plants was just the first step.
13:08The entire economy needed reorganizing.
13:11Nikolai Woznisenski, Stalin's favorite economist,
13:14was in charge of the remobilization of industry.
13:18He was the head of Goss Plan,
13:21the agency responsible for the USSR's economic planning.
13:27He summoned engineers and technicians to the Kremlin.
13:32Metallurgy engineer Sergei Emelianov attended one of the meetings
13:45and described it in his diary.
13:48When I reached the Kremlin, the meeting had already begun.
13:53Woznisenski started speaking.
13:58From now on, nickel is reserved for armor plating
14:03and 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.
14:16At the heart of this monolithic and centralized system,
14:22chief economic planner Woznisenski asked what he should do.
14:27He spoke directly to engineers,
14:30bypassing the numerous layers of bureaucracy.
14:34Importance had shifted.
14:35This was a time of emergency.
14:41Woznisenski focused the entire Soviet economy on a single aim,
14:45the war.
14:46The war.
15:05You can imagine a powerful river that suddenly took two courses.
15:11And one course was the course of mobilization.
15:14So, immediately, hundreds of thousands of young men were called up
15:20and taken into the armed forces,
15:22many of them from the countryside, from agriculture.
15:25And at the same time, the leaders knew that they had to
15:29immediately ramp up the production of weapons.
15:31And so, all around the country, you get civilian enterprises,
15:49stopping making sewing machines and bicycles and so on,
15:54and converting to various branches of war production.
15:56And so, on one side, you get the immediate increase in the size of the armed forces,
16:03and a surge of war production.
16:06And then, on the other side,
16:08you find other branches of the economy that simply dropped away.
16:12And then, on the other side,
16:13you have to be dropped away.
16:14And then, on the other side, you have to be dropped away.
16:15And then, on the other side, you have to be dropped away.
16:18And the other side, you have to be returned and the other side.
16:25And now, the other side, you have to be replaced with all the cables.
16:27orders rain down from above like thousands of plant directors engineers
16:43and workers Yeremen would need to rely on resourcefulness to work miracles
16:48simple people lived up to its title the film doesn't show high-ranking party dignitaries
17:11model workers or heroic soldiers
17:20it tells us that the displacing of industry depended on the people their
17:26capacity to survive and their talents for improvisation
17:41by late July 1941 in less than a month German troops had advanced 300 kilometers inside the
17:56Soviet border the front now stretch from the Baltic states in the north to the Black Sea in the south
18:02the evacuations race against time continued beneath the shells of the German artillery and the bombs of
18:15the Luftwaffe
18:16finally you get to a railhead in somewhere in the remote
18:32interior and then you have a greenfield site it's a site that lacks worker accommodation it doesn't
18:40have electric power you know there might not be enough workers the workers might have peeled off
18:45on the way though somebody might have conscripted them for some other project so it's kind of
18:50greenfield industrialization has to take place
18:54don't you know there might be enough for any country to come back
18:58they need to clean up a lot of military ISIS in the river and the public
18:59and that is what is seen in the defense so it makes an issue
19:04I protested, were looking to a shelter and ask for other people to experience
19:06I protested, were looking to help but not to do the
19:07well what is he did not make an issue
19:08I protested the army
19:10Well, that's why we're going to be able to do it for a long time.
19:17Now we're going to be able to do it for a long time.
19:19Now we're going to be able to do it for a long time.
19:24No, no, you don't write it.
19:26It's called, go and explain it.
19:29Dенис Petrovich, you're going to take a look at the plate.
19:40On the ground, the evacuation became a massive headache.
19:49Each plant had its own story.
19:53In late August 1941, the production lines of the Kirov tank factory in Leningrad finally found a new home.
20:01They were transferred to Nizhny Tagil, 500 kilometers away.
20:07In September 1941, the front reached dangerously close to the precious locomotives plant in Kharkiv.
20:15The only site capable of receiving it was Nizhny Tagil.
20:20The Kirov tank factory had to move again, this time to Chelyabinsk,
20:27where it merged with a tractor factory to continue manufacturing tanks.
20:37The fall rains began on October 8th.
20:43The roads became treacherous.
20:51In early November, the Germans closed in on Moscow.
20:55500 companies left the city, and with them, almost half of its 4.5 million inhabitants.
21:02On December 5th, German troops came to a halt a few kilometers from the Kremlin.
21:20Winter set in.
21:25As 1941 came to an end, the USSR had not collapsed.
21:31The Red Army counted its dead in hundreds of thousands.
21:37The renowned Russian poetess Anna Akhmatova wrote,
21:43Life is for others, not for you.
21:48Cold in the snow you lie.
21:50Bayonets made 28 wounds, bullets, another fire.
21:54A garment of new grief I made.
21:57I sewed it for my love.
21:59O Russian Earth, it loves the taste.
22:02It loves the taste of blood.
22:04After six months of blitzkrieg, the toll on human life was terrifying.
22:19The economic toll, too.
22:24Hitler's troops controlled the regions that produced half of the USSR's steel,
22:30and half of its farm produce.
22:35Heady with the sweeping success of their blitzkrieg,
22:38the Nazis failed to notice that the Soviets had opened another front.
22:43220 plants had been reinstalled in the Caucasus.
22:48660 in the Urals, 240 in Western Siberia, 80 in Eastern Siberia,
22:55and 300 in Kazakhstan and Central Asia.
23:01The Soviets had managed to relocate more than 1,500 plants,
23:05equivalent to 13% of the country's entire industrial production.
23:12On some shop floors, production had already started up again.
23:18The Red Army began receiving the tanks, aircraft,
23:22and heavy artillery it required.
23:32The graph of war production during the war is very impressive.
23:36It's a bit like 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.
23:43But in the winter of 1941, that ascent hesitates.
23:47And it's hesitating partly because all the other branches of the economy are falling away,
23:53and partly because a lot of the capacity of the economy that was in the Western regions,
23:58if it's not being captured, it's on railway trucks.
24:02The Soviet Union owed the rescuing of its war factories to the courage of its people.
24:16Alexander Wirth, one of the few Western journalists present in the USSR in 1941, was an eyewitness.
24:28I had the opportunity of talking to many workers, both men and women,
24:34who had been evacuated to the Urals or Siberia during the grim autumn or early winter months of 1941.
24:42The story of how whole industries and millions of people had been moved to the east,
24:50of how industries were set up in a minimum of time, in appallingly difficult conditions,
24:58and of how these industries managed to increase production to an enormous extent,
25:03was, above all, a story of incredible human endurance.
25:11In most places, living conditions were fearful.
25:15In 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.
25:34They knew that never was their work more urgently needed than now.
25:39Many died in the process.
25:45The Soviets were coming out of a terrible decade with lots of fear,
25:52deportations, executions, and purges in the party and in the economic apparatus.
25:59So they were used to surviving.
26:02But at least war has the advantage of you knowing what you're surviving.
26:06It's not the state attacking its own people, but a foreign power, a foreign army,
26:12bringing blood and thunder onto Soviet territory.
26:15Basically, for civilians, the war was merely an extension of a society and economy that had been living in wartime conditions throughout the 1930s.
26:34That explains, one, their endurance, but also their lack of protest and their familiarity with all of the hardships they had suffered during the decade before the war.
26:49In the late 1920s, Stalin imposed a series of five-year plans to industrialize the Soviet Union.
27:08Within a few years, industrial giants sprang up like mushrooms in Magnitogorsk, Chelyabinsk, and Deni-Propetrovsk.
27:21The Stalinist economy was planned and centralized. Its implementation was violent and brutal.
27:37The plans didn't forecast. They were primarily instruments of mobilization and constraint.
27:47Across the country, they imposed outsized targets.
27:55In every workshop, factory, office, kolkas, street and store, workspace was invaded by injunctions.
28:03You must do better. You must outdo the goals of the plan.
28:17Stalin wanted to create a new society. An army of workers who, in factories and fields, were obliged to produce always more, and around the clock.
28:29The
28:42If you go to work, you go to millions of dollars with you.
28:47Your family is a big family,
28:51I'm not sure my family,
28:54I'm not sure my family,
28:58I'm not sure my family.
29:02Your family is a big family,
29:05I'm not sure my family,
29:07what characterised the political and economical life of the 1930s
29:14was the omnipresence of war.
29:17Not only war in its classic sense of military conflict,
29:24the entire mobilisation of Soviet society
29:30was a warlike mobilisation.
29:34They spoke of the labour front,
29:37soldiers of industrialisation.
29:40When a worker left his post without authorisation,
29:44it was called desertion of work.
29:51The USSR was a bastion of socialism
29:56besieged by a hostile environment,
29:59seen as an enemy.
30:01And so all economic development
30:04was primarily a development of military power,
30:08so that it was respected on a military level.
30:11The two were intrinsically linked.
30:21The regime's parades exalted war and industry.
30:25The Soviet Union had had its strong confidence
30:32to make it necessary!
30:33In the 1930s,
30:34Soviet society was already mobilised,
30:36against capitalism and imperialism from the outside,
30:42and against the enemies of the regime,
30:44on the inside.
30:45And the powers of the regime were in the main
30:47war,
30:48and the enemies of the regime,
30:49all this war,
30:50these enemies were not only
30:53and the powers were at war with the people
30:56who needed transforming and purging.
31:05Agricultural land was collectivized in 1929.
31:11Farmers were obliged to give their harvest to the state
31:14to feed the new population of workers who were tolling away,
31:18by will or by force, in Soviet factories.
31:23Collectivization and industrialization killed millions of people
31:27and profoundly reshaped society.
31:38In the 1930s, despite the incredibly difficult living conditions,
31:46the large majority of people did believe that a new world was being built,
31:52a world called socialism.
31:56That doesn't mean that everybody adhered to all of the regime's values,
32:03but the notion of a world of progress and new construction
32:09was definitely at the core of society's beliefs.
32:18The men and women who lived through the Stalinist thirties
32:21had learned the very hardest way.
32:24Between June and December of 1941, the Soviet people, now used to enduring the worst
32:36and getting by on little, were ready to handle the chaos of industrial evacuation.
32:42Protests were rare, but they did exist.
32:57At the locomotives plant in Kharkiv, Ukraine, 7,000 out of 12,000 workers refused to leave for the Urals,
33:03preferring to stay put.
33:14In Ivanovo, a city specialized in the textiles industry,
33:18200 kilometers northeast of Moscow, reports by local officials bear traces of the revolt of simple people.
33:24Report 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, shouting,
33:43If 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.
33:55Worker Kulikova stated,
33:58Hitler isn't stealing our bread.
34:00Our managers are sending it to him.
34:02Our managers have stopped giving us bread.
34:05Are they keeping it for themselves?
34:10Worker Lebovo stated,
34:11We're hungry. We cannot work anymore.
34:21Expressing anger or resentment was risky business in a world fueled by heroics and enthusiasm.
34:31Trouble was rare, and didn't last long.
34:37But a large part of the population was dismayed,
34:40shocked by the repeated defeats of the Red Army,
34:43lost in the incredible confusion that reigned across the entire country.
34:51The propaganda machine had its work cut out in trying to quell doubts,
34:55and to convince the Soviet people to mobilize at the front and at the rear.
35:00The propaganda was equipped with all kinds of tools, the press, art, literature, posters, and of course film.
35:13And in the propaganda machine, film was given a privileged place right from the beginning.
35:27The film industry was made a priority.
35:28Movies continued to be shown at the front and behind the lines.
35:29Movies continued to be shown at the front and behind the lines.
35:30The film industry was made a priority.
35:31Movies continued to be shown at the front and behind the lines.
35:32The cinema is not only a voice.
35:33The movies were more than a film.
35:34The films were made a priority.
35:35Movies continued to be shown at the front and behind the lines.
35:44The film industry was made a priority.
35:52Movies continued to be shown at the front and behind the lines.
35:59The movies were more than entertainment in the Soviet Union, they were an indispensable
36:06weapon.
36:07Very early on, in the summer of 1941, filmmakers received their first injunctions.
36:13They were required to make films to mobilize the population, and also, very quickly, later
36:19that year, to highlight the crimes of the enemy.
36:37Movie studios left Moscow and the
37:07Leningrad, and were evacuated, just like the factories.
37:18The director, Sergei Eisenstein, his actors and technicians, found themselves in Alma-Ata,
37:25the capital of Kazakhstan, in makeshift studios hastily put together by Mosfilm, for the shoot
37:31of the second half of Ivan the Terrible.
37:42In Ivan the Terrible, they sought a figure from the distant past, who had been decried throughout
37:47the early part of the history of the Soviet Union.
37:52They sought this figure because he had nonetheless united Russia, and this was very important,
37:58around Moscow.
37:59He was a military figure, a victor in battle, and he stood up to the west, which was a foundation
38:11of the Soviet patriotism that emerged during World War II.
38:31Other than talk of the war in Marxist terms, Stalin had a stroke of political genius, in his great
38:42speech of July the 3rd, 1941, to liken this war to the long line of great patriotic victories,
38:53won by eternal Russia over all invaders.
39:02The powers that be had changed their tune.
39:05The people were no longer fighting for the future of communism, but for the survival of
39:10the homeland and holy Russia.
39:15In the Soviet Union, World War II became known as the Great Patriotic War.
39:32Propaganda's conjuring trick had worked.
39:36Whether it was for the USSR, for holy Russia, or the motherland, the Soviet people would fight.
39:44And their resistance was extraordinary.
39:57In late 1941, the country was in chaos.
40:08But that didn't stop Stalin from launching the construction of a north-south railroad to
40:13open up Stalingrad and its surrounds.
40:27Compared with the urgency of the Blitzkrieg, another, much longer time frame began.
40:34Stalinist time was applied to a vast territory, an empire with distant boundaries and numerous
40:41peoples.
40:43A stock of space and human lives which allowed the USSR to withstand the German invasion.
40:59The Soviets were playing poker.
41:01They unfurled their blitzkrieg in search of the decisive moment, the definitive collapse
41:08of the enemy.
41:10While the Soviets were playing chess, in the face of the speed of the lightning war, they
41:16set up their defenses, behind which was progressive and lasting industrial intensification.
41:22The敬е of the Allies
41:35Начнем!
41:36Я дал приказ начать производство.
41:39У нас нет крыш.
41:41Нет цехов.
41:42Станки под открытым небом.
41:44Нет людей.
41:46Будет невиданно трудно и хватит об этом.
41:49It will be difficult to forget.
41:52We will start working without the walls.
41:55The walls will be building around the walls.
41:58The people...
42:19The workers' names of Yichkhalov.
42:29This is a half of Kazakhs.
42:32You call them the workers' names of Yichkhalov.
42:35Yes, we need to teach them.
42:37And we will teach them.
42:39And with them, we will give a plane for two months.
42:45In reality, the arrival of the plants
42:48was rarely celebrated.
42:50In the regions that received them,
42:52the inhabitants were recruited by force.
42:55They were given the toughest, most dangerous jobs.
42:58With little food, they were the first to die.
43:01They spoke little Russian and had no training.
43:05The problem with the workforce, of course,
43:07is that a great many workers
43:09have been mobilised into the armed forces.
43:11Many of them lost, of course,
43:12with a huge number of prisoners that the Germans seized.
43:15You had to have a core of skilled workers
43:19to be able to cope with the demands of war production.
43:22But a huge proportion of the other workers were women.
43:26Women who were hastily drafted into war work, if necessary,
43:30given very short training courses and so on.
43:34Or even young people, people of 14, 15, 16,
43:37were there in the factories working ten-hour shifts and so on.
43:49Everywhere they worked an average of nine hours a day,
43:52six days a week.
43:54Work was closely watched and run like in the military.
43:58Absenteeism, lateness, and negligence were punished.
44:10A decree dated December 26, 1941,
44:13foresaw five to eight years in the Gulag
44:15for leaving one's post without permission.
44:17There was also forced labour,
44:24much of it carried out by Gulag prisoners.
44:28Political opponents,
44:30common-law detainees,
44:31potato thieves,
44:32workers who clumsily let out a joke about Stalin,
44:35Catholics, Protestants, and Muslims,
44:38the inmates of the Gulag
44:40made up an exploitable workforce
44:42for the dirtiest, toughest jobs,
44:45like extracting raw minerals,
44:47coal mining, logging, and construction.
44:58And this forced mobilisation of labour bore fruit.
45:08By will or by force,
45:10the Soviets produced.
45:12In the mines and the armaments factories,
45:14tomorrow's victories were forged in the workshops.
45:40the
45:45LET'S GIFTO
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