“Military triumph rested on the people on the home front who supplied the armaments the soldiers needed. The greatest victory of the 20^th century depended on their efforts.”

By Wendy Z. Goldman

WHEN Germany invaded the Soviet Union early on the morning of June 22, 1941, the socialist state rapidly adopted a policy of total war. Every precious resource was mobilized for production for the front. The vast majority of German divisions were concentrated in the east, and it was here that the outcome of World War II was decided. The Red Army broke the backbone of the Wehrmacht, freed millions from fascist occupation, and liberated the inmates of Maidanek, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, and Auschwitz along the way.  Its military triumph, however, rested on the people on the home front who supplied the armaments the soldiers needed. The greatest victory of the 20^th century depended on their efforts.

In the first months following the German invasion, Hitler’s troops had conquered the heartland of Soviet industry and agriculture, turning the occupied territories into mass killing fields. Reeling from the blitzkrieg, the Red Army initially stumbled backward in disordered retreat, abandoning massive stocks of armaments, and giving up entire divisions. In fact, not until the victory at Stalingrad in February 1943, did the army begin to recapture the ground it had ceded.

In contrast to the disaster on the military front, Moscow’s policies on the home front were initially far more effective. It rapidly created the basic pillars of the wartime system: evacuation, reconstruction of industry in the east, the ration system, public health controls and labor mobilization. Yet the home front and the military front followed opposite trajectories. As the Red Army grew in strength after Stalingrad, the home front population began to weaken. By 1942, dire shortages of food, consumer items, and shelter began to take their toll.

The state reached the height of its massive mobilizing power during the war. It created the Soviet for Evacuation (SE) within two days of the invasion, offering an alternative to the panic that engulfed local officials and people in the frontline zones. The evacuation of children was the SE’s first priority, but as more territory was lost, the state made a bold and unprecedented decision to move the industrial base from west to east, beyond the reach of German bombers.

Workers in frontline zones laboured around the clock, under enemy bombardment, amid fires and even floods, to dismantle factories and mines and to load the equipment onto the railway cars. After long and perilous journeys, they disembarked to build a new industrial base in the east. By fall 1942, the SE had organized the successful rescue of more than 2,400 industrial enterprises, almost eight million animals, and up to 25 million people.

Evacuation set in motion a tsunami of consequences. The millions of refugees and evacuees created a public health disaster along the evacuation routes. Public health workers struggled to contain epidemics of measles, typhoid, and typhus that took many lives en route and upon arrival.

The eastern towns were sparsely populated, and the reconstructed factories were desperate for workers. The state quickly established the Committee to Distribute the Labor Force, a new organization charged with counting the unemployed throughout the country and dispatching them to enterprises in need of labor.

The entire able-bodied population was subjected to compulsory labor mobilization. No such draconian control over labor had previously existed in the Soviet Union nor any other nation in time of peace or war. With the help of draft boards and vocational schools, the committee mobilized millions of people to work on distant sites far from home. Mobilization, the most expeditious solution to the industrial labor shortage, forced enterprise directors to feed, house and care for the new workers, replacing the services normally provided by women within the family.

Under enormous pressure to produce amid an almost total absence of consumer goods and building materials, authorities provided workers with little more than unheated barracks, earthen dugouts and poorly provisioned canteens and childcare centres.

By 1944, the labor system had reached its limits. Industry and collective farms competed fiercely for labor, and local soviets were unable to meet their mobilization targets for new workers. The supply of labor was exhausted.

Adding to the misery, the German occupation of the great grain-producing lands precipitated a growing food crisis. In response, the state quickly established a complex ration system that planned and delivered set allocations of food to all waged workers and urban residents. A hierarchy of provisioning privileged defence workers and provided supplementary food to the most vulnerable groups such as children, nursing mothers and those suffering starvation disease (distrofiia). As food stocks dwindled and women went to work, the family kitchen was replaced by the collective canteen. State stocks provided the majority of calories consumed by the population but could not cover basic human requirements. By 1942, ordinary people and even defence workers began to starve. The death rates among poorly provisioned groups, such as prisoners, were horrific.

As the food situation improved, in part thanks to the West’s Lend-Lease food aid, factory managers and officials began to provide a second hot meal in manufacturing plants, more food to vulnerable groups and special dietary programs to reverse the ravages of starvation.

State and Communist Party organizations struggled over food supplies as each sought to protect its own constituency. They siphoned food from workers’ stocks to feed starving children, evacuees and other poorly-provisioned groups. These efforts levelled the hierarchies of the ration system, and kept the more vulnerable groups alive. At the same time, some local officials, food service employees, and others took advantage of their positions to self-provision and steal stocks. Practices of redistribution, theft, and self-provisioning remade the ration hierarchy and spawned teeming black and grey markets.

Repression played a role in enforcing discipline, but its efficacy was limited. Forced labor, the most extreme example of coercion, was employed in defence construction and industry, but in the wake of the mass amnesties that followed the invasion, the labor camps suffered the same shortage of workers as the larger economy. The most common experience of coercion came through strict labor legislation. Penalties for lateness, absenteeism and desertion were harsh; many people were convicted. Yet penalties were so poorly enforced that many workers regarded them without fear. Managers, judges and prosecutors proved reluctant or unable to enforce the law. They understood that desertion could only be reduced by creating better conditions for workers.

The mobilizing efforts, so essential to victory, would have faltered without broad popular support and participation. Initially, however, state propaganda failed to connect with ordinary people. Many reacted strongly, for example, against the obvious disjuncture between the state’s initial boasts of military prowess and the Red Army’s humiliating retreat. Yet over time, propaganda aligned more closely with people’s emotions, infusing individual experience with political and collective meaning.

In 1942, as the Red Army discovered the extent of Nazi brutality and genocide, the state’s anti-fascist messages began to resonate more powerfully. The consequences of the enemy’s ideology were on ample display in the piles of Soviet POW corpses, the shooting pits and gallows in the newly liberated territories.

The state also established a convincing link between home front production and military victory. Many people, especially workers, believed in the ideals of socialism. The older generation had participated in the struggle for soviet power, and younger people were raised on heroic tales of 1917 and the Civil War. Nor were Soviet citizens alone in viewing the war as a great ideological battle; they were joined by allies all over the world who saw socialism as a desirable alternative to both fascism and capitalism.

The war marked the Soviet Union in ways that are evident to this day. The country lost more people, in absolute numbers and as a percentage of its population, than any other combatant nation: an estimated 26 to 27 million people, about 13.5 percent of its prewar population.

In contrast, the United States lost 418,500 people or 0.32 percent of its 1939 population; the United Kingdom and its colonies, 450,700, or 0.94 percent; and France, 567,000, or 1.35 percent. Axis deaths were higher, but still not comparable.

Nonetheless, because of the Cold War that followed, the Soviet contribution to the Allied victory over fascism remains poorly understood in the West. Many people never learned that despite the urgent pleas of the U.S.S.R., the United States and Britain did not open the second front in Europe until June 6, 1944. And that even after the Normandy landing, two-thirds of the Germany army remained in the east.

When Stalin died in 1953, the country had repaired much of the material damage done by the Germans. Yet a generation of children had lost their childhoods, and many grew up without fathers. Large numbers of women were unable to marry. Parents never recovered from the deaths of sons and daughters. The victory against fascism, celebrated by people around the world, left a lasting mark on every Soviet family.

Wendy Z. Goldman is the co-author of Fortress Dark and Stern. The Soviet Home Front during World War II. She is  the Paul Mellon Distinguished Professor of History at Carnegie Mellon University.