The Red Army and economic planning, 1925–40

Abstract

From the early 1930s a central goal of Soviet forced industrialisation was to create the foundations of a modern armaments industry. Thanks to its new heavy industry and machine-building sectors, by 1941 the Soviet leadership could withstand armed attack even by the much more industrialised Germany. The general framework of Soviet economic planning in the 1930s has been analysed, as well as its war economy in 1941–5.¹ There also exists a specialised literature on the Soviet art of war in the interwar period.² However, until the archives opened in the 1990s it was impossible for western (and most Soviet) scholars to do empirical research on related themes.³ Now that it is possible to study Soviet defence industry plans and programmes at least for the period up to the Second World War, how does this evidence add to our knowledge of the driving forces behind the rearmament and different phases of the Soviet military build-up? What patterns of interaction between the military and political leadership can be discerned in the planning process? How did external threat assessments influence economic planning for war?