The Cost of World War II to the Soviet People: Two Five-Year Plans?

1980 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
pp. 842-844 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward Saraydar
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
National Income ◽  
Soviet Economy ◽  
World War ◽  
Direct Estimate ◽  
Total War ◽  
Upper Limit ◽  
Income Data ◽  
Output Ratio ◽  
The Cost

In a recent paper in this Journal, James Millar and Susan Linz seek “to determine the reasonableness of the Soviet claim that World War II cost the Soviet economy two Five-Year Plans.” They argue that Soviet direct estimates of non-human war cost (capital loss plus direct war outlays plus wartime loss of national income), made by a postwar Extraordinary Commission, imply a cost per employed member of the 1940 population of 7.4 years' earnings. Their own indirect approximation of war cost—based on a construct which incorporates estimates of prewar and wartime propensities to consume and invest, a 30 percent capital loss claimed by the Soviets, and an assumed capital-output ratio of 3—is 3.9 years' earnings. After hypothesizing various values for their parameters, they conclude that “[t]he popular Soviet claim that World War II cost ‘two Five-Year Plans’ is, therefore, above the upper limit [6.0 years' earnings] of the range of the total war cost estimates calculated using Soviet national income data.”2 The implication is that their results cast significant doubt on “the reasonableness” of Soviet claims of war cost. This paper will demonstrate that if the Soviet direct estimate of war cost is properly expressed in Sovietmeasured 1940 consumption years, Millar-Linz's perceived divergence between the Soviet direct and their indirect estimate of war cost disappears.

The Cost of World War II to the Soviet People: A Research Note

1978 ◽  
Vol 38 (4) ◽  
pp. 959-962 ◽  
Author(s):  
James R. Millar ◽  
Susan J. Linz
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
National Income ◽  
Soviet Economy ◽  
World War ◽  
The Real ◽  
Real Cost ◽  
Soviet People ◽  
Income Data ◽  
Per Capita ◽  
The Cost

Although the total real cost of World War II to the Soviet people has yet to be fully tallied, there can be little doubt that it exceeds that of any other major participant, per capita as well as absolutely. The objective of this paper is to compare and evaluate the real war costs reported by the Soviets with those implied by Soviet pronouncements and those using Soviet national income data. Our purpose is to determine the reasonableness of the Soviet claim that World War II cost the Soviet economy two Five-Year Plans.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 6-15
Author(s):  
Kathy Peiss
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Open Source ◽  
Professional Expertise ◽  
World War ◽  
Total War ◽  
Public Figures ◽  
Open Source Intelligence ◽  
Book World ◽  
The Military

World War II witnessed an unprecedent effort by American librarians, scholars, intelligence agents, and the military to acquire foreign publications and information. In a total war, the book world became a terrain of battle. Fighting the enemy required the mobilization of knowledge, including the open-source intelligence gleaned in publications. It involved ideological confrontations between freedom and fascism that required the elimination of Nazi literature. And it prompted new attention to the preservation of culture and, as the scale of Nazi pillaging became clear, the restitution of looted books. Wartime mobilization encouraged librarians and scholars to put their professional expertise to these efforts. Some of those involved were public figures, but most were ordinary individuals, predominantly men, from a range of backgrounds, who came together in the unique conditions of the war.

Epilogue

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colin F. Baxter
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
Total War ◽  
War Effort

The extraordinary story of RDX during World War II is composed of many striking chapters, one of which is the unprecedented collaboration between Britain, Canada, and the United States. At each stage, however, the proponents of RDX had to surmount formidable technical and human obstacles before the super-explosive and its offspring, Composition B and Torpex, could make an impact on the Allies’ war effort. Although researchers at the Woolwich Arsenal had desensitized the dangerous explosive by mixing it with TNT and some beeswax, the Ministry of Supply was unable to supply the vast quantities that were needed for total war....

scholarly journals Commentary: Serving the nation, serving the people: echoes of war in the early NHS

2020 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 154-156
Author(s):  
Roberta Bivins
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
National Health Service ◽  
Health Service ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
State Institution ◽  
World War ◽  
Total War ◽  
The People ◽  
Post War ◽  
British People

It is something of a cliché to speak of Britain as having been transformed by the traumas of World War II and by its aftermath. From the advent of the ‘cradle to grave’ Welfare State to the end of (formal) empire, the effects of total war were enduring. Typically, they have been explored in relation to demographic, socioeconomic, technological and geopolitical trends and events. Yet as the articles in this volume observe across a variety of examples, World War II affected individuals, groups and communities in ways both intimate and immediate. For them, its effects were directly embodied. That is, they were experienced physically and emotionally—in physical and mental wounds, in ruptured domesticities and new opportunities and in the wholesale disruption and re-formation of communities displaced by bombing and reconstruction. So it is, perhaps, unsurprising that Britain’s post-war National Health Service, as the state institution charged with managing the bodies and behaviour of the British people, was itself permeated by a ‘wartime spirit’ long after the cessation of international hostilities.

Technological Change: Some Effects on Three Canadian Fishing Villages

1952 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 17-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Richardson
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Technological Change ◽  
East Coast ◽  
Small Islands ◽  
World War ◽  
Fishing Villages ◽  
Sea Bed ◽  
The Cost ◽  
Traditional Fishing

There are two small islands off the east coast of Canada whose inhabitants make a livelihood by traditional fishing techniques. Since World War II they have been greatly disturbed by the encroachment of American and Canadian draggers onto the local fishing grounds. These draggers are motor-driven boats 60 to 90 feet in length which fish with a large bag-like net that is towed along the sea bed. At about the same time the draggers appeared off the islands the fish catches of the local fishermen began to decline, the cost of fishing equipment to rise, and the price of fish to fall.

The Cost of Juridification: Lineages of Cheap Labor in Twentieth-Century Romania

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 30-52
Author(s):  
Adrian Grama
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
World War I ◽  
Import Substitution ◽  
Labor Law ◽  
Full Time ◽  
World War ◽  
East European ◽  
Cheap Labor ◽  
The Cost

This article explores the relationship between the development of labor law and the cost of labor in Romania between the end of World War I and the 1960s. Drawing on a variety of archival and printed sources, the author argues that the historical trajectory of this peripheral East European country shows in exemplary fashion how the increasing juridification of labor relations was first enabled by policy makers’ concern to neutralize class conflict during the 1920s and then propelled by the collapse of industrial wages and the turn to import substitution in the aftermath of the Great Depression. The state socialist regime after 1945, the author further contends, inherited not merely the cheap labor of the interwar epoch but also the institutional mechanisms for controlling prices and wages set up to manage the economy during World War II, all of which facilitated the expansion of socialist labor law during the first two postwar decades. By the second half of the twentieth century, rapidly industrializing socialist Romania could thus integrate an expanding workforce into a type of employment relationship normally deemed standard: full-time, stable, dependent, and socially protected work. The author concludes by pointing out some of the implications of this Eastern European case study for how we might rethink the twin issues of the cost of labor and the transformation of labor law in our age of precarity.

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