Archival Documents on the Impact of the Great Patriotic War on the State of the Sugar Industry Factories: Materials of the Kursk Region
The article draws on archival sources on the activities of regional authorities in regulation of economic relations under wartime conditions to discuss problems in organizing production activities of sugar enterprises of the Kursk region. Although there are some works on the history of the industrial production development during the Great Patriotic War on the all-Union, republican, and regional levels, which take into account all modern achievements of historical science and development of the source base, the impact of the war on the state of individual branches of food industry supplying the front and rear remains unexplored. The choice of the territorial frameworks of the study springs from several circumstances. Firstly, the Kursk region for a long time occupied a leading position in the RSFSR in the volume of products manufactured by sugar factories. Secondly, during the war, the territory of the region had the status of a front-line, occupied, front-line, and rear-line area, which had a significant impact on the specifics of all tasks related to production organization. The main source is archival documents on various aspects of management and production activities. The authors have identified documentary materials in the fonds of the Russian State Archives of Economics, the State Archives of the Kursk Region, and the State Archive of the Socio-Political History of the Kursk Region, that cover events and processes associated with the dynamics in the sugar industry of the Kursk region, one of the key sectors of regional wartime economy. They have analyzed the content of these documents and offered a general assessment of problems in functioning of the industry under extreme conditions. Of greatest information value on the said topic are materials from regional archives. Archival documents objectively reflect the situation in the food industry during the war. Their introduction into scientific use will contribute to a reliable reflection of the role of economic potential of the USSR in the defeat of Nazism.