Conclusion

The Red Army broke the back of the Wehrmacht, liberated Auschwitz and other camps, and freed millions from occupation. Its strength, however, was determined by civilians on the home front. The greatest victory of the twentieth century depended on their efforts. The Stalinist state reached the height of its powers during the war, manifesting a greater ability to mobilize its people than any other combatant nation. The evacuation and rebuilding of the industrial base, mass mobilization of workers, food allocation under starvation conditions, aversion of a public health disaster, and reconstruction of the liberated territories were the result of unprecedented organizational efforts. Strict discipline and repression played a role. Yet, without the support of the vast majority of people, the achievements on the home front would not have been possible. The war has now become central to a new Russian national identity. The victory of the Soviet people against fascism, however, is also part of an ongoing international struggle against virulent nationalism, race hatred, anti-Semitism, and exploitation.

Rolling East and Resettlement

The transfer and resettlement of millions of people, including children, invalids, and elderly, posed a vast challenge to public health officials, factory managers, and local soviets. People crammed into freight and cattle cars, and their journeys were often derailed by bombing, illness, and death. Child measles and typhus took a deadly toll. Evacuees from Leningrad during the siege were often in no condition to travel. Families left their dead at unknown stations along the way. The exhausted people who reached their destinations were billeted with other families, in barracks, and in earthen dugouts. Newcomers and natives clashed. Construction crews built their own shelters before laying new electricity, water, and railway lines, and erecting structures for the evacuated factories. Factories too were ordered to merge and share space. Along with new hazards, new, more efficient methods of production emerged. The war proved a powerful crucible, forcing every branch of administration to confront challenges of epic proportions.

Illicit Provisioning: Inequality, Leveling, and Black Markets

Throughout the war, the pyramid of the ration system was remade through three illicit practices: self-provisioning, leveling, and theft. Many officials created steep new hierarchies through self-provisioning, establishing elite canteens, stores, and special parcels for themselves and their patronage networks. They also leveled distinctions by redistributing stocks, mainly allocated for workers, to feed vulnerable groups. Finally, large-scale and petty theft was ubiquitous. Shortage created demand for stolen goods, and theft in turn drained the ration system and increased shortage. Gray and black markets sprang up everywhere. Hungry workers, thieves, disabled veterans, and pensioners used markets to trade, supplement their rations, and sell stolen goods. In the absence of retail stores, markets bolstered the ration system by allowing goods to circulate, and destabilized it by providing an outlet for stolen goods. As such, they reduced stocks allocated to ordinary people and forced them to buy back at vast markups what they should have received by right.

Coercion Constrained: The Wartime Labor Laws

In June 1940 the legal status of Soviet workers changed dramatically. Absenteeism and unauthorized job-changing became criminal offenses. Six months after the German invasion, the severity of the penalties escalated: workers in defense sectors who left their jobs were branded “labor deserters” and subject to long prison terms. More than seven million workers were convicted for absenteeism or illegal quitting. Yet coercion had its limits. Despite the draconian penalties, millions of vocational trainees and workers defied the law and fled, prompted by painful working and living conditions. Authorities showed themselves either unable or unwilling to enforce the law, thus weakening the threat of punishment. Barely half of those who fled were convicted, and of these only 40 percent were ever found and made to serve a sentence. Collective farms welcomed the return of mobilized workers. Coercion proved ineffective in practice.

Introduction

On June 22, 1941, the Nazis launched Operation Barbarossa with the mightiest military force ever concentrated in a single theater of war. They occupied large swathes of Soviet territory; surrounded Leningrad in the longest siege in modern history; and reached the outskirts of Moscow. Soviet leaders adopted a policy of total war in which every resource, including labor, was mobilized for war production. The civilian toll was great. The Soviet Union lost more people, in absolute numbers and as a percentage of its population, than any other combatant nation: an estimated 26 million to 27 million people. Almost every Soviet family was affected in some terrible way. This book is the first archivally based history of the home front to explore the relationship of state and society from invasion to liberation. Focusing on the cities and industrial towns, it shows how ordinary citizens, mobilized for “total war,” became central to the Allied victory.

“All for the Front”: Free Labor, Prisoners, and Deportees

During the war, the Soviet state created a labor system that was unique among the combatant nations and unprecedented in its own history. The evacuation of industry to sparsely populated eastern towns demanded a new labor force. All able-bodied civilians became subject to a labor draft. The state sent millions of free workers to work on distant sites, enrolled youth in vocational schools, deployed exiled national groups in a “Labor Army,” and employed prisoners in Gulag camps in industry and construction. Women, peasants, and teenagers became major sources of new labor. Mobilized workers became the foundation of the war effort, but they also posed the state’s greatest domestic challenge: to provide services traditionally performed by the family. The provision of clothing, food, shelter, cleaning, and repair—jobs assumed by women for no remuneration—fell to the industrial enterprises. Pressure to produce and persistent shortages created appalling living conditions. Many mobilized workers fled. In the prison camps and Labor Army, starvation and illness decimated the labor force.

The Labor System in Crisis: The Limits of Mobilization

By 1943, the labor system was in crisis. The state switched its focus from the cities to the countryside, mobilizing people to work far from home. Hundreds of thousands of Central Asian peasants were sent to eastern towns. Factories, mines, and timber operations became multinational sites combining workers from more than fifty national and ethnic groups. By 1945, 70 percent of Russian women were engaged in waged labor. As the Red Army began liberating the occupied territories, more workers were needed to rebuild devastated towns and industries. Local soviets, collective farms, and industry fought fiercely over labor. Leaders of the Central Asian republics demanded the return of their citizens. The Committee to Enumerate and Distribute the Labor Force failed to meet the demands of industry, and vast backlogs undermined all semblance of planning. Hundreds of thousands of newly mobilized workers fled back home; others sickened and died from illness and starvation. The labor system, initially a powerful weapon in the struggle for defense production, reached an impasse.

“Our Cause Is Just”: Loyalty, Propaganda, and Popular Moods

The state’s mobilizing efforts could not have been sustained without the support and sacrifices of ordinary people. The initial military losses and daily conditions were so demoralizing that the state’s ability to garner popular support assumed grave importance. Although at times communication broke down, a unifying wartime culture emerged based on political education, newspaper and radio reportage, art, poetry, and song. Collective activities such as production campaigns and civil defense bound people together. Over time, propaganda became franker and more emotional. “Vengeance propaganda,” based on eyewitness accounts, reached its pinnacle with the discovery of the death camps. Propaganda changed again when the Red Army entered Germany. The state was responsive to popular moods, which evolved from the shock of invasion to anxiety over retreat, disgust with official corruption, fury at Nazi devastation, and pride in the Red Army. Propaganda was most successful when it elevated the experiences of ordinary people into a larger political understanding.

“Brick Dust and Ashes”: Liberation and Reconstruction

As the Red Army fought its way back west, it discovered a devastated land: thousands of villages burnt to the ground; Jewish civilians, along with those accused of partisan activity or Soviet sympathies, lying dead; and millions of young people sent to Germany as slave labor. Party activists were faced with reintegrating survivors and rebuilding the economy. In western Ukraine, Belorussia, and the Baltic states, nationalist guerrillas continued to fight against Soviet power. NKVD officials carried out “filtration” to identify active collaborators, and the Party and unions reviewed all members who sought reinstatement. The newly freed inhabitants were incorporated into the ration system and subject to mobilization for labor and the army. Many resisted mobilization, especially for work on distant sites, and rebuilding was complicated by nationwide shortages. The German High Command finally surrendered on May 8, 1945. People streamed into the streets to celebrate, dance, embrace, and toast the victory. Although reconstruction would continue for years, the war at last was over.

The Public’s Health

The war saw a protracted mortality crisis among civilians. The movement of millions of refugees and evacuees with little access to sanitary facilities, clean water, or medical care led to widespread epidemics. Evacuation took an especially heavy toll on small children, who died from a measles epidemic as well as starvation, diarrhea, and pneumonia. Widespread hunger and nutritional deficits damaged the health of people of all ages. In 1943 and 1944 starvation and tuberculosis—a disease highly sensitive to malnutrition—together became the largest single contributor to adult mortality. Defense production exposed workers to new, toxic chemicals. The war made unprecedented demands on public health, but health officials and medical staff lacked almost everything they needed. After the majority of medical professionals were drafted, only a “skeleton staff” remained to treat the civilian population. Yet public health officials managed to contain the worst epidemic outbreaks. During the final years of the war starvation and malnutrition became the country’s primary health hazard.