Recently I've been reading quite a bit about the Eastern front between Germany and the Soviet Union during the second world war. It has been said that the majority of Soviet industry was based in the western portion of the union. As Operation Barbarossa commenced and German forces closed in on major industrial centers the Soviets would come to move vast quantities of factory equipment east to the Ural regions of Russia. As is often the case, little more is mentioned than the fact that industrial equipment was put aboard freight trains and shipped east.
Obviously this must have had a major impact on the country and the war itself. My questions to you are
How much of their industry would come to be transferred east? What did they manage to move vs. what had to be left behind/destroyed before it was captured by invading forces?
The movement of large portions of industry certainly must have had an effect on their ability to wage war. From the little reading I've done on the battles around Rzhev in 1942 I've come to an understanding that there was a critical shortage of munitions at the time?
I figure there weren't a bunch of empty factory halls awaiting this equipment as it arrived in 1941/1942. How did they manage in building the new accommodations/infrastructure to support it?
I've also read that many of the factory workers were transferred along with the equipment itself. Would most of these workers continue living within the Urals after the war had ended or did they return to their homes in the west?
I think that covers it. Thank you for your time!
Apologies for the rushed response but I'll expand on an old comment to quickly address your points. Let me know if you've any questions on the below and I'll find time to respond to them.
Ultimately the evacuation campaign managed to salvage some 13% of the USSR's pre-war industrial assets. This is not an significant number. Yet before the war the occupied territories had accounted for a third (33%) of Soviet industrial production, meaning that, at a stroke, the invasion destroyed approximately 20% of the Soviet industrial base. These are the high-level figures, by key industries it was much worse: the lost lands had once contained 63% of all coal production, 68% of pig iron, 58% of steel, 60% of aluminium, 80% of sugar, 38% of grain, etc, etc. It was a devastating blow.
Re-establishing this industrial base obviously took time. In this there was also some success: on reaching their destinations (ie the Urals, Siberia or Central Asia) a factory could be operational again in a matter of 4-6 weeks. This is obviously the best case but most enterprises were producing again by mid-1942. The circumstance were obviously different but the rate of factory construction during the war years (approx 780 plants per year) was on par with the Second and Third Five Year Plans (900 and 860 respectively). The Soviets were well used to throwing up basic industrial towns.
Understandably, the actual state of the reconstructed factories was not ideal. Most were built from scratch and necessitated laying down of new infrastructure, allocation of new labour forces, etc. Accommodation and such comforts were not high on the priority list: cramped and unheated worker barracks would not have been the worst conditions. Some ten million (!) workers were evacuated alongside the machinery in 1941 but there was also a need to identify, train and deploy large workforces in these new, and often isolated, factory locations.
So the Soviet war machine did keep ticking along though, albeit only just. Munition production actually increased year on year throughout the war (and exceeded German production). If there was a shortage at the front then it was due to a transportation network on the brink of collapse and the sheer desperation of the fighting. This resilience was a product of the ability to mobilise the civilian economy: by 1942 the Soviets were devoting an astonishing 66% of GDP to defence despite the overall total having shrunk by almost a third since the invasion began. No other power came close to squeezing their civilian populations like this and ultimately it wasn't sustainable - military victories allowed Moscow to relax its grip on the economy in 1943.
What may have saved the Soviet Union was that by 1941 it was experienced in such large-scale mobilisation campaigns. Stalinist planning had always operated by crisis, the biggest difference was perhaps that this one wasn't self-inflicted. Grossly inefficient in peacetime, this chaotic 'planning' it came into its own in 1941. The dire conditions greeting workers in the new factory sites in Siberia 1941 would not have been much different from those encountered during the FFYP - hurriedly constructed sheds and cold, austere dormitories.
As for movement in the post-war years, it depends. The demobilisation phase unleashed a wave of movement across the country. Workers were probably more tied down in this than soldiers but the need for reconstruction and conversion to civilian production would have enabled many to travel back west. That said, many would have stayed as the Urals defence industry established during the war became a permanent feature of the Soviet economy. Similarly, the mass mobilisation of peasants into these factories (and the Red Army) produced a significant increase in urbanisation in post-war society.
Hope that helps. Let me know if you have any questions.
Sources
Mark Harrison has already been mentioned. Much of this was drawn from his essay on the war in Davies' The Economic Transformation of the Soviet Union. Also relevant is his Stalinism and the Economics of Wartime and Resource Mobilisation for WWII. I also drew from Alec Nove's An Economic History of the USSR and Eugene Zaleski's Stalinist Planning for Economic Growth
Since you've been reading a lot on the Eastern Front, you should check out the work of Mark Harrison who pretty much answers all of the bullet point questions here, especially the specifics. The short answer to these questions is the early Soviet war economy was organized chaos. The Soviet defense industry had built-in factors to allow for rapid expansion. Factories built under the Five-Year Plan often had excess machinery and the mass mobilization of the prewar period habituated Soviet workers and managers to methods of mass production. But German occupation of the Western USSR meant there was a significant loss both in material and labor. The evacuations into the Urals was only the start of the problems for the Soviets for there were shortages of labor, materials, and infrastructure. To resolve this impasse, the Soviet defense industry turned to the tools of Stalinist power: forced labor mixed with a general indifference to civilian hardship. The real crunch for the Soviet economy was in 1942, but Stalinist measures led to a stabilization in production over the long-term.
Again, the above is just a pale imitation of Harrison and his various papers are well worth checking out.
/u/kieslowskifan and /u/international_KB , thank you both for your replies!
@ /u/kieslowskifan , thanks for linking to the research by Harrison, I've already started reading and its quite interesting! Add to the fact that its free as well! I had looked online for books on this particular subject but oddly everything I could find (on amazon that is) was in the $100-150 price range. They didn't appear to be text books either? I found that really strange.
I've only just begun to understand the dire situation the Soviets were faced with in 1942. Mainly it has to do with what I've read about the fighting around Moscow and Rzhev in '42. I'm interested to know more about these battles and I'll look into getting books that specifically cover the subject, because everything I own and have read so far overshadows this conflict with what happened in the south during Case Blue and then at Stalingrad. If you have any pointers on reading materials in thus regard I'll gladly take note. Cheers!
@ /u/international_KB , I wanted to say first and foremost that your reply didn't seem offhand or hastily written. I'm not a student or academic so I don't have crazy standards or anything, hahaha. No offense to students or academics!
I watched a documentary recently that said government reports from the time stated something like a million freight cars had been shipped east by rail during the initial stages of the invasion. Unofficially it was said that if you had lined up these freight cars from end to end they would have stretched from the original western borders all the way to the Pacific. Whether that claim is true or not, I think what was accomplished is nothing short of astonishing. If I'm not mistaken I seem to recall having read that several tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of freight cars were caught in a massive traffic jam further to the east of the Volga in the southern part of the union as they were moved east.
Just let me know if this is covered in the writings by Harrison as I've only just started with them. You had commented that if ever there were any shortages of munitions at the front it could solely be attributed to the Soviets overwhelmed supply lines? To my understanding, after the defeats suffered during 1941 and with portions of the war industry having been transported cross country and then needing to be subsequently reestablished, the winter and spring portions of 1942 can be seen as perhaps the darkest period for the Red Army. New formations were created to replace the losses sustained the year prior, but arming these new units was set back by the situation within the munitions industry as a whole. Something that would have a major effect on the Red Army as they attempted to push the Germans further back from the Moscow area in the first half of '42. Correct?
This is simply conjecture on my part, but it almost seems as though the actions taken by Stalin in the decade prior were an absolute necessity to the future survival of the USSR and its many differing ethnic groups. I'm not an apologist for Stalin and neither do I hold Communist sympathies, but I can't imagine the Soviet Union having survived the war without their reliance on the major portions of industry that had been so ruthlessly built only a decade before. Add to that purges within the government, society and the military had crafted a society of people who were familiar with and capable of surviving in unimaginable circumstances. Though obviously, its easy for me to hold such an opinion when I myself never experienced the difficulties of the era.
I've taken note of the two books you mentioned and I'll look into purchasing them at a later date. Cheers!
At that, I thank the both of you for helping me further my understanding on the subject!
This doesn't have to be answered if its considered trivial or irrelevant, but the question is in relation to Soviet agriculture. Taking into consideration the front lines around the time period of 1941 and 42, was most of the remaining farmland still within Soviet possession situated between the Volga and the Urals? When speculating about alternate outcomes of the eastern front I've read the argument that the Soviets would have retreated into Siberia and continued the resistance from there, although it doesn't seem like there would be any significant portion of farmland based there beforehand?