1/9
Siberia in the Second World War requires some significant context, so I’m gonna start with its development under the Soviets before moving into how it fit into the Soviet home front. Let me know if you want me to go into more detail on any specific topic!
Siberia Before the War
The concept of a “Siberian rear” (Sibirskiy tyl) where the nation’s industry could be both safeguarded and placed close to natural resources, while commonly associated with the Second World War, has conceptually existed in Russia for much of its modern history. The economic development of the Urals and Siberia was a priority for the Russian Empire in the late 19th and early 20th century. Investment in local military industry from 1910 to 1914 grew significantly as the military recognized the Ural’s value as a secure rear area for production. However, the Tsarist state lacked the capital and administrative organization necessary to take advantage of the region’s full potential. It wasn’t until the 1917 Revolution and the consequent centralization and mobilization of state resources, particularly those related to defense, that the Soviet government was able to overcome the logistical and spatial challenges involved in developing the region.
In 1918 Soviet leaders first began discussing the possibility of taking advantage of the Urals and Kuznetsk Basin in Siberia to facilitate economic growth deep in the country’s rear. Both Lenin and Trotsky favored the exploitation of the Urals and Kuznetsk Basin due to its defensibility. The loss of Russian territory under the Brest-Litovsk Treaty necessitated the exploitation of new sources of coal and ore, which the Urals could provide. However, the first concrete blueprint for the development of the Urals wasn’t proposed by Uralobkom until 1926, coinciding with growing international tension and demand for industrial expansion.
The prevailing belief in Soviet defense circles in the late 1920s and early 1930s was that war with the capitalist states was imminent. Declining relations with Britain and Poland as well as the rise of Nazi Germany precipitated a crisis in Soviet planning. Their “besieged fortress” was likely to come under attack, and its industry in the West and South remained vulnerable to attack by the enemy. Planning for military mobilization thus took center stage in discussions about industrialization and the First Five Year Plan, both in terms of the construction of new industrial facilities and the future mobilization of existing ones in the event of war. As a result, most new industrial construction was built to be mobilized for military use - the military’s concept of the five-year plan largely preceded the national plan - and needed to be protected.
People’s Commissar for Defense Kliment Voroshilov and General Secretary Stalin both argued aggressively in the late 1920s for the growth of the military-industrial complex. Because of these attitudes, the Urals and Siberia would become a priority for new defense investment in the First Five Year Plan. The Chairman of VSNKh (Supreme Soviet of the National Economy) Valerian Kuybyshev summed up the prevailing view of the Soviet state in his statement at the Fifteenth Party Congress:
There is an ongoing dispute about the Urals. It seems to me that one can now be certain of one thing: the construction of our five-year plan and the relative interregional distribution of financing in industry and the whole economy must focus more on the east. The Urals and Siberia have every basis for expecting that the five-year plan will boost the development of their industry, particularly that of the Urals.... The Urals has inexhaustible riches of fuels, minerals, and ores. It is the safest among regions in the sense of strategic defense.... It is geographically the most logical base for the industrialization of the entire east. Therefore, the reconstruction of the backward, pre-emancipation economy of the Urals is one of the most important tasks of our five-year plan. We must undertake a substantial shift to the east.
Thus, as the Soviet leadership began crash industrialization, regional managers in the Urals as well as several military leaders and their political allies in VSNKh pushed for the Urals to receive a significant share of state investments. As a result, Soviet investment in the Urals rose from 148 million rubles in 1928 to 532 million in 1930. This upstart backwater seizing funds that could be earmarked to more established areas earned its regional leaders enemies from most other parts of the Soviet Union. Belorussia was excluded from new investments, as was the Smolensk region. Leningrad only gained an exception to continue investing because of its political and economic significance as the country’s “second capital”. Ukraine had the worst relationship of all with the Urals, with the two groups frequently sparring in Party discussions.
The expansion of Siberian industry required a massive effort across the region. In constructing the Magnitogorsk Metallurgical Combine in the Southern Urals, Magnitostroi planned to build a steel plant with a working capacity of 2.5 million tons of pig iron, along with a smaller coking plant and expansion of the mine on which the complex was founded. The city that supported the industry grew from 25 original settlers in 1929 to a reported 146,000 people in 1941. The explosion of population led to a lack of living space and services – the average person had 1.9 square meters of living space, less than the 2 required for GULAG camp prisoners. Many people lived in dugouts in the ground, and necessities such as clean water and electricity were nonexistent for many districts. Established cities such as Chelyabinsk and Novosibirsk experienced similar problems. Nonetheless, industrial and extractive facilities continued to grow rapidly, requiring more labor.
The lack of regional infrastructure, including housing, electricity, and running water, made cities throughout the region very unattractive to workers imported to Siberia from the countryside or elsewhere in the Soviet Union. For example, healthcare cost in Siberia were 2.5 times that of the national average. As a result, nearly 61% of workers in the Kuznetsk Basin had left after only a year after the start of the project, with 40% staying for less than 6 months. Poor living conditions in 1932, 4 years later, still saw 60,000 workers entering the project and the same number leaving. Over 400,000 workers arriving in the Western Siberian region were migrant laborers, of whom only half stayed. The resulting labor crisis continued unabated throughout the First Five Year Plan, leading to increasingly desperate measure by regional officials. Uralobkom ended purely voluntary recruitment in April 1930, with officials in villages reassigning peasants to factories by lists often without warning. However, even these recruitment measures did not prove fully satisfactory.
Dekulakization and increased repression in the late 1920s and early 1930s offered a solution to regional labor shortages. Kuzbas party leadership, noting their deficit of 23,000 workers, demanded that laborers be sent to make up the shortfall. Over 60,000 people were deported to the region between 1930 and 1932 as special settlers, not including assignments from other departments of the OGPU’s camp system. In Magnitogorsk, Novosibirsk, and Chelyabinsk, camps were also set up to supplement existing manpower and provide resources, becoming integral parts of the city’s infrastructure – the special labor settlement in Magnitogorsk grew to contain 30,000 people in a number of zones and factories. But poor standards of living, the execution of male heads of household, and awful working conditions meant that only 26% of special settlers in one town in the Kuzbas were fit for work in August 1931. Other neighboring regions suffered similar problems. Kuzbasugol was forced to intervene against the OGPU to demand improved living standards as well as offer greater freedom to special settlers such as access to education.
While largely inefficient and poorly managed, because of poor conditions these laborers remained essential to maintaining manpower demands in forestry, agricultural, and mining industries in the region, composing, for example, anywhere from 25 to 40% of the workforce during the 1930s. Thus, on the eve of war forced labor from the GULAG system and special settlements was essential to local industry and an integral part of Siberian society – in May 1941 63,646 prisoners were in Siblag in Western Siberia alone, 83% within 35 kilometers of a city -as free and forced laborers worked and lived in the same space.
Other less well-known areas also received significant development. The regional oil industry saw investment during the 2nd and 3rd Five Year Plans in order to meet acute shortages. However, the share of investment in exploration in Siberia declined to just 8% by 1940 as the arms industry and Red Army consumed significant resources. While refining capacity grew by 50%, extraction grew by just 20% - only the onset of the Second World War would see this capacity appropriately exploited. The Siberian Arctic saw an intense campaign of development as GUSMP (The Main Directorate for Arctic Exploration) attempted to open the Arctic shipping channels for Soviet commerce. However, even by 1937 ice trapped a third of all ships passing through the region, leading to a purge of GUSMP. Only in 1939 was consistent, safe travel in the region achieved and yearly tonnage had increased to over 200,000. Tragically this period also saw the repression of indigenous culture and their forced incorporation into Soviet society, a trend which the war would only worsen.