Every time i read about the german invasion of the soviet union, there's always the comment that, immediately after the invasion the soviets moved the factories to the Ural region/mountains to prevent them from getting captured by the germans and to continue the production of vital war material like tanks and airplanes, but they never explain how they actually accomplished this and is something that always gets glossed over as if it was something easy and unproblematic, like as far as i know creating factories is something complicated, even if you are just "moving them", not to mention that, we are talking about massive and complex factories of tanks, engines, airplanes, etc.
i have seen some photos of those factories like this one and i can see that they had concrete floor and everything, but how could they do it so fast? concrete takes some time to dry, not to mention that they had to cut an entire forest , level the soil and dump gravel and everything.
my point is, it takes YEARS to make ONE factory, but apparently the soviets made HUNDREDS of them in just months, in 1941, all the while they where:
- in the middle of nowhere.
- while losing millions of tons of equipment and food to the germans.
- losing millions of manpower to the war
- just a overall state of crisis.
- they had to make houses for thousands of people, what about basic services like drainage, electricity and drinking water
i just can't understand how they did it, every time i think about it a logistic nightmare forms in my mind, my small brain can't comprehend how they did it, and i hope someone can help me understand how they did it.
thanks and sorry for any grammar error, english is my second language.
There is still a lot of study on this, and a lot of propaganda as well.
The whole process of the Soviet economy is incredibly hard to understand, modern research simply didn't have the man power to really get a handle on this since we actually have the archives.
First lets dispel some myths in your question. First of all, its defiantly not true that that they simple moved hundreds of factories and within a year they were all build up and producing. It is also wrong to say that, they moved into 'the middle of know-where', the ural industrial regions had long been in fast buildup and industrialization. The workers often had incredibly bad condition, housing they usually absolutely did not have electricity or even rail drainage systems, sometimes sleeping outside in not much more then tents.
The actual process was 1000x more chaotic and random then it sometimes is portrayed to be when people speed over the history. Basically 1000s of rail-cars with industrial equipment were moved per factory, often they had the origin simply written on them with chalk that would often be unreadable if it rained. Massive 'junk yards' appeared all over the Soviet Union specially at rail road jards were established where factory managers of new factories sent people to forage for the right equipment.
I think a more accurate description description would be that new factories were established using as much equipment as they could get from the old factories. This process was not done after a year and the Soviet industrial buildup continued for the whole rest of the war.
However some very high priority factories were moved with more organization as well. Some of it was centralized control over some high priority resources and high priority factories, but also lots and lots of local improvisation.
Not enough research has been done on this, not near enough.
i just can't understand how they did it, every time i think about it a logistic nightmare forms in my mind, my small brain can't comprehend how they did it, and i hope someone can help me understand how they did it.
That is the problem. No human mind understands it, neither now nor then. Its a logistical nightmare of such a scale that trying to understand it any systematic way has been pretty much impossible up to now. Even the people who lead this research are overwhelmed by the complexity.
One thing is for sure, the Soviet economy was hard hit. Any claim that they simply moved the factories back and it was buissness as usually is nonsense. It was catastrophic economic collapse that took years to recover from.
I wish I could give you a better answer, but I don't think anybody has yet really done justice to this question.
The Soviet Home Front, 1941-1945: A Social and Economic History of the USSR in World War II
The Economics of World War II: Six Great Powers in International Comparison
