Forced industrialization was carried out in a very short time, mainly at the expense of agriculture, which was brought to ruin, and of consumer goods industry, which was largely neglected. As we have seen, industrialization and collectivization meant the destruction of the most productive strata of the rural population (the so-called kulaks and well-to-do middle peasants) and the transformation of a significant part of the peasant population into a cross between wage workers and paupers, reduced to servitude and tied to their particular localities. Compulsory deliveries of farm products to the state in inordinate quantities and at extremely low prices debased the value of the collective farmer's labor and prevented most kolkhozes from breaking out of perpetual poverty and de facto servitude to the state. Millions of people who were driven from the rural areas on the basis of "class criteria" or who fled to the cities before the internal passport system was introduced in 1932, and hundreds of thousands recruited for work in the cities, swelled the ranks of the industrial working class, which together with the scientists and engineers built an industrial base during the 1930s that provided the basis for the defense industry.
On the eve of World War II the Soviet Union held first place in the world for extraction of manganese ore and production of synthetic rubber. It was the number one oil producer in Europe, number two in the world; the same for gross output of machine tools and tractors. In electric power, steel, cast iron, and aluminum it was the second largest producer in Europe and the third largest in the world.2 In coal and cement production it held third place in Europe and fourth place in the world. Altogether the USSR accounted for 10 percent of world industrial production.3
It is not enough to evaluate overall productivity, however. One must also take into account the size of investments, the productivity of labor, the quality of production, and the state of production relations.
Let us look, for example, at the ferrous metallurgy industry, a key sector, and one of the most powerful in the Soviet economy. The statistics are fairly impressive: 99 blast furnaces, 391 open hearth furnaces, 207 electric furnaces, 227 rolling mills, and 139 batteries of coke ovens.4 At the same time, starting in 1937, at the height of the terror, and continuing through the first half of 1940, this sector of industry regularly failed to fulfill the plan. The official figures on increases in production, themselves very much open to question, claim only a 3 percent increase in the smelting of cast iron and steel from 1938 to 1941 and only a 1.1 percent increase in sheet iron production. The average output of steel per square meter of open hearth furnace was less in 1940 than in 1937.5 Production also decreased from 1937 to 1940 in the motor vehicle industry, electrical engineering, transport, road building, the paper industry, and construction machinery. 6
One reason for these decreases was that the targets set by the Third Five-Year-Plan (1938-1942) did not correspond to the economic realities. Another no less important reason was the mass terror carried out by Stalin.
Repression not only stripped industry of managers, chief engineers, and scientific and technical personnel; it also sowed fear and uncertainty. The spy phobia artificially created by the party leaders intensified the general atmosphere of suspicion. Very broad prospects opened up for careerists and climbers of all sorts, for informers, slanderers, slackers, and self- seekers—in short, the cream of the new ruling class. Newly appointed managers often preferred not to make technological improvements, whose benefits might not be evident immediately, out of fear of being charged with "wrecking activity" by members of this new elite.
Right up to the outbreak of war, ferrous metallurgy, the foundation for all processing and machine industries, remained one of the weakest links in the Soviet economy. This especially affected the arms industry.
During the ten years preceding the war, arms spending increased fivefold, according to the official budget figures, from 5.4 percent of the total budget during the First Five-Year Plan to an average of 25.4 percent during the first three years of the Third Five-Year Plan.7 The projection for 1941 was that 43.4 percent of the budget would go for defense.8 The USSR was far behind schedule in introducing mass production of new types of weapons, particularly fighter planes, tanks and artillery. At the outbreak of war the arms industry was still in the process of retooling, although its infrastructure had been significantly expanded.
As in the Soviet economy generally, the decisive role in the arms industry was not played by economic or technological considerations but by the frequently incompetent opinions of the party leadership, especially those of Stalin and Zhdanov, the Central Committee secretary in charge of the army and defense industry. Their conceptions of war, military technology, and strategy and tactics had not advanced beyond the experiences of the civil war. For example, Stalin suggested that tanks produced at one Leningrad factory be equipped with 107mm cannon, because such cannon had made a very good showing in the civil war.9
Stalin had no idea that the field artillery he was talking about was a completely different weapons system from the kind of cannons mounted on tanks. As a result of similar ignorance, a decision was made on the eve of the war to stop production of the most urgently needed types of antitank guns, the 45mm and the 76mm.10 This went on despite the objections of Boris Vannikov, people's commissar of the armaments industry, who bluntly told Zhdanov during a meeting of a commission of the Central Committee, "You are disarming the army on the eve of war." Vannikov was arrested at the beginning of June 1941.11 Similarly, Professor V. I. Zaslavsky, a talented tank designer, fell victim to repression, and В. I. Shavyrin, a designer of mortars, was accused of slowing down the output of mortars, although he had nothing to do with the production process.12 In general, a search went on everywhere for people to blame for alleged disruption of war preparations, but those truly responsible, the top leaders of the party and government, were never touched. The situation was no better with the production of anti-aircraft guns, antitank weapons, and machine guns.
At the beginning of 1939 the great wave of terror ebbed. The bloodstained dwarf Ezhov was replaced at the NKVD by Beria, who had arrived from Georgia. Under Beria repression took on more routine forms. Beria used his position in the NKVD not only to strengthen his influence within the party leadership but also to exploit more systematically the labor of prisoners and internal exiles as well as the "free" work force in the NKVD's employ.
Since the Soviet government does not publish statistics on the number of prisoners, approximate figures must be used. The most cautious and conservative estimates made by Western researchers place the number in the camps at the beginning of the war with Germany at 6.5 million (in 1940), down from 8 million in 1939.13 The reason for this decline was the high death rate. Most of those arrested in 1937 and 1938 were unable to survive the harsh conditions in the camps for more than two or three years. It is true that the Soviet concentration camps did not have gas chambers or crematoriums like the Nazi death camps. Mass extermination was organized in a more primitive way, due to technical backwardness. People were simply shot, starved to death, or killed off by disease, brutal treatment, or unendurably demanding labor.
The Gulag described by Solzhenitsyn and other writers both Soviet and foreign was only one part, though certainly the most important part, of the monstrous state within a state that was the NKVD. In addition to the camps the NKVD had special research laboratory prisons (sharashkas), industrial enterprises, and separate administrative divisions for the construction of canals, tunnels, roads, and railroads.