Russia at war 1941-1945

production, and some workshops of the Kirov and Izhora plants were evacuated in time; the rest were trapped in Leningrad after the Germans had cut all the railway lines.

The large-scale industrial evacuation of Moscow was not started until October 10, with the Germans only a few miles away. But by the end of November 498 enterprises had

been moved to the east, together with about 210,000 workers. No fewer than 71,000

railway wagons were required for this evacuation. During those grim winter months

measures were also taken to evacuate from "threatened areas" like Kursk, Voronezh and the North-Caucasian provinces, as much as possible of the available food reserves, as well as the equipment of many light-industry factories.

This fantastic migration of industries and men to the east was not completed without considerable difficulties: there were gigantic bottlenecks at certain major railway

junctions such as Cheliabinsk, and the evacuees suffered some terrible hardships on the way to the Urals, Siberia and Kazakhstan in the late autumn and at the height of winter.

Altogether, between July and November 1941 no fewer than 1,523 industrial enterprises, including 1,360 large war plants had been moved to the east—226 to the Volga area, 667

to the Urals, 244 to Western Siberia, 78 to Eastern Siberia, 308 to Kazakhstan and

Central Asia. The "evacuation cargoes" amounted to a total of one and a half million railway wagon-loads.

This transplantation of industry to the east at the height of the German invasion in 1941

is, of course, an altogether unique achievement. But it would, at the same time be naive to assume that everything of any industrial importance was either evacuated in time, or destroyed on the strength of Stalin's "scorched-earth" instructions of July 3.

After the war, the Soviet Government officially claimed that, apart from destroying six million houses, leaving twenty-five million people homeless, slaughtering or carrying off seven million horses, seventeen million head of cattle, twenty million pigs, etc., the Germans and their allies had also "destroyed 31,850 industrial enterprises, employing some four million persons before the war, and had destroyed or carried away 239,000

electro-motors and 175,000 machine-tools".

[Molotov's speech on Reparations on August 26, 1946, at the Paris Peace Conference for the Satellite countries, quoted in Vneshnyaya Politika Sovietskogo Soyuza, 1946 (Soviet Foreign Policy 1946) (Moscow, 1947), pp. 296-7.]

Even allowing for the fact that, with an eye on reparations Molotov quoted some greatly inflated figures for the industrial equipment destroyed or looted by the Germans and their allies, his statement is, in fact, still an admission that a very important quantity of such equipment was left behind.

Everything tends to show that a very important part in this evacuation of industry and its

"resettlement" in the east was played by Molotov, Beria, Malenkov and Kaganovich, but one would look in vain for any of these names in present-day accounts of this gigantic achievement which was ultimately to enable Russia to carry on the war. Instead, the

names that are now given pride of place are Mikoyan and Kosygin, who remain among

Mr Khrushchev's closest associates, and Voznesensky, who was shot, apparently in the course of the lurid "Leningrad Affair" in 1949.

Especially when the Battle of Moscow was at its height, and after the Russian counter-offensive had begun, the Russian working-class worked with redoubled energy in

resettling the evacuated war plants. Here was the combination of a great feat of

organisation with an almost unparallelled example of mass devotion, for the men and

women engaged in re-starting the evacuated armaments industry had to work at the

height of winter, with worse than inadequate food and housing.

In October, many government departments, such as the People's Commissariats of

Aircraft Production, Tank Production, Armaments, Iron and Steel, and Munitions were

evacuated from Moscow to Kuibyshev. Voznesensky, the head of Gosplan, was

instructed to send a weekly report to Moscow on the progress of the armaments

industries. Similarly, a part of the apparat of the Central Committee of the CPSU had been evacuated to Kuibyshev and "was authorised to send recommendations and

instructions to the regional party committees of the Volga, Urals, Siberian and Central-Asian provinces concerning the organisation of industries evacuated to these areas, and also concerning agricultural State purchases". Special "evacuation bases" were established in industrial centres such as Gorki, Kuibyshev, Cheliabinsk, Novosibirsk, Sverdlovsk, Magnitogorsk, Tashkent, etc.