2 - An inside view

Summary

First releases of wartime data

Official assessments of the scale and degree of wartime economic mobilisation began to appear in print in 1945. They were accompanied by release of the most limited selection of figures from the official wartime national accounts of aggregate production and utilisation. Only recently has it become possible to reconstruct these accounts with any precision.

In 1945 a leading official of Gosplan published an article in its monthly journal, and then a short pamphlet, devoted to the Soviet Union's economic experience of World War II. Their author, B. Sukharevskii, was wartime head of the Gosplan section responsible for overall national economic balances. His work served as an official summary of the pattern of Soviet wartime economic mobilisation, at least in its main dimensions, until the appearance of N.A. Voznesenskii's more celebrated War economy of the USSR in the period of the Patriotic War at the end of 1947. Voznesenskii, a member of Stalin's war cabinet and Politburo, was head of Gosplan and Sukharevskii's immediate boss; Voznesenskii's text was later said to have been approved personally by Stalin.

Sukharevskii's published work, although brief, contained some note-worthy ideas. He developed a distinction between transient and permanent sources of wartime economic mobilisation. He argued that in the first phase of the war, in 1941–2, the Soviet supply of war had grown by transferring resources out of civilian material production, out of the nonproductive sphere, and out of stockpiles.