7 - War losses

Summary

Physical destruction

As a result of World War II, the Soviet Union suffered both current costs and capital losses. The current costs of the war effort are encapsulated in the idea of the defence burden or sacrifice borne by Soviet citizens in order to defend their country and punish the invader. In previous chapters we examined how this burden compared with national resources, and the extent to which it was alleviated by foreign aid. The distinctive feature of current costs is that they had to be met within the war period itself. No part of the immediate cost of the real resources used to defeat Germany could be postponed to the period after Germany's defeat, although the cost could to some extent be redistributed among the Allies. In contrast, the impact of capital losses, although it took effect immediately while the war was still in progress, persisted far into the postwar period.

Capital losses must be understood broadly. The Soviet Union entered World War II with stocks of physical, human, and other sorts of capital. Physical assets can be understood conventionally as the total value of structures, equipment, inventories, and farm stocks. Human assets are represented by the value embodied in the workforce through the process of rearing, education, and training. Neither physical nor human assets can be evaluated without difficulty. Just as important, but still more difficult to measure, is the intangible stock of accumulated scientific knowledge.