7 - The USSR and Total War: Why Didn’t the Soviet Economy Collapse in 1942?

Summary

The aim of this chapter is to reconsider the importance of economic factors in the outcome of World War II and especially on the eastern front. In a recent essay on the war, I asserted that “Ultimately, economics determined the outcome.” Production was decisive: the Allies outgunned the Axis because they outproduced them. Economic factors carried more weight in the Allied victory than military or political factors. For example, the Allies did not make better soldiers or provide better weapons. Nor were they better led. It is true that some of the Allies were more democratic, but being a democracy did not save the Czechs, Poles, or French, and being a dictatorship did not defeat the Soviets. The Allies won the war because their economies supported a greater volume of war production and military personnel in larger numbers. The Allied preponderance in this dimension appears so decisive that, once one has grasped it, it hardly seems necessary to pay attention to anything else.

The historian Richard Overy has objected that this leaves no room for “a whole series of contingent factors - moral, political, technical, and organizational - [that] worked to a greater or lesser degree on national war efforts.”