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Women farmers line the road to greet Red Army soldiers riding atop a captured Nazi tank, October 31, 1943. ASSOCIATED PRESS. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION. to divert their food supplies to feeding the German army. He planned to deprive the urban population of food and drive much of the rural population off the land. Jews and communist officials would be killed and the rest starved into forced migration to the east.
The Soviet Union suffered roughly 25 million war deaths compared with 350,000 war deaths in Britain and 300,000 in the United States; many war deaths were not recorded at the time and must be estimated statistically after the event. Combat losses account for all U.S. and most British casualties; the German bombing of British cities made up the rest. The sources of Soviet mortality were more varied. Red Army records suggest 6.4 million known military deaths from battlefield causes and half a million more from disease and accidents. In addition, 4.6 million soldiers were captured, missing, or killed or presumed missing in units that failed to report. Of these approximately 2.8 million were later repatriated or reenlisted, suggesting 1.8 million deaths in captivity and a net total of 8.7 million Red Army deaths. But the number of Soviet prisoners and deaths in captivity may be understated by more than a million. German records show a total of 5.8 million prisoners, of whom 3.3 million had died by May 1944; most of these were starved, worked, or shot to death. Considering the second half of 1941 alone, Soviet records show 2.3 million soldiers missing or captured, while in the same period the Germans counted 3.3 million prisoners, of whom 2 million had died by February 1942.
Subtracting up to 10 million Red Army war deaths from a 25-million total suggests at least 15
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million civilian deaths. Thus many more Soviet civilians died than soldiers, and this is another contrast with the British and American experience. Soviet sources have estimated 11.5 million civilian war deaths under German rule, 7.4 million in the occupied territories by killing, hunger, and disease, and another 2.2 million in Germany where they were deported as forced laborers. This leaves room for millions of civilian war deaths on territory under Soviet control, primarily from malnutrition and overwork; of these, one million may have died in Leningrad alone.
In wartime specifically Soviet mechanisms of premature death continued to operate. For example, Soviet citizens continued to die from the conditions in labor camps; these became particularly lethal in 1942 and 1943 when a 20 percent annual death rate killed half a million inmates in two years. In 1943 and 1944 a new cause of death arose: The deportation and internal exile under harsh conditions of ethnic groups such as the Chechens who, Stalin believed, had collaborated as a community with the former German occupiers.
The war also imposed severe material losses on the Soviet economy. The destruction included 6 million buildings that previously housed 25 million people, 31,850 industrial establishments, and 167,000 schools, colleges, hospitals, and public libraries. Officially these losses were estimated at one-third of the Soviet Union’s prewar wealth; being that only one in eight people died, it follows that wealth was destroyed at a higher rate than people. Thus, those who survived were also impoverished.
CONSEQUENCES OF THE WAR
The war had a greater effect on the external position of the Soviet Union than on its internal organization and structure. The Soviet Union became a dominant regional power and quickly thereafter an atomic superpower. The wartime alliance soon fell apart, but the Soviet Union soon replaced it with a network of compliant neighboring states in central and eastern Europe and remodeled them in its own image. This set the stage for the Cold War. In the process the popular sympathy in the west for the Soviet Union’s wartime struggle quickly dissipated.
Within the country, the victory of the wartime alliance gave rise to widespread hopes for political relaxation and an opening outward but these hopes
were soon dashed. Living conditions remained extremely tough. Millions were homeless; it was just as hard to restore peacetime production as it had been to convert to a war footing; and the pressure to restore food supplies on top of a bad harvest led to one million or more famine deaths in Ukraine and Moldavia in 1946. In addition, Stalin used the victory not to concede reforms but to strengthen his personal dictatorship, promote nationalism, and mount new purges although with less publicity than before the war. After an initial phase of demobilization, the nuclear arms race and the outbreak of a new conventional war in Korea resulted in resumed growth of military expenditures and revived emphasis on the readiness for war. Not until the death of Stalin did the first signs of real relaxation appear.
After the famine of 1946 the Soviet economy restored prewar levels of production of most commodities with surprising speed. It took much longer, possibly several decades, to return to the path that the economy might have followed without a war. It also took decades for the Soviet population to return to demographic balance; in 1959 women born between 1904 and 1924 outnumbered men of the same generation by three to two, despite the fact that women also fought and starved.
One of the most persistent legacies of the war resulted from the wartime evacuation of industry. After the war, despite some reverse evacuation, the war economy of the interior was kept in existence. Weapons factories in the remote interior, adapted to the new technologies of nuclear weapons and aerospace, were developed into closed, self-sufficient company towns forming giant, vertically integrated systems; they were literally taken off the map so that their very existence became a well kept secret. Thus, secretiveness and militarization were taken hand in hand to new levels.
It is easier to describe the Soviet Union after the war than to say what would have happened if the war had gone the other way. World War II was a defining event in world history that engulfed the lives of nearly two billion people, but the eastern front affected the outcome of the war to a much greater extent than is commonly remembered in western culture and historical writing. See also: COLD WAR; LEND LEASE; MILITARY, SOVIET AND POST-SOVIET; STALIN, JOSEF VISSARIONOVICH; WAR ECONOMY; WORLD WAR I; YALTA CONFERENCE
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Barber, John, and Harrison, Mark. (1991). The Soviet Home Front: A Social and Economic History of the USSR in World War II. London: Longman. Erickson, John. (1962). The Soviet High Command: A Military-Political History, 1918-1941. London: Mac-millan. Erickson, John. (1975). Stalin’s War with Germany, vol. 1: The Road to Stalingrad. London: Weidenfeld amp; Nicolson. Erickson, John. (1983). Stalin’s War with Germany, vol. 2: The Road to Berlin. London: Weidenfeld amp; Nicolson. Erickson, John. (1997). “Red Army Battlefield Performance, 1941-1945: The System and the Soldier.” In Time to Kill: The Soldier’s Experience of War in the West, 1939-1945, eds. Paul Addison and Angus Calder. London: Pimlico. Erickson, John, and Dilks, David. (1994). Barbarossa: The Axis and the Allies. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Glantz, David M. (1991). From the Don to the Dnepr: Soviet Offensive Operations, December 1942-August 1943. London: Cass. Glantz, David M., and House, Jonathan. (1995). When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. Gorodetsky, Gabriel. (1999). Grand Delusion: Stalin and the German Invasion of Russia. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Harrison, Mark. (1996). Accounting for War: Soviet Production, Employment, and the Defence Burden, 1940-1945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Harrison, Mark, ed. (1998). The Economics of World War II: Six Great Powers in International Comparison. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Haslam, Jonathan. (1984). The Soviet Union and the Struggle for Collective Security in Europe, 1933-39. London: Macmillan. Haslam, Jonathan. (1992). The Soviet Union and the Threat from the East, 1933-41: Moscow, Tokyo, and the Prelude to the Pacific War. London: Macmillan. Kershaw, Ian, and Lewin, Moshe, eds. (1997). Stalinism and Nazism: Dictatorships in Comparison. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Moskoff, William. (1990). The Bread of Affliction: The Food Supply in the USSR during World War II. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Overy, Richard. (1997). Russia’s War. London: Allen Lane. Reese, Roger R. (2000). The Soviet Military Experience. London: Routledge. Roberts, Geoffrey. (1995). The Soviet Union and the Origins of the Second World War: Russo-German Relations
