World Wars of the Twentieth Century 347
Soviet-style economic planning with war mobilization more obvious.
Certainly the rhetoric of Russian planning was military from the be
ginning. Heroes of Soviet labor struggled to win victories in produc
tion campaigns on both the agricultural and industrial fronts. Propa
ganda enveloped the whole effort in a haze of ideological enthusiasm,
intended to link party and people, rulers and ruled, managers and
managed, into a single cooperating whole. War propaganda had aimed
at exactly the same result using very similar means.^68
Despite much wastefulness and years of intense collision with the
peasantry, Soviet success in accelerating the pace of industrialization
was enormous, as Russia’s performance in World War II showed. The
Russians had the advantages of a rapidly growing population, abun
dant natural resources, and an autocratic tradition in politics which
made submission to orders more acceptable than would have been the
case elsewhere in Europe. At the same time, faith in the future and in
the apocalyptic promises of Marxism provided justification for present
hardships. The paradoxical combination of quasi-military administra
tion with a revolutionary and libertarian ideology proved potent
indeed.
Japan responded to the depression by renewing aggressive expan
sion on the continent of Asia. In the puppet state of Manchukuo, set
up by the Japanese army in 1932, state-owned corporations carried
through a very rapid industrial development. Coal and iron produc
tion shot upward in much the same way that Russian enterprises were
simultaneously developing production from new coal and iron fields in
western Siberia.^69 In Japan itself, raw material imports from Man
churia helped to sustain a fivefold increase in heavy industrial output
between 1930 and 1942, whereas light industry remained about stable
during those years.^70 Armaments were the spark plug and principal
growth point of this entire development.
- John Scott, Behind the Urals: An American Worker in Russia's City of Steel (London,
1942), pp. 8–9: “Ever since 1931 or thereabouts, the Soviet Union has been at
war.... People were wounded and killed, women and children froze to death, millions
starved, thousands were court martialed and shot in the campaigns of collectivization
and industrialization. I would wager that Russia’s battle of metallurgy alone involved
more casualties than the battle of the Marne. ’’ For the Five-Year Plans as a species of war
economy see Moshe Lewin, Political Undercurrents in Soviet Economic Debates from
Bukharin to the Modern Reformers (Princeton, 1974), pp. 102–12.
- F. C. Jones, Manchuria since 1931 (London 1949), pp. 140—60. In 1936 the
Japanese inaugurated a five year plan for Manchukuo consciously imitating the Russian
model.
- Jerome B. Cohen, Japan’s Economy in War and Reconstruction (Minneapolis,
1949), p. 2.
