(^354) Chapter Nine
fell far behind what was needed to keep pace with improvements
elsewhere.^84
The USSR was transnational in itself, and its war effort was also
linked with the Anglo-American economies through Lend Lease and
Mutual Aid deliveries. These were never large enough to satisfy Rus
sian requirements and Stalin always suspected that the western powers
really wished to see Russia and Germany bleed each other white
so as to emerge tertius gaudens as he had hoped to do in 1939. Yet
by the end of the war, the Red Army owed its mobility in the field
very largely to Lend Lease trucks, boots, and food. After 1942, the
USSR manufactured weapons and munitions in sufficient quantity
to keep the Red Army reasonably well supplied. But this achievement
came at extraordinary cost to civilian industrial production, and to
agriculture.^85
Russia’s relation to the United States in World War II much re
sembled the relation of France to Britain and the United States in
World War I. In both cases, heavy initial losses of metallurgical plant
required radical redeployment of industrial resources in the first
months of the war. Yet in both countries, lopsided emphasis on ar
maments and soldiering paid off in the sense that an industrially
weaker country was nonetheless able to meet and repel Germany’s
attack successfully, but only at a very heavy cost of human life. More
over, Stalin’s Russia continued the tsarist policy of giving absolute
priority to armaments and heavy industry against all competing claims
on the economy. Russia escaped the food catastrophe of World War I
partly because of American food shipments, which fed the army, but
mainly because the collectivization of agriculture assured effective
administrative methods for delivering grain to urban consumers
whether or not the people who did the fieldwork got anything back in
the way of consumer goods.^86
By far the largest and most complex of the transnational war econ
omies was that dominated by the United States, in collaboration with
- Cohen, Japan's Economy in War and Reconstruction, pp. 56, 267.
- The following figures tell the tale (Index: 1940 = 100):
1941 1942 1943 1944
Gross industrial output 98 77 90 104
of which. Arms 140 186 (^224251)
Gross agricultural output 62 38 37 54
Source: Alec Nove, An Economic History of the USSR (Harmondsworth, 1969), p. 272.
- In addition to Nove, cited above, see Nikolai Voznesensky, The Economy of the
USSR during World War II (Washington, D.C., 1948), and Roger A. Clarke, Soviet
Economic Facts. 1917—1970 (London, 1972) for a very convenient summary of officially
published statistics.