Soviet defence industry planning : Tukhachevskii and military-industrial mobilisation 1926-1937

Sammanfattning: From a logical point of view, it is obvious that a large military build-up must have occurred in the Soviet Union during some period preceding World War II. The purpose of this dissertation is to analyse the military objectives of the Soviet leadership, to examine how such objectives were formulated in public statements and internal decisions, to determine whether they were supplemented or competed with industrialisation, and to see to what extent they were accomplished. This study formulates a new analytical approach to Soviet rearmament as a process. The purpose in this regard is limited to establishing a framework for further empirical studies. This analytical model will be tested on a few selected branches, rather than to give an exhaustive description of the whole Soviet defence industry. Given the archival access, the primary purpose is to determine exactly what kind of plans were designed by the military. Such an approach raises several questions: Was there a specific pattern of planning in the defence sector? Did the defence industry apply methods that differed from economic planning in general? Did the combination of military goals with those of the industrialisation in general form a specific Soviet model of planning? In other words, will the new knowledge concerning the military targets in planning change, or even require revisions of our views on the planning system as such? To elaborate on this analytical approach, the scope of the study has been limited in time and space; to the years 1926-1937, to the defence industry in a narrow sense and to the highest decision-making circles in the Party, State, military and planning organisations. The central actor in this study is Mikhail Tukhachevskii, acting as Chief of Staff at the time when this study commences, and as a Deputy Defence Commissar and Chief of Armaments in the mid-1930s. Tukhachevskii’s flamboyant career during the Russian Civil War and the Soviet-Polish war in 1920 had already made him a famous personality in the mid-1920s. The implications of Tukhachevskii’s elaboration of new warfare doctrine for the industrialisation of the Soviet Russia are taken up. The two basic questions for this study are: Which were his strivings with regard to the new weapon producers? What was the result of his involvement in industrial management and mobilisation. The study covers the development of Soviet defence industry planning from 1926 to 1937. The starting-point of 1926 was chosen because it was then that defence matters, for the first time since the Russian Civil War, were again high on the political agenda. The choice of 1937 as the final year of this study is motivated by both historical factors and the available sources. By then, a clear pattern of defence planning system had emerged. Several reforms designed to synchronise the military and planning organs had been implemented. In other words, a fixed structure for defence industrial planning had taken shape. Thereafter, in the "Geat Terror" of 1936-38, a whole generation of cadres from the Party, state and industrial authorities was wiped out, while the Red Army literally was beheaded. A subsequent study would be required to analyse whether or not the organisation was sufficiently solid to make it possible for the newly-promoted successors to continue the preparations of the country for war. This study is limited in space so as to highlight the specific decisions and plans for the defence industry. When it had become accepted that a future armed conflict would require the resources of the whole economy, and that a new kind of warfare including long-range aviation and chemical weapons would inflict damage far behind the front-lines, war preparations came to include most sectors of the economy, the administration, and the educational and transport systems. When the Soviet leaders foresaw a total war, their war-preparedness naturally came to include most sectors of society. The scope of this study is limited, however, to the drafting of and implementations of plans for the armaments manufacturers and, to a certain extent, also for the principle suppliers to the defence industry. The dissertation is cronologically divided into three parts: Part I: Contours of the future war, threat assessments and their implications. Part II: The role of the defence in the first five-year plan Some reconsiderations. Part III: The military and the defense industry in the second five year-plan, 1933-1937. Each part is structured basically in the following manner. The first chapter in each part deals with military threat perception, its doctrines and its main proposals for the transformation of the armed forces. The organisational network that linked the military, the planners and the high political decision-making bodies forms the following element of each part. In these chapters the author scrutinises both the formal processing of various plans and defence issues through the highest military, planning and Party organs, on the one hand, and the personal in-fighting that went on among outstanding military leaders, on the other hand. These two elements provide the background for the war plans. The war plans are analysed not in their operational, but in their material dimension. The material requirements of the military, expressed in the long-term mobilisation requests and the annual military armaments order were the centrepiece of the investment and production plans of the defence industry and its suppliers. Thereafter, the author analyses the military components in the first, respectively the second, Five-year plans and evaluate the military results of each of these plans. The results deal both with actual armaments productiom during these years, and so far as the indirect estimations allow, with the eventual mobilisation preparedness of the industry.