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Western perceptions of Soviet strength during the

Soviet-German War

Anusar Farooqui

‘Considering the measure of Russia’s power revealed in this war,’ the Office of Strategic

Studies—the precursor of the C.I.A.—argued in the summer of 1943, ‘there is no longer

any question as to whether the Soviet Union can be left out of the postwar scheme of

things.’1 Nor was there any doubt ‘that after the present conflict Russia can and will make

her power felt.’2 It can be safely assumed that collaboration between the Anglo-American

coalition and the Soviet Union will be necessary for ‘an e↵ective policing of the world in

the immediate postwar period.’3 To secure Soviet cooperation, the O.S.S. concluded, the

Anglo-Saxon powers must o↵er her ‘a coordinate place in a three power scheme of world

control.’4

Two years earlier, Western perceptions had been radically di↵erent. After the Fall of

France, with Hitler widely expected to launch a devastating Blitzkrieg against the Soviet

Union, there was a near-total consensus in Western intelligence circles that the latter

would capitulate in short order.5 The O.S.S. did not yet exist. But US naval intelligence

and the G-2, the intelligence arm of the US Army, considered a Red Army defeat to be

assured.6 On 19 June 1941, Colonel Mason, the Acting Assistant Chief of Sta↵ at the

1
G-2, submitted a memo to the US Chief of Sta↵ on the Soviet-German situation predicting

that Germany would ‘rapidly’ defeat the Soviet Union, ‘overthrow the Stalin regime, and

seize the western provinces’.7 MI2, the British military intelligence service, thought it

possible that the Soviets would resist a German entry into the Ukraine.8 Churchill’s private

secretary recorded in his diary on 21 June 1941 that ‘the P.M. says a German attack on

Russia is certain and Russia will assuredly be defeated’.9 War Office assessments gave the

Soviets three to eight weeks.10 Stimson reckoned that it would take a maximum of three

months.11

What explains the catastrophic failure of Western intelligence assessments on the eve

of Operation Barbarossa? What did the O.S.S. know about the Soviet Union in 1943 that

Western intelligence did not in 1940-1941? What can modern scholars tell us about the

strength and stability of the Stalinist state at mid-century? And what are their blind spots?

In what follows we will try to identify the rigidities of the Western discourse that distort

Western perceptions of Soviet modernity. While modern scholarship has dramatically

improved our understanding of high Stalinism, we shall argue, many of these rigidities

continue to persist.

II

As the world situation deteriorated in July 1941, Franklin D. Roosevelt tasked William

J. “Wild Bill” Donovan, the President’s confidante and foreign policy advisor, to set up a

centralized intelligence agency. His office of the Coordinator of Information was renamed

the Office of Strategic Services, and after the war to the Central Intelligence Agency.

Donovan appointed William L. Langer to lead the O.S.S.’s Research & Analysis wing (‘the

O.S.S. Chairborne’). It was Langer who hired the dominant figure in US intelligence on

the Soviet Union during the early-1940s, Geroid Tanquary Robinson. Taking temporary

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leave from the Department of History at Columbia University, Robinson was appointed as

the chief of the Eastern European Section, and later the USSR Division.

After World War I, Robinson had helped edit The Dial, the radical Greenwich Village

periodical whose sta↵ included John Dewey, Robert Morss Lovett and Thorstein Veblen,

and that published articles by Franz Boas and Lewis Mumford, among others. Robinson

and Dewey were especially close, both personally and in their views. Both sought a ratio-

nal reorganization of society and both looked forward to seeing socialism in operation so

its efficiency could be adequately tested.12 The Bolsheviks, an early article of Robinson

noted, were carrying out ‘a large-scale experiment’ in social organization by erasing the

distinction between the economic and political and forging ‘a country permanently orga-

nized, politically and industrially, for production.’13 The ultimate measure of success of

the ‘communist experiment,’ Robinson concluded, would be the Soviets’ ability to build

their industrial sector. Robinson’s work increasingly echoed the New History at Columbia

that looked beyond high politics to everyday life. In his study of the Russian past, Robin-

son focused more and more on the problem of rural Russia. Mocking Orientalist notions

of peasant passivity—‘the Russian mushik has been for centuries almost as inert as the

soil he tills’—Robinson recounted three centuries worth of peasant revolts.14 In 1925 he

left for Russia to dig into the Russian archives, returning two years later to Columbia to

write up his results. Rural Russia Under the Old Regime appeared in 1932. Robinson

charted peasant politics from the rise of serfdom to the Bolshevik revolution. It was so

comprehensive that, according to Esther Kingston-Mann, it closed o↵ the study of the Rus-

sian peasantry for two generations.15 Unabashedly taking their side against the landlords,

Robinson argued that Russian peasants were the real dynamic force in Russian history.

Alongside Robinson, Langer had recruited a who’s who of academic stars to the Divi-

sion: Paul Baran, Wassily Leontief, John A. Morrison, Bernadotte Schmitt, Alex Inkeles,

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Barrington Moore, Jr., Robert C. Tucker, John Curtiss, and Abram Bergson; among oth-

ers. These men set about the business of doing what Barry Katz called ‘social science

in one country’.16 Over the next two years, the eminent scholars of the Division went

through a veritable crash course on the Soviet Union and closely followed the situation on

the eastern front. Between September 1941 and December 1943, the Division produced

1,390 pages of strategic analysis on the Soviet Union; 4,893 pages in 1941-1945. The re-

ports covered virtually every aspect of Soviet military and industrial strength; morale and

stability; Soviet intentions and policies; propaganda and religion; and much else besides.

The very first task assigned to the Division was to estimate the loss of Soviet war

potential as a result of German occupation of the western USSR. The report ‘Losses of

Russian Industrial Production Resulting from the Eastward Movement of the War Front,’

was published on 19 September 1941, with a revised and extended version appearing on 13

October.17 If all of the Ukraine fell to the Germans, as it soon did, the losses in the critical

coal, pig iron, steel were estimated to be 60 percent; 60-80 percent for aluminum. Machinery

and metal output losses were estimated at 33 percent. A second report titled ‘Lines of

Communication between the United States and the Russo-German War Zone’ examined

the possibilities of supplying lend lease aid to the communist great power.18 Strategic

surveys of Siberia and the nationality problem in the Caucasus were followed by a six-part

series on Soviet military potential. Published in November 1942, the series included a 31

page report on civilian manpower; a 73 page report on ‘the food problem under peacetime

conditions’ and another 70 page report on ‘the food problem under wartime conditions’; a 24

page report on basic industry; an 84 page report on munitions output; and a 34 page report

on morale.19 In a report released on November 3, 1942, the O.S.S. estimated that 20 million

people had been evacuated from the western Soviet Union.20 We know from later research

that the Soviets had actually managed to evacuate 25 million people from the western

4
regions.21 Even more importantly, 1,523 large factories had been evacuated, including

some of the largest weapons plants; all but 55 were back in operation by the end of 1942.22

The success of the evacuations already suggested a formidable administrative capacity of

the Stalinist state. But through 1941, the Division remained relatively pessimistic about

Soviet prospects and continued to worry about a potential separate peace between the

Soviet Union and Germany through 1942. By the summer of 1943, however, the Division

had developed a very strong appreciation for the strength and stability of the Soviet Union.

In terms of US foreign policy, the Division therefore converged to the position that the US

must seek a modus vivendi with the Soviet Union while it still had substantial assistance

to o↵er. This position became the idée fixe of the Division that would remain in place

until the end of the war.

Robinson’s reports were widely disseminated and very broadly appreciated amongst

US security and foreign policymakers. His 1943 evaluation of Soviet strength were near-

universally accepted, although his position on Soviet intentions was met with skepticism

in some quarters; eg, Harriman.23 Donovan sent Robinson to attend the secret Quebec

conference in August 1943 where he impressed the British with his analysis. It is difficult

to establish whether the emerging American consensus behind the Division View embold-

ened FDR to finally push back against Churchill and commit to a western front. At the

very least it seems plausible that it was so.24 For as the Division had come to appreci-

ate, what made the western front necessary was not German strength but Soviet strength.25

The O.S.S. was not around on the eve of Operation Barbarossa. But as we have seen, other

Western intelligence agencies, including the G-2, had been deeply pessimistic about Soviet

survival. They had presumably done their homework as well. Why, then, did they get the

European balance of power so wrong in 1940-1941? The question cries out for a cultural

5
explanation.

III

David Engerman’s Modernization from the Other Shore frames the evolution of the Ameri-

can perceptions on Russia in terms of the tension between ‘universal progress and national

di↵erence’.26 ‘Said’s insights,’ Engerman writes, ‘about perceptions as a form of social

power—and their intimate connections to imperatives of government rule—are applicable

to American views of Russia.’27 Engerman explains that ‘Americans’ notions of Russian

character often contained within them the idea that Russians were Asian—“Asiatic” in the

language of the day. The claim, stated as often in racial as in geographic terms, further

legitimated violence in Russia. According to an oft-repeated refrain, life meant less to

Asians, and therefore to Russians. Personal traits also held political implications. Asians,

the argument went, could only be ruled through “Oriental despotism.”’28

An integral part of this Orientalist-racialist discourse was ‘the natural hierarchy of the

races’ that placed the Slav under the Teuton, and the Anglo-Saxon at the head of the

table of the great powers; with the Japanese accepted as honorary Whites after proving

their racial chops against Russia in 1904-1905. Indeed, Foreign A↵airs was founded as

The Journal of Race Development in 1910. We are promised in the introductory issue

that the ‘problems of eugenics will be emphasized, for the record of social evolution shows

clearly the immense importance of sound stock in the survival of races and nations.’29

This race talk that looks to Engerman like the ‘language’ of the 19th century concealed

an important rigidity of Anglo-Saxon thought. From the ‘scientific racialism’30 of the

early-19th century to interwar American international relations scholarship documented

more recently by Bob Vitalis in White World Order, this discourse says: If you want to

understand ‘international relations’, you must understand ‘race relations’.31 In the Western

6
mind, the natural hierarchy of the races explained the geopolitical relations of the globe.

This Orientalist-racialist discourse that he politely calls ‘particularism,’ Engerman ar-

gues, gave way in the third decade of the century to a ‘romance of development’ that cou-

pled an expectant fascination with Soviet forced-pace modernization with the emancipatory

promise of socialism in the context of a world depression. Scholars widely sympathized with

Soviet forced-pace modernization, ‘not because of any attachment to Communist doctrine

but because they saw hope for creating a new kind of society.’32 But even in the scholarly

discourse analyzed by Engerman, this passage was incomplete in 1940. It is only in the early

1950s, that ‘particularist notions moved to the margins of academic Russia expertise.’33

‘[R]eporting on ambitious Soviet plans, professional journalists explained away their ex-

traordinary costs by appealing to particularist notions—the flaws of Russian character.’34

The Foreign Service too remained a ‘refuge of particularism’.35 As late as April 1940, we

find André Siegfried expaining in the pages of Foreign A↵airs that the ‘real issue issue in

the present war’ is ‘[w]hich of the various Powers that share in [White] civilization is to

exercise leadership?’ ‘German domination on the continent would not lead to a balance of

power on the seas but to German supremacy on the seas’. So the issue was ‘not in fact

control of Europe’; it was ‘world control.’36 More precisely, the question was whether the

Teuton would displace the Anglo-Saxon from the cockpit of history. Under the fortress

of the global color line, this intrawhite racial discourse played an extraordinary role at

mid-century. The Nazis, of course, attempted to exterminate the Slavic race to make way

for German homesteaders.37 As a German military journal explained in 1935, ‘totalitarian

warfare is nothing but a gigantic struggle of elimination whose upshot will be terrible and

irrevocable in its finality.’38 But the Germans had no monopoly on racial thought. It was

a mental map which held common currency across the transatlantic world in 1940-1941.

The British Chiefs of Sta↵ noted the ‘inherent desire of the Russian to shirk respon-

7
sibility.’39 In a lecture at the Imperial Defense College, Major Kirkman from the British

MI2 spoke of the ‘inherent defects in the Russian character such as irresponsibility, lack of

initiative, and an absence of administrative ability.’40 The US assistant military attaché in

Paris wrote of ‘Slav incompetence’;41 US military attaché to Moscow, Major Hayne wrote

of the Soviet soldiers’ ‘ox-like docility’; the British military attaché, Colonel Firebrace, of

‘the characteristic Russian herd instinct.’42 The Foreign Office described the Germans as

an ‘efficient race’.43 The British Ambassador to Moscow, Clark Kerr submitted a memo-

randum that traced the general inefficiency of the country to ‘Slav mentality.’44 Sir Sta↵ord

Cripps, a British parliamentarian and newly appointed member of the War Cabinet, noted

in December 1940 that ‘the half-Asiatic propensity of the Russians’ made them ‘admire a

strong and cruel ruling hand.’45 In an August 1942 Joint US Strategic Committee report

we are informed that ‘Russian soldiers are physically hardy and accustomed to privation

and the idea of sacrificing individual liberty and life for the good of the state.’46 The For-

eign Office Research Department stressed in August 1943 that ‘the Russian could not be

compared to a Westerner in general.’47 As late as August 1944 we find Lt General Burrows,

the head of the British military mission in Moscow and an old friend of Eden’s, reporting

that Russian troops are ‘rabble’ used to ‘living on the smell of an oiled rag’, una↵ected by

‘climate, lack of food and even death,’ and have an ‘animal instinct’ in matters of ‘life and

death’.48 The Soviet General Sta↵ was apparently loath to let foreigners visit Red Army

units due to their low ‘standards of civilization.’49 Western armies could learn from Soviet

‘simplicity’ and their ‘complete ruthlessness and disregard for human life.’50

This Orientalist-racialist discourse played an important role in the catastrophic failure

of Western intelligence assessments on the eve of Operation Barbarrosa. But race and

national stereotypes weren’t enough. After all, in a struggle between ‘the Slav and the

Teuton’ the former could prevail despite racial inferiority by the typical ‘Asiatic’ advantage

8
of numbers. Western intelligence analysts still had to make concrete evaluations of Soviet

warfighting capabilities.

IV

Those struggling to understand the Soviet Union in 1941 were not just working though a

thicket of racial preconceptions. Strategic analysis is difficult even in hindsight. In real-

time it is subject to the shock of unforeseen events. In the lead up to Barbarossa, Western

analysts and policymakers were operating under the impact of a triple shock of the terror,

the Red Army’s abysmal performance in Finland, and Guderian’s triumph in France.

Contemporaries struggled to understand the ‘bizzare episode’51 of the great purges. Not

only did the terror puncture the illusions of Western enthusiasts of Stalinism, it undermined

the perceived strength of the Red Army. Almost every intelligence analysis stressed the

deleterious e↵ect of the purges on Soviet strength.52 Indeed, the impact of the terror on

Western perceptions of the strength of the Red Army may have played an important role

in the Anglo-French de facto rejection of a triple-alliance and cornered Stalin into signing

a non-aggression pact with National Socialist Germany.53 Chamberlain confessed to the

leader of the British Military Mission in Moscow that it was the House of Commons that

had pushed him further in the direction of an alliance than he wished to go.54 In a private

letter to his sisters, he wrote ‘If we do get an agreement [for a triple alliance] as I rather

think we shall, I’m afraid I shall not regard it as a triumph. I put as little value on

Russian military capacity as I believe the Germans do.’55 Then the Red Army su↵ered

severe setbacks in Finland; becoming the object of international ridicule. In a radio address

on 20 January 1940, Churchill spoke of Finland’s struggle for freedom and ‘the military

incapacity of the Red Army and of the Red Air Force [and] how Communism rots the soul

of nations, how it makes it hungry and abject in peace and proves it base and abominable in

9
war’.56 Lord Halifax observed in a memorandum to the War Cabinet in December that ‘the

Red Army would almost certainly be no match for the armed forces of a great European

Power.’57 In January-February, the British made concrete plans to intervene in support

of Finland. The British had already made plans to bomb Soviet oil fields in the Caucasus

and spark a Muslim revolt after the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. These plans reached Stalin

and fueled mutual suspicions. They were at least in part based on perceptions of Soviet

military weakness. But above all was the shock of Guderian’s triumph in France. What

Germany had failed to achieve in four years in World War I was now accomplished in six

weeks. Why did it come as such a shock?

In the aftermath of World War I, great power war was viewed above all as ‘total war’—a

thick notion that encompassed a number of specific assumptions about the nature of great

power war. First, the dominance of firepower over mobility meant that wars would be wars

of attrition fought along long, static fronts where prodigious quantities of munitions would

be expended until one side capitulated. Second, industrial societies could support a war

e↵ort on an unprecedented scale. Unlike agrarian societies of similar demographic size, big

industrial countries could field armies of several million men; armies that were voracious

consumers of munitions, industrially manufactured war material, food and other supplies.

Such massive armies could therefore be fielded for any appreciable length of time only by

countries of great economic size and industrial strength. Third, even big powers could

simply collapse under the strain of sustaining the war e↵ort at such scales. Famine and

economic hardship induced by the prolonged war of attrition could sap societies’ willingness

to carry on the struggle, undermine morale, and beget revolution and instability. That was

the lesson learned from the experience of Russia, Austria-Hungary and Germany in the

World War. In sum, the lessons that Ivan Bloch, a Polish banker and railway financier who

devoted his private life to the study of modern industrial warfare, tried to teach in his turn

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of the century book, The Future of War, were finally learned the hard way.58 The hold

of this orthodoxy in the Western imaginary was such that they simply failed to anticipate

the return of maneuver.

There were contemporaries who got it right. The most notable is the mysterious Max

Werner, aka Alexander Schifrin, who wrote a series of brilliant analyses on strategic a↵airs.

Werner is a remarkable figure; a sort of Ivan Bloch of the interwar era. His magnum

opus, The Military Strength of the Powers, appeared in 1939. Werner realized that the

arrival in large numbers of internal combustion engines to the battlefield had introduced

unprecedented mobility, tempo and depth to army operations. The radical new mobility

a↵orded by motor-engines greatly complicated the defense. Armored forces could quickly

develop a local penetration of the enemy’s front and pursue exploitations deep into the rear

areas. This made static horizontal defense a losing proposition.59 The Soviet-German War

would instead be fought and won in a series of o↵ensive operations with massive mechanized

armies precisely as Werner had anticipated.60 In the Soviet-German War, both armies

systematically conducted dozens of operational o↵ensives of greater scale than Guderian’s

triumph in France. The battles of the Soviet-German War were won by tank armies 61

encircling the enemy’s armies through operational maneuver at depths of hundreds of

kilometers.62 ‘As the war progressed it became axiomatic that where Soviet mobile forces

succeeded, the o↵ensive succeeded; where they failed, the o↵ensive also failed’.63 In 1944-

1945, the Red Army elevated mechanized maneuver warfare to a fine art.64

One of Werner’s most important insights was to realize that the arms race of thirties had

upended the balance of power in Europe. ‘Between 1932 and 1939 lie the biggest revolution

in military technique and the most violent armament race the world has ever seen.’65 ‘The

military hegemony of the Versailles powers came to an end between 1930 and 1935.’66 ‘The

strongest motorized army in the world is now concentrated in Eastern Europe,’ Werner

11
notes, ‘an army of great mobility, enormous fire-power and simply tremendous break-

through force.’67 The actual balance of forces was crystal clear to Werner in real-time.

Germany’s fateful search for a lightning decision led it inexorably, Werner argued, to what

he called ‘time-table war’: a war of aggression where you fix the date of the invasion in

advance, arrange your war preparedness to peak at that preset date, and then hurl it

all at once at the enemy to seek a quick decision.68 Timetable war provided a plausible

formula for turning global inferiority into local superiority through the application of the

military principle of force concentration on the time axis. The o↵ensive possibilities of

motorized maneuver and force concentration seemingly held the prospect of a lightning

victory despite global inferiority. While France and Manchuria admitted such operational

solutions to strategic problems, the Soviet Union did not. Werner noted that ‘a war of

lightning decision is hypothetically possible only in the narrow territorial limits of the

West. In the East the strategy of lightning decision must necessarily fail.’69

These desperate strategies of the weak were misperceived as the supremacy of the

German way of war in the Western panic after Guderian’s triumph in France. In the

popular Western imaginary, the cognitive shock would not only generate myths about the

invincibility of the Wehrmacht, the German way of war70 and, above all, the legend of

the Blitzkrieg.71 It would also provide a crucial arena in which to re-inscribe cultural and

racial stereotypes that were otherwise on their way out. On 14 June 1941, the British

Joint Intelligence Committee submitted a report evaluating the outcome of a possible

Soviet-German war. They doubted that the Red Army would last very long in the face

of German ‘mechanized warfare’ and the Luftwa↵e’s dive bombers. Whatever the size of

the Red Army, it would not be able to o↵er substantial resistance to an army ‘as highly

mechanized or ably-led’ as the Wehrmacht.72 In a report to the G-2 dated 19 June, Major

Michela, the US assistant military attaché in Moscow, stated that the combat efficiency of

12
the Red Army was no match for ‘the high powered, efficient, modern armies now formed

[ie, the Wehrmacht] and being formed [in response to Guderian’s triumph] in the world’.

Adding that the Red Army ‘cannot move much faster than it could thirty years ago.’

The deficiencies of its equipment, Michela concluded, ‘reduced its air power, fire power

and mobility. It could not hold up against a hard-hitting, fast moving army with modern

equipment and armament.’ His boss, Colonel Yeaton, the US military attaché to Moscow,

concurred with Michela’s assessment.73

Until 1941, Werner was still a marginal voice. But in 1941-1943, Robinson’s Division

paid close attention to his analyses; citing him multiple times in their reports, beginning

with the introduction to the six-part series on Soviet military potential. Indeed, his book

is the only book on military issues cited in the O.S.S. reports. In e↵ect, he became the de

facto authority on military-technical issues for the Division’s analysts. Of course, reading

Werner on the technological conjuncture and the strength of the Red Army was not enough.

Robinson’s Division also had to examine the Soviet economy and society to form judgements

on Soviet morale, stability, and the economic foundations of the Soviet war e↵ort. Modern

scholars too have looked carefully at the Soviet economy and everyday life under high

Stalinism. How does the O.S.S. fare compared to modern scholarship and vice-versa?

On 22 June 1941, the Red Air Force had 21,000 combat aircraft.74 Most Western estimates

put the number of combat aircraft between 4,000 and 12,000, dramatically underestimating

Soviet airpower.75 Once the Soviet-German War began, Western intelligence paid much

greater attention to Soviet armament production. The British Joint Intelligence Committee

estimated in July 1942 that Soviet output from 22 June 1941 to 1 May 1942 was 12,000

aircraft and 10,000-12,000 tanks.76 Actual output in the same period was 15,500 aircraft

13
and 12,900 tanks.77 The O.S.S. report on Soviet munitions output, dated 25 November

1942, estimated both tank and aircraft output at 2,000 units per month.78 The O.S.S.

estimate of monthly tank output in September 1944 was also 2,000, while monthly aircraft

output had been revised upwards to 2,200 units. More generally, in 1943-1944, most

Western intelligence estimates were around 2,000 tanks and 2,000-2,500 combat aircraft.

Since actual output of tanks averaged 2,000 in 1943 and 2,400 in 1944, and combat aircraft

output averaged 2,500 and 2,750 respectively, most estimates were not far o↵ the mark even

if they were slight underestimates.79 In general, Western intelligence estimates became

increasingly accurate over time and estimates of tank output were closer to the mark than

those for combat aircraft. Beyond the performance of the Red Army on the battlefield,

these estimates played a crucial role in Western reassessments of Soviet strength. In the

second half of the war, as their estimates became more and more accurate, they came to

appreciate Soviet preponderance in armament and hence Soviet military potential.

Soviet capacity to produce advanced war machines at this scale was, of course, predi-

cated on the existence of a massive military-industrial base. This military-industrial base

did not exist in 1928 when Stalin launched strategic industrialization that was overweight

everything upstream from war production. From 1928, the Soviets imported entire factories

from American firms among others—a much more decisive Western contribution to Soviet

victory than the western front and lend-lease put together—and erected thousands more

to construct an industrial base that would place the Soviet Union’s armament potential in

the ballpark of the United States’; and crucially, comfortably above that of other European

powers. Suddenly, thousands of gigantic factories mushroomed all over the Soviet Union;

many of them in factory towns ‘out east’, beyond the Urals—to give the Soviet Union

strategic depth against a possible future attack from the west. But even as late as 1934 it

was not in fact clear that the leveraged bet would pay o↵. For it was not enough to erect

14
gigantic factories. Millions had to acquire the skills required for industrial work. What was

required again was nothing short of a productivity miracle; for Stakhanovism to actually

succeed.80 The smashing success of forced-pace industrialization became evident when the

results of the Second Five Year Plan came in. Soviet per capita GNP grew by as astounding

9.2 percent per annum during the Second Plan.81 By comparison, the maximum average

rate of growth in per capita GDP over any five-year period by Germany during the postwar

Wirtschaftswunder was 8.4 percent in 1950-1955.82

Soviet industrial growth averaged 10.0 percent in 1928-1940, according to Nutter’s

estimate; 12.9 percent according to Hodgeman’s.83 The critical machinery sector grew

at 21.5 percent in 1929-1940, and a breathtaking 31.7 percent during the Second Plan,

1933-1937.84 Between 1932 and 1937, physical output of pig iron rose from 6.2 million

tons to 14.5 million tons; rolled steel from 4.4 million tons to 13.0 million tons; and metal

cutting machine tools from 19.7 million tons (up from just 2 million tons in 1929) to

48.5 million tons.85 During the Second Plan, industrial employment grew by 24 percent,

from 9.4 million to 11.6 million,86 while estimates for industrial output growth during the

Second Plan range from Nutter’s 86 percent to Hodgman’s 116 percent.87 Putting these

two together yields an estimated range of 62-92 percent for growth in output per worker

during the Second Plan, which translates to an annual rate of productivity growth of 10-14

percent. The truth must be closer to the upper bound since, as already mentioned above,

per capita GNP as a whole grew at 9.2 percent in this period. In either case, output per

worker in Soviet industry as a whole grew at double digits through the Second Plan.

The O.S.S. paid little attention to GDP. Instead, the Division compiled an extraordi-

narily thick description of the Soviet war economy. The 3 November 1942 report on basic

industry noted that coal shortages due to transport bottlenecks had a↵ected steel output,

which was estimated at 10 million tons a year compared to an estimated requirement of 12

15
million tons.88 Transport problems were also thought to have hampered oil supply. Produc-

tion of non-ferrous metals—copper, lead, zinc, tin, nickel, and especially aluminum—were

estimated as being below requirements. In two reports on the food problem in the same

series, the O.S.S. noted that even though there was a substantial deficit of foodstu↵s, the

Soviets were rationing food in a carefully planned way.89 The 3 November 1942 report on

manpower stressed the acute shortage of labor; especially skilled labor.90 For the rest of

the war, the O.S.S. would return repeatedly to the problem of food supply, transportation

bottlenecks, labor shortage and inadequate supply of strategic commodities. In January

1945, the O.S.S. reported on Soviet industrial productivity. The annual rate of increase

in output per worker was estimated to have been 10 percent in 1928-1941; consistent with

modern estimates mentioned earlier.91 Munitions, machine tools, electrical goods, and

several other strategic industries were described as having seen ‘substantial increases in

productivity per worker [sic] during 1942-1944.’92

It is impossible to give an adequate summary of the thousands of pages of the extraor-

dinarily detailed reports prepared by the O.S.S. in the course of the Soviet-German War.

Suffice it to say that the O.S.S. had developed a very high-dimensional picture of the Soviet

war economy. Compared to the O.S.S. later in the war, pre-Barbarossa intelligence assess-

ments were based on an extremely low-dimensional and superficial picture of the Soviet

Union. More often than not, they were compiled by individual military attachés and often

based on anecdotal evidence. A typical example is the US Charge d’A↵aires in Moscow

Walter Thurston’s report from May 1941 based on interviews with several US engineers

employed by Soviet enterprises. The engineers, we are told, assumed that the Soviets would

be unable to operate the installed US equipment properly.93 Perhaps these engineers had

arrived after the Second Plan.

The O.S.S. was analyzing the Soviet war economy in real-time under considerable un-

16
certainty. Still, we may ask how they fared in comparison to the best analysis produced

by modern scholarship.

Mark Harrison’s Accounting for War dealt directly with the economics and statistics of the

Soviet war e↵ort. In Harrison’s telling, once Germany had failed to obtain a lighting victory,

‘the predominant factor was the scale of national resources deployed by each side’.94 But

‘the Soviet advantage of size was unlikely to prove decisive on its own’, Harrison argued,

because ‘low prewar GDP per head limited the surplus of resources over basic subsistence

which could be diverted from civilian to war uses; it was easier for a rich country than

a poor one to commit 50 percent of more of GDP to military outlays’.95 Moreover, the

German occupation of the western Soviet Union had literally reversed the Soviet-German

balance in economic size, from 1.3:1 in the Soviets’ favor to 1:1.3 against. This meant that

‘the Soviet Union depended for its military success, more than the Allies, upon the ability

to mobilize a very high proportion of limited resources for combat’.96 Indeed, the Soviets

achieved mobilization rates hitherto only achieved by advanced industrial economies; higher

than the Western Allies and nearly as high as Germany. For Harrison, the big question

that emerges from his study then is how a poor economy managed to mobilize like a rich

industrialized one.

‘In World War II, regardless of the performance of the Red Army’, Harrison says, ‘the

Soviet economy should have collapsed’. For this is ‘what poor, agrarian economies, even

large, relatively self-sufficient ones, normally did under the impact of a massive assault’.97

Why did it not collapse? ‘The explanation of this success lay in the Soviet institutional

capacity to manage shortages and distribute the defense burden.’ For Harrison, this extra-

economic capacity was decisive; ‘it made the di↵erence between Russian defeat in World

War I, and Soviet victory in World War II.’98 Harrison is right to sense that coercion

17
enhanced Soviet stability. It did, in a very specific sense that has little to do with his

causal logic for the war: The problem of the breakdown of rural-urban trade due to the

diversion of the urban economy from consumer goods to war goods was solved by the

forcible collection of grain, ie collectivization in practice. So terroristic control of the

countryside did remove an important vulnerability. Grain was coercively appropriated

from the countryside not only to feed the towns but also to pay for the importation of

Western capital goods. The countryside’s ‘enslavement’—to use the term used by Kotkin

in Waiting for Hitler, the second volume in his biography of Stalin—endowed the party-

state with considerable stamina and stability.

Table 1: Soviet:German mobilized GDP ratios and mobilization rates.


Source: The Economics of World War II, 1998, Table 1.3 and Table 1.8.

GDP Soviet German Mobilized GDP


1940 1.1:1 17% 40% 1:2.2
1941 1:1.1 28% 52% 1:2.1
1942 1:1.3 61% 63% 1:1.4
1943 1.1:1 61% 70% 1:1.1

But Harrison’s account of materialist causation in the decision of the Soviet-German

War su↵ers from a glaring anomaly. This is the fact that the ratio of GDP mobilized for

war was even more favorable to the Germans since they had achieved higher mobilization

rates than the Soviets through 1941-1943, on top of having a larger GDP. Table 1 shows

the ratios. If ‘the predominant factor’ that decided the war ‘was the scale of national

resources deployed by each side’, then clearly Germany would’ve won the Soviet-German

War. Harrison obscures this anomaly by paying attention instead to Allied:Axis ratios. So

in his telling, World War II was decided by the material preponderance of the Allies. But

this relies rather too heavily on the nesting of the Soviet-German War in the larger bundle

18
of military conflicts called World War II.

Soviet material preponderance is not evident at the level of GDP or GDP mobilized for

war. Rather, just like the O.S.S., we must drill down to the level of armament to uncover

Soviet material preponderance. Harrison does not do so in his account of materialist

causation in the war. But looking plainly at weapons output as the obvious channel of

materialist causation in the Soviet-German War, the anomaly goes away immediately.99

Table 2 displays the armament outputs of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. Soviet

preponderance is manifest and ranges from 1:1.3 in combat aircraft to 1:2.2 in tanks, with

a median ratio of 1:1.5. How did the Soviets achieve such a decisive preponderance in

armament production? There are two possible answers to this question. The first appeals

to extra-economic features of Soviet planning that allowed the Soviets to pour resources

into war production. But this cannot possibly be the whole story. For although terroristic

control over the economy did allow the Soviets to allocate more resources to war than other

economies at a similar level of development, it was not nearly enough. As we documented

above, even after the Soviets allocated two-thirds of their economic output to the war

e↵ort, the Germans still had a decisive advantage in GDP mobilized for war.

Table 2: Weapons production, 1942-1944.


Source: The Economics of World War II, 1998, Table 1.7.

Germany Soviet Union Soviet:German


(’000) (’000) ratio
Rifles 6,501 9,935 1.5:1
Machine guns 889 1,254 1.4:1
Guns 262 380 1.5:1
Tanks 35 78 2.2:1
Combat aircraft 65 85 1.3:1
Median 1.5:1

Contrary to Harrison’s account, the decisive feature was not primarily the Soviet

19
Union’s extra-economic ‘institutional capacity’. Rather it was a thoroughly modern, purely

economic superiority. Specifically, what allowed the Soviets to outproduce the Germans

in armament was a much greater productivity miracle than the one that obtained in Ger-

many. In 1940-1944, Soviet real defense industry output grew by a factor of 5.0.100 But

employment in the defense industry grew by a factor of only 1.6; from 1.8 million to 2.9

million.101 The di↵erence was accounted for by growth in labor productivity. In 1940-

1944, value added per worker in the Soviet defence industry trebled as mass production of

field-tested armament was scaled up.102 As Adam Tooze notes, Speer’s ‘armament miracle’

is much less impressive by comparison.103 By 1944, German defense output per worker

grew to only 1.8 times its level in 1940.104 The Soviet margin of superiority documented in

Table 2—with a median ratio of 1:1.5 across weapons—would not have obtained without

the productivity miracle. Table 3 marshals the evidence for this claim. We see that had

productivity stalled completely in Soviet armament production—as it did in agriculture

and civilian industry—Germany would’ve enjoyed an overwhelming preponderance in all

armament; with a median ratio of 1:1.9. Even if Soviet productivity had grown at the

German pace, the ratios would’ve been squarely in favor of the Germans; with a median

ratio of 1:1.3; a level sufficient to reverse the odds in the Soviet-German War.

Table 3: Soviet:German armament output ratios for 1942-1944 under di↵erent Soviet pro-
ductivity hypotheses. Source: Table 2.

Actual German Rate Zero


Rifles 1.5:1 1:1.2 1:1.8
Machine guns 1.4:1 1:1.3 1:1.9
Guns 1.5:1 1:1.3 1:1.9
Tanks 2.2:1 1.2:1 1:1.2
Combat aircraft 1.3:1 1:1.4 1:2.1
Median 1.5:1 1:1.3 1:1.9

20
Our hypotheses on Soviet productivity in Table 3 are uniform across weapons. If we

drill down to the level of major weapons,105 the importance of Soviet productivity growth

becomes even more evident. Note that the real constraint on Soviet weapons production

was not so much cost—which could be somewhat defied in a planned economy—but scarce

labor, especially the skilled labor required in making sophisticated war machines. The

O.S.S. noted that there ‘has been a chronic shortage of skilled labor in the entire Soviet

Union which has been accentuated by the present war.’106 Table 4 documents the direct

labor cost of producing Soviet armament at the 1941 and 1943 productivity levels. We see

that had labor productivity stalled at the 1941 level, the Soviet war workers would have to

put in 2.8 billion hours of work compared to 1.6 billion hours at the 1943 level. Given the

scarcity of skilled labor, it would’ve been impossible for the Soviets to produce the same

quantity of armament as they did without comparable gains in productivity.

Table 4: Direct labor hours required for Soviet armament production in 1942-1944 at
di↵erent levels of productivity. Source: Accounting for War, 1996, Table E.5., Table 1.7.

Weapon Output Per unit Total Per unit Total


(’000 ) 1941 (mil ) 1943 (mil )
Rifles 9,935 12 119 9 89
Machine guns 1,254 642 805 329 413
Guns 380 1,200 456 800 304
Tanks 78 8,000 624 3,700 289
Combat aircraft 85 9,500 808 5,900 502
Total cost 2,812 1,596

We have seen that Harrison’s own data—Tables 1-4 is based on data taken from the three

books either written or edited by Harrison—suggests a very di↵erent channel of materialist

causation in the decision of the Soviet-German War than the one he puts forward. Why

does Harrison pay such unwarranted attention to GDP? Why does he look at Allied:Axis

ratios instead? We’ll return to these questions at the end of the essay. For now just note

21
that the O.S.S. did not make these mistakes. Instead of collapsing their high-dimensional

data to summary measures like GDP, the O.S.S. worked with a thick description to make

their judgements. This allowed them to get the Soviet-German balance right in real-time.

VI

Beyond the military strength of the Red Army and the ability of the Soviet economy to

support the war e↵ort, intelligence analysts had to assess the morale of the Soviet people.

For on it depended the ability of the Soviet Union to stay in the fight.

In March 1939, the US military attaché to Belgrade, Lt Colonel Villaret sent a report

to the G-2 arguing that the population detested the communists and the Stalin regime. He

believed that the population hoped for a war to shake o↵ the yoke of communism.107 In

late 1939 and early 1940, several Foreign Office reports spoke of ‘unrest’, ‘danger of revolt’

and ‘uneasiness’ due to food and fuel shortages.108 In January 1940, the British Chiefs

of Sta↵ stated that the Finnish War had caused discontent in the army and the civilian

population of Moscow and Leningrad. Parallels were drawn to the Russian situation in

1905 and 1917.109 Colonel Yeaton, the US military attaché to Moscow, wrote about the

Soviet armed forces’ low morale in June 1941.110 His assistant, Major Michela, commented

on the possible internal unrest in the event of a war in a report on 16 June to the G-2. He

pointed to ‘German influences in the Baltics’, ‘separatist movements in the Ukraine,’ and

‘Moslem influences in the Caucasus’ as potential sources of instability.111

In sharp contrast to these pre-Barbarossa assessments, the O.S.S. reported extraor-

dinarily high morale throughout the war and repeatedly noted the breadth and depth

of support for the Stalin regime beyond the patriotism unleashed by the Great Patriotic

War.112 Four di↵erent US reports in the fall of 1942 noted that the population was behind

the war e↵ort and that the internal situation was stable.113 The British Joint Intelligence

22
Committee concurred in December. The O.S.S. report on morale, part of the six-part

military potential series, quoted German sources to the e↵ect that Red Army and civilian

morale was very high. In February 1943, the O.S.S. again stated that the morale of the

Soviet people was ‘at a very high level’.114 In general, intelligence reports assessed morale

to be very high throughout the war.

Why was morale so high? Moreover, as we have seen, productivity miracles superior to

those in Germany, both before and during the war, were necessary. Why did they obtain?

Furthermore, Soviet survival in 1941 required much more than winning the arms race and

high morale. To be able to absorb losses that were comparable in scale to a medium-scale

nuclear attack—an equivalent shock for the United States would be losing all territory

east of the Mississippi—the Stalinist state had to have extraordinary balance and stability.

That it had these properties is what most surprised Western intelligence. ‘The greatest

underestimation,’ Kahn notes, ‘was of course the general idea that the Soviet regime and

the system would collapse when confronted with a first class military power.’115 Why

did it not collapse? What was the font of this balance and stability? The source of the

dynamism and stability of the high Stalinist state must be sought in the body-social. For

it is no coincidence that the lacunae of military and economic frames can be illuminated

by a social frame of reference.

VII

The O.S.S. noted the strategic significance of Magnitogorsk, which in their estimate ac-

counted for a quarter of the unoccupied Soviet Union’s blast furnace capacity.116 Magni-

togorsk was, of course, the subject of one of the most influential studies of high Stalinism

in modern scholarship. Stephen Kotkin’s magnum opus, Magnetic Mountain, appeared in

1995. He shared Sheila Fitzpatrick’s gaze on everyday life under high Stalinism. Kotkin

23
mobilized Foucault in order to understand how Stalinism emerged from the vertical inter-

action of ‘Homo Sovieticus’117 from below and the party-state from above; in compliance

with the implicit, symmetric version of Foucault’s dictum: ‘Sovereignty is shaped from be-

low; by those who are afraid.’118 Kotkin had chosen the right city for a deep dive into the

everyday life under high Stalinism. The city of pig iron and steel was the socialist city par

excellence; a city of the future; created ex nihilo in the middle of the barren steppe by sheer

human will. The factory around which Magnitogorsk was build was modeled on the US

Steel plant at Gary, Indiana—also a city of the future; the very embodiment of American

machine civilization. Building socialism was as concrete as it could get in Magnitogorsk.

It is here that we must seek the source of Stalinism’s dynamism and stability.

‘[S]ocialism was not only built but lived by people,’119 Kotkin writes, ‘as a pioneering

adventure.’120 ‘[W]ithin a context of the broad acceptance for the goals and results of

building socialism, people participated for a variety of reasons—but participate they did.’121

What did it mean to be a ‘speaker of Bolshevik’ ? In the ‘antiworld’ of Stalinism, this meant

more than nodding along with the state discourse of anticapitalism. It meant negotiation

and resistance; ‘little tactics of the habitat’ that allowed the Soviets to bear the radical

turbulence of all-out industrialization and the coercion of the Bolshevik theocracy. It meant

genuine belief in the justice of the pursuit of anticapitalism. Capitalism was not exactly

advertising itself in the thirties; a crucial source of legitimacy for the Stalinist state. But

there was genuine popular enthusiasm for building socialism per se.

High Stalinism is no doubt a civilization alien to the West. One in which factory

managers and the most productive workers were national celebrities; where subjects self-

identified with their jobs; with their work. Europeans associate workaholism with American

achievers. But workaholism was the defining addiction of Stalinism. Soviet achievers seem

to all work as much as freshman investment bankers. Unlike bankers in New York, the

24
Soviets in Magnitogorsk tried to outdo each other by contributing to the building of so-

cialism; with even greater enthusiasm and added urgency after 1933, for the survival of

Stalinism itself was now widely perceived to be at stake. This is a civilization in which ev-

eryone seems to be studying and political education was ubiquitous. More generally, Soviet

modernization meant much more than industrialization. It meant above all the creation

of thoroughly modern subjects; more modern in their self-conception than Americans on

account of being socialist and therefore from the future. Soviet subjects of high Stalinism

saw themselves as co-creators of a just version of American civilization; a land of plenty

like the mimetic other, but also a land of economic justice.

In the grand-strategy of the state, beyond anticapitalism, ‘by socialism was meant,’

Kotkin writes, ‘the party’s monopoly on power combined with the headlong expansion of

heavy industry.’122 ‘Strategic concerns played a crucial role’ in the superindustrialization

drive, Kotkin notes in passing.123 But ‘the sense of urgency evoked by perceived strategic

concerns was magnified beyond all measure, becoming the rationale for the breathless

tempo adopted in the defiant schemes chosen to meet the strategic challenge. Gripped by

insecurity, this was a party in a self-defeating hurry, mesmerized by the elixir of heavy

industry. . . .The dizzying upheaval that was Soviet industrialization was reduced to the

proposition: build as many factories as possible, as quickly as possible, all exclusively

under state control. That was planning; that was socialism.’124

Thousands of gigantic factories mushroomed all over the Soviet Union in short order.

Prodigious quantities of steel was produced at Magnitogorsk; some ten million tons in 1937-

1942, according to John Scott,125 an American who lived and worked in Magnitogorsk for

a decade and wrote about his remarkable experience in Behind the Urals. Kotkin on

the other hand barely notices the blast furnaces. We never hear of the millions of tons

of steel being produced except when he notes that much of this prodigious output was

25
wasted. ‘Quantity exercised a tyranny over the economy,’ Kotkin tells us, ‘resulting in

the indiscriminate consumption of inputs and the production of enormous wastage, called

brak.’126 In a footnote, after noting Western estimates that show double digit output

growth in 1928-1937, Kotkin wonders ‘what meaning such statistics of growth could have,

given the notorious problems of double-counted output, defective and low quality goods,

and prodigal waste we have encountered at Magnitogorsk, and that were characteristic of

the entire country.’127 Kotkin never stops to ask whether this prodigal waste was the price

of achieving double digit growth.

In an interesting coincidence, the mathematical model used by the Soviets for planning

was Leontief’s, who served as an analyst at Robinson’s Division in the O.S.S. Chairborne.

The point about Leontief’s model that is relevant to us is that you have a system of

inequalities; meaning, only shortages are binding; overproduction is not. It was always

better to err on the higher side; and some amount of overproduction was necessary upstream

so as not too constrain production downstream. This tendency of the planning system

together with incentives of the pervasive shadow economy (eg, factory managers hoarding

anything and everything so as to be able to trade it illegally for what they actually needed

to deliver on plan targets) generated what looked like veritable investment cycles in Soviet

production; a completely unexpected development that flummoxed contemporaries and

latter-day researchers alike.128 The command-shadow economic system of Stalinism was a

hall of mirrors in other ways as well. For instance, what looked like overcapacity in heavy

industry was actually excess capacity by strategic design—for the coming war.

This messy system of bottlenecks, overcapacity and seeming waste has always looked

dysfunctional to Western eyes. But what looks in the static frame like inefficiency in the

command-shadow economy obscures a dynamic efficiency; in the sense of producing the

highest possible rates of growth; and hence globally optimal from the perspective of rai-

26
son d’état. After all, as we documented above, the Soviet command-shadow economy did

achieve a truly gargantuan expansion in industrial capacity. Locked in an existential arms

race with Germany, what was the choice? Even in the late Versailles order, 1928-1933,

when Stalin initiated all-out modernization, he thought he had reason to be afraid. In

Waiting for Hitler, Kotkin describes the hold of the threat of capitalist encirclement in the

despot’s mind.129 That is understandable. A mere decade separates Stalin’s initiation of

forced-pace modernization and the Russian revolution; even less since Western and Polish

arms left Soviet soil. In any event, did history not prove Stalin right? There was hardly

any time for the Soviet Union to modernize before it had to submit to the harshest exam

ever o↵ered by history.

There seems to be no one more self-aware as a historical subject than the steelworker at

Magnitogorsk. It was on the enthusiasm and the creativity of the steelworker and her coun-

terparts in thousands of other factories dotting the country, that the materialist logic of

causation we identified with Harrison’s help, rested. What was presented earlier in purely

statistical terms was, paradoxically, primarily a social question. As we have seen, the Sovi-

ets literally out-innovated the Germans. How come there was so much socialist innovation

in a command-shadow economy? That is, why did Stakhanovism actually succeed? The

answer lies in the hearts and minds of the steelworkers; who were evidently making history

with great enthusiasm and anticipation. We submit that the stability and balance of the

party-state was also due above all to the same factor. The talisman of Soviet success must

be sought in the genuine enthusiasm of Soviet workers.

Kotkin paid no attention to the blast furnace. But the blast furnace is central to

understanding Soviet success. The steelworker faced the blast furnace as the object of

her attention and e↵orts; the source of her pride and joy; her adrenaline and dopamine

27
fix. It was how she related to her most intimate group outside of her immediate family—

her work-gang. It was how she related to Magnitogorsk; for the blast furnace was the

reason for the existence of the socialist city par excellence. And it was what connected her

directly to the war e↵ort; thrice: in the metaphorical war of forced-pace modernization

to begin with; in the existential arms race against Hitler; and, of course, through the

greatest war in history. The blast furnace was what situated her; how she self-identified;

how she identified socially; how intimate groups, communities and entire cities situated

themselves; how the great experiment of Soviet machine civilization hung together. Kotkin

under-appreciates the intrinsic motivation of men and women struggling together with

their e↵orts and attention anchored on the machine; one that arises naturally in what

Matthew Crawford describes as ‘ecologies of attention’.130 The joint machine-community

is an instance of what Latour calls a ‘quasi-object,’ a beast straddling the fundamental

nature-society dichotomy of the Western discourse.131 Just as Harrison ignores armament

in favor of GDP, Kotkin ignores the blast furnaces in favor of the purely social. Both of

them do so as a result of the rigidity identified by Latour in We Have Never Been Modern—

the idea, deeply ingrained in the modern mind, that all phenomena can be neatly separated

into nature and society and examined in relative isolation.132 Things are not so simple.

The everyday life of Magnitogorsk makes little sense without the blast furnaces; nor can

we hope to understand the productivity miracles without bringing in the social and the

psychological.

By machine civilization we also mean polities that try to impose ‘a rational order’

that Kotkin confusingly describes as an Enlightenment Utopia: ‘Stalinism constituted

a quintessential Enlightenment utopia, an attempt, via the instrumentality of the state,

to impose a rational ordering on society. . . ’133 The reason why Kotkin was cornered

into that awkward frame is that the search for a rational order doesn’t have a label in

28
common currency. Herbert Marcuse, working with the rest of the Frankfurt trinity for

the O.S.S. Chairborne’s Central European Division, identified a solution. He described

the National Socialist search for a rational, aesthetic order as a machine civilization. In a

machine civilization a rational order is imposed from above; the civilization itself becomes

a machine. I suggest that it would help to think of the great mid-century struggle in

the frame of warring machine civilizations. Had he paid more attention the blast furnaces,

perhaps Kotkin would have been persuaded to reframe his grand narrative of high Stalinism.

Kotkin rightly emphasizes the attractiveness of the astonishing social welfare component

of Soviet socialism. But the welfare state itself is not exogenous to machine civilization.

For the search for the rational order extends to the reproduction of the populace; indeed,

constitutes it as a biopolitical order. And subjects on whom order has been imposed from

above are in fact participants who help shape the order from below—we are not moving

away from Kotkin’s commitment to Foucault at all.

VIII

We have seen how Western observers trying to evaluate Soviet warfighting capabilities

had to grapple with radical uncertainty about the nature of warfare. We have seen how

the rigidities of the Orientalist-racialist discourse interacted with the cognitive shock of

Guderian’s triumph in France to generate myths about the German way of war and led

to the catastrophic failure of Western intelligence assessments on the eve of Barbarossa.

We have seen how modern scholars emphasize the coercive and terroristic aspects of high

Stalinism and ignore the productivity miracles that obtained in the Soviet Union as a result

of the Latourian rigidity. We have seen how Robinson’s all-star division at the O.S.S.

Chairborne discovered in the course of their meticulous investigations just how strong,

militarily, economically, and socially, the Soviet Union really was. Their conclusions were

29
not just in dramatic contrast to Western intelligence assessments in 1940-1941, but also in

considerable tension with modern scholarship on high Stalinism.

We have argued that looking at Stalinism on its own terms, as a machine civilization,

immediately resolves these tensions. Breaking with the Latourian rigidity allows us to see

how the military, economic, and social accounts of Soviet victory cohere; as they must—

these being simply di↵erent lens through which to view the same animal in the wild. To

wit, Zhukov outgeneralled Guderian by becoming better than him in the operational art

of mechanized warfare. The Red Army defeated the Wehrmacht by learning to fight with

modern war machines better than the Germans. The Soviet Union prevailed against Ger-

many by producing said war machines of comparable quality and in considerably greater

quantities through greater productivity miracles than those that obtained in Germany;

productivity miracles that were the result of the genuine enthusiasm and motivation of

situated communities of skilled practice themselves anchored on machines. Stalinism owed

its extraordinary dynamism and stability, we have argued, as much to the vitality of such

‘ecologies of attention’ as to the Soviets’ belief in the emancipatory promise of a just version

of American civilization. In short, the Soviet Union prevailed in the Soviet-German War

by outcompeting National Socialist Germany as a machine civilization.

Another important rigidity of the Western discourse is implicated in Western perceptions of

Soviet strength. This is the core rigidity of the liberal democratic discourse that explains

strength through virtue. Anglo-Saxon geopolitical supremacy is no longer explained by

the natural hierarchy of the races as it was until mid-century, but by the superiority of

‘inclusive institutions’ that are traced above all to the revolutions in Western political

economy in the long-eighteenth century, 1688-1815.134 That is, Western power is traced to

the superiority of Western institutions. War, and the supremacy of Anglo-Saxon arms, is

30
mobilized as a test of history to demonstrate the superiority of liberal market democracy;

the superiority of Western civilization. But in a great slight of hand, the applicability

of this test of history for Stalinism as a civilization is denied. Succeeding as a machine

civilization is not enough. For a non-Western country to be considered truly modern, it

too must be a liberal market democracy. Whence, one can simply dismiss Stalinism as at

best a monstrous modernity; manifestly too terroristic to be admitted into the ranks of

civilized nations.

The liberal democratic discourse is how the West talks to itself. It plays an impor-

tant role in keeping America’s Delian league, ie the Western alliance, together, and in the

reproduction of liberal market democracy at home. The problem with this transatlantic

discourse is that it perpetuates a jaundiced view of Soviet modernity under high Stalinism.

More generally and disturbingly, it blinds Western eyes to the strength of alternate moder-

nities. This is an issue of great importance at the present conjuncture when for the first

time since it emerged as a global power at the end of the nineteenth century, the United

States faces a geopolitical competitor potentially stronger than itself.135

The rigidities of the liberal democratic discourse were in full display in a recent article by

the Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf—a widely-respected commentator—pointedly

titled ‘The Challenge of Xi Jinping’s Leninist Autocracy.’136 ‘China is our partner,’ we

are told. ‘It is not our friend.’ China’s ‘autocratic and illiberal’ system has so far worked

‘spectacularly.’ But the fact that ‘the party is always above the law’ and that corruption ‘is

inherent in a system lacking checks from below’ will ‘sap economic dynamism.’ ‘In the long

run, the rule of one man over the party and that of one party over China will not stand.’

But for the time being, ‘those of us who believe in liberal democracy—the enduring value

of the rule of law, individual liberty and the rights of all to participate in public life—need

to recognize that China not only is, but sees itself, as a significant ideological rival.’ The

31
West must therefore ‘keep a margin of technological and economic superiority’ by creating

‘more inclusive and dynamic economies.’

Unfortunately for ‘those of us who believe in liberal democracy,’ the coupling of virtue

and strength is not a law of nature nor has it been decreed by the Lord Almighty. Notwith-

standing the premises of the Western discourse, the West has no monopoly on modernity;

nor do liberal market democracies have a monopoly on great military power. The West

would do well to remember that these monopolies were smashed at mid-century by Stalin-

ism as a civilization.

Notes
1
O.S.S./State Department Intelligence and Research Reports, Reel 1, Report 1. Microform.
2
Ibid.
3
Ibid.
4
Ibid.
5
Martin Kahn. The Western Allies and Soviet Potential in World War II: Economy, Society and Military
Power. Taylor & Francis, 2017, p. 1.
6
Ibid, p. 86.
7
Ibid, p. 96.
8
Ibid, p. 85.
9
Ibid, p. 113.
10
Ibid, p. 112.
11
Ibid, p. 113.
12
David C. Engerman, Modernization from the Other Shore, 2003, p. 143.
13
Ibid, p. 143.
14
Ibid, p. 145.
15
Esther Kingston-Mann, “Breaking the Silence: An Introduction” in Peasant Economy, Culture, and
Politics of European Russia, 1800-1921, 1991.

32
16
Katz, Barry M. Foreign intelligence: Research and analysis in the Office of Strategic Services, 1942-
1945. Harvard University Press, 1989.
17
O.S.S./State, Reel 1, Report 1.
18
O.S.S./State, Reel 1, Report 2.
19
O.S.S./State, Reel 1, Report 13-18.
20
O.S.S./State, Reel 1, Report 16.
21
Kagan, Frederick. “The evacuation of Soviet industry in the wake of ‘Barbarossa’: A key to the Soviet
Victory.” Journal of Slavic Military Studies 8.2 (1995): 387-414.
22
Ibid.
23
Betty Abrahamsen Dessants, “The American Academic Community and United States-Soviet Union
Relations: The Research and Analysis Branch and Its Legacy, 1941-1947”. PhD thesis, University of
California, Berkeley, 1995.
24
Western Allies, Chap. 15.
25
O.S.S./State Reel 1, Report 1.
26
Modernization, Introduction, passim.
27
Ibid, p. 8.
28
Ibid, p. 3.
29
George H. Blackeslee. “Introduction,” The Journal of Race Development, July 1910.
30
Reginald Horsman. Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism,
1981.
31
Robert Vitalis, White World Order, Introduction, passim, 2015.
32
Modernization, p. 13.
33
Ibid, p. 13.
34
Ibid, p. 13.
35
Ibid, p. 13.
36
Siegfried, André. “War for Our World.” Foreign A↵airs. April, 1940. Web. 14 Dec. 2017.
37
Stephen Fritz. Ostkrieg: Hitler’s War of Extermination in the East, 2011.
38
Deutsche Wehr, Supplement Die Deutsche Volkskraft, June 13, 1935. Quoted in Max Werner, The
Military Strength of the Powers, p. 133.
39
Western Allies, p. 36.
40
Ibid, p. 41.

33
41
Ibid, p. 67.
42
Ibid, p. 73.
43
Ibid, p. 101.
44
Ibid, p. 203.
45
Ibid, p. 153.
46
Ibid, p. 217.
47
Ibid, p. 239.
48
Ibid, p. 297.
49
Ibid, p. 297.
50
Ibid, p. 298.
51
Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 1995, p. 357.
52
Western Allies, passim.
53
Ibid, passim.
54
Ibid, p. 47.
55
Ibid, p. 48.
56
Ibid, p. 70.
57
Ibid, p. 71.
58
Bloch, Ivan S. The Future of War in Its Economic and Political Relations: Is War Now Possible, 1899.
59
To defend against a mechanized operational o↵ensive, you needed to organize an elaborate defense-
in-depth. When the enemy’s mobile forces rushed through the penetration they would meet resistance
from your first, second, third, or even fourth echelons; whose task was to slow them down until sufficient
forces could be mobilized to reduce them. It was important to hold divisions in reserve and deploy them
against the exposed flanks of the invading mechanized force. But defense-in-depth was very hard. This was
no surprise. When firepower dominates, defense dominates; where armor and mobility dominate, o↵ense
dominates. Defense-in-depth was only worth the trouble if you had prime territory to defend, eg Battle of
Moscow. It was much easier to hold armies in reserve and counterattack.
60
Like the Battle of France, the battles of the Soviet-German War were decided at the operational level.
That is, not at the tactical level of the soldier, rifle squad, company, or division, which were often simply
encircled, but at the level of armies and army groups (fronts).
61
Soviet tank armies were combinations of mechanized corps and tank corps; which were in turn combined
arms formations of tanks, self-propelled artillery and motorized infantry in di↵erent proportions. As an

34
adjective, mechanized just means motorized and armored. But Soviet mechanized corps were weighted
towards infantry and tanks corps towards tanks. Tank armies became more balanced over the course of the
war as the lessons of combined arms warfare were relearned.
62
‘[From 1943 onwards] the five (later six) tank armies were the spearhead of Soviet deep attacks, con-
ducting operational maneuver and seeking objectives deep in the German rear areas. On a map, Soviet
o↵ensive plans often resembled a set of nesting dolls, with shallow encirclements inside of other deeper
encirclements. The separate tank and mechanized corps, sometimes replaced by cavalry-mechanized groups
in difficult terrain, were attachéd to the forward combined-arms armies so that they could encircle one
or more German corps immediately behind the German main defense lines. Meanwhile, operating under
front control, the tank armies bypassed these struggles, straining to penetrate as far as possible into the
operational depths and thereby achieve larger encirclements.’ David M. Glantz and Jonathan M. House.
When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler. University Press of Kansas, 2015, p.207.
63
When Titans Clashed, p. 238.
64
‘By war’s end operations by groups of fronts involved from 100-200 divisions, up to 2.5 million men,
20,000-40,000 guns/mortars, 3,000-6,000 tanks/self-propelled guns and 2,000-7,500 aircraft. These opera-
tions had decisive objectives (usually the encirclement and destruction of large enemy groups), huge scope,
high maneuverability, and significant military-political or economic results. They spanned frontages from
450-1,400 kilometers (4,400 kilometers in Manchuria) and thrust to a depth of 500-600 kilometers while
destroying as many as 50-100 enemy divisions.’ Colonel David M. Glantz. Soviet Military Operational Art:
In Pursuit of Deep Battle. Routledge, 2012, p. 146.
65
Military Strength, p. 2.
66
Ibid, p. 7.
67
Ibid, p. 76.
68
Werner’s logic holds for the German e↵ort: German strength on the eastern front peaked at over 3.3m
men in September 1941; whereafter it dwindled; averaging 2.5m in 1942, 2.6m in 1943, 2.1m in 1944, and
1.9m in 1945. The relative strength of the Germany’s eastern armies peaked in November 1941 at a ratio
of 1.3:1 in their favor, which may explain the early results of Operation Barbarossa.
69
Military Strength, p. 140.
70
See, eg, Robert Citino, The German Way of War, 2005.
71
Karl-Heinz Frieser. The Blitzkrieg Legend, 2013.
72
Western Allies, p. 95.

35
73
Ibid, p. 95-96.
74
Western Allies, p. 103.
75
Ibid, p. 103.
76
Martin Kahn. “From Assured Defeat to ‘The Riddle of Soviet Military Success’: Anglo-American
Government Assessments of Soviet War Potential 1941-1943.” The Journal of Slavic Military Studies 26.3
(2013): 462-489.
77
Ibid.
78
O.S.S./State, Reel 1, Report 17.
79
Western Allies, p. 306.
80
Stakhanovism emphasized socialist innovation; although the phase was never used by the Soviets. It is
often confused with shock work which consisted of workers pulling all-nighters and maximizing labor input.
The di↵erence is important in framing Soviet growth as intensive or extensive, a distinction of great moral
importance to contemporary economists.
81
Maddison, Angus. “Dataset: Statistics on World Population, GDP, and Per Capita GDP, 1—2008
AD.” (2010).
82
Ibid.
83
Davies, Robert William, Mark Harrison, and Stephen G. Wheatcroft, eds. The Economic Transforma-
tion of the Soviet Union, 1913-1945. Cambridge University Press, 1994, Table 24.
84
Ibid, Table 31.
85
Ibid, Table 27.
86
Ibid, Table 13.
87
Ibid, Table 24.
88
O.S.S./State, Reel 1, Report 16.
89
O.S.S./State, Reel 1, Report 14, 15.
90
O.S.S./State, Reel 1, Report 13.
91
O.S.S./State, Reel 4, Report 5.
92
O.S.S./State, Reel 4, Report 4.
93
Western Allies, p. 83.
94
Mark Harrison. Accounting for War: Soviet Production, Employment, and the Defence Burden, 1940-
1945, 1996, p. 91.
95
Ibid, p. 10-11.

36
96
Ibid, p. 123.
97
Ibid, p. 12.
98
Ibid, p. 126-127.
99
There is simply no evidence to suggest that lend-lease or the western front or both changed the decision.
The latter could not have for the simple reason that the decision was already clear before June 1944. And
the former because the bulk of it went to Britain; and what arrived in the Soviet Union was too little
too late. The importation of four hundred thousand trucks meant that the Soviet Union did not have
to reconvert auto plants that had been converted to tank production early in the war. But the Soviets
had 1:2.2 advantage in tank output, so this convenience was far from decisive. Indeed, Harrison himself
documents how lend lease finally allowed Soviet non-war consumption to rise modestly in 1943-1935. That
was the extent of the contribution of lend lease. In GDP terms, the Soviets had suggested that US help
amounted to a mere 4 percent. No credible estimate above single digits have ever been proposed. In sum, in
the no lend-lease, no western front counterfactual, and assuming no Western embargo of the Soviet Union,
the Soviets would’ve still prevailed in accordance with the arms channel of materialist causation for which
we marshal empirical evidence.
100
Mark Harrison, ed. The Economics of World War II: Six Great Powers in International Comparison.
Cambridge University Press, 2000, Table 7.7.
101
Ibid, Table 7.8.
102
Ibid, Table 7.10.
103
Adam Tooze. “No Room for Miracles. German Industrial Output in World War II Reassessed.”
Geschichte und Gesellschaft (2005): 439-464.
104
Economics, Table 4.14.
105
Midcentury mobile air-land warfare singled out the medium battle tank and the dive bomber as the
principal weapons of modern combat. Once good design solutions were tested on the battlefield, they had
to be mass produced in large numbers to take advantage of economies of scale. The Germans settled on the
Panzer III and IV for their battle tank and the Stuka for their dive bomber. The Soviets settled early on the
T-34 as their main battle tank and the Il-2 Sturmovik as their dive bomber of choice. Both the T-34 and
the Il-2 were superior machines than their German counterparts. The real cost of producing the Sturmovik
and the T-34 fell by half in 1941-1943. The costs of producing the KV heavy tanks—required for infantry
support and urban fighting—fell by two-thirds. Note also that modern weapons (tanks and aircraft) were
much more expensive than those that had dominated the battlefield in 1918 (rifles, machine guns, and

37
artillery). Assuming the productivity levels of 1943, producing 10 million rifles and 1.2 million machine
guns took 500 million hours of work, about the same as producing just 85,000 combat aircraft. Tanks were
expensive too. Each T-34 required 3,700 hours of work; an order of magnitude greater than a machine gun.
What this meant for force structure was that the Soviets faced a tradeo↵ of four rifle divisions for each
tank corps. A Soviet rifle division in July 1943 had around 10,000 men armed with rifles, 200 field guns,
and 50 machine guns. Producing the weapons for the standard rifle division thus required 266,450 hours of
work. A Soviet tank corps in July 1943 had 230 tanks as well as 10,000 men in mechanized infantry units
with their own rifles plus 160 field guns. Arming this standard mechanized formation required 1,069,000
hours of work. The air-ground tradeo↵ was even more daunting. For the price of arming an entire rifle
division, the Soviets could obtain a squadron of just 45 combat aircraft. What compelled both Hitler and
Stalin to maximize the production of combat aircraft and tanks and push for wholesale mechanization of
their armies was the technological-economic conjuncture discussed earlier in this essay.
106
O.S.S./State, Reel 1, Report 8.
107
Western Allies, p. 57.
108
Ibid, p. 74.
109
Ibid, p. 74.
110
Ibid, p. 93.
111
Ibid, p. 86.
112
O.S.S./State Reel 1, Report 18.
113
Western Allies, p. 199.
114
O.S.S./State, Reel 2, Report 1.
115
Western Allies, p. 102.
116
O.S.S./State Reel 1, Report 16.
117
Sheila Fitzpatrick. Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the
1930s, 2000.
118
Michel Foucault and Franois Ewald. Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collge de France,
1975-1976. Vol. 1, 2003.
119
Magnetic Mountain, p. 154.
120
Ibid, p. 155.
121
Ibid, p. 154
122
Ibid, p. 29.

38
123
Ibid, p. 30.
124
Ibid, p. 32.
125
John Scott. Behind the Urals, 1942, p. 240.
126
Magnetic Mountain, p. 64.
127
Ibid, p. 423.
128
Paul R. Gregory. The Political Economy of Stalinism: Evidence from the Soviet Secret Archives, 2004.
129
Stephen Kotkin, Waiting for Hitler, 2017.
130
Matthew B. Crawford. The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of
Distraction, 2015.
131
Bruno Latour. We Have Never Been Modern. Harvard University Press, 1991, passim.
132
Ibid, passim.
133
Magnetic Mountain, p. 364.
134
Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson. Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and
Poverty. Crown Business, 2013.
135
Arvind Subramanian. “The Inevitable Superpower: Why China’s Dominance is a Sure Thing.” Foreign
A↵airs. 90 (2011): 66.
136
Wolf, Martin. “The Challenge of Xi Jinping’s Leninist Autocracy.” Financial Times, 31 October 2017.

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