Authors

H.G.W. Davie¹;  ¹ University of East Anglia, UK

Discussion

In August 1941 Stalin reformed the logistics of the Red Army, centralising all services in the Main Directorate of the Rear under General A.V. Khrulev. Despite facing a shell crisis during the Battle of Moscow, by 1943 the Centre was responsible was delivering everything required for the war from as far away as the factories in the Urals to the Divisional Exchange points such 15 km behind the front line. Yet, the Soviet Union was one of the poorest countries in Europe and it had lost a considerable proportion of both its population and industry during the German invasion, so it was short of everything, with its inhabitant on the verge of starvation. Given this, why was the Rear so successful in transporting and supplying the Red Army and what was its role in defeating the Axis powers?     

This is particularly pertinent since the Rear remained a relatively small organisation and had to integrate into the overall command structure of the army while operating in a wide variety of terrain from the snows of the Artic all the way to the arid mountains of the Caucasus. At the national level, it played a key role in the resource management of state output, regulating the flow of materiel along a frontline several thousand kilometres wide. As the front advanced all the way into Germany from 1943, it was faced with the enormous challenge of rebuilding the transport infrastructure of the occupied territories and then operating on the territory of the enemy.

 Despite these formidable obstacles, the key personnel of Directorate remained in post throughout the war, there were few organisational changes and there were no instances of repression. In stark contrast, after the occupation of Poland in 1939, the Winter War in 1940 and the early defeats of the summer of 1941, there had been numerous organisational changes and repression with the head of the Military Communications Service (VOSO) being arrested in July 1941 and then shot in February. Khrulev, himself took on extra responsibilities during the war, becoming People's Commissar of Railways in early 1942 and his position would not come under serious challenge until 1953 when his Jewish wife was implicated in the Kremlin Doctors Plot just before Stalin's death.

There has never been any major assessment of the Rear of the Red Army in Western historiography, yet it was one of the main foundations of the Soviet Union's ability to win the Soviet-German War. This paper will address the key factors and debates in this subject and outline the overall scope of recent research in this field. It has the potential to disrupt long held assumptions about the military capability of the Soviet armed forces and what was important in the way the war was fought.