Mobilization of Finances in the USSR During the Great Patriotic War

During the WWII, the Soviet government faced a whole range of economic problems that required financial mobilization. Mechanisms for the redistribution of monetary resources through the tax system were created and tested during the first five-year plans. However, in conditions of war, these mechanisms needed to be improved. The article deals with the problem of causes and ways of mobilizing finances in the USSR during the war years. Based on the statistical and archival materials of the Russian State Archive of Economics, the study analyzes the structure of revenues and expenditures of the USSR budget in 1941—1945. The authors conclude that the key difficulty in reformatting the budget, taking into account the sharp increase in military spending, was the imbalance of domestic trade. The dependence of the USSR budget on turnover tax revenues in the face of a reduction in domestic trade required urgent measures from the country’s leadership to mobilize the population’s funds. These measures were necessary, on the one hand, to compensate for lost revenues, and, on the other hand, to curb inflation by withdrawing funds from the economy that were not backed by goods.