EVACUATION OF THE USSR DEFENSE INDUSTRY IN 1941

The article is devoted to the analysis of the most important aspects of the evacuation of the USSR defense industry in 1941. The author comes to the conclusion that by the beginning of the Great Patriotic War in the Soviet Union there had been no single comprehensive plan for the evacuation of either the industry as a whole or the defense industry, therefore the entire evacuation of 1941 was carried out in an improvisational mode. At the same time, a number of organizational errors led to the fact that the beginning of the mass evacuation of defense enterprises was postponed until October 1941. Nevertheless, the Soviet leadership managed to evacuate 1,350 large defense enterprises to the eastern regions of the country in the second half of 1941, which is an outstanding economic achievement both in Russian history and on a global scale. Of course, the evacuation, carried out in an improvisational mode, in the conditions of active enemy resistance, could not but be accompanied by many errors, overlaps and inconsistencies. However, in general, the tasks were accomplished. The article examines the most important trends characteristic of evacuation measures of defense industries in general, as well as in the sphere of the most important sub-sectors of the defense industry: aircraft manufacturing, tank manufacturing, and shipbuilding. The evacuation led to a significant decline in military production in late 1941 — early 1942, but it allowed the main defense industries of the USSR to be saved. There is no doubt that without the successful solution of this problem, the Soviet Union would not have had a chance of winning the Great Patriotic War.