Deserters from the Labor Front: The Limits of Coercion in the Soviet War Economy

During World War II, a special system of crisis management took shape in the USSR. Its defining characteristics included a high degree of mobilization of human and material resources to meet the demands of the front, as well as a related centralization of management and employment of repression. Detailed study of the basic parameters and mechanisms of how the system functioned at the front and in the rear unavoidably leads to a new series of questions.¹ How effective was the Soviet model of military mobilization? To what degree were the extreme centralization and severe repression in their fullest form able to achieve the required results? What contribution did other, nonrepressive methods make? In addressing such questions, historians are examining many phenomena and processes that corrected for the negative consequences of the extreme centralization and harsh coercion and therefore improved the operation of the system of crisis management. These include changes in Soviet ideology, especially the concessions by the Stalinist government to religious traditions as a whole and the Russian Orthodox Church in particular; the introduction of one-person command and the heightening of the authority of the Soviet corps of officers and generals; the partially spontaneous localization of management, the relative rise in producers' economic self-reliance, and more.²

Taken as a whole, these works show that it is important to examine the Soviet military mobilization system together with its harshly repressive and "soft" corrective components. This article applies this approach to study the actual practices for implementing the extraordinary wartime laws in the realm of labor. Here we are speaking, above all, about the decree of 26 December 1941, on deserters from war industries, which was one of the basic mechanisms of coerced labor during wartime.³

The widespread employment of various forms of forced labor, as well as the centralized distribution of the labor force, were characteristics of the Soviet economy from the moment it emerged. The ideal of Soviet socialism was the principle that each should labor where and as much as the state deemed necessary. The harshly regulated distribution of labor resources was caused not so much by inadequate quantity as by low quality: that is, insufficient labor productivity and a high rate of turnover. Crash industrialization was forced via a rapid decline in living standards, as well as the collapse of agriculture and the social sector. This significantly weakened both wages and attractive living conditions as methods for incentivizing labor. To a considerable degree, compulsory labor was to compensate for the limited opportunities to employ economic incentives.⁴

The system of coerced labor functioned in its fullest form in the Gulag economy. On 1 January 1941, there were 1,500,000 prisoners in People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD) corrective labor camps, almost 429,000 prisoners in labor colonies, and about 488,000 in prisons.⁵ At that time, laboring internal exiles numbered an additional 930,000.⁶ As researchers have noted, mass repressions not only provided labor power for the forced-labor economy but also served as an important means of disciplining workers in the Soviet economy as a whole.⁷ However, for the threat of repression to actually function as a labor incentive, it was necessary to criminalize labor, transforming into a crime any violation of discipline or the independent choice of a job.

After the outbreak of World War II, the Stalinist state solved this problem by publishing a decree by the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet on 26 June 1940. It stipulated harsh punishments: for late arrival to work, up to six months corrective labor with a portion of wages garnished by the state; for unauthorized leave from a workplace—up to four months of prison. Enterprise managers who responded to violations of discipline with insufficient alacrity could similarly find themselves in court. Because of this growing pressure from above, the campaign for labor discipline attained enormous proportions. As Table 1 demonstrates, in the period of less than a year preceding the beginning of the war with Germany...