Stalin's V-2: Technologietransfer der deutschen Fernlenkwaffentechnik in die USSR und der Aufbau der sowjetischen Raketenindustrie 1945 bis 1959 (review)

The transfer of German rocket technology to the USSR's guided-missile and space programs has long been recognized as important, at least outside the former Soviet bloc. But it is only since the end of the cold war that historians and military specialists could construct a reasonably accurate depiction of the process by which the Soviets rapidly assimilated this technology and then cast aside the German scientists and engineers who had been brought to the USSR against their will. Memoirs in German and Russian, above all those of the leading Soviet rocket engineer Boris Chertok, plus interviews and published documents, were the raw material for a number of books, most notably Asif Siddiqi's excellent and encyclopedic Challenge to Apollo: The Soviet Union and the Space Race, 1945-1974.

Because of the sensitive military and political character of the topic, however, the Russians were and are reluctant to allow anyone access to their archives. The first scholar who has broken through this resistance is Matthias Uhl, whose doctoral dissertation, Stalins V-2, is a very well-researched, well-written, and well-illustrated work based first and foremost on the Russian State Economic Archives, which houses the records of the Soviet industrial ministries and the former central planning organization, GOSPLAN.

The book's title is well chosen: Stalin did indeed have a central role in pushing the Soviet military to develop guided missiles in parallel with the only program that had higher priority after 1945: the atomic bomb. This is well known. The real originality in Uhl's work lies in his detailed description of how the Soviets set up an astonishingly large infrastructure of rocket institutes in the Soviet zone of Germany during 1945 and 1946, ultimately employing more than 7,300 Soviet and German scientists, engineers, and technicians, only to deport the cream of the Germans and all their laboratory and production equipment to the USSR in October 1946.

In parallel with this effort, Uhl describes a systematic program of industrial dismantling in Germany that appears less chaotic than it is usually depicted. Once in the USSR, the chosen 302 Germans (plus many more from the aviation and other industries) were pumped for their knowledge, then shunted off into "paper" studies before finally being isolated from secret work and allowed to go home starting in 1952. In contrast, the United States took about half that number of rocket specialists, but allowed them to become citizens.

A larger part of Uhl's story, based on the strength of his archival sources, concerns the way that the Soviet leadership built up a "military-industrial-academic complex" in the field of rockets and missiles, based in a number of ministries, most notably Dmitri Ustinov's armaments ministry. A network of design bureaus and factories set out to copy or reverse engineer not only the German V-2 ballistic missile but also the Wasserfall, Schmetterling, and Rheintochter antiaircraft missiles and other guided weapons.

As is true of the earlier literature, Uhl devotes rather more attention to the ballistic-missile line of development—leading from the V-2 to the Soviet "copy," the R-1, through a stretched version, the R-2, and on into more sophisticated, nuclear-capable systems—than he does to antiaircraft and air-launched systems. In that sense his book is true to its main title but not as balanced in its coverage as promised in its subtitle. Still, there is rather more information here on these other missile systems than we have had before.

As Uhl demonstrates, copying German technology was not nearly as simple as it sounds. Often it required the creation of whole new subcomponent and materials industries, as the existing Soviet factories were incapable of supplying complicated electronic parts or...