Allen Binney has said hey tech keep up the excellent clips question how close did the Soviet Union come to collapsing in 1942 I'm thinking more about the civilian population here as I recall hearing of widespread food shortages due to the need to keep the armies of the front supplied any comments okay first things first if you haven't seen I believe it's the second episode of battle storm Stalingrad now's the chance to go and watch it because I actually mentioned this during that episode this question was asked before that and I haven't got a lot of
time to answer it but I actually did a lot on the how the 62nd Army in the 64th army and so on were hungry how cats and dogs were disappearing off the streets in Moscow and most of this information came from sources on lend-lease but also a great book the taste of war by calling him which I'll be referring to again in this episode bought and whilst gonna be looking at primarily the Econo economics of world war ii by harrison which also goes into a lot of detail as well so i think this question you
know how close to the soviet union come to collapse in world war ii or 1942 this is gonna be an ongoing thing because the more books I read the more snippets of information on game because the problem at the minute is that it's impossible to actually calculate what the Soviet economy was and I'll get to that so it's pretty hard to tell okay there was you know 2% from collapsing or something there's no way to calculate it and and so we're relying on almost anecdotal evidence here so what we need is a convergence of evidence
we need a whole lot of evidence to all be pointing in the same direction be kind of going yeah there's something to this and that seems to be developing now cats and dogs going missing in Moscow people complaining that all the food is bad at home so we're gonna actually go to the front oh the food is bad at the front we thought it we'd better actually it's not 62nd Army and 64th army 63rd army all running out food so on and so forth all this is a kind of building up towards this idea that
1942 1943 the Soviet Union is in dire straits so this is all building up the other one as well where people were complaining that or I mentioned this and our text clearly biased above why it's like well no because we have a source that says it Molotov is talking to Roosevelt I think it was 1942 or so and and Roosevelt says look we will reduce the amount of lend-lease we're sending you so that we can launch a second front in 1943 rather than 1944 moltov turns around and says no no no no please we actually
need the food we need this Middle East keep sending this delay the second front he actually says this so it's like mmm more evidence is kind of coming along but as I said we can't calculate the economy so the problem of the Soviet Union is and Harrison in his economics of World War two even though he's not I don't think he's fully grasped economics but even he makes this point that it's actually kind of impossible to calculate anything in the Soviet Union the reason why is because they are basically making it up right it's a
centrally planned economy they are making up the price of a tank right Oh a t-34 costs 10,000 rubles or something it's like well does it like there's no way to know because there's no free market and without the exchange of goods and services you don't have prices so there is prices on the goods bought them the meaningless right the GDP figures the GNP figures which Harrison relies upon the meaningless so this is why historians have kind of ignored the economics of world war two because they can't actually calculate it but also it's why they've ignore
the Soviet Union economy they know it's collapsing but they can't really measure why or how etc because all the manipulations in the economy prevent you from doing that but what I'm gonna try and do is give you a few not anecdotal what sort of aha this is kind of hinting in the same direction because it does I am slowly coming to this opinion that the Soviet Union was close - collapsing if not in 1942 then if the Germans had kept hold of the Caucasus in 1942 let's say Stalingrad had been won and they'd hold on
to that area if that had happened there's a good chance that the Soviet Union economically would have collapsed in 1943 that's how I'm looking at it now there's no way to ever prove this probably but it's it's something that it's like well this this is actually got something to it so let's start off with the pre-war economy because it will give us some hints as to why this might be the case so we know about things like the holiday mall we know things about the purges in late 1930s and so on we also know that
in 1937 there was a census the population was seen to be lower than what it actually should have been in certain areas so Stalin had the people who did the census shot and then redid the census and made it out as if everything everything was okay right so there are manipulations in the economy however some statistics that Harrison gives are pretty interesting so he says 57% of the Soviet working population so the whole of the working population in the Soviet Union 57% of them were agricultural workers and they were producing just 33 percent of the
economic output of a non agricultural worker so to compare this Germany had 26 percent of their population in agriculture the USA had 27 percent and the sorry 17 percent and the UK had 6 percent so yeah you can basically say well there's they're more industrialized but they are significantly more industrialized 57 percent of the Soviet population were in agriculture compared to you know the worst one though is Germany at 26% it's like wow that's such a significant so a lot of these guys are on agriculture and going off the statistics they weren't as efficient in
the Soviet Union as they were in these other countries so they probably didn't have enough tractors the collectivization obviously hasn't happened helped but they were 33 as economically productive 33% as economically productive as a non agricultural worker in Germany they were about half as productive so again that's due to the industrialization and my tractors and so on the USA was forty percent as productive and the UK for some reason was 59 percent not sure why and the point in the matter is that the Soviet Union's got more people in the agricultural sector and then not
even though it's done that they're not as efficient as any of these Western powers which means and I think Harrison comes to this sort of explanation he actually says the low productivity meant that they couldn't extract to means workers from the farms because if they did that they would start starving well what happens in in 1942 the Ukraine which is the breadbasket of the Soviet Union is overrun by the Germans then the Northern Caucasus and you've got a bunch of people drafted into the army and another one which is going on about gulags talked about
how the population changed from male to female because all the males were being drafted into the war so the agricultural workers in the farms were all the females and all the men have gone to the war which I mean it's hard to sell because it's I don't have any specifics but when they did this in Britain when they did this in Germany I believe and then the women took over they the women weren't used to doing it so as a result they weren't as efficient as the men that's not to say that this is not
sexism that's not to say they couldn't have learned it's just that somebody who doesn't do the job is suddenly thrust into a new job they're not going to be as good as somebody who's a veteran out of the job that's kind of so with all these new people oh okay I'm driving a tractor now obviously not as efficient as people who already were farmers etc so this happens as well so it's had knock-on effect after knock-on effect of actually the agricultural sector in the Soviet Union is is in dire straits so according to another statistic
the amount of rubles spent on the economy drops from fifty eight point three billion in 1940 to thirty one point six billion in 1942 now there is at the same time inflation going on in the Soviet Union so not only was it Oh a drop of about half it's also the inflationary impact would have impacted it as well so it again it's impossible to calculate but it's more than half because of the inflation so if you think okay let's say a good portion of that is on agriculture you're gonna have less than half of the
money going into the which makes sense because the spending on the war but the point is it's not like oh we kept it consistent no they dropped it down in order to focus on the war effort which they did to be fair and made lots of tanks but that's not good because the economy in terms of agriculture was already severe by this point and you then have the overrunning of the Ukraine and the Caucasus is so and so so on and so forth so these are all just little hints that sort of saying maybe there's
something wrong here so the Soviet Union currency the ruble went from twenty three point nine billion rubles in 1940 in today's prices circulating to thirty four point eight billion in nineteen forty to forty three point nine billion in 1943 so on so this is again more statistics saying yes there is actually inflation going on which is just this it's not good it's all you'll do is you'll fall into the capital goods industries so I mean that actually might help the agriculture to be fair bought we already know that they starve the peasants throughout the Soviet
Union emphasize that otherwise we'll have people crying in the comment section we know they did that we know they centralize the farms so that you know they collective eyes the farms and the problem with that is that there's no those two problems one there's no incentive for the farmers to actually produce anything beyond the subsistence level and then which is why their productivity was probably lower and then also because of the manipulations in the economy there's no way to calculate prices so there's no idea what to be produce there's no way to calculate it so
they're just kind of reducing whatever rye bread which is yeah so all these manipulations and whatever else in there and this collectivization doesn't help you've already half starved them so these people are very productive me actually says that one aspect of the low soviet development was a large low productivity agricultural sector this meant that millions of works OB workers had to be held back from military service an industrial war work they were retained in agriculture where their GNP contribution gross national product was a decreasing fraction of the contribution to the average industrial worker in order
to supply the army and defense industry with agricultural products and it's drawing the centralization collectivization era that's the centralized distribution system for food while setup which as according to calling ham basically collapses during the war to quote from calling him page 343 a soviet citizens average daily intake of calories between 1942 and 1943 is estimated to have been two thousand five hundred and fifty-five calories and then in 1944 this amount his thoughts were increased to two thousand eight hundred and ten calories as the war changed she says a little bit later the soviets survived on
far less food than all of the combatant nations except the japanese they consumed at least 500 calories less than the average British or German civilian while Americans were on average consuming at least one thousand more calories a day than than a Soviet BOTS she says the picture conveyed by averages fails to convey the unreliability of the food supply and periods of shortages and severe lack of food the fact that food was distributed unequally across the population so that while the communist elite might stuff themselves on stewed meat for breakfast the dispossessed and hungry were reduced
to licking the plates after others had finished their meal a dependent or non manual workers ration of 200 to 400 grams of substandard bread not rye bread actually says substandard bread this time meant that it it took great ingenuity to scrape together enough to eat and we've seen this as well in other books and I think I mentioned in the styling of our video some estimates put it where the Soviets are eating half as much food as a US soldier or civilian so the the u.s. people are getting twice as much food as a Soviet
soldier or civilian I didn't really want to mention this but I'll mention it now because I've kind of leaving it till the Stalingrad campaign ports Chuikov is actually boasting that his men are surviving on 1,000 calories a day during the Battle of Stalingrad so it's like you know the the amount of calories regardless of whether use you know it's half Kalen calories I get it but the point is that on average these guys are not getting enough food and this is in 1942-43 some good statistics here so Harrison makes the point yeah you definitely can't
trust the official figures but even if you do there's some surprising results so he says just between 1940 and 1942 the real output of most civilian branches fell by 1/2 to 2/3 while that of the military services more than doubled and that of defense industry more than trebled ok and then he mentions these statistics as a percentage of their official 1937 level which again you can really trust but let's just go over there by 1942 the agricultural output had reached 44% 44% of the 1937 level right and then trading catering have plummeted to 36 percent
and the gross national products have declined to 79 79 percent so again this is not I mean again you can't really trust the official statistics bought its hint I mean I do you think the Soviets wouldn't kind of boost that a little bit I think they would and they probably did but yeah the statistics are basically pointing in the direction of something's going wrong here when you've got less than 50% of the food from 1937 in 1942 you're not doing well you're not doing well at all he also points out that there's roughly 50 million
people employed in agriculture in the Soviet Union in 1940 and by 1942 that figure had dropped to 25 million so again a half you're seeing a half of the production level you know basically everything's cut in half and so you know imagine just having half as much food as you would now and that's the official figures which again I'm not I don't trust he does say there's a shifting from the the can I say in the consumer economy to the defense industries and that is definitely true we see the production levels grow etc and that's
fine and it's understandable but it does seem like they squeezed the consumer really badly and that's what he's saying now he does say and this is a quote there remains no satisfactory overview of Soviet living standards during World War two which is why I said before a few stylized facts may be presented for the mass of the people wartime consumption was limited to the struggle for housing heating basic clothing and food food supplies were the critical factors determining survival and during most of the war there was not enough food to go around half the population
mainly soldiers and public sector employees were covered by the official rationing system and then he goes on he says that most important commodity was bread which supplied 80 to 90% of the rations etc now but yeah if the point was half the population was on the official ration system well what happened to the other half okay there's more evidence that in the gulags which okay fine they don't have great living standards anyway I know some people think their holiday camps or not but in the gulags rationing was was decreased massively and it I forget the
exact yeah I think it's nineteen forty 1643 they're actually strong they're actually starving like really starving in the GU likes to the point where that people are saying hey we're running out of workers we need more workers and obviously can't supply it but the the gulags are actually starved okay so this comes from labor camp socialism and it says in all in all during the war years over five million prisoners passed through the gulag camps and colonies of these about 1 million were released early and sent to the front the overwhelming majority of those remaining
in the gulag were ill emancipated and infirm many of them had survived purely by chance some have has been given light work others had encountered a good boss or humane doctor there's evidence that even before the war in 1939 in the gue likes the wasn't enough food and there's one quote saying there's a high mortality in the camps due to the fact that provisions were not being provided in enough quantities and this is in 1939 so you can imagine ok the food supplies were terrible then what they're gonna be like in nineteen forty one forty
two this is a quote camp mortality reached its peak in 1942 when an average of over 50,000 prisoners died every month okay in some camps the death rate was substantially higher than in the gulag as a whole in one place accomplice SCV you are a ll AG said there are a lag for example and what the administration considered to be the worst of the camps in 1942 1615 prisoners died in January alone so we said before five million people went through the camp's 1 million went to the army and according to calculations made in this
book over 2 million people died in the camps and colonies of the gulag during the war years so that's that's half of those remaining who hadn't been shifted to the Army Wow Harrison says less is known about the living standards of the rural population collective farmers lived off the meager residual product of the collective farm and the product of their own sideline activities anecdotal evidence suggests pervasive hardship and tends to confirm that World War two in contrast to World War one saw a loss of social privilege for food producers the Soviet Konami did not disintegrate
food producers did not retain food surpluses and the burdens of the war were forcibly spread across the population urban and rural alike he goes on he actually mentions household consumption per worker decreased roughly two-fifths from 1940 to 1943 yeah so again all these all these things are just pointed the fact that the Soviet Union even behind the lines isn't doing so well and I'm just getting to that you know I'm getting to this conclusion I think something was really catastrophic here we can't though suggest okay if the Germans have we retained control hundred percent definitely
the Soviet Union would have collapsed in 1943 you can't really say that or looking at this it's like I mean how how close worthy to be another quote malnutrition was widespread and undoubtedly carried off many victims in the interior of the country not just in famous episodes like the siege of leningrad poor dietary conditions were so conductive to the spread of diseases were also conducted to the spread of diseases and the incidence of typhus typhoid fever and tuberculosis rose sharply in 1942 another 1942 one apparently 90 in 1942 death rates in Siberia Pete you know
Siberia right next to the front line clearly not quo after 1942 death rates fell not because conditions were improving but because the most vulnerable members of society had already been carried off Wow Wow yeah uh again no way to prove it I just think that something desperate was happening in 1942 and if if they had an account rataxes 1943 and so this is where we get to the lend-lease argument says I know it's gonna cause controversy soviet union's in dire straits I am NOT saying Len least won the war not saying that what I am
saying though is that it might have actually helped enough to keep the Soviet Union in the war not in terms of tanks and all that although they certainly held it's not about the tanks it's not about the aircraft or whatever else necessarily it's actually about the resources that the the United States and to some extent Britain are giving to the Soviet Union I did quote the amount of rations etc they were given to the Soviets from lend-lease I believe coins to the books on lend-lease that this could have kept a million people fed in the
Soviet Union considering that the rations were haft does that mean that two million people in the Soviet Union were kept alive through the power of lend-lease I don't know but you can imagine just oh no there's not enough food for two million extra people how about would the situation have been so this is not a solvent yeah at least this is more than the Soviet Union's in dire straits it wasn't really in dire straits by 1942 and if the Germans had or the axis had kept hold of the Ukraine and the quarks or the Northern
Caucasus in nineteen forty two to three which is what Hitler had hoped could that have been the death knell of the Soviet Union would the people have just hadn't often rebelled and or would would it just people would have just started dying in the streets which they may have been anyway I don't know again here since it's an alternative tile and no way to know I'd love to hear what you guys think but all this evidence is coming along which is just is suggesting yeah something was definitely wrong with the Soviet economy and so on
because ever had people in the comments going no no no it takes making it Obama blah I've got like 20 sources now they're all saying the same thing no something's going wrong here I don't know I'm not I'm not hearing them bountiful quantities of food in 1942 not hearing that so yeah I'm really I'm really coming to that conclusion but I'd love to hear what you guys think I genuinely think ninety 43 would have been a very bad year had the Germans not been pushed back at Stalingrad
