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Posted: July 25, 2025
World War II was known as the Great Patriotic War in the USSR, and remains so in Russia today. Best estimates for the number of deaths in the war range from 20-27 million people, approaching 10% of the USSR’s population. This death toll was the result of facing the brunt of the Nazi invasion for the entirety of the war, the true human cost of fighting back fascism. Through these unprecedented sacrifices, the people of the USSR won World War II.
There is a revisionist WWII narrative, especially common in Western Europe and North America. It blames these death tolls on the USSR leadership’s disregard for the lives of their citizens. This is disgusting slander against one of history’s most heroic people’s struggles. This narrative is spearheaded by the world’s leading imperialists, and rooted in the economics of empire. Hitler threatened the USSR with colonialism, modeled on the colonial economic projects of the USA, Canada, the UK, and France. Behind Hitler and the Nazis were the German imperialists. They wanted a bigger slice of the half-millennia European colonial Holocaust and plunder of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, Asia, Africa, and Oceania. The Nazis and their capitalist backers wanted Eastern Europe’s labour and resources like the British took from India. They wanted to colonize with German settlers as the Americans and Canadians had conquered Turtle Island. Hitler even took American legal segregation as the model for his ‘Jewish Jim Crow’ policies. The USSR faced the full extent of these racist exterminationist methods of colonial warfare, and won. They did so, because of the resilience of their socialist economic development, and bravery of the USSR population.
Imperialism allows capitalist nations to temporarily postpone economic crises by exporting capital and contradictions to the colonies. From these colonies, they extract resources and superexploitated labour power. Fascism remains the ultimate capitalist response to economic crises, bringing home the imperialist methods once they have failed abroad. The more successful imperialists (the UK, USA, Canada) primarily avoided the ascendant fascism in Germany, Italy, and eventually Vichy France. That is because they had best consolidated their economic imperialist and settler colonial projects. Britain survived due to its isolated geography and Europe’s best-plundered economic base. America never faced a mainland attack, and only entered the war after its Hawaiian colony was attacked. If the USA, UK, or Canada had fallen to Nazi invasion like the French did, outright fascist elements in all three countries (like Oswald Mosely in the UK, Adrien Arcand in Canada, or the German-American Bund) would have likely assumed power. The removal of all potential fascist sympathizers or collaborators from USSR leadership ensured that the Party never cracked under the incredible stress of the Nazi invasion.
Leading up to the war, it’s important to recognize an oft-overlooked aspect of USSR geography. Because of how it spanned the Eurasian continent, the USSR was sandwiched, albeit with ample buffer space, between fascist Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. Since the October Revolution, they had remained targeted for elimination by all the world’s imperialist and fascist powers. Now, the USSR’s decade and a half of (externally) peaceful development was coming to an end. This was proven by the Battles of Khalkhin Gol, in socialist Mongolia in May 1939, against Japan and their Manchurian puppet state. The Japanese Empire wanted to carve out parts of the Eastern USSR for themselves, like the Nazis did in the West.
1939 was also when the USSR signed the infamous Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact with the Nazis. After years of effort to sign similar pacts with the Western capitalist countries, USSR leadership could see the Western capitalist powers turning a blind eye to USSR national defence concerns. These imperialists wanted the Nazis to eliminate their shared concern (socialism), weakening the German war machine in the process. If you still think this was an agreement between two equally evil forces, please look into how Poland’s Jewish population was treated by the Nazis and USSR alike, after the Partition of Poland.
The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was the USSR’s last push to prepare for the coming anti-fascist war. The industrial explosion in the 20 years since the October Revolution had secured the material base that the USSR would need to survive the Nazi invasion. Just note the differences in war preparedness between the Russian Empire (WWI) and USSR (WWII). In 1939, industrial output was 11.7x higher, and industrial engineering and metal-working was 41x higher, than in 1913, with 100% socialized production. The grain harvest had increased ~50%, during a period when urban population grew by 2.4x. So this harvest increase was achieved with 20 million fewer people working the land. Additionally, the grain surplus was basically entirely socialized, versus the 72% owned by landlords and kulaks before WWI.
Atop this immense socialist industrial machine was the State Committee of Defence (SCD). The SCD combined the executive and legislative power of the Soviets with the CPSU’s leadership structure. Under the SCD, industrial production capacity was mobilized for the Great Patriotic War. Agricultural production was mobilized to feed the army and industrial workforce. Transportation networks shifted to meet war needs. The construction workforce built new defence plants. Labour was mobilized to replace the industrial workers fighting in the Red Army.
This type of state command economy was the norm in all WWII combatant countries. But not all war economies were the same. We can compare the USSR and American economies during WWII to see the distinctions most clearly.
The USSR had a socialist economy with public ownership of means of production. Its driving force was the moral and patriotic power of the alliance between urban workers and rural collective agricultural labourers. They suffered 25M+ deaths, tens of millions more injured, territorial losses to Germany, as the standard of living plummeted while shifting to a full war economy.
The American economy was dominated by capitalist monopolies, who only strengthened their economic control during the war. 75% of all orders went to 100 companies, and 49% to the largest 30. The economic driving force was monopoly capital’s profit opportunities, as profits increased from $6.4B (1939) to $24.5B (1943). American monopoly profits totalled $87B from the war, giving the USA global economic dominance from the destruction of its allies and the Axis powers alike.
Nowhere is the existential nature of the challenges the USSR faced more evident than in the initial 1941 Nazi invasion of the USSR, Operation Barbarossa. During late 1941 and early 1942, the following USSR resources came under areas the Nazis controlled: population (40%) coal (63%), pig iron (68%), steel (58%), aluminum (60%), wheat (38%), sugar (84%), cattle (38%), pigs (60%), and rail lines (41%). One of the most important interwar dynamics that kept this devastating invasion from being fatal was the movement of key industries away from the USSR’s western border area, WWII’s Eastern Front. In 1942, just the eastern, relatively underdeveloped yet easily defendable areas of the USSR had 20x the Union’s total industrial output of 1920. This enabled the USSR to not only restore the industrial capacities lost to Nazi occupation, but to actually exceed them as the war progressed.
The toll on the USSR population was enormous, in the areas invaded by the Nazis and across the lands of the great Worker’s State. To feed the war production needs, war expenditures rose at the expense of consumption and investment, from 11% of national income (1940) to a high of 44% (1943). Even this amount is believed to be an underestimate of ~15%, based on ongoing analysis of USSR economic data. These expenditure patterns can be most clearly tracked through industrial output allocations. In 1940, heavy industry and light industry (consumer goods) accounted for 61.2% and 38.8% respectively. At the peak of the Nazi invasion in 1942, heavy and light industry were at 20.5% and 15.6%, with defence taking up 63.9% of output. By 1946, heavy and light industry were back to 65.9% and 34.1%.
These blows to the population’s material needs involved great suffering across the USSR. However, they made possible the defense of the territory, necessary for the USSR’s continued existence, and the expansion of socialist production after the war. The Red Army and people of the USSR prevented the Nazis from taking Moscow, denying the Nazis victory. They outlasted the horrific sieges of Leningrad and Stalingrad, the latter battle ensuring that the Nazis would be defeated. They won history’s biggest tank battle in Kursk, assuring the total destruction of the colonial fascist invaders. They liberated Eastern Europe, and took Berlin, flying the USSR Flag over the Nazi capital. The USSR would not be colonized, and had defeated fascism.
The most pervasive impact of WWII in the USSR was the human toll. Over 30 million people were killed or injured in WWII, not to mention the lasting impacts of siege starvation. A demographic legacy of the Nazi invasion was the extreme loss of men. In 1939, women exceeded men in the USSR by ~7 million. By 1959, there were ~20 million more women than men, nearly all concentrated among women 32 years old and older. Another consequence of WWII was the population to the East. The population of the eastern regions went from 47 million in 1939 to 63 million by 1959. During this period, Kazakhstan’s population increased by 50% (6.1 to 9.3 million), while the population west of the Urals rose by only 2 million. These post-war population dynamics altered the composition of the USSR workforce for generations.
In our next post, we will review and analyze a classic in the economics canon: Economic Consequences of the Peace by John Maynard Keynes. In this work, Keynes outlines how the Treaty of Versailles after World War I set Europe on track for its next apocalyptic war, just twenty years later. If you're interested in these ideas, don't hesitate to reach out. This project is a conversation, not a lecture, so all good faith feedback is encouraged, especially from trained economists.
Sources
https://www.marxists.org/history/ussr/great-patriotic-war/pdf/worker.pdf&sa=D&source=docs&ust=1753450704347232&usg=AOvVaw2Ddzf_8dNRVxYBRCCwXdJI
World War II and Soviet Economic Growth (1940-1953) - Susan J. Linz, Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of Economics, College of Commerce and Business Administration, University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign