Soviet economy during the second world war

The great Patriotic War of 1941-1945 caused radical changes in the national economy of the U.S.S.R.; it remolded Soviet economy to insure victory in the war, and gave rise to economic laws peculiar to wartime. This has gone down in the history of the U.S.S.R. as a special period of socialist economy, the period of war economy, which constitutes the subject of a special chap ter in the political economy of socialism-the political economy of the Patriotic War.

The unity of the national interests of the peoples of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics manifested itself with full force during the great Patriotic War, in which socialism was pitted against fascism, the Soviet people against the Germans poisoned by Nazism. The war against fascist Germany was a holy war fought by all the peoples inhabiting the Soviet Union for their existence as nations, for their country, for socialism.

The great unity of the peoples of the Soviet Union in the Patriotic War, which won the admiration of the entire world, stemmed from the victory of the socialist mode of production and the abolition of the exploiting classes in the U.S.S.R. Indeed, the very roots of parasitic classes and groups were destroyed in Soviet society long before the outbreak of the Patriotic War, and it was this that laid a firm foundation for the moral and political unity of the Soviet people.

Fascist Germany chose predatory war as the means to achieve its imperialist aims: the conquest of foreign lands and states, the destruction of the land of socialism, and the reduction of freedom-loving nations to the status of slaves of the German imperialist "masters." No wonder therefore that the national interests of the various peoples of the U.S.S.R. were at one in the war against German imperialism.