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Lennart Samuelson, Plans for Stalin's War Machine: Tukhachevskii and Military-Economic Planning, 1925-1941. Basingstoke and London: Macmillan Press in association with the Centre for Russian and East European Studies, University of Birmingham, Studies in East European History and Society, 2000, xv + 267 pp., L42.50 h/b.
THIS BOOK CONSIDERS SOVIET WAR PREPARATIONS in the interwar period through a close study of the relationship between the central organs of the Red Army, the defence ministry, the central planners and industry. A small number of individuals also played key roles: Tukhachevsky (of the army General Staff but not always for it), Voroshilov (the defence minister) and Ordzhonikidze (for heavy industry), with Stalin presiding and at times brooding over them all. The centre of the stage is given over to contingency plans and mobilisation plans for war production and the associated investment plans for defence industry. Thus rearmament is considered in terms of both actual and potential war production, while potential war production is considered in both present and future; the author argues that the future targets written down on paper in mobilisation plans may tell us more about the real dimensions of Soviet rearmament than the numbers of aircraft, tanks and guns actually being produced at the time. The main burden of evidence falls on original documentation from the former Soviet state, party, economic and Red Army archives.
The underlying story of Samuelson's book can be paraphrased in a few sentences. Plans to build a military-industrial complex were laid down in the 1920s (chapter 1). At this time Tukhachevsky was already designing what would have become a `military-planning complex' in which the Red Army would participate directly in...