About the Work of Leningrad Industrial Enterprises in 1941

Abstract

Before the Great Patriotic War (GPW) at least 1/3 of cumulative total yield of Leningrad factories was the products of ―defense‖ or ―special‖ function, i.e. military ones. A significant proportion of civilian products could also be used for the army, navy or the NKVD troop’s demands. Pre-war production planning provided for the all-round increase in the output of military products.In this regard, the city s enterprises experienced an acute shortage of production and office premises, electricity and personnel. Plants and factories operated with external raw materials and fuel which made them critically dependent on the functioning of the logistics chains connecting Leningrad with the regions of the USSR. The main criterion of evaluating the work of an industrial enterprise was the amount of output and the mandatory fulfillment or over-fulfillment of production plan. At the factories the problems of quality were ignored and this led to the necessity of conducting periodic campaigns of struggle for quality by senior management. However, such campaigns turned to be useless and did not result in the required demands due to the initially defective system of goal-setting in industry. The peculiarities of conducting economic activities in wartime, on the one hand, deepened the previous problems, on the other hand, made the processes of deploying new industries more dynamicby reducing the number of management links and lengthening work shifts,. The main role in setting production tasks to the enterprises was transferred from the specialized People s Commissariats to the City Committee of the All-Union Communist Party and the Military Council of the Front; factories were often forced to execute three parallel production plans. The establishment of the blockade regime focused the industry of Leningrad almost exclusively on the interests of the Leningrad Front. Mobilization into the army and recruitment into the people s militia deprived enterprises of the number of qualified personnel; at first, the replacement of experienced workers by housewives and adolescents could not be considered complete and equivalent. In September – October 1941 the reserves of fuelwere exhausted in the city and this led to a fuel and energy crisis in November – December 1941 and an almost complete shutdown of heavy and light industry enterprises in the first quarter of 1942. The factors which influenced the manufacturing processes of Leningrad industrial enterprises in the pre-war, war and blockade periods of 1941 have been considered in the present article.