Being a communist state there was no private enterprise in
Soviet Russia because the state owned everything including all manufacturing.
There was a motor industry to produce vehicles for a range of purposes
including the military, but like the collective farming policy that controlled
agricultural output, there was a Five-Year Plan governing how the industry
should operate. The first of the Five- Year Plans ran from 1928 to 1933 and
during that period the AMO factory near Moscow was engaged in building
Italian-designed 1.5-ton trucks. Another factory was built at Gorky and this
was the GAZ, which covered an area of 256 acres and employed a workforce of
12,000, making it the largest plant of its type in Europe.
It built 1.5-ton American-designed trucks called the Model
AA and together these two factories increased production from 50,000 vehicles
in the first Five-Year Plan to more than 200,000 by the second Five-Year Plan.
Other factories were also built, such as the ZIS (Zavod Imieni Stalin) and YAG
(Yaroslav Automobilini Zavod), and these added to the output of trucks.
Because of the German-Soviet non-aggression pact agreed in
1939, Russia had felt secure from attack. In the weeks and months after the
attack of 22 June vital manufacturing facilities such as the GAZ, AMO, ZIS and
YAG factories would all be relocated beyond the Urals along with all of the
workers. There the factories would be established in new centres of industry
such as Sverdlovsk, Magnitogorsk and Chelyabinsk and would produce tanks,
trucks and guns. Yet it seemed that no matter how many trucks and cars were
built there was never enough to replace the thousands lost in battle. The
vehicles sent by America bolstered the output and the contribution by Britain
also helped the situation. As with other armies, some of the Russian trucks,
such as the 2.5-ton AAA built by GAZ, were adapted to mount armaments such as
quadruple machine guns for the anti-aircraft roles. Other truckss including the
6×4 ZIS-6 were adapted to carry the rocket artillery systems that were the
famous ‘Stalin Organs’ which terrified the Germans with the shrieking noise as
the rockets were fired. Russia produced 2.5- ton half-tracks for use as
artillery tractors and between 1933 and 1940 well over 1 million trucks were
built by the GAZ and KIM factories. The Americans supplied vast numbers of
vehicles including Jeeps, which the Russians promptly copied at the GAZ factory
and produced as the 4×4 GAZ-67. This was a heavier vehicle than the Jeep and
some 92,000 were built between 1943 and 1953, which was still only a fraction
of America’s production figures for the Jeep. As impressive as all this was, it
was Russia’s output of AFVS, especially tanks, which bolstered the army and
gave it the fighting force to take on the Germans.
At the northern end of Russia the campaign against the city
of Leningrad was bogged down in stalemate with 300,000 Germans holding the
southern end of the isthmus and the Finns holding the northern end. The Finns
and Germans had not joined their front lines to cut off the southern edge of
Lake Ladoga, which left the Russians in possession of Lednevo with its railway
links and Novaya Ladoga with road links from where supplies could be
transported into the besieged city. The Finns may have been allies of Germany
but as far as lost in 1940 during the war against Russia and they to go any
further and this left open the water route into Leningrad. The Russians had
built defences but with a population of 3 million the problem was feeding the
people. In October 1941 the city was being supplied with 1,000 tons of food
daily brought in by ship from Novaya Ladoga, but when the waters froze in
November that rate dropped to half the capacity. The problem was compounded
when a German attack captured a stretch of the rail link at Tikhvin and severed
the route into Lednevo. they were concerned they had re-conquered the territory
they had were satisfied. They were not prepared
The Communist Party secretary in Leningrad, Andrei Zhdanov,
ordered that a route be cut through dense forest so that trucks could carry
supplies from the railhead at Zaborye to Novaya Ladoga, from where convoys
could continue to Lednevo and across the waters of the lake. The route that was
hacked through the forest to connect Zaborye to Novaya Ladoga covered a
distance of 50 miles and had been created in just over four weeks, from 9
November to 6 December. It was a prodigious feat of work by labourers, many of
whom were on the point of collapse from hunger. The terrain was so steep in
places that the trucks had to be physically pushed up the inclines. Even so,
the best distance they could manage to cover was 25 miles per day. There was
some news when a Russian counter- attack seized back the railhead at Tikhvin,
which shortened the route the trucks had to take and, with the waters of Lake
Ladoga frozen, the trucks drove across the icy surface. By January 1942 there
were up to 400 trucks daily driving the treacherous 20-mile route across the
frozen surface of Lake Ladoga from Lednevo to Osinovets from where they could
continue overland to Leningrad The civilians called it the ‘Road of Life’, but
to the drivers who risked crashing through the ice it was the ‘Road of Death’.
Only seven months earlier some fifty-four trains had removed almost 1.2 million
works of art and national treasures from the city in a month- long operation to
prevent them from being captured by the Germans. By the time of the first thaw
in April 1942 some 53,000 tons of supplies such as fuel and ammunition and a
further 42,500 tons of food had been driven across the Lake Ladoga ice road.
The siege of Leningrad would last for a total of 890 days and would not be
relieved until 13 January 1944. The suffering of the people and the military
defenders was enormous, with an estimated 1.5 million being killed or keep it
supplied was one of the greatest examples of logistics during the war, but it
was overshadowed by events at Stalingrad where entire armies would be wiped
out. Andrei Zhdanov declared that ‘We must dig Fascism a grave in front of
Leningrad’. The cost to the German Army and its Italian and Finnish allies is
not known, but the fact that the operation tied down so many troops, tanks,
trucks and other equipment certainly assisted by preventing them from being
deployed elsewhere. or the railhead could take supplies direct to the city dying
of starvation. The struggle to save the city and keep it supplied overshadowed
by events at Stalingrad where entire armies would be wiped out. Andrei Zhdanov
declared that ‘We must dig Fascism a grave in front of Leningrad’. The cost to
the German Army and its Italian and Finnish allies is not known, but the fact
that the operation tied down so many troops, tanks, trucks and other equipment
certainly assisted by preventing them from being deployed elsewhere.
