This dissertation explores the transformation of the Soviet defense economy in 1920s and 1930s. By the mid-1920s, the USSR'S general economic recovery allowed the reconstruction of tsarist Russia's defense industry, devastated by war and revolution. Reconstruction, however, quickly became expansion. Soviet military theorists argued that modern war required the complete subordination of economy and state to the demands of war, and the Bolshevik belief in the unremitting hostility of the outside world ensured a firm commitment to Soviet rearmament. Scarce fiscal resources limited military budgets and investment in military industry during 1927 and 1928, but the quickening pace of Soviet industrialization eased that constraint. Stalin's rise to supreme power removed those like Bukharin and Rykov who supported conservative fiscal policy and, consequently, low military spending. This, combined with mass campaigns against supposed saboteurs and "wreckers," discredited opposition to faster expansion to meet the Red Army's growing hunger for modern weaponry. The First Five-Year Plan's approval in April 1929 led to another directive in July 1929 endorsing further investment in military industry and the comprehensive modernization of the Red Army. Even after that, the rigidities of the Stalinist economic system meant that the military, increasingly frustrated with industry's inability to produce arms fast enough, still pushed for more modern arms. Finally, the Manchurian crisis of 1931 replaced an ill-defined fear of "capitalist encirclement" with a concrete threat: Japan. The resulting mobilization of the Soviet economy to a state of half-war, half-peace in response to the Japanese threat never ended, creating the defense economy that would endure until the collapse of the Soviet Union. Defense industry now had a dominant place in economic policy, while the Red Army would never lack for vast quantities of modern weaponry.
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