The military-industrial complex (MIC) is a set of research, testing organizations and manufacturing enterprises that develop and manufacture military and special equipment, ammunition, ammunition, etc., mainly for state law enforcement agencies, as well as for export. http://en.wikipedia.org

The military-industrial complex has played and continues to play a backbone role in the economy as regions Russian Federation and Russia as a whole.

In May 1915 (g.), at the 9th Congress of Representatives, the idea of ​​​​creating military-industrial committees was first formulated. In July 1915, the 1st congress of the military-industrial complex took place. In August of the same year, a normative legal act was adopted, assigning to the committees the functions of assisting government agencies in supplying the army and navy with the necessary equipment and allowances through the planned distribution of raw materials and orders, their timely execution and price fixing. The Central Military-Industrial Complex formed in its composition a number of sections for branches, the number of which increased all the time. Sections were created: mechanical, chemical, army supply, clothing, food, sanitary, inventions, automobile, aviation, transportation, coal, oil, peat and forestry, mobilization, large shells, machine tools, etc. http://ru. wikipedia.org

In the 1920s, the Soviet defense industry was characterized by the restoration of large-scale industry in the USSR. Having carried out the reform of the armed forces in 1923-1924, the Soviet government also developed and implemented the reform of the military industry. The main strategic reason for the need to create a permanent branch (organization) of military-industrial production in the USSR was that, without exception, all weapons and supplies for the army should be prepared within the Republic; all military production should be based exclusively on domestic raw materials.

Reporting in 1932 on the results of the defense preparation of industry in the 1st five-year plan, Deputy Chairman of the State Planning Committee of the USSR I.S. Unshlikht stated: "In the USSR, the military industry is a systematically organized industry that unites personnel military enterprises." Beskrovny L.G. The army and navy of Russia at the beginning of the 20th century. Essays on the military-economic potential. http://rufort.info/library/simonov/simonov.html

During the 1920s-1950s, the process of development of military-industrial production and the acquisition of military-industrial "cadre" and "reserve" factories went through several stages.

The first stage occupies the period from 1921 to 1930 and is characterized by the concentration of military-industrial production in separate groups of "personnel" military factories under the general supervision of one special management body under the single People's Commissariat of Industry - the Supreme Economic Council of the USSR.

The second stage occupies the period from 1930 to 1936 and is characterized by the concentration of "personnel" factories of the 1st group of military products and the dispersal of the rest (2nd and 3rd groups) in all related industries.

April 7 - May 3, 1930 military-industrial trusts and their Glavk (GUVP) were abolished. From the "personnel" factories of the 1st group of military products, the following were formed: the All-Union Association of Gun-Weapon-Machine-Gun Productions (Oruzhobedinenie), the All-Union Association of Cartridge-Tube and Explosive Production (Partubvzryv). Other factories capable of producing military products, such as shipbuilding, optical-mechanical, explosives and poisonous substances, passed or remained part of civilian trusts and departments.

In early January 1932, the Supreme Economic Council of the USSR was abolished. All military-industrial enterprises of the "cadre" and "reserve", on an equal footing, were transferred to the jurisdiction of the People's Commissariat of Heavy Industry of the USSR, its main departments and trusts, namely: aviation - to the Main Directorate of the Aviation Industry (GUAP); shipbuilding - to the Main Directorate of the Shipbuilding Industry (GUSP); military chemical - to the Military Chemical Trust (Vokhimtrest), the All-Union Trust of Organic Production (VTOP) and the All-Union Trust of Artificial Fiber (VIV); weapons, machine-gun, bomb, shell, mine and torpedo - to the Main Military Mobilization Directorate; cartridge and cartridge cases - to the Cartridge and Case Trust; guns - to the Arsenal Trust; shell - to the shell trust; armored vehicles - to the Special Machine-Building Trust (Spetsmashtrest), optical-mechanical - to the State Association of Optical-Mechanical Plants (GOMZ). As of April 5, 1934, the list of “personnel” factories of the “military industry” approved by the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks includes 68 enterprises. They establish a special procedure for the recruitment of labor force.

The functions of the coordinator of the activities of military factories in the Narkomtyazhprom system were performed by its Main Military Mobilization Directorate (GVMU), divided in 1936 into the Main Board of the Military Industry and the Main Directorate of Ammunition.

The third stage covers the period from 1936 to 1941 and is characterized by the concentration of all "personnel" military factories and part of the "reserve" factories - at the beginning in the People's Commissariat of the Defense Industry, and then in several military-industrial people's commissariats, specially created to accelerate the process of rearmament of the Army and Fleet.

The People's Commissariat of the Defense Industry was formed on December 8, 1936 by the Decree of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR. From the composition of the People's Commissariat of Heavy Industry, the new People's Commissariat included: 47 aircraft factories, 15 artillery factories, 3 weapons factories, 9 optical-mechanical factories, 10 tank factories, 9 cartridge case factories, 7 tube-explosive factories, 7 shell factories, 3 factories for the production of mine, torpedo and bomb weapons, 10 shipbuilding plants and shipyards, 23 military-chemical enterprises, 16 plants for the production of electrical appliances and radio devices, 8 precision engineering enterprises, 5 battery and 3 metallurgical plants.

The fourth stage covers the period of the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945. and is characterized by the transformation of most of the machine-building national economic complex of the USSR into a military-industrial complex, with a division into special military-industrial sectors under the leadership of the relevant people's commissariats: weapons, ammunition and mine-mortar weapons, aviation, tank and shipbuilding industries. The State Defense Committee (GKO) of the USSR becomes the supreme body directing the activities of the entire state defense complex.

The fifth stage covers the period from 1946 to the end of the 1950s and is characterized by the modernization of the production of the so-called "general military equipment"and the emergence of new types of military products, united under the general name of" special military equipment "; these are systems of jet and missile weapons and jet aircraft, samples of nuclear weapons and various radio-electronic systems of military-technical equipment and military communications.

In 1946-1957, "personnel" military factories were concentrated in the ministries aviation industry, armaments (since 1954, the Ministry of Defense Industry), the shipbuilding industry and more or less evenly dispersed by special "bushes" in the civilian ministries: transport engineering, agricultural engineering, heavy engineering, auto-tractor industry - as the head enterprises of the partially mothballed military-industrial productions: ammunition, mine and mortar weapons, special vehicles and armored vehicles. Golovanov Ya. Korolev. Facts and myths. http://rufort.info

To organize work on the creation of nuclear missile weapons, a Special Committee and three Main Directorates are created under the Council of Ministers of the USSR. To organize work on the creation of radar and electronic equipment, a Committee on Radar is created under the Council of Ministers of the USSR. Functions of the coordinator of the activities of the ministries of "defense industries", the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the USSR, the Ministry of the Armed Forces of the USSR, the Ministry of State Security of the USSR in matters of drawing up a plan for orders for weapons and military equipment, organizing research work on defense topics, etc. carried out until 1952 by the Bureau for Military-Industrial and Military Affairs under the Council of Ministers of the USSR, and then - the Commission of the Presidium of the Council of Ministers of the USSR on military-industrial issues.

In 1956, 220 “personnel” military factories were concentrated in the Minaviaprom system, 210 in the Ministry of Defense Industry, 135 in the Minsudprom system, and 216 in the Minradtechprom system. In addition to production functions, these ministries are intensively working to create new types of weapons and military equipment through the efforts of 270 experimental plants, design bureaus, research, special and design institutes.

In 1958, all research institutes, design bureaus, special design bureaus and design bureaus of the Soviet military-industrial complex, together with pilot plants, were transferred to the jurisdiction of the State Committees for aviation technology, defense technology, electronic technology and shipbuilding. The ministries of the military industry are disbanded, and the serial factories of the military-industrial "cadre" are transferred to the jurisdiction of the councils of ministers of the union republics and economic councils of economic regions.

Until the beginning of the 60s, the formation of the all-Union defense complex and its development were completed, aimed primarily at creating a nuclear missile shield of the country and means of delivering nuclear weapons, the 60s - early 80s - the powerful self-development of the Soviet military-industrial complex and its transformation into the dominant National economy countries, the second half of the 80s - 90s - the gradual degradation of the military-industrial complex in connection with the collapse of the USSR and the first attempts of the military-industrial complex to fit into the new market socio-economic conditions. A. Losik, A. Mezentsev, P. Minaev, A. Shcherba. "Domestic military-industrial complex in the XX - early XXI century" / http://vpk-news.ru/articles/6102/ 2008

By the mid-1960s, there were nine basic defense-industrial ministries in the USSR, which, together with 10 related ministries under the leadership of the highest party bodies and the Military-Industrial Commission under the Presidium of the Council of Ministers, formed the basis of the entire socio-economic system of the USSR.

In the late 1980s, defense complex enterprises produced 20-25% of the country's gross domestic product (GDP), absorbing a huge part of material and human resources (military spending accounted for up to 60% of the country's budget). The best scientific and technical developments and personnel were concentrated in the defense industry: up to 3/4 of all research and development work (R&D) was carried out in the field of the defense industry. The enterprises of the defense complex produced most of the civilian products: 90% of televisions, refrigerators, radios, 50% of vacuum cleaners, motorcycles, electric stoves. About 1/3 of the country's population lived in the area where defense industry enterprises are located. All this, at the same time, led to an excessive inflation of the zone of "unproductive" expenditures on the development and creation of weapons, to the detriment of the sphere of consumption.

Since the early 1990s, the OPK, together with Russian society entered a period of economic and political crisis. A sharp reduction in appropriations led to the degradation of defense enterprises, the leaching of qualified personnel into other areas of activity (business, going abroad, etc.). According to the estimates of the Ministry of Economy of Russia, in 1991-1995. 2.5 million workers left the defense industry. The military production of the defense industry decreased in 1997 compared with 1991 by almost 90%. Bystrova I.V. Domestic military-industrial complex in the XX century. / http://hist.msu.ru/Labs/Ecohist/OB8/bystrova.htm / 2002

Since 1999, Russia's military-industrial policy has changed in the direction of increasing the financing of the defense industry, consolidating and increasing the competitiveness of the export of arms and military equipment. On June 22, 1999, the Commission on Military Industrial Issues was established under the government of the Russian Federation to develop military-industrial policy. The management system was reorganized: 5 federal agencies of the defense industry were created (Russian Aviation and Space Agency, agencies for conventional weapons, for ammunition, for shipbuilding, for control systems).

Today, the military-industrial complex is being further formed in accordance with modern working conditions. At a meeting of the Government of the Russian Federation on January 20, 2011, a draft federal law “On Amendments to the Federal Laws “On Insolvency (Bankruptcy)” and “On Enforcement Proceedings” in terms of improving the procedures used in bankruptcy cases of strategic organizations” was considered. http://www.vpk.ru/cgi-bin/uis/w4.cgi/CMS/Item/2540012

military industrial shelf rental

§one. The state of the military-industrial complex of the USSR in the 60s, the first half of the 80s of the XX century.

By the beginning of the Second World War, 1000 tanks will be produced, crude but effective. At that time, Stalin abandoned the project of the S-7 tank, which was considered the tank of a new era. He thought about the atomic bomb, the creation of which required resources and forces. This bomb was tested in August 1949. In 1947, work was completed on the creation of the first R1 combat missile. In the 50s. R2 missiles appear, and then ballistic ones. The military-industrial complex was created at the expense of the hardships of the Soviet people, agriculture was ruined. The military-industrial complex in a certain way influenced all the economic parameters of the country's development. In 1961, the first manned spacecraft was launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome. 1961 "Vostok" with a man on board was put into orbit around the Earth. Since that time, the Soviet doctrine has been changing See: Gorbachev M.S. Perestroika and new thinking for our country and for the whole world. M., 1988. - S.23. .

It comes from what the West is preparing new war: nuclear missile. On November 7, 1967, the USSR demonstrated its ballistic missiles to the world for the first time. The development of rocket technology in the 1950s and 1960s led to the creation of the fifth branch of the Soviet armed forces: the Strategic Missile Forces. The decision to establish them was made in December 1959.

The 1950s and 1960s are marked by the rapid development of science and technology in the USSR, as well as throughout the world. The first nuclear stations, a nuclear-powered ship, and an artificial earth satellite appeared in the USSR, which gave grounds for believing in their invincibility. The 1960s and 1980s are marked by an arms race. By the end of the 1980s, the military-industrial complex occupied a leading position in the economy of the USSR. According to some estimates, military-industrial complex enterprises produced 20-25% of GDP, while absorbing the largest part of the country's resources (for example, for certain types of metal products and plastics - from 30 to 50%).

The need to constantly improve the technical level of products produced by this huge sector of the economy also led to the deformation of government spending: for example, in 1988, 3/4 of all funds allocated from the state budget for research and development were spent on the needs of the defense industry. . The total number of personnel of defense research institutes and design bureaus exceeded 1.8 million people, which turned this area into the largest branch of intellectual labor application. It should be noted that the majority of military-industrial complex enterprises had a "double profile", producing many types of civilian products.

The term conversion appears in the second half of the 80s. The Soviet military-industrial complex requested 60 billion rubles for its implementation (13 billion for conversion, and the rest for the development of new capacities of the national economy). The real structure of the USSR's economy, inherited by Russia, was characterized by two essential features: the predominant mass of resources (and the best ones) were directed to the production of weapons and components for them; a significant proportion of civilian products (almost all durable goods) were produced at the enterprises of the military-industrial complex. By 1990, they produced: over 90% of radio receivers, televisions, refrigerators; more than 50% of motorcycles, vacuum cleaners, electric stoves and other complex technical products. True, the quality of these goods was below world standards, and the production costs were higher. Therefore, sales were possible only under the conditions of a planned distribution system with an appropriate pricing mechanism See: V.A. Pechenev on the causes of the collapse of the USSR // www.yandex.ru. August 2, 2003. .

Even in St. Petersburg, every fourth employee was engaged in the production of military products. Further preservation of the structure of the economy has lost all meaning, since the political situation has fundamentally changed. The lack of a sound state policy regarding the military-industrial complex has led to the fact that, as a result of the transition to market relations, many enterprises. The military-industrial complex literally collapsed. This also affected those enterprises that produced products that were competitive in the foreign and domestic markets.

But there was no conversion plan. Military-industrial complex facilities have been privatized, and qualified workers are gradually dispersing. In 1992, it was possible to stop the departure of specialists in the field of rocket science to Korea. One of the results of the conversion initiated by Gorbachev was the loss of high-tech branches of science and technology. Instead of transferring technology to the West and receiving additional finance, defense enterprises were stopped, unloaded by the state. orders. Russia supplied weapons to those countries that could become potential adversaries. They were armed. Modern technology while growing up. troops were equipped with old equipment. The Russian army was unable to purchase samples of modern technology See: M.V. Khodyakov. recent history Russia. 1914 - 2005: studies. allowance / ed. - M .: Higher education, 2007.- S. 27. .

Western financial and industrial groups do not seek to invest in the Russian economy. It is much easier to buy ideas in Russia, which is always rich and impoverished. The situation in Russia is aggravated by the fact that in the USSR the best raw materials and labor resources were directed to the development of the defense industry, and the civilian sector was content with what was left of the defense industry. The absence of any competition among commodity producers, and hence incentives to improve the quality of products, provided an opportunity only for the extensive development of civilian sectors of the national economy. As a result, there was a chronic lag in the quality of domestic civilian products from the world level, although for military products this difference was minimal.

During the years of stagnation in our country, the policy was aimed at a general arms race associated with the period of the “cold war” between our country and the West. The main share of our industry was aimed at increasing military base countries. And so the state spared no funds for the development of this industry. The entire scientific and technical potential of the country was directed to the development and improvement of the military-industrial complex. But times went on. Comparing the economies of Western countries and the USSR, it was easy to see what kind of economic crisis such a political orientation led to. Our country was the best in the military field, it showed its power to everyone, but at the same time it was a shame to turn the other side - the socio-economic situation of society. Our country faced the question of how to most effectively rebuild most of the military-industrial complex on a peaceful basis, so that it bears a peacekeeping character.

In the West, the question of disarmament arose long ago. In this regard, it is worth recalling the famous manifesto of B. Russell and A. Einstein (1955), who called for unity in order to save the human race, the reports of the Club of Rome, reports of the commission of the Socialist International.

Refusal from pressure, from the use of military force in interstate relations must be replaced by something, linked with positive proposals See: Rakovsky SA, The collapse of the USSR: causes and consequences. Formation of the new Russian state // www.history.perm.ru (historical portal). January 22, 2008. .

International interaction can be raised to a new level by improving the practice of political negotiations, gradually moving away from the principle of balance of power towards finding an acceptable balance of partners' interests See: PS Samygin, tutor in the history of Russia. Series "Textbooks and study guides". Rostov n / a: "Phoenix", 2002. - S. 116. .

Those facing the army of a militarily developed country will entail a change in the quality level of products manufactured in the military-industrial complex. The cessation of the nuclear arms race on a global scale between the two superpowers, the USSR and the USA, as well as the elimination of the "Iron Curtain" led to the fact that the possibility of global military operations has noticeably decreased. Therefore, the main task of the armed forces at the new stage will be participation in local conflicts without the use of weapons of mass destruction. According to Pentagon military analysts, the US Armed Forces should in the future have the strength and means to conduct more than one global war, but two local military conflicts.

armed forces military industrial

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Russia's military potential is initially perceived as quite impressive. At the same time, not every citizen of the Russian Federation can clearly imagine the structure of the defense sphere of his country. Moreover, this information was not always available. Therefore, there is every reason to pay attention to the structure of the military-industrial complex.

Military-industrial complex of Russia

Concerning this topic, it is initially worth noting that the military-industrial complex can be safely attributed to an industry that has had a more than tangible impact on the development of the economy over the many years of the existence of the Russian Federation.

And although some time ago such a concept as the military-industrial complex of Russia was somewhat vague, in the middle of the 2000s, progress in this area became obvious. If we talk about the situation that has developed in this moment, then it is worth voicing the fact that the military-industrial complex has many progressive industries:

Aviation industry;

Nuclear;

Rocket and space;

Release of ammunition and ammunition;

Military shipbuilding, etc.

The following enterprises can be identified as the main players that deserve attention within the framework of the military-industrial complex:

- Russian Technologies;

- "Rosoboronexport";

OJSC Air Defense Concern Almaz-Antey, etc.

What does the structure of the military industry look like?

Within the framework of this topic, it is necessary to initially highlight the following information: during the active 90s, the wave of privatization did not bypass the enterprises of the military-industrial complex of Russia. Therefore, if we now analyze the ownership structure of the military-industrial complex of the Russian Federation, we can easily notice that joint-stock companies. More specifically, there are 57% of such joint-stock companies in the entire military-industrial complex. At the same time, the share of the state is absent in 28.2% of such enterprises.

You can refer to other data provided by the Accounts Chamber. According to this information, approximately 230 enterprises operate within the aviation industry. But only 7 of them belong to the state (we are talking about a controlling stake).

One of the key features of Russian enterprises is their jurisdiction in various forms to federal organizations. At the moment, the structure of the military-industrial complex of Russia includes 5 state agencies that oversee the defense industry and are located in:

RASU. Operates in the field of communications and radio industry.

- "Rossudostroenie". Responsible for supervising shipbuilding production.

RAKA. Controls processes within the rocket and space and aviation industries.

RAV. In this case, we are talking about the armaments industry.

- "Rosammunition". This agency specializes in working with the special chemicals and ammunition industry.

Key elements of the military-industrial complex

If we consider the features of the military-industrial complex of Russia, then we cannot ignore the types of organizations that are part of it:

Design bureaus that are focused on working with prototypes (prototypes) of weapons.

Organizations of a research profile. Their main task is theoretical developments.

Manufacturing enterprises. In this case, the resources are used for the mass production of weapons.

Polygons, as well as testing laboratories. Here it makes sense to talk about several important tasks. This is the so-called fine-tuning of prototypes in real-life conditions, as well as testing weapons that have just rolled off the production line.

In order to draw a complete picture of the functioning of the military-industrial complex and identify all the facets that the military-industrial complex of Russia has, it is necessary to pay attention to the fact that enterprises that are part of the defense sector also produce products for civilian purposes.

Now it is worth taking a closer look at the military-industrial complex sectors

Nuclear weapons complex

It is difficult to imagine the development of the military-industrial without this direction. It includes several strategically important areas of production.

First of all, this is the subsequent production of a concentrate from this raw material. The next important step is the separation of uranium isotopes (the enrichment process). This task is performed at enterprises located in cities such as Angarsk, Novouralsk, Zelenogorsk and Seversk.

In fairness, it should be noted that 45% of all capacities that are concentrated in Russia are located in Russia. At the same time, it is important to pay attention to the fact that the production of nuclear weapons is declining and the industries described above focus on Western customers.

Another task of this complex of the military-industrial complex is both the development and the allocation of its reserves concentrated in the Russian Federation, which will last for many more years.

Enterprises operating within the framework of the nuclear weapons complex are also engaged in the manufacture of fuel elements that are necessary for the operation of nuclear reactors, the assembly of nuclear weapons and the disposal of radioactive waste.

Rocket and space industry

It can rightly be called one of the most knowledge-intensive. What is one ICBM (intercontinental ballistic missile) worth, for the full operation of which approximately 300 thousand different systems, devices and parts are needed. And if we talk about a large space complex, then this figure increases to 10 million.

It is for this reason that most of the scientists, engineers and designers are concentrated in this industry.

Aviation industry

Studying the military-industrial complex of Russia, the branches and directions of this sphere, aviation must be paid attention in any case. Here it is relevant to talk about large industrial centers, since parent enterprises are needed to assemble products. Others simply do not have the necessary technical base to organize the processes required for fast and high-quality production.

At the same time, two key conditions must always be observed: the availability of qualified specialists and well-organized transport links. The military-industrial complex of Russia and specifically the aviation sector are in a state of constant development, which allows the Russian Federation to act as a major exporter of weapons, including aviation.

Artillery and small arms

It is also an important industry. The military-industrial complex of the Russian Federation can hardly be imagined without the famous Kalashnikov assault rifle. This is the most massive type of small arms currently produced in Russia.

Moreover, outside the CIS, it was adopted by 55 states. As for artillery systems, their production centers are located in cities such as Perm, Yekaterinburg and Nizhny Novgorod.

armored industry

If you pay attention to the centers of the military-industrial complex of Russia, then after a simple analysis it will be possible to draw an obvious conclusion: this direction of the defense industry can be defined as one of the most developed.

The tanks themselves are produced directly in Omsk and Nizhny Tagil. The factories located in Chelyabinsk and St. Petersburg are at the stage of conversion. As for armored personnel carriers, enterprises in Kurgan and Arzamas are engaged in their production.

Military shipbuilding

Without it, Russia's military-industrial complex cannot be considered complete.

At the same time, the largest production center in this area is St. Petersburg. Within this city there are up to 40 enterprises related to shipbuilding.

Regarding the topic of nuclear submarines, it is necessary to pay attention to the fact that at the moment their production is carried out only in Severodvinsk.

What you need to know about the conversion of the military-industrial complex

In this case, we are talking about changing the military industry, and more specifically, about its transition to the civilian market. The explanation for such a strategy is very simple: the production facilities that exist at the moment are capable of producing significantly more military products than actual demand requires. That is, neither Russia itself nor its current and potential clients need so much.

With such a prospect, one obvious maneuver remains: to reorient some of the military enterprises to the production of products that are relevant in the civilian sector. Thus, jobs will be preserved, factories will continue their stable operation, and the state will make a profit. Complete harmony.

The use of the military, so to speak, for peaceful purposes is also promising for the reason that at such enterprises there is a significant concentration of advanced technologies and specialists with a high level of qualification.

Using such a strategy, it is possible to solve at least some of the problems of the Russian military-industrial complex. At the same time, a stable production of the most relevant equipment for the army is maintained.

Obvious difficulties

Against the background of the above information, it is easy to conclude that the same conversion is not an easy task. In fact, it can be attributed to one of the most difficult tasks facing the military-industrial complex. Here simple solutions no by definition. In order to see any progress in this area, you need to constantly make significant efforts.

Another problem that has to be faced is the uncertainty about the future financing of military-industrial complex enterprises. The military-industrial complex of Russia can receive funds from the state only for those enterprises that are part of any federal program or are among the state-owned production facilities.

As for foreign investments, there are no reasons to boldly count on them yet. At the same time, plants with production lines that are already outdated or incapable of producing a wide range of competitive products, including military ones, may find themselves in a particularly difficult situation.

If we try to assess the economic state of defense enterprises as a whole, we can conclude that it is very heterogeneous. The bottom line is that there are factories whose products have a certain demand. At the same time, there are those enterprises that are in a state of deep production crisis, regardless of whether they belong to the state or not.

Nevertheless, one must be aware that the government fixes the state of some components of the military-industrial complex. This confirms the fact that the Coordinating Council approved the main directions of development and stabilization of the situation.

In addition, Russia is actively combining the fundamental and applied scientific areas within the framework of the activities of military enterprises, which significantly increases the chances of the military-industrial complex for successful development and full-fledged functioning. Competently organized efforts are also being made to maximize the compliance of products that come off the assembly line of military-industrial complex enterprises with the investment expectations of the Russian and foreign markets.

Results

Obviously, with all the difficult situation that has developed around the military-industrial complex, there are definitely chances for a bright future and a progressive present. The government is constantly working to make the necessary changes that will allow defense enterprises to operate as efficiently as possible.

And experimental design institutions that develop and manufacture military equipment, ammunition and weapons.

Before the collapse of the USSR, the military-industrial complex consisted of 1100 factories with a number working more than 9 million people, more than 900 research institutes (NII) and design bureaus (KB), as well as the army as part of the ground, air, missile, navy, border, as well as auxiliary (railway, construction ) troops. The military-industrial complex had its own spaceports, air and seaports, arsenals, test sites with a system of laboratories, a powerful communication infrastructure (transport and communications). The main part of the military-industrial complex of the USSR was located on territory of Russia and currently composes the military-industrial complex of the Russian Federation.

The military-industrial complex partially includes the production of other complexes, for example, in mechanical engineering the share of defense plants is more than 60% (Table 19, Fig. 31).

In turn, the branches of the defense industry produce civilian products, while the conversion carried out at defense industries increases the share of civilian products while reducing the defense order.

Let us briefly list the main principles that determine the geography of the branches of the military-industrial complex.

1. The main principle is the security of the location of its production, taking into account the flight time of missiles and aircraft from abroad. Hence - the location of the most important centers and enterprises of the military-industrial complex in the deep regions of the country (the Urals, Siberia).

Table 19

The role of intersectoral complexes in the production of defense products

Intersectoral complex	Defense production	Specialized defense complexes
Fuel and energy	Nuclear fuel production	Nuclear weapons (atomic weapons)
Engineering	Ship, aircraft, rocket, tank, automotive, production of communications, firearms, electronics, electrical engineering, etc.	Aerospace and rocket and space
Structural materials: metallurgical Chemical-forest	Production of composites, metal powders and rolled products Production of chemicals, compounds, lumber	Chemical weapons
Building	Cement and other production	Military construction
agro-industrial	Processing industries (casein production)
Consumer goods and services	Production of technical fabrics and uniforms

2. The principle of duplication: placement in different regions of the country of understudy enterprises. For example, aviation factories producing the same type of fighters (of the MiG or Su type) or Tu bombers are located in different parts of the country, ranging from Moscow and Nizhny Novgorod, the cities of the Volga region (Kazan, Samara, Ulyanovsk) to the Far East ( Komsomolsk-on-Amur).

3. Concentration of production and research and production associations of the military-industrial complex in Moscow and around it, where Russia has the right to create and build up anti-missile defense systems.

In the Soviet Union, as part of the military-industrial complex, there were many special closed secret cities (ZATO - closed administrative-territorial formation), many of which had special names: Arzamas-16, Chelyabinsk-65 and Chelyabinsk-70, Krasnoyarsk-26 and Krasnoyarsk-35, Tomsk -7.

They concentrated especially important objects of the military-industrial complex. Some of them are now becoming promising technopolises where the latest technologies are being developed.

Thus, the main factors in the deployment of the military-industrial complex are: security and the preservation of military potential both in peacetime and in wartime, science intensity, high qualification of personnel, and the transport factor.

Within the military-industrial complex, systems of industries (complexes) are singled out. Among them, the nuclear complex is important - a shield that ensures the country's security. The main ones in its composition are two Russian nuclear centers: in Sarov (Arzamas-16) and Snezhinsk (Chelyabinsk-70).

Nuclear weapons themselves were largely intended to be used on missile systems. Naturally, the rocket and space industry has become the most important complex of the military-industrial complex. It was especially important to prepare the scientific and technical base for astronautics and rocket science. The first large research and production centers were created in the Moscow region. First of all, this is the powerful Energia corporation, which was created in the city of Korolev (Kaliningrad). Here, under the guidance of the famous rocket designer S.P. Korolev, since 1946, work was carried out to create ballistic missiles, artificial satellites of the Earth, spacecraft were created, including Vostok, on which the first cosmonaut Yu.A. Gagarin flew. In Moscow, in the Scientific and Production Machine-Building Center named after. M. V. Khrunichev also created ballistic missiles, long-term orbital stations ("Mir"). Plants for the production of ballistic missiles in the Urals (Votkinsk, Zlatoust) and Siberia (Krasnoyarsk), and launch vehicles in Samara and Omsk operate on the basis of scientific and design developments. Rocket technology is also produced in St. Petersburg.

The main military cosmodrome of Russia, from which all the main military spacecraft and military artificial satellites were launched, is located near the city of Mirny (Plesetsk station) to the south of Arkhangelsk. Significantly more space launches were carried out here than from Baikonur, however, ships with astronauts on board launched from the latter. There was another cosmodrome - Kapustin Yar - in the Astrakhan region, which was then turned into a testing ground for testing missiles and military equipment. At present, a new Russian cosmodrome, Svobodny, has been created in the Amur Region.

To control the military space forces of Russia, a center was created in the Moscow region - the city of Krasnoznamensk (formerly Golitsino-2), and for manned space flights- Mission Control Center (MCC) in Korolyov. Near it there is a Cosmonaut Training Center - Zvezdny.

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Bystrova I.V., Ryabov G.E.

History of Soviet society in the second half of the XX century. is inextricably linked with the development of the military-industrial complex (MIC). This term was first used in 1960 by US President D. Eisenhower, who warned the American people about the danger of the growing influence of the military-industrial lobby on the life of the country.

In the West in those years there were heated discussions on this problem. Most researchers understood the military-industrial complex as the result of the merging of various socio-political groups - professional military men, owners of large military-industrial companies and government officials interested after 1945 in the escalation of military spending. A number of political scientists interpreted the military-industrial complex as the ruling class, and in some cases as the ruling elite of society or as a bureaucracy. Some historians generally denied the existence of the military-industrial complex as a more or less organized group.

It was in Western literature that the Soviet version of the military-industrial complex became the subject of study. In the works of Soviet authors of the 1960s and 1970s, such a formulation of the question aroused sharp condemnation; in them, the military-industrial complex was a symbol of the "US military". The question of the domestic military-industrial complex was not even raised. The military industry of the USSR was invariably regarded as a defense industry, a reliable shield for the fatherland and the countries of the socialist community as a whole. The situation changed only at the end of the 1980s: during the perestroika that began then, the most closed and secret part of Soviet society slowly and with difficulty became public.

Interest in studying the essence of the military-industrial complex arose not by chance. In the United States, the most furious debates around the problems of the military-industrial complex unfolded at the turn of the 1960s and 1970s in connection with major setbacks in Vietnam War. In Russia, this happened under the influence of the total crisis of the Soviet system. Because of this, most of the publications were overly politicized. Blaming the military-industrial complex for all the misfortunes of a society involved in a senseless arms race, historians and publicists did not always back up their conclusions with documents. At the same time, they drew public attention to the role of the military-industrial complex in Soviet society, showed the need to reform the gigantic military-industrial machine, which for decades determined the course of the country's economic and political development. The Russian reader first got acquainted with the data on the composition and deployment of the strategic nuclear forces of the USSR, which have been known in the West for a long time.

In the 90s, memoirs of a number of prominent organizers of the Soviet military-industrial complex, scientists, specialists, whose names were known in the West until then, but never appeared on the pages of domestic newspapers, magazines, books, saw the light of day. And although the wall of the former secrecy has not collapsed, much has become known. True, in Russian literature, the idea of ​​the military-industrial complex as a defense sector of the national economy still prevails, which developed only in order to protect the USSR and the countries of the socialist camp from the capitalist encirclement led by the United States. This article is based on a fundamentally different approach to the problem. The military-industrial complex is seen as a kind of superstructure within Soviet society. It arose, firstly, as a result of the merging of the party, military, state and economic bureaucracy, and, secondly, in the course of the creation of an extensive military-industrial infrastructure throughout the country.

The lack of knowledge of the military-industrial complex gives researchers the opportunity not only to be among the pioneers. The noted circumstance forces us to focus on consideration of only some important issues. It is important first of all to show the causes and conditions for the emergence of the military-industrial complex in the USSR, the main factors that determined its development, the main directions and dynamics of the arms race. This will allow us to consider the relationship between political changes in the life of society and the development of the military-industrial complex. Given the above, we will mainly consider how the nuclear missile complex arose, which during the years of the Cold War was the main strategic direction of the confrontation between the two military-political blocs, the arms race.

The creation of the military-industrial complex of the USSR, to a certain extent, is connected with the age-old historical traditions of Russia, which left an indelible imprint on the views and lifestyle of all segments of the population. The priority of the state over society, imperial ambitions and the hypertrophied ideas of national security associated with this created the socio-psychological, economic and political prerequisites for the formation of the military-industrial complex.

The origins of the Soviet military-industrial complex go back to the 20-30s, when a specific society was created in the USSR - it was dominated by one form of ownership, one party, one ideology, one leader. At that time, and especially in the 1930s, the defense industry developed rapidly and militarization of other branches of the national economy took place. This process was imposed on the economy and society for certain political purposes (here, the continuity of the traditions of the Russian Empire was traced).

In the mid-1930s, the military industry began to take shape in a special system of industries with special financing, special-security secret enterprises, whose military expenditures were allocated in a separate line in the budget and were considered state secrets. These tendencies intensified markedly during the years of the military-industrial boom.

At the same time, on the wave of pre-war militarization, a new galaxy of leaders emerged - young technocrats, who later took the helm of the post-war military-industrial complex.

Among them were such well-known leaders as V.A. Malyshev, D.F. Ustinov, E.P. Slavsky, M.Z. Saburov, M.G. Pervukhin, A.I. Shakhurin, A.N. Kosygin. Their nomination was associated both with the organization of new defense industries, and with the pre-war purges of the senior command staff of the Red Army. Most of them had a secondary or higher technical education and some experience in industry, which significantly helped them subsequently to actively participate in the creation of new military-industrial industries - nuclear, missile, radio electronics.

The conventional arms race and the restructuring of the economy for military needs reached its peak during the Second World War. But, in our opinion, this factor was not the leading factor in the formation of the military-industrial complex as a power and socio-economic structure. Ultimately, this superstructure took shape in conditions when the deployment of the scientific and technological revolution (STR) and the emergence of a bipolar world became a reality. This meant that a system of two opposing military-political blocs and a fundamentally new weapon of mass destruction—nuclear missiles—were being created. It was this that predetermined the historical fate of the military-industrial complex, the development of which for the first time made the death of earthly civilization real, which, in turn, was a deterrent that did not allow opposing sides use atomic and hydrogen bombs.

The formation of the military-industrial complex became an attribute of the Cold War and the struggle for a new "redistribution of the world." The norm was military rivalry, which repeatedly escalated into local crises. The apogee of the policy pursued at that time was the Cuban Missile Crisis - for the first time the world faced a real threat of a nuclear catastrophe. After 1962 there was some sobering up of politicians.

Within this period, two stages are traditionally distinguished: the end of the Stalin era, the peak of Stalinism (1946-1953) and the beginning of the thaw, i.e. next decade.

But, paradoxically, it was after Stalin's death, when the country's leadership attempted democratic changes in society, that a new military-economic boom began, unprecedented in pace and size. As a result, from the end of the 1950s, an intensive self-development of the military-industrial complex began, which soon became the dominant feature of the life of Soviet society. It is all the more important to emphasize that if repressions continued in the first post-war years, methods of emergency management of the country, all spheres of the national economy, including the military-industrial complex, were used, then the period that began in 1953 was outwardly more calm and liberal.

The most important feature of the initial period of the Cold War was that it was the time of Stalin's undivided rule. The leader single-handedly formed the main directions of policy, including in the field of armaments, tightly controlling the most important areas of development of strategic weapons. To talk about any kind of independence of the military and military-industrial leadership in 1945-1953. do not have to. In an effort to strengthen control over the law enforcement agencies, which had greater independence and influence during the war years, Stalin inspired a number of trials against military leaders (the aviation case, in particular, the conviction of Air Marshal A.A. Novikov, People's Commissar of the aviation industry A.I. Shakhurin and their entourage) . The continuation of this policy was the removal of G.K. Zhukov and a number of other heroes of the war.

Instead, Stalin put people from his inner circle to fundamentally important posts, whom he easily manipulated (the tactics of shuffling personnel was characteristic of the leader at all stages of his reign). The leadership of the ground forces was entrusted to N.A. Bulganin, who did not enjoy authority either among the professional military or in the highest party circles.

At the same time, other loyal comrades-in-arms of Stalin occupied high posts. Special Committee No. 1 under the Council of Ministers, called upon to deal with atomic affairs, was headed by Beria, and Special Committee No. 2 on rocket technology was headed by Malenkov. These people, who were not professional soldiers, became the top of the Soviet military-industrial complex in the mid-40s. In obedience to Stalin, they put into practice his plans for the participation of the USSR in the nuclear missile race. At the initial stage of the Cold War, the nature of this race was associated with the creation, development and first steps in the distribution of the latest weapons of mass destruction. However, the methods of mobilizing resources basically remained the same: slavish-feudal exploitation of the majority of the country's population in the form of nationwide competition in the name of the speedy restoration of the war-ravaged economy and the rise in the material well-being of the working people.

To better imagine the situation in the country by the end of the war, let us recall the well-known figures. During the war years, the victorious country lost three-quarters of its national wealth. According to official figures, 70,000 villages and 1,710 cities were destroyed. The industry was severely destroyed in the territories that were under occupation, and in the rest of the territories it was almost completely transferred to the production of military products. The total population of the USSR decreased from 196 million in 1941 to 170 million in 1946, i.e. for 26 million people.

At the same time, real losses were carefully hidden from the people. Summing up the results of the war in a speech at the pre-election meeting of voters of the Stalinist electoral district of Moscow on February 9, 1946, Stalin noted the successes of domestic industry, comparing industrial production in 1940 with 1913. But not a word was said about the post-war state of the country's economy.

During the next five years, the leader promised to restore the pre-war level of industry and agriculture, to pay special attention to increasing the output of consumer goods. In fact, the economy was restored and developed not at all to improve the well-being of the people. The globalist plans of Stalin, obsessed with the idea of ​​world domination, the emergence of socialism beyond the boundaries of one country, demanded the approval of the status of the USSR as a great superpower. To do this, in the coming nuclear age, the country under the leadership of the leader had to concentrate all efforts on mastering new weapons of mass destruction.

Solving such an unprecedented task required overcoming equally difficult obstacles. The situation was aggravated by the fact that the USSR (unlike the USA) did not have the opportunity during the war years to concentrate efforts on the implementation of the atomic project. Not the last factor that determined the lag in this area was the belated realization by the country's leadership of the importance and possibility of creating this new weapon.

But when awareness came, the most extreme measures were taken. Now it is already known how large-scale the country's leadership used not only the scientific potential of the USSR. Without fear of exaggeration, one can say that the efforts of the entire Soviet people, including the domestic special services, were energetically directed towards the elimination of the US nuclear monopoly. Western researchers were the first to talk about this, and already in the 1950s they touched upon the topic of Soviet "atomic espionage".

This issue was discussed with new acuteness in connection with the publication in the United States in 1994 of the memoirs of the former KGB general P.A. Sudoplatov, who in the 1940s was directly involved in obtaining materials on the progress of work on the atomic bomb in the United States. Using a number of original documents from Soviet archives and his own materials, the author shows that the most important information was obtained by the NKVD and other special agencies with the help of Soviet intelligence workers who came into contact with some of the creators of the American bomb. First of all, we are talking about physicists who voluntarily agreed to "leak information" for the sake of the balance of power in the post-war world. Many veterans of the Soviet nuclear project and Western researchers found this approach to reporting on the past an insult. Some were disgusted by the belittling of their own role in the creation of the Soviet atomic bomb; others felt that individual American scientists were portrayed as traitors and spies.

Whatever the disagreement on this issue, most writers acknowledge that intelligence played a significant role in 1942-1945. - at the initial stage of the Soviet atomic project. Particularly authoritative is the opinion of Academician Yu.B. Khariton, who headed the team of the Arzamas-16 atomic center. In 1994, at the height of the controversy, he said: “Intelligence allowed our physicists to shorten the time as much as possible, helped to avoid a “misfire” in the production of the first atomic explosion, which had tremendous political significance. Intelligence made I.V. Kurchatov the most informed nuclear physicist, who, knowing the achievements of his colleagues, at the same time, at an important stage of the nuclear race, was privy to the results of Western specialists.

However, many historical evidence and documents remain inaccessible to the modern Russian reader. Thus, the journal Questions of the History of Natural Science and Technology (1992. No. 3), which published archival documents on the history of the Soviet atomic project, was withdrawn from circulation, although Western authors continue to actively refer to them, using copies that have managed to go on sale. The mentioned book by P.A. Sudoplatov, twice published abroad, was published in Russia only in September 1996.

It seems that until now, some forces at any cost want to preserve the legend of the omnipotence of the Stalinist regime, capable of solving any, even the most difficult task, moreover, in an unprecedentedly short time, relying solely on internal discoveries, resources, experience and personnel.

Life, however, takes precedence over decrepit dogmas. Most researchers and veterans confirm that only the use of atomic bombs by the Americans in Japan in August 1945 made the atomic project program No. 1 for the Stalinist leadership.

On August 20, 1945, by a decree of the State Defense Committee (GKO), a special committee No. 1 was created, endowed with special powers to eliminate the US atomic monopoly. It was headed by Beria, which testified to the extreme urgency of the tasks set. Even during the war years, as deputy chairman of the State Defense Committee and People's Commissar of Internal Affairs, he gained extensive experience in mobilizing the military industry. A skilled administrator, Beria had at his disposal a colossal force that kept the whole society in fear - the apparatus of the NKVD. With its help, he was able to quickly mobilize resources and exercise control to vigorously solve problems of paramount importance. In the opinion of the party and state leadership, the already created and well-established repressive-protective system was the best suited for this purpose. The secret practice of total surveillance, filtering, and selection of personnel also came in handy. Back in 1944, the NKVD began to recall specialists in rare metals from the front, and since 1945, all work on uranium was transferred to the NKVD, which had at its disposal huge resources of the GULAG workforce.

Forced labor became one of the main sources of labor force mobilization for the creation of the nuclear industry, especially in the first post-war years, when the mass construction of enterprises, cities, and roads began. At the same time, the development of uranium mines began for the first time.

As one of the leaders of the atomic project B.L. Vannikov, Beria suggested that Stalin completely transfer the management of the project to his department and create a special department within the NKVD for this purpose. Vannikov cautiously objected to such a proposal. The experienced people's commissar considered it necessary for the participation of specialists in the management of the project and in its implementation, and not just the heads of the NKVD and prisoners.

These considerations appealed to Stalin, because, as always, he was not interested in excessively strengthening the power of one person or one department, acting on the principle of "divide and rule." As a result, the secretary of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks G.M. Malenkov, Deputy Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR M.G. Pervukhin, Chairman of the State Planning Commission N.A. Voznesensky, People's Commissar of Ammunition B.L. Vannikov, Deputy Commissar of Internal Affairs A.P. Zavenyagin, Scientific Supervisor of the Program, Head of Laboratory No. 2 of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR I.V. Kurchatov, Director of the Institute of Physical Problems Academician P.L. Kapitsa. In this composition, the emergency committee was actually a superstructure that symbolized and reflected the essence of the military-industrial complex. Within the framework of the newly emerged body, endowed with enormous powers, there was an apical merging of the strategic and departmental interests of party and state leaders with the interests of representatives of the security services, business executives, and scientists. However, at this stage, the committee did not formally include representatives of the military (if we mean the heads of individual branches and types of troops). This can be partly explained by the fact that the work was at an early stage and was still far from army tests and the need to use ranges.

For daily management and coordination of work on the organization of the nuclear industry, on August 30, 1945, the First Main Directorate (PGU) headed by B.L. Vannikov. The composition of the PGU mainly included representatives of the senior level of industry and the NKVD: Deputy People's Commissar of Internal Affairs A.P. Zavenyagin, deputy member of the State Committee for Geology P.Ya. Antropov, Deputy People's Commissar of the chemical industry A.G. Kasatkin, Deputy Chairman of the State Planning Committee of the USSR N.A. Borisov, Deputy People's Commissar of Internal Affairs P.Ya. Meshik. Later, the Deputy People's Commissar for Non-Ferrous Metallurgy E.P. Slavsky, Deputy People's Commissar for Ferrous Metallurgy B.C. Emelyanov and the head of Glavpromstroy of the NKVD A.N. Komarovsky.

All previously created laboratories and facilities were transferred to PSU: Laboratory No. 2 of the Academy of Sciences, the State Union Design Institute in Leningrad and machine building plant No. 48 in Moscow, the largest uranium ore mining plant in Tajikistan, formerly under the jurisdiction of the NKVD, and one of the secret research institutes.

At the same time, various facilities were created for the research and industrial stage of the atomic project: special design bureaus (SKB or KB) at the Leningrad plants Elektrosila and them. Kirov, etc. At the end of 1945-beginning of 1946, a decision was made to build a research complex for the design of nuclear weapons near Arzamas in the village of Sarov, and a plant for the production of enriched uranium-235 in the Middle Urals. Sites were selected for the construction of the first industrial reactor in the South Urals to produce weapons-grade plutonium.

This program required the utmost concentration of efforts of many ministries, research institutes, and laboratories. On April 9, 1946, the Council of Ministers approved the structure of the PGU. Within the administration, there has been a clear delineation of responsibilities between its members. So, E.P. Slavsky was responsible for the work on obtaining graphite for the first reactors, P.Ya. Antropov - for geological exploration and development of uranium deposits, A.P. Zavenyagin and A.N. Komarovsky - for the construction of closed cities, the construction of secret enterprises and institutions, as well as providing them with a workforce.

The Special Committee and the CCGT received the right to requisition the resources of any sector of the economy for the needs of the emerging nuclear industry without limitation. This often led to clashes between CCGT representatives and employees of various industries, who, to the detriment of departmental or local interests, were forced to give away scarce raw materials, change plans, etc. At the same time, they often did not know the true reasons for the adjustments that complicated the work of their enterprises. It was not only the secrecy of tasks that affected. The leaders of the nuclear complex believed that new laboratories and enterprises should not be created in those cases when the products needed by nuclear scientists could be obtained at existing plants with the help of orders from CCGTs. So, A.P. Zavenyagin, prone to humor, more than once jokingly said that the organization of the nuclear industry differs from the usual scheme for creating new industries in other industries, since it lacks elements of time.

There was a great deal of truth in Beria's deputy's joke: he had to hurry. This approach promised the acceleration of construction and other types of work, but was accompanied by the requirement of additional cash costs. CCGT orders were very often paid for without any estimates and at the highest rates. Therefore, in a number of cases, they were beneficial to those civilian enterprises that, working at CCGT, made up for the lack of funds necessary to expand their production, update it, and, if possible, return to pre-war indicators.

A paradoxical situation arose: the emergency bodies created to organize the production of new weapons of mass destruction played an important role in economic recovery. On the whole, however, the dominant feature of the period, which was called the recovery period, was the satisfaction of the needs of the nuclear industry, and then the rocket and other branches of the Soviet military-industrial complex. Thus, the national interests of the country were subordinated to the political goals of the Cold War.

From the very beginning, the military-industrial complex was hidden from the population of the USSR by a dense veil of secrecy. Those who were restoring, say, the Dneproges with super-intense labor, were unaware that the lion's share of electricity would be used to supply the military industries.

The society was not supposed to know anything about the existence of the secret empire of the military-industrial complex. The decree of August 20, 1945 stated that all work carried out in the field of CCGT and related enterprises was controlled only by a special committee: “No organizations, institutions and persons without special permission from the State Defense Committee have the right to interfere in the activities of the First Main Directorate enterprises and institutions, or require information about his work or work carried out on orders from the CCGT.”

Closed nuclear cities grew up in deaf remote places, isolated from the outside world, since in such conditions it was easier to organize a strictly classified zone. In general, the word "zone" has become a household word and even frightening not only for those who guarded the centers of the nuclear industry, but also for local residents. So, when organizing the first of the closed zones in the Lenin-Bad region of Tajikistan, all people of the indigenous nationality were evicted, and the name of the village of Tabashary, where they used to live, was even forbidden to be mentioned. A similar thing happened with the ancient name of the future Arzamas-16 - Serov, which, by order of the KGB authorized P.Ya. Mexica was effectively erased from the map. The name of this object has changed several times - "base", "office", "mailbox", etc. Residents are accustomed to living in such a bizarre unreality. Since the mention of old names became dangerous, people tried to avoid it.

Arzamas-16, Krasnoyarsk-25, Chelyabinsk-70 and other nuclear cities were at the highest level of secrecy in the hierarchy of Soviet society, permeated from top to bottom with the phenomenon state secret. The entire system of the First Main Directorate under the Council of Ministers, being the most important component of the military-industrial complex, existed outside the control not only of local party and Soviet organizations, but also of the usual economic and financial bodies of the state. It is no coincidence that in the report for 1946-1947. officials of the Department of Financing of the Armed Forces under the Council of Ministers of the USSR, which, among other departments, financed the expenses of the PSU and special laboratories of the USSR Academy of Sciences, complained about the "uncontrolled financing" of the PSU "due to the fact that the required calculations and reporting materials are not submitted to the Ministry of Finance."

Moreover, in a special letter dated May 8, 1948, the leadership of the PSU forbade their organizations to give any information about their activities to the party and Soviet bodies. On this basis, sometimes there were conflicts and misunderstandings. For example, the management of the Dvigatel plant, subordinated to PSU, turned to the Central Committee of the Communist Party (b) of the Estonian SSR with a request to select a candidate for the enterprise for the position of party organizer of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks. In response, the republican Central Committee demanded from the director of the plant Kashuro and the secretary of the party bureau Dolmatov "a certificate characterizing the profile of the plant, its purpose, capacity and prospects for its development, indicating digital data." The management of the plant turned to the department of mechanical engineering of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, hoping to get support. But the department considered it inexpedient to establish the position of Party organizer of the Central Committee at this enterprise due to the small number of communists in the work team.

The party archives contain many documents of similar content. So, the secretary of the South Kazakhstan Regional Committee of the Communist Party (b) of Kazakhstan Suleimenov complained to the Central Committee of the party M.A. Suslov that the construction of PGU No. 830 (at the same time, he mentions only the number, and the decoding of the object’s ownership is already given in the memorandum of the mechanical engineering department to the secretary of the Central Committee G.M. Malenkov) “is absolutely beyond the control of the party and Soviet organizations of the region”, which is why to check the "signals" about the abuses of the head of construction, Khaustov. In this regard, the regional committee asked to allow local party bodies "to take control and leadership of construction No. 830 in matters of party political work and the progress of construction."

However, Malenkov decided otherwise. He instructed to check the complaint by the workers of the CCGT. Based on the results of the inspection, PGU submitted to the Central Committee a proposal to relieve Khaustov of his duties as construction manager. The resolution of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks on this issue took place on November 19, 1949.

Many such troubles complicated the already unprecedentedly difficult work in the elimination of the US nuclear monopoly. This is all the more important to emphasize that domestic publicists have drawn a favorable picture of the knowledge of the secrets of the atomic nucleus by Soviet scientists in the name of strengthening the defense might of the USSR. Sometimes the very situation of emergency is idealized, the administrative-command style of work, headed by the Lubyanka Marshal and his zealous assistants, is glorified. At the same time, American scientists believed that the Kremlin would possess atomic weapons ten years later than the White House, which became a monopolist in 1945. They did not question the talent and knowledge of Soviet physicists, chemists, mathematicians, researchers and practitioners, but for The devastating losses of the USSR in the Second World War were not a secret. It was not difficult to determine the extent to which the economic potential of the Soviet Union lagged behind the production capacities of the United States.

In this respect, the statements of those who created the world's first atomic bomb coincide with the point of view of our journalists and newspapermen. But, relying on their own experience, US scientists took into account something else: the exceptional importance of work culture, the degree of qualification of workers, laboratory assistants, engineers and, of course, the organizers of the production process, managers. Along with this, the inevitability of colossal financial costs was taken into account, the discovery of which turned out to be a difficult task even for the American authorities.

For overseas analysts, the most difficult question turned out to be how the USSR could train in a short time a lot of specialists in previously unknown specialties for work in industries that were being created for the first time? Where will the country that has suffered the greatest losses in the war be able to find the means to overcome the backlog in a few years and become the second nuclear power? Across the ocean, the opinion prevailed that the Soviet Union would not create nuclear weapons without first restoring the national economy.

Assumptions expressed abroad were not confirmed. However, so far Russia has not paid tribute to the feat of our compatriots, whose super-hard work amazed the world: already in 1949, Soviet atomic weapons were successfully tested at the Semipalatinsk test site. The USSR confirmed the right to be considered the second superpower in the world. But essays on individual scientists and teams that solved this problem cannot give a holistic view of the scale and realities of the process, which for many decades predetermined the fate of not only Soviet society, but of all mankind.

The absence of works objectively showing this process reflects the general difficulties in the development of historical science in Russia, including present stage. To describe the path from the creation of Special Committee No. 1 in August 1945 to the test in Kazakhstan, which took place four years later, it is necessary not only to declassify, but also to study a lot of archival documents. Without this, it is impossible to describe the activities of party and state bodies in the center and in the localities, the work of law enforcement agencies and special services, the role of the Gulag in solving the atomic problem, the life of closed cities, etc. This is not about highlighting individual topics or problems, but about writing the history of Soviet society, which already in the early years of the Cold War was entirely associated with Stalin's course towards victorious competition between the two camps. The creation of the Soviet atomic bomb was not an end in itself, it was the most important step on the previously outlined path.

Scientific understanding of this decision and subsequent events is just beginning. Historians have to overcome many objective and subjective difficulties, but a start has been made. Today we know for certain with what determination the leader threw all the resources of the devastated country into the creation of the nuclear industry. It is also well known that in the autumn of 1945 the Soviet leadership received from the English citizen K. Fuchs, who was directly involved in the Manhattan project, a detailed description of the atomic bomb, as well as information about the production of uranium-235 and plutonium in the USA.

This information, obtained from an experienced researcher (he worked, by the way, disinterestedly and refused to receive any material reward from Moscow), was of great political importance: on its basis, the Soviet secret services calculated how many atomic bombs the Americans could produce when this happened. It was found that the United States and Great Britain were capable of accumulating enough nuclear weapons to attack the USSR no earlier than 1955.

Was the unbridled pursuit of the atomic bomb necessary under these conditions, undertaken in a bloodless country in dire need of restoring the economy and a normal standard of living? The government of the USSR was well aware of the plight of the working people in all union republics. In the 1990s, materials confirming this conclusion were first published. The situation was aggravated by the fact that in 1946-1947. the country, in which the majority of the population was engaged mainly in rural labor, experienced a massive famine. It covered not only rural areas, but also Moscow, Leningrad, the capitals of the republics, the cities of Siberia. The reduction in food prices promised by Stalin did not happen: on the contrary, prices in September 1946 were increased by 2-2.5 times. About 20 million people lived in the famine-stricken regions of the RSFSR, Ukraine, and Moldova. In 1947, the population of these regions decreased by 5-6 million people compared to 1946 (both due to flight to other regions and due to high mortality).

We do not claim that the famine was a direct consequence of the arms race, but in any case it was drawing the last juices out of the devastated village. In 1948, the agricultural tax increased by 30% compared with 1947, and by 1950, by 2.5 times. Even after the abolition of the rationing system (December 1947), peculiar forms of serfdom persisted, blocking the way for the rural population to the city: the existence of a propiska, the deprivation of peasants of passports, etc.

It is reasonable to assume that if Soviet nuclear weapons had been tested not in 1949, but two or three years later, the competition with the United States would not have been accompanied by such sacrifices on the part of Soviet society. But official propaganda persistently oriented the country towards the speedy elimination of the US nuclear monopoly. US imperialism has been declared Enemy No. 1, capable of using its military advantage above all against the homeland of world socialism. It was in such conditions that a new industry was created and one of the main strongholds of the military-industrial complex - the nuclear industry.

During the creation of a closed nuclear empire, specific social groups were formed that were directly related to the military-industrial complex. They were united by special corporate interests and psychology. Due to the closeness and secrecy of the system, they led a secluded lifestyle (they did not travel abroad, did not meet with foreign scientists, only occasionally participated in meetings of the USSR Academy of Sciences, etc.). Even those of them who were elected deputies of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR did not have the right to communicate with voters. Only in the mid-1950s did this regime soften somewhat. The country has learned the names of some outstanding physicists. The appearance of I.V. Kurchatov on the podium of the XX Congress of the CPSU was a real sensation. His speech in London, where the head of the Soviet atomic project flew in as part of a government delegation led by Khrushchev, had an international resonance.

Of course, the elite in question enjoyed relative “freedom” even under Stalin, since the leader and his henchman Beria knew that no one could replace these people at the helm of the atomic project. Yes, and scientists worked not for fear, but for conscience. One can agree with the American researcher D. Holloway, author of the book "Stalin and the Atomic Bomb", that the participation of Soviet physicists in the uranium project allowed them to maintain "an island of intellectual autonomy in a totalitarian society."

Selfless work for eighteen hours a day was the everyday norm for engineers, technicians, workers, scientists who worked to create the nuclear missile power of the USSR as opposed to the "US nuclear monopoly". Their general mood is clearly expressed in the memoirs of the three times Hero of Socialist Labor, an outstanding public figure, academician A.D. Sakharov. Joining the nuclear project in 1948, when "atomic weapons were already on the way in our country", he then played a leading role in the creation of the Soviet hydrogen bomb (hence the abundance of awards and high rank academician at a young age). In this "great collective work," Sakharov wrote, "a huge number of people took part - both extremely enterprising and making great efforts. I also made great efforts, because I thought: this is necessary for world balance ... I and others thought that only in this way could a third world war be prevented.

They really worked selflessly, caring little about their health, forgetting too often about the danger of exposure. A striking example of this is the short life of Academician V.G. Khlopin. He was born in 1890 in Perm. He graduated from the Leningrad University, having connected his life with radiochemistry. Together with V.I. Vernadsky created the Radium Institute in the 1920s, which he headed in 1939. A year later, he was already in charge of the Uranium Commission. His scientific works were important for the successful promotion of the Soviet atomic project. In 1949, among the first physicists, Khlopin was awarded the title of Hero of Socialist Labor. He was instructed to create the largest center near Chelyabinsk, similar to Arzamas-16. Alas, work with plutonium ended his life in 1950, when he was 60 years old.

At the same age, three times Hero of Socialist Labor K.I. Shchelkin and I.V. Kurchatov... The mournful list is easy to replenish, especially since next to outstanding scientists and under their supervision, tens, and later hundreds of thousands of ordinary scientists, engineers, workers worked day after day, sometimes without days off and holidays. At the end of 1948, 55,000 people worked in the CCGT system (excluding builders, mostly military men and prisoners), as well as employees of more than 100 involved organizations. The total number can be judged by the following example: the plant in Chelyabinsk-40 in 1947-1948. erected by about 45 thousand people.

The population of nuclear-rocket cities was formed on a voluntary-compulsory basis. The question of whether to go or not to go according to distribution to one or another closed center did not arise. They did not argue with party workers and state security officers. E.P. Slavsky, one of the organizers of the nuclear industry, who led the Ministry of Medium Machine Building for over 30 years, wrote about this: , selected, attracted. They checked up to the tenth generation along the line of the regime ... It was difficult to attract outstanding scientists and engineers to us - everyone was terribly afraid, especially scientists, they seemed to fall into isolation.

The combination of enthusiasm with wartime discipline was perceived by most of the workers as a natural state caused by the Cold War, which was imposed on socialism by the West. The mobilization of resources in such an environment implied both strict control by the punitive departments and a high measure of responsibility. Therefore, no one was surprised that Beria, having arrived at the first diffusion plant in 1949, said at a meeting with the local leadership: “Everything that you asked and demanded, the country gave you in abundance with all its difficulties. Therefore, I give you a period of three months to solve all the problems of launching the plant. But I warn you: do not do it - cook crackers. There will be no mercy. If you do everything right, we will reward you.”

Everyone was well aware that Beria did not throw words into the wind. After the first successful test of the Soviet nuclear device RDS-1 (which, according to one version, meant "Russia does it herself"), the project participants were awarded. The legend says that Beria distributed the awards as follows: those who, if the test failed, were to be shot, received the title of Hero of Socialist Labor; those who would receive the maximum terms of imprisonment were awarded the Order of Lenin, and so on. Even if this version is not entirely reliable, it allows us to better imagine the environment in which the creators of the Soviet bomb worked.

The first Soviet nuclear device, which, strictly speaking, was not a bomb, was tested primarily for political purposes. As you know, in order to maximize its creation, Stalin decided to copy the already well-known American version of the device.

A similar situation arose during the development of the first Soviet long-range ballistic missile, which was designed on the model of the German V-2, although at the same time more advanced domestic samples were created. A copy of the American B-26 aircraft was the Soviet long-range bomber TU-4. According to authoritative scientists, the borrowing of foreign samples caused damage to the scientific and technical progress of the USSR, and significantly increased the cost of producing the first samples. But Stalin had other plans. He was not just in a hurry to get the desired result. The leader was an amazingly distrustful person, especially when he clearly felt weak or even completely lacking in his knowledge. The mechanism of an atomic explosion, or, say, rocket technology, was one of them in the first place.

Stalin believed: to reproduce what has already been done by others is easier than to create your own in unknown ways. In addition, the secret services did a great job. A special success was the discovery in the Far East of an American aircraft that fell into a swamp at the end of the war and remained unharmed. A.N. Tupolev to create in a short time a domestic machine of a higher class, the generalissimo resolutely rejected. “If you,” he warned the designer, “change even one node in the aircraft in question and it does not match the model, I will again send you to prison.”

Apparently, Stalin believed that the creation of such a copy is already evidence of the level and quality of the work of scientists and those teams that are engaged in super-important work aimed at strengthening the USSR as a power competing with the United States. For the sake of this, it was possible not to spare the people's funds, including the use of "trophy" scientists, engineers, workers.

Foreign specialists, primarily German, were mainly involved in the creation of the first samples of Soviet nuclear missile weapons. They were even given favorable conditions: Finnish houses were built for them in closed settlements, special rations were allocated, they were provided with the highest salaries, etc. In general, the inhabitants of closed cities (except, of course, prisoners) were in a privileged position compared to the majority of the country's population. In the first post-war years, they still lived, as a rule, in barracks (although the higher authorities lived in cottages), but in the 1950s and later, comfortable houses, kindergartens, sports facilities, etc. were built in the territories of closed cities.

When one of the creators of the first bomb, engineer V.I. Zhuchikhin arrived in 1947 from hungry Moscow to the future Arzamas-16 (then Design Bureau No. 11), he was struck by what he saw: the most favorable working conditions were created, all workers received housing, preferential cards for food and clothing.

The salary of an average engineer at that time was 1,300 rubles. Many highly skilled workers received 2-3 times more. Personal salaries for leading designers in a number of military branches in 1946-1947. ranged from 5 to 10 thousand rubles. The average wage of a worker in the USSR was several times higher than that of collective farmers and state farm workers.

Thus, a worker in the military-industrial complex has always been provided better than a worker employed in unclassified production. In the most privileged position (meaning housing, life, recreational conditions, etc.) were residents of closed cities. Otherwise, under Stalin, the whole society remained closed from the outside world; travel abroad, tourism were the exception. Perhaps the crown of secrecy was the law passed in 1947, which forbade marriages with foreigners.

The observance of such top secrecy was largely due to the successes of the Soviet nuclear scientists, who at the turn of the 1940s and 1950s managed to get ahead of American colleagues. The latter circumstance intensified the activities of the overseas special services, which, in turn, began to hunt for secret information about the laboratories and enterprises of the USSR that developed new models of nuclear missile weapons, which often actually surpassed the developments of foreign scientists in terms of their tactical and technical characteristics.

This was most clearly manifested in the solution of the missile problem. Already during the creation of nuclear weapons, the question of its carriers - the means of delivery to the target - was on the agenda. In the United States, a course was taken to use and improve long-range bombers; in the USSR, preference was given to missiles. Russia used to have good traditions in the development of rocket technology. In the 30s, the previous experience was multiplied by the Group for the Study of Jet Propulsion (GIRD), the Jet Institute (on the eve of the war, renamed NII-3), the aviation design bureau of V.F. Bolkhovitinov. Successfully engaged in the development of rocket technology talented scientists, engineers, designers: F.A. Zander, M.K. Tikhonravov, G.E. Langemak, SP. Korolev, V.P. Glushko and others.

However, on the eve of the war, rocket men fell out of favor with the leader in connection with the “case” of Tukhachevsky, who actively helped the first scientific and technical societies to study jet propulsion. In 1933, design engineer V.P. Glushko; he was sentenced to eight years in labor camps "for participating in a counter-revolutionary organization." A year later, a senior engineer of the same joint venture institute received the same term. Korolev. Both were lucky: in 1944, they were released for valuable work that had "important defense value." They ended up in a large group of specialists (factory directors, shop managers, defense laboratories, engineers, designers), whom Beria introduced to Stalin for release with subsequent assignment to work in the aircraft industry.

But they hardly had to work in this area. Soon, at the behest of the same leadership, they received officer ranks and ended up in Germany, where they searched for and studied the latest technology. As in the case of the atomic bomb, the strategic importance of rocket technology was not immediately recognized by the country's leadership. However, in 1945, during the division of war trophies, when the United States removed from Germany the documents and equipment of the rocket center, and at the same time the "father" of the German FAA missiles, W. von Braun, the Kremlin became more active. The desire to keep up with the development of the legacy of the "Third Reich", to get their share of the booty was realized, in particular, by sending to Germany in July 1945 a large group of domestic specialists in rockets, engines, control systems, ground equipment. Among them were M.K. Tikhonravov, V.P. Glushko, SP. Korolev, V.P. Barmin, A.M. Isaev, N.A. Pilyugin is the future color of Russian rocket science. V.I. also arrived. Voznyuk, who went down in history as the first head of the missile range near the village of Kapustin Yar, Astrakhan region. (Later, the first-born of Russian rocket science during the Cold War were tested there.)

People's commissars who came to Germany, in particular D.F. Ustinov, A.I. Shakhurin, I.G. Kabanov. The first of them represented the People's Commissariat for Armaments, the second - for the aviation industry, the third - for the electrical industry, that is, precisely those departments that, as is now known, were in especially close contact with rocket technology. However, this did not come to light immediately, because according to the staff list, each of them already had a lot of responsibilities, and they did not even dream of free time. As a result, Kabanov's subordinates were engaged in radio equipment, electrical engineering, and radar. The aviators looked down on the German V-2s, perceiving them as a weapon that did not really justify itself, and hardly promising in flight business.

The Supreme Commander-in-Chief, whose personnel policy was always full of intrigues, used the passivity and oversight that was made by the People's Commissar of the Aviation Industry and Malenkov, a member of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, who oversaw this People's Commissariat. And when the analysis of the “aviation case” took place at the highest level, Shakhurin and Malenkov were charged with negligence, allegedly deliberately committed by them when assessing the prospects for using German missiles. The gifted and state-minded young Colonel-General D.F. acted in a fundamentally different way. Ustinov. People from the entourage of the People's Commissar of Armaments quickly realized the magnitude and foresight of Glushko, Korolev, Isaev, and other rocket men who arrived through the aviation industry, but did not receive the proper support from their direct superiors. Almost the most sick of rockets V.M. Ryabikov, Ustinov's constant deputy throughout his career. He helped the people's commissar understand that rockets are not the brainchild of aviation and not a continuation of artillery technology. A new branch was born, adjacent to those named, but in the future absolutely independent and militarily extremely important.

Ustinov pondered for a long time what and how to say to Stalin. Finally, in April 1946, he made up his mind and made an appointment. The success exceeded all expectations of the People's Commissar and his associates. Already on May 13, 1946, the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks and the Council of Ministers adopted a decision according to which the main set of organizational measures for the creation of a new type of strategic weapon was transferred to the Ministry of Arms (then still the People's Commissariat). D.F. became the head of rocket production. Ustinov.

The resolution provided for the creation of a central coordinating body for jet technology - the Committee on Jet Technology under the Council of Ministers of the USSR, later renamed Special Committee No. 2. Its composition was largely the same as the composition of the atomic committee. Member of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR G.M. Malenkov. The committee included the heads of the main ministries involved in the development of jet weapons: the already mentioned D.F. Ustinov, I.D. Zubovich, who was previously the first deputy people's commissar of the electrical industry, P.N. Goremykin, Minister of Agricultural Engineering, and Deputy Chairman of the State Planning Committee of the USSR P.I. Kirpichnikov. Included in the committee, Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs I.A. Serov was the deputy chief of the Soviet military administration in Germany for civil administration; he was supposed to provide conditions for the work of institutes, laboratories and factories for jet technology in Germany. Scientists in the committee were represented by Academician A.I. Berg, director of the Institute of Radio Engineering and Radioelectronics of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. The only difference from the atomic committee was that the new committee included a representative of the military - the head of the Main Artillery Directorate and the first deputy commander of artillery N.D. Yakovlev.

The same decision legalized the plan for experimental work on jet technology for 1946-1950, which planned the construction of the first special training ground of the Ministry of the Armed Forces in Kapustin Yar.

Given the experience gained by the secret services that guarded the secrets of the atomic project, work on jet weapons was also surrounded by a dense veil of secrecy. The resolution stated that "no institutions, organizations and persons, without special permission from the Council of Ministers, have the right to interfere or demand information about work on rocket weapons." In 1946, SP. Korolev was appointed chief designer of long-range strategic missiles. This direction interested the leadership of the country most of all. The head department was a complex organized on the basis of the plant number 88 of the Ministry of Armaments in Kaliningrad near Moscow. All other production tasks from the plant were removed. Because of this, between the Minister of Arms Ustinov and a rather powerful representative of the party and state nomenclature, the secretary of the Moscow Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, the chairman of the Moscow Council G.M. Popov, a conflict arose: Popov wanted to organize the production of tram cars at the mentioned plant. However, contrary to the government's decision to reduce military production in 1946, Ustinov managed to defend the interests of the jet business. Stalin helped.

In 1947, Popov suggested that caterpillar tractors be manufactured at the Radar Equipment Plant of the Ministry of Armaments and at the plant for the production of jet aircraft engines, which was subordinate to the Minaviaprom. Now two ministers - Ustinov and Khrunichev - united against the Moscow leadership and again, with the support of Stalin, won. Unsightly litigation with the call of various commissions, the use of administrative methods and other activities continued in the future. According to archival documents, Ustinov felt confident. As a result, the civil authorities lost, and the militarization of Moscow and the Moscow region continued at an accelerated pace.

Already in 1946, Kaliningrad near Moscow, the main base of NII-88, began to turn into a closed city.

Following this, on the basis of a military camp on the island of Gorodomlya (Lake Seliger) in the Kalinin Region, the Ministry of Armaments organized a branch of NII-88, in which specialists in rocket weapons who had been taken out of Germany lived and worked.

Assessing the degree to which Soviet rocket builders use German experience, it should be remembered that the first domestic long-range missiles were assembled according to the German model, but in practice they were not used and were not accepted into service.

A meeting in the Kremlin on April 14, 1947, was of fundamental importance for the further development of the rocket industry. As Korolev, who participated in this meeting, recalled, Stalin “was interested in the speed, range and altitude of the flight, the payload that the rocket could carry. Especially with passion, he asked about the accuracy of her hit on the target. Around the same time, Stalin preferred a rocket over an airplane in a dispute about a nuclear charge carrier, which was supposed to deliver weapons of mass destruction to the lair of a "probable enemy." First of all, the United States was considered such, which explained the special interest in the range of missiles. The directives adopted at that time had a direct impact on the escalation of a new round of militarization of the national economy.

The result was not only a sharp increase in the volume of investment in the military industry, but also a change in the structure of the national economy: a rapid increase in the proportion of industries working for defense. The word "defense", as always, was understood conditionally: in one case it covered the offensive military-political plans of Stalin, in the other case - a rebuff with a subsequent counterattack. With all options, a course towards the accelerated creation of long-range strategic missiles was necessary.

Since 1947, the amount of funding for work aimed at the development of rocket technology has sharply increased. Plans in this area changed from day to day in the direction of their increase, introducing great confusion into the activities of organizations of various subordination, each of which demanded a redistribution of funds in its favor. Scattered figures do not give the right to generalizations, but sometimes they help to understand some important trends. In this regard, we note: for the construction of the central training ground in Kapustin Yar in 1947-1948. 158.8 million rubles were allocated. From another document it follows that in 1947 capital investments reached 275 million rubles. The construction of a typical school building in those years cost about 300 thousand rubles.

In total, in 1946-1947. 38 samples of rocket weapons were mastered; more than two-thirds of them were new developments. The head organizations that carried out this enormous work were three ministries: armaments, aircraft industry and agricultural engineering.

At enterprises associated with the production of missiles, already in 1948, a short period of imaginary post-war conversion ended, which freed them from obsolete equipment and technologies. The labor collectives of these enterprises were involved in a forced race in order to get ahead of the United States in the production of the latest nuclear missile weapons. Factories transferred to the production of various types of jet weapons were exempted from the production of civilian products.

Energetic steps in the creation of atomic weapons and rocket technology required the development of other branches of industrial production, among which enterprises designed to solve the problems of radar acquired particular importance. The appearance of missiles, the speed of which was many times higher than the speed of a fighter, required equipping the army with devices that could timely and quickly control the movements of domestic missiles, as well as the security of the air borders of the USSR.

Some experience had already been accumulated by the second half of the 1940s. Initially, radars were used in England to repel German air raids. The advance warning of the population of London and other cities not only saved the lives of many people, but also raised the morale of the population. Needless to say, radar contributed to the effectiveness of British air defense. Churchill was proud to say that England was the birthplace of radar. We can only agree with him on one thing: the British were the first to use radar for mass use a new type of detection of approaching aircraft and ships (both day and night).

Academician P.L. Kapitsa wrote to Stalin in 1946 about serious miscalculations in the scientific and technical policy of the Soviet leadership, in particular in the field of radar. Materials published later indicate that in the summer of 1933, in the name of the People's Commissar of Defense of the USSR K.E. Voroshilov presented a report substantiating the possibility of using radio waves to detect aircraft. Soon, the leaders of the people's commissariat met with the young inventor P.K. Oshchepkov. As this talented person later wrote, he was immediately supported by Deputy People's Commissar of Defense M.N. Tukhachevsky, who struck the innovator with a sharp and clear mind, the ability to quickly understand and evaluate the essence of the proposed idea.

As always, there were skeptics, but the active support of Tukhachevsky made it possible to receive a significant amount for those times for the organization of work to create radio detection devices. In 1934, Oshchepkov published an article in one of the Soviet military open-use magazines on the principles and ways of creating equipment that became the forerunner of future radars.

At the request of the military, the Academy of Sciences of the USSR joined in the development of a new problem. The idea was actively supported by the President of the Academy A.P. Karpinsky, academicians S.I. Vavilov, A.N. Krylov, A.F. Ioffe. On January 16, 1934, a meeting was held at the Academy of Sciences between workers of the Red Army involved in air defense with a group of scientists representing the scientific community of the country. The final document of this meeting, which took place 10 years before the appearance of British radars, has been preserved. Its name is noteworthy - “Minutes of the meeting with Academician A.F. Ioffe on the use of aircraft detection tools at night, in conditions of poor visibility and at high altitudes for air defense purposes.

Many of the names of those present at the meeting were then known not only in the USSR, but also abroad.

Something else is no less characteristic. The discussion was attended by the future academician and Nobel Prize winner N.N. Semenov, who in 1940 began to "disturb" the government of the USSR with letters about the importance of the uranium problem. The same should be said about Yu.B. Khariton, who later went down in history as the creator of the Soviet atomic bomb.

At that time, when the first work on radio detection began in the USSR and the possibility of using short-length electromagnetic waves to detect air targets was being studied, such studies had not yet been carried out abroad. In the autumn of 1934, the Soviet government decided on the industrial production of five experimental stations for electromagnetic detection of aircraft.

A few years later, the same step was taken in the United States and England. All the more surprising is the fact that in 1941 the Soviet government bought radar stations abroad. It was then that the foreign word radar came into use. This did not happen by accident. The repressions of the second half of the 1930s significantly slowed down the re-equipment of the Red Army with the latest technology. For many years, the inventor Oshchepkov and many of his workmates were cut off from their beloved brainchild. It was not only individuals and scientific ideas that suffered. Long before Hitler's aggression, the country suffered the most severe damage, which had to be compensated for under extreme conditions and emergency measures.

Stalin reacted painfully to any reports that testified to flaws in the activities of the air defense forces in the early years of the Patriotic War. The lack of radar systems also had a negative effect on the actions of the navy. The Generalissimo could not have been unaware of how and why the pioneering work in this area, which began in the USSR in the 1930s, was thwarted.

Information about the tests in Germany of new models of guided missile weapons was even more depressing. In search of a way out of this situation, the Supreme Commander-in-Chief, who was also the Chairman of the State Defense Committee and the General Secretary of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, instructed specialists to discuss the urgent problem.

In March 1943, a series of meetings were held in the department of the electrical industry of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, in which senior officials of the State Planning Committee of the USSR, the people's commissariats of armaments, the electrical, aviation and shipbuilding industries, the main artillery department of the people's commissariat of defense and the radio plant-institute of the People's Commissariat of Electrical Industry took part. It was decided that it was necessary to coordinate the activities of defense plants and a number of radio plants for the production of radar equipment. On June 4, 1943, a radar council was created under the GKO. G.M. became its chairman. Malenkov, deputy - A.I. Berg, who carried out the daily scientific and organizational management of the new industry. (Until October 1944, he also remained in the position of Deputy People's Commissar of the USSR electrical industry.)

The experience gained by the radar council, in which the main burden of work fell on the lot of A.I. Berg, A.I. Shokin (later Minister of Electronic Industry of the USSR), AN. Schukina, Yu.B. Kobzarev and G.A. Ukhra, was of fundamental importance for understanding the role of the new industry both in the development of the latest military equipment and in shaping the structure of the Soviet military-industrial complex.

And yet, the most serious shifts in the development of radar occurred only in the course of studying and using captured equipment, which was exported in large quantities from Germany to the USSR in early 1945. In March of the same year, People's Commissar for the Electrical Industry of the USSR I.G. Kabanov and the commander of the 1st Ukrainian Front, Marshal I.S. Konev received an order from the GKO to dismantle three large radio vacuum plants located in Germany and Poland. Soon followed by regular decrees signed by Stalin, and an extensive set of first-class equipment, special stands, materials, semi-finished products, documents was delivered to the Soviet Union (Moscow, Leningrad, Kharkov, Novosibirsk, Tomsk, Voronezh, Kaluga, etc.).

Positively assessing the unfolding under the leadership of A.I. Berg's work, Stalin instructed to expand the program for the development of radar equipment and equipping the armed forces with them. On May 10, 1945, the GKO issued a decree directing the People's Commissariat for Armaments to create a production base for the integrated design and manufacture of Soviet radar stations. 950 thousand dollars were allocated for the organization of this work (the cost of captured equipment and documents, of course, was not included in this amount).

As already mentioned, the 4th Main Directorate (radar) was organized in the system of the People's Commissariat for Armaments, to which the enterprises allocated for this purpose and the central design bureau (TsKB-20) were subordinate. According to the plan 1946-1950. the marketable output of the new main department was to almost double every year and in 1950 exceed the level of 1946 by 11 times. Particular attention was paid to radar stations, the production of which was also planned to be increased by 10-11 times.

So at the time of conversion, restoration of the national economy, the Ministry of Armaments quickly increased the pace of construction and reconstruction of factories intended for the production of the latest radar means for controlling anti-aircraft fire, detecting aircraft and ships, as well as for other military installations. Of great importance for the development of Soviet radar was a thorough acquaintance with the highly developed German radio engineering industry directly in Germany, the study with the help of German specialists of scientific and technical documentation and production technology of the leading electrical engineering firms Siemens, Telefunken and others.

On the territory of East Germany, a branch of TsKB-20 was created, in which research work was carried out on electrovacuum technology, insulating materials and radio components. In Leipzig, Soviet and German specialists worked together at a factory included in the reparations bill. The work of the design and technical bureau created here turned out to be highly effective.

The efforts made were crowned with success. In the autumn of 1945, thanks to the efforts of Soviet researchers, bomber aircraft were equipped with the latest instruments that warned pilots of possible enemy detection. Signals troops and the People's Commissariat of State Security received unique devices at their disposal, including radio reconnaissance installations for eavesdropping, sound recording equipment, etc. Under these conditions, the People's Commissar of State Security Merkulov, whose department was undergoing a technical revolution, became one of the most informed persons in the state: in his hands were the equipment and inheritance of the secret units of the SS and the Abwehr. Stalin was pleased - on his recommendation, A.I. Berg in 1946 was elected a full member of the USSR Academy of Sciences.

At the same time, the government of the USSR considered it expedient to purchase additional equipment from the United States, for which another 200 thousand dollars were allocated from the reserve fund (significant money at that time). At the same time, a plan was approved for the construction of three new factories for the production of radar systems and devices (in Novosibirsk, Chelyabinsk and Izhevsk).

In June 1947, the radar council was transformed into special committee No. 3, or the radar committee under the Council of Ministers of the USSR; it was headed by the chairman of the State Planning Commission M.Z. Saburov. As before, Academician A.I. Berg, who was directly responsible for the head institute TsNII-108.

Thus, in the first post-war years, which officially took place in the USSR under the sign of the restoration of the economy on the paths of peaceful construction, three committees were formed special purpose, subject only to the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, more precisely to Stalin. The first, which arose in August 1945, was in charge of the creation of nuclear weapons. The second, active since the spring of 1946, dealt with rocket technology; the third, created in the summer of 1947, was for radar, air defense and anti-missile defense systems. All of them were considered top secret, created and operated under the cover of state secrets, the slightest violation of which was punishable by law. The latter was specified in the documents when applying for a job and was supported by the personal signature of each "civilian", whether it was a major scientist or an ordinary locksmith, a general or a security worker.

The largest ministries and departments, scientific and construction organizations, hundreds of thousands, and then millions of employees and workers, military and civilians were subordinate to these committees. But they did not report to the local, or to the republican and all-Union authorities. None of the transcripts of the sessions of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR contains a single line about their activities; there is not even a mention of their existence, but it was these departments that played a decisive role in strengthening the military power of the USSR. That is why (both separately and taken together) they reported directly to Stalin. He was their god and chief; his words were considered law. Yes, and they arose at his direction. The sequence of their appearance reflected the character and nature of the system, which was called the Soviet one.

It is no secret that there were very few people who seriously understood the secrets of the atom and jet technology in the early 40s, especially in the highest echelon of the party and state nomenclature of the USSR. Much simpler was, for example, the mechanism of a device that picks up the noise of an approaching aircraft, or even a mechanism for reflecting radio waves. Everything was clear here. This was one of the most important reasons explaining Stalin's attention to radars and the emergence of a corresponding council in early 1943.

The path to understanding the significance and prospects of first atomic and then missile weapons turned out to be more difficult. Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and not the letters and requests of scientists, accelerated the creation of the most secret structures to ensure the military power of Stalin. In turn, their experience was used in the transformation of the Radar Council, with very limited functions, into Special Committee No. 3, equipped with rights and authority at the level of the previously created Special Committees No. 1 and No. 2.

The aforementioned special committees were associations unprecedented in the history of science and technology both in terms of their creative power and the possibilities for its implementation. The almighty state apparatus clothed the conclusions of scientists in directive resolutions that were obligatory for immediate implementation. The journey from conception to implementation was amazingly fast. This gave many theorists, designers, and engineers a feeling of their omnipotence. In the 90s, evaluating the work of the legendary joint venture and his associates (i.e. Korolev and the council of chief designers headed by Sergei Pavlovich), Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences B.E. Chertok writes: “The authority of this council as an interdepartmental, not administrative, but scientific and technical leadership in all our activities was of decisive importance.

Despite the cruel totalitarian state regime in our field of activity, and, perhaps, also among nuclear scientists and radar specialists, a peculiar form of management has developed that can be called technocratic.

Technocracy in the person of scientists, chief designers, engineers, leaders for the time being was actually not subject to the whims of the party-state bureaucratic hierarchy.

What time is the outstanding rocket scientist talking about? About Stalin's rule? About Khrushchev's decade? The erroneousness of Chertok's views, his nostalgia is easy to understand - after all, he recalls his unique youth, when everything was eclipsed by the successful assault on space and Gagarin's flight. But it was then that hydrogen weapons were tested, and a bomb of unprecedented power exploded in the area of ​​Novaya Zemlya. Seismic instruments from around the world continually recorded tremors caused by underground tests at the Semipalatinsk test site in Kazakhstan.

Somewhat earlier, in 1954, secret military exercises took place near Orenburg, during which a large group of soldiers and officers crossed the epicenter of the explosion that had just been made ... The consequences of this experiment were terrible. They provoked protests from individual scientists who were well aware of the detrimental effect on people and the environment of rocket launches from nearby test sites. However, other sentiments prevailed. The vast majority of scientists, designers, workers, military personnel who worked at enterprises, institutions, organizations subordinate to the three special committees approved and supported the official policy, whether it was expressed in the decisions of the party and government or in secret orders for official purposes.

To this day, we do not know exactly the number of people who worked in closed cities, in the so-called number organizations, in general, in industries that strengthened the military power of the USSR. But there is no doubt about the steady tendency towards an increase in this multi-million mass of the population.

Since the end of the 1940s, the geography of military production has also expanded. According to the decree of the Council of Ministers of August 2, 1948, in order to duplicate work on rocket weapons in the eastern regions of the USSR, the construction of a special design bureau and pilot production began. In 1949, in the Crimea and in the Astrakhan region, the construction of many research institutes, laboratories, and factories began in addition to dozens of secret institutions that already existed in Moscow, Leningrad, and their suburbs. The arsenal of weapons was increasingly shifting to the Urals, in Western Siberia, Kazakhstan, etc. The government financed and supplied the understudies with labor, as well as equipment and instruments, including through reparation supplies, in the first place.

During the construction of new facilities, giants of the military construction industry arose - the Ministry of Construction of Heavy Industry Enterprises, the Ministry of Construction of Mechanical Engineering Enterprises, etc. Most of the facilities were built by military builders. In the early post-war years, prison labor was widely used at construction sites, including prisoners of war. The main centers of construction work were Chelyabinsk, Sverdlovsk, Novosibirsk, Saratov, Tomsk and other cities.

At the same time, the militarization of formally non-military industries and industries continued. The special orders that existed in the pre-war years, special financing, the construction of special workshops at civilian enterprises, which gradually changed their purpose, were revived. For example, the Uralkhimmash plant of the Ministry of Mechanical Engineering and Instrumentation, the Novokramatorsk plant of Mintyazhmash, etc. were oriented towards the production of rocket weapons.

In the early 1950s, vast areas in the east of the USSR turned into the sphere of activity of the military-industrial complex, strictly classified and, as a rule, cut off from the outside world. Thus, the scale of the split of Soviet society into two parts - open and secret - increased. This division, of course, did not correspond to the official social structure Soviet society, which was considered homogeneous.

At the same time, the importance of the military increased in the leadership of the military-industrial complex. Their role in unwinding the mechanism of the arms race inevitably increased with the development and distribution of the latest types of weapons of mass destruction and their adoption by the army. This, apparently, was associated with a partial reorganization of the management of the military sectors. In 1949, special committees under the Council of Ministers were liquidated, instead of them the Bureau for Military and Military-Industrial Issues was created, headed by N.A. Bulganin (however, we should not exaggerate the role of this figure in making political decisions). More and more weight was acquired by purely military departments, primarily the Ministry of the Armed Forces, headed by Ustinov. On August 29, 1949, almost all the employees of Special Committee No. 2 were transferred to the 4th Directorate of this ministry and formed its backbone. The department was headed by a professional military colonel-general of artillery M.I. Nedelin, the future first commander-in-chief of the strategic missile forces. All employees of the former committee, regardless of whether they have any military qualifications, received the appropriate ranks.

A powerful stimulus for strengthening the role of the military was the growing confrontation between the two systems, which manifested itself during the Berlin crises of the late 1940s and especially in the Korean War (1950-1953). In 1955, i.e. six years after the emergence of NATO, the USSR and its allies created an organization of a similar type in Europe - the Warsaw Pact. However, at that time, both sides understood that their arsenals did not allow them to wage a global nuclear war.

Nevertheless, at the headquarters of the armed forces of the USA and the USSR, plans for an attack on the enemy with the use of nuclear weapons continued to be vigorously (and not too hidden from the public) developed. The Americans relied mainly on long-range aviation as the main means of delivering nuclear weapons. In the USSR, stakes were placed on ballistic missiles, which, if necessary, could deliver atomic charges to destroy military targets both in Western Europe and in the United States.

The demands of the military departments grew like an avalanche. The first complex with the R-1 missile (its flight range reached 270 km) was adopted by the Soviet Army by a government decision of November 28, 1950. The industry then transferred 18 missiles to the military. According to the calculations of military experts, several thousand of them were required for the first year of the war.

The inflamed appetites found Stalin's support. The issues of the priority development of the nuclear missile complex were considered at the next meeting of the leader with the leaders of the military-industrial complex in July 1949 (there were the commander of the artillery of the armed forces of the country N.N. Voronov, the Minister of Armaments D.F. Ustinov, the Deputy Minister of the Armed Forces N.D. Yakovlev, head of the main artillery department M.I. Nedelin, heads of the missile and atomic program). The nuclear missile industry was again recognized as a priority, requiring unlimited investments and efforts in the strategic race for America.

After passing away, Stalin left his heirs (and all compatriots) many questions and mysteries. Shortly before his death, he published the work "Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR", dated early 1952. Published in a huge circulation, it quickly sold out. It could not have been otherwise: the Soviet public sincerely perceived every word of the Generalissimo as a guide to action, as major achievement scientific communism. If you believe the newspapers and magazines of the early 50s, this is how the Soviet people perceived the named work. However, in archival documents and in the memory of many veterans, something else has been preserved.

A certain doubt was caused not so much by Stalin's thesis about the deepening crisis of the world capitalist system, but by the assertion that "no capitalist country could provide such real and technically qualified assistance to the people's democratic countries as the Soviet Union provides them." Assistance from the USSR, according to the leader, "is the cheapest and technically first-class." Just as unsubstantiated was the conclusion: "Nowhere are machines so readily used as in the USSR, because machines save labor for society and facilitate the work of workers."

Stalin again spoke of the inevitability of wars between capitalist countries. He even criticized his own judgment about the relative stability of markets during the period of the general crisis of capitalism, expressed before the Second World War. At the same time, Lenin's thesis was also rejected, which in 1916, speaking of the decay of capitalism, wrote: "On the whole, capitalism is growing immeasurably faster than before."

All the shortcomings of the leader's latest work are obvious. It is much more important to emphasize that Stalin published his work, knowing other points of view set forth by academicians E.S. Vargoy, P.L. Kapitsa, S.G. Strumilin and other authoritative scientists. AT Everyday life a new stage in the development of productive forces began, caused by the achievements of science and technology, discoveries in the field of genetics, the use mathematical methods in the economy, the creation of polymer chemistry, and finally, in the field of energy use, the use of the latest computers and automatic lines.

Stalin ignored these phenomena and the qualitative shifts that more and more clearly characterized the economic development of the West, mainly the United States. Even the vocabulary of his work seemed old-fashioned. In any case, none of the terms we mentioned, none of the newest trends for that time, were named. And there was a certain logic in this. Remaining a pragmatist, the leader concentrated his attention on the activities of the three special committees. It seemed to him that everything here was going according to plan, of course, top-secret, and this was another reason not to touch on this topic.

The economic problems of socialism in the USSR were considered one-sidedly, without a proper understanding of the scientific and technological revolution that had begun. The main confirmation of this is the specific course of development of the Soviet economy in 1945-1953, which was marked by militarization; everything else receded into the background. It can be said that in the Soviet Union during this period, the scientific and technological revolution was reduced to a military-technical revolution. True, in 1955 the Central Committee of the CPSU held a plenum devoted to technical progress. The report by N.A. Bulganin, which first spoke about scientific and technological revolution. But the trend that gained momentum under Stalin was not criticized: the policy of militarization of society received an additional impetus, which immediately affected the activities of the military-industrial complex.

According to the new five-year plan for 1951-1955. it was planned to allocate about 6.4 billion rubles for the reconstruction of existing plants and the construction of new ones. Moreover, in order to please the emerging military-industrial complex, military production plans were constantly adjusted upwards. So, during 1951 - 1952. increased the cost of organizing the mass production of R-1 missiles. In order to arrange their production, the Ministry of Armaments additionally transferred the automobile and tire factories located in Dnepropetrovsk, and a plant near Zlatoust was built in a forced manner.

The draft control figures for 1952 were enlarged. It was planned to actively develop related industries that supplied missile production with components, ground equipment and materials, as well as the construction of new ranges and storage bases for jet weapons. At the same time, the branches of industry associated with the production of nuclear weapons, and the industries that equipped the armed forces of the USSR with radars and all kinds of radar equipment, expanded and grew.

Perhaps the most surprising thing is that, despite the plans, planning discipline, centralized management and, as was often said, iron leadership, the listed spheres of the national economy very often did not fit together. Some did not know what others were doing. Sometimes even within the seemingly monolithic community of rocket scientists or, say, nuclear scientists, there was no proper mutual understanding and unity. Lawsuits like the one mentioned (of General Ustinov with the Moscow party boss Popov) were not uncommon between rocket men of such rank as Korolev and Chalomei. In such cases, the intervention of Stalin was required, who, however, was by no means always interested in the unity of his subordinates. Moreover, within the framework of the regime he created, the leader needed a certain confrontation and competitiveness of those who invariably wanted to be the first and even monopolists in their business.

None of those who fought for power after Stalin's death - be it Malenkov, Beria or Khrushchev - could no longer abandon the arms race, the Cold War. All of them turned out to be hostages of the military-industrial structures of the Soviet society, they were forced to rely on them in one way or another, to seek their support.

Almost immediately after the death of the leader, another reorganization of the management of the defense industries took place, the number of military-industrial departments increased. On June 26, 1953, the famous Ministry of Medium Machine Building was established - the flagship of the secret nuclear empire of the USSR. The main functions of the former special committee were transferred to Minsredmash. By the Decree of the Council of Ministers of July 9, 1953, the main divisions of the main industrial building of the Ministry of Internal Affairs were also transferred to it, in the construction and installation departments of which military builders and prisoners worked. By the end of the 1950s, closed facilities were increasingly being built by military builders. No less significant was the fact that as the Gulag was liquidated, the number of civilian employees increased significantly, which changed the situation at construction sites.

The well-known statesman engineer V.A. was appointed the first minister of medium machine building. Malyshev, deputies - B.L. Vannikov and former Minister of Aviation Industry I.V. Khrunichev. From 1957 to 1986, the minsredmash was permanently headed by E.P. Slavsky. All of them were major organizers of industry, constituting an influential group within the military-industrial complex. Their elite position among other military leaders was determined by the exceptional importance of the industry under their jurisdiction.

At the same time, the Ministry of General Mechanical Engineering was created to concentrate work on rocket science and space exploration. It was another priority branch of the military-industrial complex. Of course, within the framework of the Soviet military-industrial complex, the commonality of state interests firmly united all sectors. Nevertheless, departments competed with each other, fought for priorities, lucrative orders, ranks, awards, while using not only permitted methods.

Ultimately, these clashes had their own traditions and were closely connected with the struggle for power that took place even during Stalin's lifetime. At first glance, such a phenomenon was unlikely. But the facts testify that it was Stalin himself who fought for power first of all. The great dictator skillfully selected the environment and very skillfully weaved intrigues, pushing together the figures of the highest nomenklatura, and sometimes even groups. So it was in the 1930s, when former political opponents first resigned themselves to their defeat, and then turned out to be “enemies of the people”, were publicly condemned and sentenced to death.

But there was something else. Thus, the confrontation between Voroshilov and Tukhachevsky, in fact, had no political overtones. The People's Commissar of Defense was an adherent of the dogmas of the times of the civil war and, together with his close associates, stubbornly defended the interests of the "horsemen" with all the ensuing consequences. His deputy defended a different line of development of the Red Army, foreseeing a war of engines, tank formations, landing units, the appearance of radar and missile weapons. As you know, Stalin supported the People's Commissar, his old friend.

Without fear of exaggeration, we can say that the clash between Voroshilov and Tukhachevsky is the germ of internecine strife, the threshold of contradictions that will become a sign of the formation and existence of the Soviet military-industrial complex during the Cold War. The practice of the 1940s and 1950s provides many examples of how the leaders of various branches of the military industry looked after their own interests, although they contradicted the official policy pursued. The story of how Yu.B. Khariton asked Beria not to fire researcher Altshuler. It happened at the height of the struggle against cosmopolitanism. Marshal from Lubyanka asked harshly: “Do you really need him?” The head of the atomic project answered firmly: "Yes." To everyone's surprise, the issue was resolved in the affirmative.

Even more zealously at the same time and for the same reasons, he defended many of his subordinates D.F. Ustinov. Skillfully using bureaucratic procedures, he postponed the certification of a number of employees, temporarily transferred them to other facilities, and in the end covered with his name a large group of rocket men who were ostracized. According to the apt remark of one of the rescued, the chief deliberately violated the instructions coming from above, in the name of the very same tops.

The situation did not change with the onset of the thaw. It would be naive to believe that the removal of Beria and the withdrawal from the nomenklatura structures of Molotov, Malenkov, Kaganovich, as well as lesser-known associates and followers of Stdlin, did not affect the composition of the leadership of the military-industrial complex. Only in 1957-1958. Khrushchev became the sole leader. From now on, all heads of the military branch, ministries, factories, laboratories were appointed only with the knowledge of the Central Committee. This also applied to the appointment of military commanders. educational institutions, polygons, leaders who had the rank of not less than a colonel. The Central Committee of the party began to intervene more actively in solving current economic issues, which previously remained, as a rule, the prerogative of the Council of Ministers of the USSR, the State Planning Commission and the military-industrial ministries. All changes in the field of armaments were formalized by decisions of the Central Committee and the Council of Ministers. To one degree or another, this was also a reflection of the struggle for power, in which Khrushchev succeeded most of all, who in 1958 became not only the first secretary of the CPSU Central Committee, but also the head of government.

As before, the main focus was on the missile field, especially work on the creation of an intercontinental ballistic missile. Based on the memorandum of SP. Korolev, who relied on the calculations of engineer M.K. Tikhonravova, on May 20, 1954, the government decided to develop a missile capable of "ensuring the defeat of strategic targets in any military-geographical region of the globe" and launching an artificial Earth satellite into outer space.

This made it possible to change the strategy of the Cold War, allowed the Soviet Union to take the lead in the competition with America. No means were spared for this purpose. To test an intercontinental missile, the construction of a new test site was required, since, according to Ustinov, it was already “cramped” in Kapustin Yar. Unlike other “great construction projects of communism”, which were widely reported to the Soviet and world community, the construction of the rocket and space test site, colossal in scale, in Kazakhstan was carried out in the strictest secrecy.

The missiles became Khrushchev's main trump card in the confrontation with the West. During a visit to Great Britain in 1956, he deliberately spoke frankly about the new missiles that appeared in the arsenal of the Soviet Army and could "get England."

Thus, despite the official talk of peace and reduction of the army, the Soviet Union was increasingly involved in the arms race, which became even more ambitious than during Stalin's lifetime. The launch on October 4, 1957 of the first artificial satellite of the Earth excited all mankind, but especially, perhaps, the population of the United States, because the end of "overseas invulnerability" was put to rest. From the very beginning, space exploration was carried out in the USSR with the participation of the military and for military purposes. Korolev's note to Ustinov dated May 26, 1954 contained outlines of just such an approach to the use of spacecraft. Soon the proposed approach prevailed. It is no coincidence that at the first stage of space research military rocket technology was used as launch vehicles and launch complexes. In the early 60s, special launch vehicles were created on its basis. But millions of Soviet citizens did not know such details. Sputnik was perceived as a triumph of Soviet science and technology, it became synonymous with the best achievements and "advantages of socialism."

Even greater rejoicing was caused by the historical flight of Yu.A. Gagarin. Soviet newspapers, radio, and television strove to show this pioneering feat inextricably linked with the victory of the revolution of 1917. Khrushchev "beat" him from a military point of view as well. In August 1961, at a reception in the Kremlin in honor of cosmonaut No. 2 G.S. Titov, he said: “We do not have 50- or 100-megaton bombs, we have bombs with a capacity of over 100 megatons. We launched Gagarin and Titov into space, but we can replace them with another cargo and send it to any place on Earth.”

It is not difficult to guess how spokesmen for the interests of the American military-industrial complex used such rhetoric. The accelerated development of the US military industries received additional opportunities. In the mid-1950s, rocket science also became a top priority overseas: from 1951 to 1959, more than $6 billion was spent on the development and testing of ballistic missiles. Since the end of the 1950s, outer space has become the sphere of the sharpest rivalry between the USSR and the USA. Here, each step forward reflected the comprehensive achievements of each of the countries that used rocket technology, successes in nuclear science, radar and other areas. modern science and production.

Until the Cuban Missile Crisis, which brought mankind to the brink of war, the arms race had the character of unbridled competition. For the USSR, it was a struggle to overcome the backlog from the main enemy. The position of the chasing side was in a fever for the Soviet state and the country as a whole, not to mention the fact that, according to the logic of the pursuit, the chasing party had to spend more energy on the pursuit than the leader. In addition, the Americans had technological advantages. Evidence of this is data on initiatives in the creation and development of strategic offensive weapons:

Atomic Bomb: USA - 1945, USSR - 1949

Intercontinental bomber. USA - 1948, USSR - 1955

Hydrogen bomb: USA - 1952, USSR - 1953

Intercontinental ballistic missile: USA - 1958, USSR - 1957

Submarine-launched ballistic missiles: USA - 1960, USSR - 1964

Solid-fuel intercontinental ballistic missiles: USA - 1962, USSR - 1966

Comprehending this information, one should not forget that the USSR lagged behind the USA not only in terms of the degree of technical equipment of the national economy, labor productivity, but also in terms of life expectancy, the level of material well-being, etc. Only by the beginning of the 60s, the number of the rural population of the USSR equaled the urban population. The agricultural sector chronically lagged behind. The sphere of education and culture was financed according to the residual principle. The arms race hindered social progress. So, for 1951 - 1955. the capital investment plan for the Ministry of Defense alone was set at 13,800 million rubles, and the actual implementation amounted to 24,785 million. the plan provided for investments of 26,790 million rubles (in addition, an additional 5,500 million rubles were allocated for missile weapons).

However, even after the approval of the directives under the five-year plan, the Central Committee of the CPSU and the Council of Ministers adopted a number of resolutions on increasing the production of missiles, building airfields for strategic and long-range aviation, so the volume of investments increased even more. For example, in 1957 the government allocated an additional 592 million rubles in excess of the approved annual plan. To complete the picture, we note that official spending on the country's defense in the second half of the 50s amounted to about 100 million annually.

In December 1959, an elite branch of the armed forces, the Strategic Missile Forces, was created. In order to equip them with equipment, the draft tasks for 1960 provided for an increase in rocket production compared to 1959 by almost two times, and against the control figures approved by the Central Committee of the CPSU and the Council of Ministers for 1960 - by 3.3 times. At the same time, it was planned to reduce the volume of capital construction for 1960, primarily by reducing the construction of cultural and community facilities, health care and housing. But even at such a price, it was impossible to satisfy the appetites of the military-industrial complex, since they far exceeded the possibilities of the country's economic potential. The application of the Ministry of Defense for ballistic missiles was not fully satisfied in 1960 - 5,495 units. against 1,509 produced in 1959, but according to the calculations of the State Planning Commission, it could only be completed by 64%.

At the same time, the military-industrial complex, the actual costs of its maintenance remained “ top secret”, mainly for the Soviet people, who justified the secrecy on national security grounds. However, as a result of flights by U-2 reconnaissance aircraft, and especially after the launch of spy satellites at the turn of the 1950s and 1960s, the Americans managed to obtain fairly complete information about the location and functioning of Soviet nuclear facilities and missile bases. As a result, information about the "cost" of the Soviet military-industrial complex was repeatedly published in the West. In the USSR, everything looked different. Here, the true amounts of military spending have never been published, not only in the open press, but even in statistical collections for official use. In the transcripts of the annual sessions of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR accessible to the people, military spending invariably amounted to no more than 18% of the expenditure part of the budget.

Although these figures significantly distorted reality, in those years they were not questioned. For the first time, real expenses became known with the beginning of perestroika, and in the 1940s and 1980s, even leading specialists, not to mention the “unclassified” part of society, had no idea of ​​the scale of the arms race. In addition, the majority of Soviet people who grew up behind the Iron Curtain almost firmly believed in what was written in Pravda and in what was said from the stands of congresses and sessions.

Official propaganda extolled rockets and satellites as the brightest achievements of socialism, recognized by all mankind, and the Soviet people were really proud of this. Of course, one should not forget about the popular skepticism, which manifested itself in jokes and ditties that ridiculed Khrushchev's boasting, the party, the euphoria generated by the launches of satellites, rockets, etc. And yet, in the first post-Stalin decade, during the period of thaw in the changed socio-political climate, sprouts of enthusiasm prevailed. It is noteworthy that the deterioration financial situation in the early 60s, it caused discontent among the people with the leader of the country, "Nikita", but not with the "military", which ruined the national economy.

It can be said that by the beginning of the 1960s, in general terms, the socio-political and economic structures of the military-industrial complex had taken shape - from top to bottom, although later (especially in the 1970s) the scope of its activities expanded. Some Russian autonomies, for example, Udmurtia, and regions, like Gorky, have become military by 80-85% in terms of their production profile and social structure. In political terms, the secret power of the military-industrial complex reached its apogee precisely in the 70s. Brezhnev, who officially occupied all the most important posts in the party and the state, was a toy in his hands. A clear confirmation of this is the entry of Soviet troops into Afghanistan in 1979.

The question is pertinent: why, after achieving strategic parity between the USSR and the USA (and this was the key slogan for the arms race in the 1950s and 1960s), did the competition not stop, but, on the contrary, gained momentum? The answer is beyond doubt: the military-industrial complex has become a self-contained superstructure within society; in one way or another, all the leaders of the country, who became hostages of the buildup of armaments, were drawn into the sphere of its activity. cold war was the most fertile ground for this process.

A vivid embodiment of the secret power of the military-industrial complex can be the figure of D.F. Ustinov, who, in the wake of the military-industrial revolution, became one of the most influential persons in the political leadership of the country. A native of a working-class family, an engineer-specialist in naval weapons, since 1937 he is one of the young nominees of the era of mass repressions - the director of the Bolshevik plant, since June 1941 - People's Commissar of Arms. The memoirs of contemporaries who worked with him in the 50s and 60s (and the memoirs of the marshal himself) paint a somewhat idealized image. However, a comparison of memoirs with a large set of archival documents makes it possible to create a more objective picture.

Of course, this man was one of the pillars of rocket technology, especially at the initial stage, when many leaders did not believe in the prospects of rockets. The current correspondence of the minister shows his great perseverance and meticulousness in defending the interests of the ministry and its employees: he literally bombarded higher authorities with requests and demands, trying to provide factories with equipment, labor, increased wages, bonuses, housing, etc.

On the other hand, Ustinov was able to prove himself precisely in the wake of the creation of rocket technology. With great perseverance and success, he sought new appropriations from all Soviet leaders—Stalin, Khrushchev, and especially simply from Brezhnev. Gradually, exceptionally great power was concentrated in his hands. As we have already noted, he achieved the transfer of rocket science to his People's Commissariat, then led dozens of government commissions, up to the powerful Military-Industrial Commission (VPK) under the Presidium of the Council of Ministers of the USSR, the abbreviation of which coincided with the abbreviation of the term "military-industrial complex". The Military-Industrial Commission, perhaps, most clearly embodied the political strength and influence of the military-industrial complex. Suffice it to say that in the 1960s and 1970s not a single important decision on the development of the defense complex could be made without the knowledge of this commission. It is all the more significant that it was headed by Ustinov, who went through all levels of power - from the director of the plant to a member of the Politburo. Ustinov is rightfully perceived as a symbol of the Soviet military-industrial complex.

The strength and influence of the leadership of the military-industrial complex was determined by the fact that in the conditions of Soviet society it uncontrollably used the huge economic potential, the labor of the country's many millions of people, who consciously and energetically worked in the name of strengthening the "defensive shield of socialism." As a result, a kind of labor aristocracy was formed in the country, a multi-million professional elite that lived and worked in the artificial conditions of a closed secret system, special funding, benefits and benefits that were not available to other social groups of the population. But it was at their expense that it existed, fueling the imperial ambitions of the military-industrial complex.

Consideration of the question of the imperial ambitions of the military-industrial complex deserves special attention. Until the beginning of the 90s, it was the least covered in our historical literature: this topic was the most important secret of the military-industrial complex of the USSR, which actively participated in almost all conflicts, if they could weaken or undermine the foundations of imperialism. Only a very strong government capable of systematically allocating huge funds for military spending could pursue such a policy. This is exactly how the Soviet government behaved in the first post-war years, when Stalinism went beyond the borders of one country. Khrushchev also followed the beaten path.

Brezhnev acted even more energetically, in Peaceful time adorned himself with the military order "Victory" and became Marshal of the Soviet Union. And although the years of his reign are often called a stagnant period, this in no way applies to the military-industrial complex. The same can be said about the subsequent leaders of the party and state apparatus, who headed the USSR until 1991. According to estimates made by experts in the year of the collapse of the world's second superpower, the military spending of our country over the previous quarter of a century exceeded one trillion five hundred billion rubles (in the prices of time).

Of course, no one in the USSR knew this. Official propaganda, praising the Soviet way of life, trumpeted to the whole world that "the USSR is a bulwark of peace and socialism." Meanwhile, the “champions of peace” fulfilled and overfulfilled plans for the production of weapons and military equipment, built tanks and aircraft day and night, launched 5-6 military men into space every month. aircraft, annually exploded 15 - 20 nuclear or hydrogen bombs and were the largest seller of weapons in the world. According to American experts, different countries In the world by 1991, there were approximately 50 million Kalashnikov assault rifles and only about 8 million units of the American M-16 rifle.

Regional wars and military conflicts with the use of conventional weapons have been going on since the end of the Second World War to the present. In a number of cases, they were the result of a military confrontation between the US and the USSR anywhere in the world. During these regional wars, by the beginning of 1990, 17 million people had died.

The Soviet leaders swore night and day that they were peaceful, but in reality it was not so. The militancy of Stalinist socialism, even after the death of its creator, inspired fear. He frightened mankind by rattling weapons and interfering in the internal affairs of not only border sovereign states, but also distant overseas countries.

Let us recall the actions of the armed forces of the USSR against the closest neighbors for "our interests" in peaceful decades.

1948 - the siege of West Berlin. Blocking by Soviet troops of land transport links between the FRG and West Berlin;

1950-1953 - war in Korea;

1953 - the suppression of the uprising in the capital of the GDR by Soviet troops;

1956 - suppression of the revolution in Hungary by the Soviet Army;

1961 - construction during the night of August 13, the 29-kilometer Berlin Wall. "Berlin Crisis";

1962 - secret importation of Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads to Cuba. Caribbean crisis;

1967 - participation of Soviet military specialists in the "seven-day war" of Israel with Egypt, Syria, Jordan;

1968 - the invasion of the troops of the USSR, the GDR, Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria into Czechoslovakia;

1979-1989 - Soviet intervention in Afghanistan.

The ten-year Afghan war was officially described by the Kremlin as a temporary stay of a "limited contingent" of Soviet troops in a friendly country: "it turns out" its revolutionary government asked for help to the Afghan people, who wished to free themselves from their oppressors and exploiters. The media, explaining this policy, associated it with the need to disrupt the Pentagon's interference in the internal affairs of the USSR's southern neighbor.

Keeping in mind the tragedy of the Afghan war, it is important to emphasize that the main initiators and perpetrators of the Soviet invasion were Andropov and Ustinov, the heads of the main law enforcement agencies of that time. They easily agreed with the Minister of Foreign Affairs A.A. Gromyko; the sick, decrepit Brezhnev could not withstand the pressure of this troika of members of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the CPSU. So four people made a strikingly irresponsible decision that accelerated the growth of crisis phenomena in the national economy of the USSR, in the life of Soviet society as a whole.

The above facts gradually became public knowledge only in the 1990s (the declassification of the former archives of the CPSU and appearances in the press as politicians, and participants in the war). But even in the 1980s, as the conflict dragged on, the understanding of the mistakes made grew among the people, even the failure of not only the foreign policy actions of the top, but also the widely advertised plans for the development of the agricultural sector, the transfer of the country's national economy to the rails of intensification, a sharp improvement in the living conditions of workers, etc. .P.

Perhaps, for the first time, the authority of the Soviet military-industrial complex was shaken. Recall that this concept was still absent in the USSR at that time. Nevertheless, many knew about the “defense industry” from school: moreover, they associated it both with military equipment and with the launch of satellites, spacecraft, the appearance of nuclear ships, night vision devices, new jet liners, etc. It was no secret that the country's best refrigerators, televisions, movie cameras, cameras and many other consumer goods were produced by closed enterprises or special workshops operating in ordinary factories. This was seen as the real reserves of the country's military potential.

Nevertheless, there was a growing awareness that the long-standing slogan "Catch up and overtake America" ​​had lost its significance. It was overseas astronauts who landed on the moon, not envoys from the country of the Soviets, although Khrushchev assured that a Soviet man would be the first to set foot on the moon. US spy planes repeatedly flew over the territory of the USSR, and only one of them was shot down (in 1960). The soldiers who visited Afghanistan knew whose weapons the Mujahideen used against them, who supplied them with Stinger missiles and other novelties. It became clear why many countries were more willing to buy weapons and ammunition with the “made in the USA” brand.

Hypocritical reports and censored articles about events in Afghanistan remained the norm even after the election of M.S. Gorbachev as the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU, and after the XXVII Party Congress, which exalted the human factor and universal values. Thus, the USSR Ministry of Defense considered it appropriate to publish a certificate “Losses personnel limited contingent of Soviet troops in the Republic of Afghanistan in the period from December 25, 1979 to February 15, 1989”. It dryly stated: “In total, 13,830 people were killed, died from wounds and diseases, including 1,979 officers (14.3%); 6,669 people became disabled; 330 people are wanted; more than 200 thousand people were awarded orders and medals of the USSR, 71 of them became Heroes of the Soviet Union. A total of 546,255 people passed through Afghanistan.”

Under the conditions of the advancing glasnost, the “withdrawal of a limited contingent” from Afghanistan, the mass return home of young people dressed in uniforms, which to this day is popularly called “Afghan”, it was impossible to believe in the authenticity of the above information. Soon there were calculations made by sociologists, demographers and historians. The truth about Afghanistan came out on the pages of newspapers, magazines, on TV screens. In our opinion, V.G. Pervyshin. Comparing various information, the scientist took into account the ratio of killed and wounded, the number of combat battalions and the contingent of military camps (there were 180 of them). His calculations also included data on auxiliary parts of the rear (engaged in the transport of ammunition, fuel and lubricants, repair and technical workshops, guarding caravans, roads, military camps, battalions, regiments, divisions, armies, hospitals, etc.). As a result, the scientist believes, the total number of military personnel who were annually in Afghanistan was at least 314,000 people.

In general, during the ten years of the war, at least 3 million people went through Afghanistan, of which 800 thousand participated in hostilities. Our total losses amounted to at least 460 thousand people, of which 50 thousand were killed, 180 thousand were wounded (including 100 thousand were blown up by mines - seriously wounded, 1,000 were missing), 230 thousand were ill with hepatitis, jaundice, typhoid fever.

One cannot but agree with Pervyshin: the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan in February 1989 after a ten-year senseless bloody war was a reflection of the general technical, economic, political, ideological, moral and moral weakness of the USSR, and not only the result of "new thinking", as it is number tried to represent the leadership of the country. With great-power, imperial thinking, with an obsession with the spread of socialism throughout the world and a disregard for millions of both its own and foreign citizens, the USSR would never have left Afghanistan if the country had strength and power, even if millions of Afghans had to be killed and lose hundreds of thousands Soviet soldiers.

The USSR was forced to leave Afghanistan, because it could not oppose the nationwide partisan struggle of the Afghan people and the American Stinger missiles either with the high morale of Soviet soldiers who did not understand what they were fighting for, or with the latest weapons of Soviet combat aircraft and helicopters. Soviet military equipment turned out to be weaker than American. The military-industrial complex, led by Kremlin leaders, has created a super-militarized economy and in doing so has destroyed the country's peaceful civilian economy.

This was facilitated not only by world-famous military operations with the official participation of the armed forces of the USSR, either in the form of "liberation campaigns", or as part of a "limited contingent of troops." Soviet "warriors-internationalists", dressed in civilian clothes or wearing the uniform of "local natives" (sometimes in repainted tanks and planes) took part in the hostilities in North Korea, Laos, Algeria, Egypt, Yemen, Vietnam, Syria, Cambodia, Bangladesh , Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, Cuba, Bolivia, Grenada, i.e. in more than twenty countries of Africa, Asia, Latin America.

On May 21, 1991, the Krasnaya Zvezda newspaper, with the permission of the USSR Ministry of Defense, published a "truncated" list of countries in which Soviet military personnel - "internationalist soldiers" - participated in hostilities. Adding one column, which indicates the debt of each country to the Soviet Union for the supply of military equipment and weapons, we get the following picture.

Country	Fight time	Soviet debt (billion dollars)
North Korea	June 1950 - July 1953	2,2
Laos	1960-1963 August 1964 - November 1968 November 1969 - December 1970	0,8
Egypt	October 18, 1962 – April 1, 1963 October 1, 1969 – June 16, 1972 October 5, 1973 – April 1, 1974	1,7
Algeria	1962-1964	2,5
Yemen	October 18, 1962 – April 1, 1963	1,0
Vietnam	July 1, 1965 – December 31, 1974	9,1
Syria	June 5-13, 1967 October 6-24, 1973	6,7
Cambodia	April 1970 - December 1970	0,7
Bangladesh	1972-1973	0,1
Angola	November 1975 - 1979	2,0
Mozambique	1967-1969 and November 1975 - November 1979	0,8
Ethiopia	December 9, 1977 – November 30, 1979	2,8
Afghanistan	April 1978 - May 1991	3,0
Nicaragua	1980-1990	1,0

It is not superfluous to recall another dramatic event that took place in Last year the existence of the USSR. On August 2, 1990, Iraq captured Kuwait in three hours, introducing a 120,000-strong occupation army equipped with 70% Soviet weapons and military equipment. At that time, there were at least four thousand (!) Soviet military specialists in Iraq, without whose help, in the opinion of the US military, Iraq could not have captured Kuwait.

On January 17, 1991, the counter-actions of the forces of the anti-Iraqi coalition began. On February 28, the Iraqi army, having lost more than 180,000 troops, 4,000 tanks, 1,850 armored personnel carriers, 2,100 artillery pieces, unconditionally capitulated to military force USA and its allies.

Among the trophies captured by the anti-Iraqi coalition led by the United States, weapons and military equipment, acquired in the USSR, but not yet paid for, prevailed. However, those countries, the list of which was published by Krasnaya Zvezda back in 1991, “Disinterested ideological assistance”, according to the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the USSR E.A. Shevardnadze, speaking at the XXVIII Congress of the CPSU, amounted to only 700 billion rubles for military supplies to the former socialist countries and third world countries in order to convert them to the communist faith.

Handouts to "our friends" in the form of planes, tanks, helicopters, missiles, mines cost the USSR too much. The data given at the 28th Congress of the CPSU are clearly distorted. Egypt, Somalia, Ghana, Congo, Grenada, which briefly chose the "path of socialist orientation", returned to normal development. In February 1990, as a result of general free elections and the defeat of the Sandinistas in the elections, Nicaragua turned off "our" path.

It remains to be told how tens of thousands of Soviet servicemen, dressed in civilian clothes, laid mines, ambushed the roads of many third world countries, believing that they thereby contribute to their national liberation struggle. Not all of these volunteers returned home healthy and unharmed. A significant part of the internationalists was destined for the fate of the "unknown soldier" with an unmarked grave in the African jungle, in the sands of the Sahara or on the Golan Heights. In this regard, let us cite the data of the financial department of the USSR Ministry of Defense for 1989. 2.4 billion rubles were allocated for the pension maintenance of 1 million 280 thousand veterans of the armed forces and participants in wars. Of these veterans, 832,000 received long service pensions. 111,000 people received disability pensions, including those who "sniffed gunpowder abroad," and finally, 239,000 people received pensions for the loss of breadwinners - "unknown soldiers" with unmarked graves.

The surviving "volunteers under duress" gave the competent authorities a subscription not to disclose "state secrets" - about their "business trips" to Somalia, Mozambique, and Grenada. For the rest of their lives, they had to keep quiet about their adventures and about everything they witnessed and participated in. Only on June 30, 1989, the veil of secrecy surrounding the “internationalist soldiers” began to gradually fall: the government decided to extend to them the benefits and benefits provided for participants in the Great Patriotic War and for military personnel who served in Afghanistan.

For the last quarter of a century of its history, the Soviet Union has been one of the largest arms suppliers in the world. In the early 1980s, the USSR exported 25% of all weapons and military equipment produced in the country. For comparison, let's add: in 1985, the share of the United States in world arms supplies was 27%, France - 12%, Great Britain - 5%, China - 3%; the share of Soviet deliveries in the early 80s reached 40%. But Western exporters at the same time earned fabulous sums, and the USSR did not receive anything for the bulk of the weapons sold.

Analysis of the supply of products by all industrial sectors (metallurgical, fuel and energy, machine-building, military-industrial, chemical-forestry, building materials, light and food industries) for the military-industrial complex, military science, armed forces, KGB, Ministry of Internal Affairs and calculations of the total volume spending on military production showed that in 1989 485 billion rubles were allocated for the defense of the country. In that year, military-industrial complex enterprises produced consumer goods (TV sets, radios, tape recorders, etc.) worth 30 billion rubles. Consequently, the industry spent 455 billion rubles on defense.

Let us add to this sum of expenditures the budgetary centralized expenditures on military construction—not less than 10 billion rubles, and on military science- at least 15 billion rubles. We get that the total military spending of the USSR (without transport and communications) in just one year amounted to at least 480 (455+10+15) billion rubles.

If we are to believe the experts from the USSR State Statistics Committee, who claimed that in 1989 the gross national product amounted to 924 billion rubles, and the generated national income was 656 billion rubles, then the USSR’s “defense” spending reached mind-boggling figures - 51.9% of the gross national product or 73.1% of the manufacturing national income. All this predetermined the collapse of the Soviet economy, overstrained by unbearable military spending.

This insane arms race and reckless (more precisely, criminal in relation to one's own people) assistance to everyone and everything contributed to the ruin of the country, the collapse of the USSR.