This book is an attempt at a history of the Soviet economic system and planned economy between 1938 and 1945. For the Soviet Union these were the last years of war preparations, followed by the years of ‘patriotic war’ against the German invader. Disaster was followed by recovery and ultimate victory. In this drama the economic factor was never far from the centre of the stage. Soviet wartime economic experience was so strikingly different from that of the other major powers that the story could hardly fail to be of intrinsic interest in its own right.

It is all the more surprising, therefore, to find that no major study or book-length analysis of the Soviet wartime economy has been published in the West for over thirty years. The last was the official Soviet account by Voznesensky, the wartime planning chief, translated into English and published in London and Washington in 1948. Since then the Soviet wartime economy has featured only in a handful of journal articles, textbook chapters and incidental comments in studies of related topics (among these, easily the most important are the two chapters in Zaleski's monumental study of Soviet economic planning under Stalin). This neglect contrasts oddly with the large volume of materials available from Soviet sources - official histories, personal memoirs and scholarly accounts.

I set out to write this book, therefore, partly because I wanted to work on an inherently interesting subject and at the same time help to remedy what I saw as unjustified neglect. I also had other reasons, which may help the reader to understand the nature of the result.