Matrix Games

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ORIGINAL: Richie61

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The Soviet military revival in 1942 and 1943 was inextricably linked to the recovery of the battered industrial economy. The Soviet war effort was saved only by a most remarkable exodus of machines, equipment and manpower from the areas under German attack in 1941. Two days after the German attack a Committee of Evacuation was set up, with a staff of eighty-five planners and officials under the leadership of a Party favourite of Stalin’s, Lazar Kaganovich. Unable to cope with the scale of the emergency, he was replaced in July by the trade union leader, N. M. Shvernik. Evacuation was carried out under exceptional difficulties. Subjected to air attack, with German forces often at no more than a few hours’ distance, thousands of engineers and workers swarmed like ants over their factories, dismantling machinery and hauling equipment and vital materials to the nearest railhead. Here it was loaded, often manhandled, onto flatcars or into boxcars, for the long journey east. Whenever possible, each train carried a whole plant and its workforce. The workers were packed into cars equipped with rows of bunks and a stove. At their destination in the Urals, Kazakhstan or Siberia, they poured out of the cars and began the arduous work of reassembling their workplace.