Blood Money: Inside The Soviet Economy

How did the USSR - a country considered a second-rate industrial power, economically inferior to Germany, the USA and the UK - shape its victory over the armies of Hitler's regime, and secure its place among the winners?

While protagonists, witnesses and historians recognize the value of the Red Army, it is much more uncommon to focus on the achievements of the Soviet economy, often a symbol of mismanagement and inefficiency. And yet, while the 1945 victory was a military one, it was also, and perhaps above all, an economic and industrial one. It is this little-known paradox that we intend to shed light on. Between 1941 and 1945, the country wavered, set itself in motion and restructured itself: politically, economically, industrially and socially.

Archives - of combat, of propaganda, of civilians - and historians will analyze the economic strategy deployed by the USSR to defeat Nazi Germany, explaining how the USSR, which was expected to lose, succeeded in mobilizing its people and its resources as no nation had yet done, to the point of halting the inexorable advance of Hitler's troops.