The World in March 1939

Survery of International Affairs
Edited by Arnold Toynbee

(f) INTERACTION OF THE SOVIET UNION'S INTERNAL PROBLEM AND
INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

{p. 59} In the course of the ten years following the inauguration of the First Five Year Plan, the war with the people took a turn which Lenin certainly and Stalin probably had not forseen. It began with the deportation of the kulaks, coinciding with the urgent need for unskilled labour on capital enterprise in under-populated areas—or areas, even, where free men would never stay. The deportees had to be employed: the Five-Year Plan cried out for crude labour. The GPU discovered the solution. Thus, from the miserable but far rom sholesale beginnings of the early Bolshevik penal camps, sprang up and flourished the colosaal system of forced labour which, before very long, was to form one of the main props of the Soviet economy. The more deportees, the more widespread were their labours; the more widespread their labours, the greater was the meed for more deportees—a need which first the GPU, then the NKVD, knew how to satisfy...

(g) THE STATE OF THE RED ARMY

{p. 62} We have seen how the immediate well-being of the Russian people had for years been sacrificed in order to build up a heavy industry and a large and well-equppied army. When finally completed, this immense and laborious project would be embodied in a war-machine of truly formidable proportions. But it had not yet been completed; as the event proved, it was not finally complete even in 1941.