Military-industrial policy of the Bolsheviks in 1917-1941: achievements and performances

The author proposes a periodization of industrial policy outlines the stages and presents a brief analysis of their main content. The work considers a complex of management decisions taken by the party regarding the military industry in the context of socio-economic and military-political events of that era. The evaluation of the Bolshevik experiment on building a socialist, command-bureaucratic model of economic management is given, and the reasons for its formation are examined. The article shows the contradictory nature of the results of forced industrialization in the years of the first five-year plans, and the quality of the military-technical potential received is estimated. The transformation of the views of the Bolshevik party into the role of the military industry is shown: from a relatively neutral one, conditioned by the need for stabilization, in anticipation of a «world revolution», to a classical, Soviet approach that presupposed the paramount attention to the needs of military production within the framework of building «socialism in a single country».