Military-Industrial Commission (VPK)

Origins and founding

A body answering to the same name existed before the war. In 1938, on the eve of war, the Soviet leadership created a Military-Industrial Commission under the Defence Committee of the Council of People's Commissars, tasked with mobilizing industry and supplying the Red Army and Navy with weaponry. It was assigned the role of arbiter in interagency disputes, but once the war began its defence-industry control functions passed to the State Defence Committee (GKO); in the early postwar years the industrial bureaus for machine building and shipbuilding took over the task.

On 6 December 1957, as Khrushchev's reorganization abolished the industrial ministries in favour of regional economic councils (sovnarkhozy), a joint resolution of the CPSU Central Committee and the Council of Ministers established the Commission on Military-Industrial Issues under the Presidium of the USSR Council of Ministers. Besides the Ministry of Defence, the commission took in the defence-industry ministries (medium machine building, aviation, defence, general machine building, radio, communications, shipbuilding and electronics), the KGB, the State Committee for the Use of Atomic Energy, the Main Directorate of State Material Reserves, the technical directorate for foreign economic relations, DOSAAF and the Dynamo Central Council.

Organization and functions

The commission was headed by a deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers. Its deputy chairmen held the rights of a first deputy minister and its department heads those of a deputy minister, and its apparatus did not exceed 250 people. The chairman disposed of a secretariat, deputies, a Scientific and Technical Council and an apparatus of 10 to 15 departments. For many years the Scientific and Technical Council was led by Academician A. N. Shchukin, and it worked through 10 to 12 sections on the main problems of weapons development with 200 to 250 members drawn from the defence industry, the Ministry of Defence's research institutes, the Academy of Sciences and higher education. Its decisions were binding on all ministries and departments developing and producing military products, regardless of their departmental subordination.

Its stated tasks were to organize and coordinate work on modern weapons and military equipment, coordinate the defence industries together with the other ministries and departments involved, and ensure, jointly with the State Planning Committee (Gosplan), the comprehensive development of the defence industries. They also included drafting armament programmes and five-year and annual plans, preparing proposals on control figures for defence expenditure for the Defence Council and the Supreme Soviet, coordinating military-technical cooperation abroad, and overseeing nuclear power construction and the electronization of the national economy.

The commission's functions kept expanding: oversight of weapons research and development plans was added in 1961, coordination of nuclear and chemical weapons in 1967, and laser and other special weapons and special facilities in the 1970s.

Chairmen and political context

Dmitry Ustinov, promoted to Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers, headed the new commission from 1957; Leonid Smirnov chaired it from 1963 to 1985. A resolution of 16 November 1985 transformed it into the State Commission of the Council of Ministers on Military-Industrial Issues, a permanent body managing the defence industries, and in 1991 it became the State Military-Industrial Commission of the USSR Cabinet of Ministers. At that point it comprised nine ministries: aviation, machine building, defence, general machine building, communications, radio, shipbuilding, medium machine building and electronics.

Party control over defence production shifted decisively from government institutions to the party after the Anti-Party Group affair of 1957. Ustinov, promoted in its aftermath, took charge of executing weapons research and development policy, while Ivan Serbin, head of the Defence Industry Department of the CPSU Central Committee from 1958 to 1981, presided over the field. A Council of Ministers commission for inter-ministerial coordination and a party department for defence industry thus worked side by side.