State Defense Committee (GKO)

The supreme organ of the war effort

The State Defense Committee was the extraordinary supreme state organ that concentrated military, political, and economic power in the USSR during the Great Patriotic War. The situation at the front demanded the greatest possible centralization of leadership, and the committee was created to overcome the confusion and departmental parochialism of wartime administration quickly and to concentrate all the most important affairs of the state in a single operational center. Its resolutions were binding without exception on any Soviet, economic, party, Komsomol, or military body and on all citizens of the USSR, and any document it issued had the force of law. At the same time the USSR Armed Forces, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, the Council of People's Commissars, and the people's commissariats continued to function, carrying out the committee's resolutions and decisions. Direction of military operations was exercised by the Stavka of the Supreme High Command through its executive body, the General Staff.

Creation

The State Defense Committee was established on June 30, 1941, by a joint decision of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, the Council of People's Commissars (Sovnarkom), and the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks). Nazi Germany had invaded a week earlier, on June 22. The political leadership's decision was first formalized as Politburo decision No. 136, and the handwritten draft of the resolution survived in the Politburo fonds; the document is now held by the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History (RGASPI).

The idea of creating the committee was put forward at a meeting held on June 29, 1941, in Vyacheslav Molotov's Kremlin office. Lavrenty Beria, Georgy Malenkov, Kliment Voroshilov, Anastas Mikoyan, and Nikolai Voznesensky were present as well, and in the afternoon the participants went to Stalin's nearby dacha, where duties were distributed among the members.

Composition

As first constituted, the committee consisted of Joseph Stalin as chairman, Vyacheslav Molotov as deputy chairman, and Kliment Voroshilov, Georgy Malenkov, and Lavrenty Beria as members. Stalin was concurrently General Secretary of the party Central Committee and chairman of the Council of People's Commissars, and he subsequently also took the chairmanship of the Stavka of the Supreme High Command (July 10, 1941) and the post of People's Commissar of Defense (July 19, 1941).

The composition changed repeatedly thereafter. On February 3, 1942, Nikolai Voznesensky, then chairman of Gosplan, and Anastas Mikoyan were appointed members; Lazar Kaganovich was brought in on February 20 of the same year. On May 16, 1944, Lavrenty Beria became deputy chairman, and on November 21, 1944, Nikolai Bulganin replaced Kliment Voroshilov as a member.

How it worked

The committee had no administrative apparatus of its own. Its decisions were prepared in the relevant commissariats and agencies, while record-keeping was handled by the Special Sector of the party Central Committee. Implementation ran through the existing government bureaucracy, above all the Council of People's Commissars, the individual commissariats, and the State Planning Commission (Gosplan). Meetings were held frequently but informally, sometimes at short notice and often without a prepared agenda, yet the issues acted upon were those foremost on Stalin's mind.

The most important subordinate body was the Operational Bureau, created on December 8, 1942, by resolution No. 2615. Molotov, Beria, Malenkov, and Mikoyan sat on it, and its initial task was to monitor and oversee the current work of the commissariats of the defense industry, transport, ferrous and non-ferrous metallurgy, power stations, and the oil, coal, and chemical industries, and to oversee the drafting and fulfillment of production and supply plans for those sectors. Resolution No. 5931 of May 19, 1944 broadly expanded its functions, adding supervision of the commissariats of the defense industry, transport, metallurgy, the most important branches of industry, and power stations, responsibility for supplying the army, and the duties of the abolished Transport Committee. Other bodies under the committee, established at various times, included groups of permanent plenipotentiaries and permanent commissions at the fronts, an evacuation commission, a special committee, a trophy commission, committees for trophies and for unloading the railways, a radar council, and the Special Committee charged with developing nuclear weapons.

Each member had defined areas of responsibility to supervise. Molotov oversaw tank production; Malenkov aircraft engine production and the forming of aviation regiments; Beria armaments, ammunition, and mortars; Voznesensky heavy and light metals, oil, and chemicals; and Mikoyan the supply of food, fuel, pay, and artillery to the Red Army. All members were also required to help inspect the fulfillment of decisions of the people's commissars in the course of their work.

To handle urgent tasks locally, the committee used the institution of its plenipotentiary representatives. A person who received a GKO mandate departed to carry out the assigned task, and on presentation of that document any official or worker of any local body was obliged to carry out all instructions received from him. The plenipotentiary reported directly to the committee and bore personal responsibility for the task.

On October 22, 1941, resolution No. 830 established city defense committees, and on October 23, 1941, a council of the GKO was formed.

Resolutions and their content

The committee's decisions had the force of law. Its first resolution, of July 1, 1941, concerned organizing production of T-34 medium tanks at the Krasnoye Sormovo plant, and its last, No. 9971, was issued on September 4, 1945. The numbering was continuous throughout.

The 9,971 resolutions and orders adopted during the war dealt overwhelmingly with war-related subjects: evacuation of the population and industry (concentrated in the first period of the war); mobilization of industry and the production of weapons and ammunition; the formation of guards units; the adoption of new types of armament and ammunition; the handling of captured weapons and ammunition; the study of seized equipment and industrial plant and their removal to the USSR, and reparations (in the final stage of the war); the organization of military operations and the distribution of weapons; the appointment of GKO plenipotentiaries; the start of "work on uranium" (the development of nuclear weapons); and structural changes within the committee itself. Most resolutions were signed or certified with a seal by Stalin, and some by Deputy Chairman Molotov and by the members Mikoyan and Beria. The great majority carried secrecy classifications such as "Secret," "Top Secret," or "Top Secret / of special importance," but some were open and published in the press, such as resolution No. 813 of October 19, 1941, on introducing a state of siege in Moscow.

The distribution of resolutions by year shows the escalating activity of the country's top leadership bodies: 1,087 resolutions and orders were adopted in the six months of 1941, 1,592 in 1942, and 2,396 in 1943.

The GKO was dissolved by a decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet on September 4, 1945, having fulfilled its role as a wartime organ after the end of military operations. Its documents passed to the archive of the party Central Committee and were transferred in 1995, under presidential instructions and commissions, to the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History (RGASPI), where they are now available.