The Rocketry Development and the Ministry of Armament in the Former-Soviet Union

Abstract

The main factor of the rapid growth of the former-Soviet military industries and their technological transformation is, needless to say, the outbreak of the Cold War. The risky and costly developments of the new weapons such as nuclear bombs, rockets (missiles), atomic submarine boats and others were succeeded in a very short time immediately after World War II in spite of the heavy economic damages. In this sense we also need the economic approach to this issue. What is curious about the activities of the Ministry of Armament in the period is that they took charge of the research and development of rocketry although they had not engaged themselves in this field, and that they started their project with the mere copying of the German rockets in spite of objections from the Soviet engineers. Taking advantages of the former classified documents of this Ministry that the author had found in the Branch of the Russian State Archive of Economy in Moscow and other sources, he tries to make clear the economic factors for their choice. After an examination of the materials, he concludes that the Ministry of Armament in this period failed in the conversion to the peace industries which had been needed for the economic rehabilitation, so they had to discover the new resources for the sake of the maintenance of their raison d'etre and make their idle production capacity operated as soon as they could. It seems that this aspect of the process suggests the economic or business factors of the rapid technological transformation of the Postwar Soviet military industries.