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Simple omission is not the only anomaly in Sovietology’s treatment of military-economic matters. Another is civilianization, the peaceful reinterpretation of the features of the economy that the Soviets themselves revealed to be of military significance. This chapter focuses on the objectives of the planners, the most important actors in the Soviet economy. The objectives of planning, as described by Soviet sources, are the same as those of rulers elsewhere: building up military might and popular wellbeing, with growth as the means for achieving those. The standard Sovietological view holds growth for its own sake to be the supreme objective of the Soviet rulers. Yet such an objective is incompatible with the evidence of actual economic policies pursued throughout the plan era.

Forced industrialization, which was launched under the First Five-Year Plan, was a formative event that set the course of the Soviet economy. Stalin and other Soviet rulers have repeatedly stated, with uncharacteristic candor, that the objective of industrialization was the creation of defense capability, as well as building socialism. The main feature of industrialization, primacy of heavy industry, was said to serve the same twin goals. The standard Sovietological account civilianizes industrialization by downgrading or omitting the objectives proclaimed by Stalin, and substituting growth for its own sake as the sole motive. It derives the priority of heavy industry from the writings of Marx and the obscure Soviet economists. This account disregards or glosses over contradictory Soviet sources, violates the basics of the economic approach, and fails to draw connections to similar policies in other countries and periods.

This chapter describes the influences that inclined scholars in the field to recast their subject in civilian terms. Sovietologists belonged to a small, low-prestige field of economics. They were hired and promoted by their departmental colleagues working in the other fields of economics, and stood a higher chance of being treated favorably if their research could be seen as dealing with the issues of interest for the larger discipline, such as growth and economic development.

Aversion of the discipline of economics to things military, which Sovietology, its peripheral field, emulated, is shown to be a part of a more general pattern in the social sciences. A survey of articles about the German economy in 1934–1939 finds that the authors largely ignored another great peacetime military buildup of the twentieth century. It was seen as a peculiar and successful variant of employment policy, with potential lessons for other Depression-stricken economies. Archeologists and anthropologists bypassed the evidence of warfare in pre-literate societies, or gave it strained pacific interpretations. Academic historians marginalized their colleagues specializing in military history. Civilianizing tendencies in the study of other countries and in other disciplines support some of my arguments about Sovietology, and at the same time make its case all the more instructive.