Council of Labor and Defense

The Council of Labor and Defense (Russian: Совет труда и обороны (СТО) Sovet truda i oborony, Latin acronym: STO), first established as the Council of Workers' and Peasants' Defense in November 1918, was an agency responsible for the central management of the economy and production of military materiel in the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic and later in the Soviet Union.

[1] The STO, a commission of the Council of People's Commissars, included among its executive body such top-ranking Bolshevik leaders as V. I. Lenin, Leon Trotsky, and Joseph Stalin, who oversaw a burgeoning professional apparatus.

A new body known as the Supreme Council of National Economy (Latin acronym of the Cyrillic: VSNKh, commonly sounded out as "Vesenkha") was established on December 15, 1917, as the first governmental entity for the coordination of state finance and economic production and distribution in the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic (RSFSR).

[2] As the Vesenkha bureaucracy developed, it began to generate specialized departments from itself, entities known as glavki, each responsible for the operation of a specific economic sector.

[10] The Council of Workers' and Peasants' Defense was originally conceived as an emergency body dedicated solely to the mobilization of Russia's resources for the fighting of the civil war.

[9] Lenin himself was named as chairman, Leon Trotsky sat as the People's Commissar of War, Leonid Krassin as head of the extraordinary commission of supply, and Joseph Stalin as the representative of the All-Russian Executive Committee.

[9] The organization quickly emerged as what historian Alec Nove has called the "effective economic cabinet" of the nation, with the power to issue legally binding decrees.

As was the case with the parallel government planning organization Vesenkha and its glavki, the Council of Workers' and Peasants' Defense had a set of specialized subcommittees dedicated to specific aspects of the military industries.

[10] Productive industry remained in crisis as authorities threw manpower and resources from one critical bottleneck to the next, creating new shortages in the process of attempting to solve standing problems.

[10] From 1919 the authority of Vesenkha began to wane, with the People's Commissariat of Agriculture (Narkomzem) in charge of grain requisitions and the Council of Workers' and Peasants' Defense gaining power in the industrial sphere.

[15] The Council of Workers' and Peasants' Defense was given charge of all supplies to the Red Army except for agricultural products and was the primary controller and user of the nation's industrial output, limited though it may have been.

[18] This commission, which was given a free hand to interpret and modify existing trade regulations and to propose new laws for ratification by Sovnarkom, does not seem to have exerted itself in any substantial way, however, and market forces remained paramount under the NEP.