Effectiveness of the work of the People’s Commissariat of Railways of the USSR in the first months of the Great Patriotic War

<jats:p>The aim of the study is to identify, based on archival documents and other evidence, crisis processes related to army and evacuation transportation in the first months of the Great Patriotic War. The author analyzes the little-studied issue of the effectiveness of the People’s Commissariat of Railways (NKPS) system in the second half of 1941 in the historiography of the Great Patriotic War. The crisis phenomena in the work of the NKPS are revealed, which were not completely eliminated by February 1942. The author introduces new documents, highlights facts that were previously little known to historians or facts that did not attract the proper attention of researchers. The study also questioned the expediency of a number of measures related to the evacuation of material assets from the western regions of the USSR, as this led to a shortage of rolling stock for military transportation. The paper also proves that evacuation decisions were not always made on the basis of economic rationality, but followed from Bolshevik ideas about the correct methods of warfare. The scientific novelty of the study boils down to the fact that negative trends in the work of the NKPS were identified due to the heavy load on the railway network of the European regions of the USSR in the first months of the Great Patriotic War, these data are systematized. As a result, the following results were obtained: the NKPS system turned out to be insufficiently prepared to work in the face of the sudden aggression of Nazi Germany and its allies against the USSR, one of the consequences of which was the energy crisis in Moscow in the winter of 1941/1942.</jats:p>