Council of Labour and Defence

The Council of Labor and Defense (Russian: Совет труда и обороны, 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 in its successor state, the Soviet Union. During the Russian Civil War of 1917-1922 the council served as an emergency "national economic cabinet", issuing emergency decrees in an effort to sustain industrial production for the Red Army amidst economic collapse.

The Council, 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. Following the end of the Civil War the council was renamed and its economic planning and regulatory roles expanded to encompass the entire country. As the first central economic planning authority in Soviet Russia, the Council of Labor and Defense served as the institutional precursor to the better-known Soviet planning authority of later years, Gosplan, launched in August 1923 as a subcommittee of STO.

The Russian Revolution of 1917 concluded in the fall with the October Revolution, organized and achieved through the direction of V.I. Lenin's radical Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. With the country already decimated and disorganized by three brutal years of the First World War, the fledgling socialist state struggled to hang on and survive civil war, a multinational foreign military intervention, and the collapse of the economy, including the broad depopulation of major cities and the onset of hyperinflation.

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