This line of thinking doesn't take into account the unique and dangerous situation the soviets faced. Far from the comfortable perception that the Soviets outgunned the german economy and was a modern economy with a good supply of skilled workers and ample factory space, virtually every aspect of these assumptions about Soviet industry in 1940-45 was nothing like the reality they faced.
Soviet war industries even before the war broke out were hard pressed to meet even peacetime demands. According to "
The Industrialization of Soviet Russia in the First Half Century"; John P. Hardt & Carl Modig ((
http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/698197.pdf), as an index of world out put and using 1913 as the reference point, soviet steel production fell from a baseline index of 100 in 1913, to 88.4 in 1940. Relative to its world position, despite the hype of the vaunted 5 year plans, soviet industrial self sufficiency in that period was sharply falling, and in 1913 it was insufficient. . I do not have figures for aluminium, but it would seem reasonable to assume a similar extrapolation
Factory spaces were similarly falling. Using 1913 as the baseline index, we now know that factory capacity had fallen to 89.4% of that figure in 1940. Sure, the 5 year plans had seen great steps forward, but only from the perspective that soviet industry in 1928 had come to a virtual standstill. It was recovering, but nowhere was soviet industry sufficient to meet wartime output requirements. The german invasion of 1941 made things even worse, reducing available factory spaces by more than 35% compared to the 1938 levels.
The numbers of skilled workers is a direct correlation to the available factory spaces. Hardt and Modig point this aspect out, and repeatedly mention the wartime reliance on unskilled labour. So the comfortable assumption that soviet industry was somehow akin to western methods just does not stand up to any level of even cursory examination
A later, more defence specific article "
The Soviet Defense Industry Complex in World War II*, Mark Harrison (university Of Warwick);
https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/mharrison/public/dfc1994postprint.pdf reinforces this position
At the core of the prewar defense industry lay the big assembly plants permanently specialized in producing finished tanks, guns, aircraft, and ammunition. But hundreds of smaller factories were also part-time or occasional producers of final defense products they were being drawn from civilian industry into the defense industry by the pace of prewar rearmament, which far exceeded the capacity of the big permanent defense producers. Surrounding the assembly plants lay the
subcontracting system.
This paper points out that the specialised skilled workforce working in the defence sector amounted to 1.4 million people (in 1940), however at that time the total numbers working in defence related industries included a further 9 million unskilled workers and peasants 9it had increased to over 14 million in 1942). The proportions of workers to peasants is not shown, but neither is it critical. With only 1 in 6 workers with any skill, soviet aircraft were indeed relying on WWI style production methods and skills, and that meant using guys versed in building wagons and such in the production of aircraft frames.
Recruitment into the defence industry was a problem, but nowhere was it more pronounced than in the aircraft construction sector. According to Harrison, of the nearly 2 million workers employed in the sector all but 215000 were unskilled or semi skilled in 1941. Since more than 60% of workers were press ganged peasants, it becomes unassailable that the majority of the workforce were ex-peasants. Later in the war, this massive imbalance between skilled and unskilled was partially redressed, with Gosplan reporting 1 in 5 of the annual intake of 800000 workers being in the skilled category.
