It is considered the law enforcement practice of implementing the Decree of 26 June 1940 before the adoption of the Decree of 26 December 1941, which increased the criminal penalty for desertion from the labour front. On the basis of statistics on the number of convicted and excluded from the party for violations of labour discipline the author points out the refusal of the party-State authorities to continue the unsystematic punitive policy. This refusal was manifested in the purposeful division of violators of labour discipline into "malicious" and "accidental," in the rules on prevention of illegal cases of criminal prosecution, in some reduction of the number of persons brought to criminal and party disciplinary responsibility, in the general easing and revision of severe penalties. This was due to the high level of social tension caused by the previous course of strengthening punitive policy in the field of labour legal relations and the updated failed outbreak of war. However, during the first six months of the war the number and social composition of rear workers begins to change significantly: in conditions of acute shortage of personnel, the share of low-skilled labor force in the person of graduates of schools of factory training and craft schools mobilized from rural areas by collective farmers, labor workers and prisoners increases. These changes took place in the context of the restructuring of the economy into "military tracks," which was accompanied by the disruption of economic ties between enterprises and the disruption of the supply of raw materials, the downtime of production and the failure to carry out increasing defense tasks, and a significant decrease in the standard of living of workers. This became a socio-economic prerequisite for a rather critical level of negative labour deviations which called into question the performance of defense orders by military industry enterprises. In turn, this circumstance has led to a significant increase in criminal penalties for unauthorized abandonment of the place of work.