could make it. If Stalin had a crisis in the availability of human resources, he faced an equally appalling set of tasks in consequence of the devastation of the material environment.
Not only that: the structure of administrative control was much more shaky than it had been before the war. Displaced persons were everywhere; and as the troops came back from Europe, the chaos increased. No picture of this was permitted to appear in the newspapers or the newsreels. The emphasis continued to fall upon the bravery and efficiency of the Red Army in Germany and the other occupied countries of central and eastern Europe. The reality was very different. The Soviet order was most easily restored in the larger cities, especially those which had never been under German rule. But the intense concentration on military tasks in the Great Patriotic War had led to the running down of those aspects of civilian administration which were not narrowly connected with the fight against the Germans. In the zone previously occupied by the Wehrmacht the shambles of organisation was acute. In places it was hard to believe that the Soviet order had ever existed as peasants reverted to a way of life which predated the October Revolution. Private trade and popular social customs had reasserted themselves over communist requirements. Stalin’s writ was unchallengeable in Moscow, Leningrad and other conurbations, but in smaller localities, especially the villages (where most of the population still lived), the arm of the authorities was not long enough to affect daily lives.
And despite the Red Army’s triumph in Europe there were problems in several countries under Soviet occupation. The military, security, diplomatic and political agencies of the USSR, already stretched to the limit before 1945, had somehow to cope with the responsibilities of peace. Yugoslavia was unusual in as much as its own internal forces under Tito had liberated it from the Germans. Elsewhere the Reds had played the crucial part in defeating the Wehrmacht. Victory proved simpler than occupation. Few people in central and eastern Europe wished to be subject to communist rule. Stalin and the Politburo knew how effectively the communists had been eradicated by Hitler and his allies and how little support the national communist leaders in Moscow-based emigration had in their homelands.
Somehow Stalin had to devise a way of gaining popular sympathy in these occupied countries while solving a vast number of urgent tasks. Food supplies had to be found. Economies had to be regenerated and post-Nazi administrations set up. Functionaries had to be checked for political reliability. The shattered cities and damaged roads and railways had to be restored. At the same time Stalin was determined to gain reparations from the former enemy countries, not only Germany but also Hungary, Romania and Slovakia. This was bound to complicate the task of winning popularity for himself and for communism. The Western Allies were another difficulty. An understanding existed with them that a rough line ran from north to south in Europe separating the Soviet zone of influence from the zone to be dominated by the United States, Britain and France. Yet there was no clarity about the rights of victor powers to impose their political, economic and ideological models on the countries they occupied. Nor had the victors specified what methods of rule were acceptable. As the ashes of war settled, tensions among the Allies were rising.
The global rivalry of the Allies was bound to increase after they had crushed their German and Japanese enemies. Stalin’s armies had taken the brunt of the military burden in Europe, but American power had also been decisive and was growing there. In the Far East the Red Army contributed little until the last few days. The United States, moreover, was the world’s sole nuclear power. The management of the post-war global order posed many menaces to Soviet security — and Stalin was quick to comprehend the danger.
If his regime was unpopular abroad, it was not much more attractive to Soviet citizens. There was a paradox in this. Undoubtedly the war had done wonders to enhance his reputation in the USSR; he was widely regarded as the embodiment of patriotism and victory. Even many who detested him had come to accord him a basic respect — and when defectors from the Soviet Union were interviewed it was found that several basic values propagated by the authorities found favour. The commitment to free education, shelter and healthcare as well as to universal employment had a lasting appeal. But the haters in the USSR were certainly numerous. Armed resistance was widespread in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, western Belorussia and western Ukraine. These were recently annexed areas. Elsewhere the regime was much more durably in control and few citizens dared to organise themselves against Stalin and his subordinates. Most of those who did were young people, especially students, who had no memory of the Great Terror. Small, clandestine groupings were formed in the universities. Typically they were dedicated to the purification of Marxist–Leninist ideology and behaviour from Stalinist taint: state indoctrination had got the brightest youngsters to approve of the October Revolution. These groupings were easily penetrated and dissolved.
More worrisome for the authorities was the hope prevailing across society that immense political and economic changes would follow the achievement of military victory. Stalin was a student of Russian history; he knew that the Russian Imperial Army’s entry into Paris in 1815 after the defeat of Napoleon had led to political unrest in Russia. Officers and troops who had experienced the greater civic freedom in France were never the same again, and in 1825 a mutiny took place which nearly overthrew the Romanovs. Stalin was determined to avoid any repetition of that Decembrist Revolt. The Red Army which stormed Berlin had witnessed terrible sights in eastern and central Europe: gas chambers, concentration camps, starvation, and urban devastation. Nazism’s impact was unmistakable. But those serving soldiers had also glimpsed a different and attractive way of life. Churches and shops were functioning. Goods were available, at least in most cities, which in the USSR were on sale only in enterprises reserved for the elites. The diet was more diverse. Peasants, if not well dressed, did not always look destitute. The pervasive regimentation of the USSR, too, was absent from the countries over which they had marched. This included Germany itself.
Stalin did not receive explicit reports on this: the security agencies had long since learned that they had to give him the truth in ideologically acceptable terms, and Stalin did not want to hear that life was more congenial abroad. What he was told by the agencies was alarming enough. Booty brought back by soldiers included all manner of goods from carpets, pianos and paintings to gramophone records, stockings and underwear. Red Army soldiers had made a habit of collecting wristwatches and, as often as not, wearing all of them simultaneously. Even civilians who had not moved beyond the old Soviet frontiers but had been held under German military rule had had experience of a different way of life which had not been in every way uncongenial. Churches, shops and small workshops had been restored after the initial success of Operation Barbarossa. Such Soviet citizens had neither war booty nor the experience of foreign travel; but their expectation that things would change in the USSR was strong. Across the entire Soviet Union, indeed, there was a popular feeling that it had been worth fighting the war only if reforms were to ensue.12
And so beneath the draped red flags of victory there lurked danger and uncertainty for Stalin and his regime. He understood the situation more keenly than anyone near to him in the Kremlin. It was this awareness as well as a perennial grumpiness that had made him so curt with Khrushchev after the fall of Berlin. He saw that critical times lay ahead.
Yet he would not have been human if warmer feelings had not occasionally suffused him. At the spectacular ceremonies he puffed out his chest. The stream of foreign dignitaries coming to Moscow at the end of the Second World War caught the sense of his mood. On such occasions he let pride take precedence over concern. Stalin, the Red Army and the USSR had won the war against a terrible enemy. As usual he compared current conditions with those which had prevailed under his admired predecessor. This was obvious from what he said to Yugoslav visitors:13
Lenin in his time did not dream of the correlation of forces which we have attained in this war. Lenin reckoned with the fact that everyone was going to attack us, and it would be good if any distant country, for example America, might remain neutral. But it’s now turned out that one group of the bourgeoisie went to war against us and another was on our side. Lenin previously did not think that it was possible to remain in alliance with one wing of the bourgeoisie and fight with another. This is what we’ve achieved…
Stalin was proud that he had gone one stage further than Lenin had thought possible. Whereas Lenin had hoped to preserve the Soviet state by keeping it out of inter-capitalist military conflicts and letting the great capitalist powers fight each other, Stalin had turned the USSR into a great power in its own right. Such was its strength that the USA and the United Kingdom had been obliged to seek its assistance.
How long, however, would the alliance hold after the end of hostilities with Germany and Japan? On this, Stalin was quietly definite when he met a Polish communist delegation:14
