the large capitalist economies after the defeat of Germany and Japan, only a few such as Britain and Sweden sponsored a comprehensive system of state welfare-assistance. Furthermore, the new communist authorities in Eastern Europe commenced a campaign of universal education and took steps so that the local nationalisms which had helped to cause the First and Second World Wars might be prevented from exploding again into violence.
The world communist movement followed the USSR’s example: even the Chinese communist party, which took power in Beijing in September 1949, acknowledged the USSR’s hegemony. The large communist parties in Italy and France had fought their own partisan struggles against Fascism and Nazism; but they, too, obeyed Moscow’s line of the day; their relationship with the All-Union Communist Party was more filial than fraternal. The Soviet Union was a military power of the first rank. In the post-war years, through to the break-up of the USSR, pride in the Soviet armed forces’ victory over Hitler and in their ability to compete with the USA’s nuclear power pervaded the regime. The resonance of her ideology reached parts of the globe where it had been unknown. Soviet political institutions had never been stronger, and the confidence of the country’s leaders never greater.
If Stalin and his confederates were to maintain their image around the world, however, they had to curtail the world’s knowledge about their country. The consequences of war were dreadful. Stalin sent NKVD investigators into all the areas that had ever been under German occupation to draw up an account of Soviet losses, and their reports made for depressing reading. Roughly twenty-six million citizens of the USSR lay dead as the direct result of the Second World War.1 The western regions of the USSR suffered disproportionate damage: perhaps as much as a quarter of the population of Ukraine and Belorussia failed to survive the war. The losses in Russia itself were also enormous. The number of Russians killed in wartime is not yet known; but indisputably it was huge. The Germans had occupied large regions of central, northern and southern Russia for lengthy periods and 1.8 million civilians were killed by them on the territory of the RSFSR.2 This was half the number of such deaths in Ukraine; but it should not be forgotten that Russians constituted one tenth of Ukraine’s population in 1939.3 In any case the RSFSR, where four fifths of citizens were Russians, had supplied most of the conscripts to a Red Army which suffered grievous losses throughout the Soviet-German war.
The dead were not the only victims. Russia and the rest of the USSR teemed with widows, orphans and invalids. Innumerable families had been destroyed or disrupted beyond repair. The state could not cope with the physical rehabilitation of those veterans left disabled at the end of military hostilities. Nor could it secure adequate food and shelter for the waifs and strays on Soviet streets. And since many more men than women had been killed, there would inevitably be a demographic imbalance between the sexes. The USSR’s people appeared more like the losers than the victors of the Second World War.
The urban landscape throughout the western Soviet Union was a ruin. Minsk, Kiev and Vilnius had become acres of rubble. In the RSFSR, Stalingrad was a blackened desert. The Red Army had implemented a scorched-earth policy in its rapid retreat in 1941. But the damage done by the Wehrmacht on its own long retreat in 1944–5 was vastly more systematic. Hardly a factory, collective farm, mine or residential area was left intact; 1710 towns were obliterated along with about 70,000 villages. Whole rural districts were wrecked so thoroughly that agriculture practically ceased in them.4 In Cherkessk in Stavropol region, for instance, the Soviet investigative commission reported the demolition of thirty main buildings, including the party and soviet headquarters, the furniture factory, the radio station, the saw-mill and the electricity-generating plant. Hospitals and clinics had been put out of action. The town’s thirty-five libraries had been blown up along with their 235,000 books. The commission added in a matter-of-fact fashion: ‘All the good new schools were turned into stables, garages, etc.’5
It had been Nazi policy to reduce the Russians and other Soviet nations to starvation, poverty and cultural dissolution. And so, as the Wehrmacht and Gestapo moved out of north-western Russia, they paused at Petrodvorets in order to annihilate the palace built for the Empress Elizabeth to the design of the Italian architect Rastrelli. No one who has visited that now-reconstructed great palace is likely to forget the records of vandalism: pictures defaced, wall-coverings burnt, statues bludgeoned to smithereens.
Displaced civilians and disattached soldiers swarmed on to the highways and rail-routes leading to Moscow. The Smolensk Road, from Warsaw to Moscow, was crammed with Soviet troops making their way back home and often carrying war booty. Lorries, cars, horses and even railway carriages were commandeered by them. The chaos of administration increased at the end of military hostilities, and total detailed dominance by the Kremlin was unobtainable. The police state was at its most efficient in Moscow; but the Soviet security police was overstretched by its recently-acquired responsibility for conducting surveillance over the countries of Eastern Europe. An attempt had been made in 1943 to rationalize the NKVD’s functions between two agencies: the NKVD itself and a new NKGB (People’s Commissariat of State Security). But the workload was enormous, and the result was that in many towns and most villages of the USSR there was a temporary relief from the state’s interference on a day-to-day basis.
A depiction of the scene comes to us from the Italian writer Primo Levi. Having escaped from the Auschwitz concentration camp, Levi had to make his own arrangements to get back to his native Turin. He wandered into Warsaw, where thieving and black-marketeering were rife. He walked on from Warsaw into Belorussia, and yet again he found that illegal private bartering was the only way to stay alive. After much haggling, he exchanged a few trinkets with peasants for one of their chickens. Of the party-state’s presence there was little sign.6
For Stalin, therefore, military victory in 1945 presented many risks.7 The material and social damage would take years to mend, and disorder might occur in Russia or any other Soviet republic or indeed any country of Eastern Europe. Stalin’s discomfort was sharpened by the reports that broad segments of society yearned for him to abandon the policies and methods of the past. The Red Army soldiers who had marched into Europe had seen things that made them question the domestic policies of their own government. Greeting fellow soldiers of the Western Allies on the river Elbe or in Berlin, they had been able to learn a little about foreign ways. Those other citizens, too, who had never crossed the boundaries of the USSR had had experiences which increased their antagonism to the Soviet regime. Partisans and others had resisted Hitler without needing to be compelled by the Kremlin; and Stalin’s near-catastrophic blunders in 1941–2 had not been forgotten.
Then there were those who had objections of an even more immediate nature: the kulaks, priests and national leaders repressed during the 1930s; the Gulag inmates; the deported nationalities of the Second World War; the peoples of the annexed Baltic states, western Ukraine and Moldavia; the Red Army soldiers captured as prisoners-of-war by the Germans. Countless millions of Soviet citizens would have been delighted by the collapse of Stalin’s party and government.
The sentiment was popular, too, that the wartime rigours applied by the Soviet political leadership for the defeat of Hitler should be removed. Otherwise the war would not have been worth fighting. This sense was strong among men and women who had become adults in 1941–5; for they, unlike their parents, had no direct experience of the purges of 1937–8. They felt fear, but it was not always the petrifying fear common to their parents.8 There was also less tension than in earlier times between the working-class and the intelligentsia. In particular, the soldiers on campaign had shared appalling conditions regardless of social origin, and they wanted policies to be changed not just for a section of society but for everyone. Courageous individual spirits had been produced by the war. It is no accident that some of the most durable critics of the ascendant party leadership in the 1960s and 1970s, including Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Roy Medvedev, had been young veterans in the war.9
At the USSR Supreme Soviet elections in 1946, people privately complained that there was no point in voting since there was only a single candidate for each seat and the electoral results would not affect decisions of policy. In the countryside rumours spread like wildfire that the kolkhozes were about to be disbanded,10 and peasant households went on appropriating land from the farms and growing produce for personal consumption and black-market trade.11 There was disgruntlement with the abject remuneration for farm-work. The same mutterings were heard in the towns, especially after the raising of food-ration prices in 1946.12
Stalin ordered his intimates ‘to deliver a strong blow’ at any talk about ‘democracy’, talk which he thought to be the unfortunate result of the USSR’s wartime alliance.13 He was striking before opposition got out of hand. No unifying political vision existed among the peasants; factory workers, low-ranking administrators, teachers and other professional people were equally vague about what needed to be done. It is true that bands of guerrillas challenged Soviet rule in the newly-annexed regions of the USSR — in western Ukraine they held out until the mid-1950s. But such resistance was rare in the older parts of the USSR. In Russia it was virtually non-existent,
