Stalin no longer accorded great significance to its tasks of supervision.
In any case, Zhdanov had not challenged the priority of the capital-goods sector, which in 1945–50 amounted to eighty-eight per cent of all industrial investment.26 The Fourth Five-Year Plan’s first draft, which had taken consumers’ aspirations into more favourable consideration than at any time since the NEP, was ripped up.27 Capital goods output, including armaments, rose by eighty-three per cent in the half-decade after the Second World War.28 This towering priority was enhanced in subsequent years. The budget of 1952 provided for a forty-five per cent increase of output for the armed forces in comparison with two years before.29 Meanwhile the Soviet team of nuclear scientists led by Sergei Kurchatov and controlled by Beria had exploded an A-bomb at the Semipalatinsk testing-site in Kazakhstan in August 1949. Beria was so relieved at the sight of the billowing mushroom cloud that he momentarily abandoned his haughtiness and gave Kurchatov a hug.30
The priority for the armed forces meant that factory production for the ordinary consumer was starved of investment. Although output in this sector was doubled in the course of the Fourth Five-Year Plan, this was an increase from the pitifully low level of wartime.31 Machine-tools, guns and bombs took precedence over shoes, coats, chairs and toys. The supply of food was also terribly inadequate. The grain harvest reaching the barns and warehouses in 1952 was still only seventy-seven per cent of the 1940 harvest.32
Schemes were introduced to raise additional revenues. Stalin sucked back citizens’ personal savings into the state’s coffers on 16 December 1947 by announcing a nine tenths devaluation of the rouble. Extra taxes, too, were invented. Among them was a charge on the peasant household for each fruit tree in its kitchen garden. Owners of cattle, pigs, sheep and hens were also subjected to punitive taxation. In 1954, fully a year after Stalin’s death, the monthly pay for a typical kolkhoznik remained lower than a sixth of the earnings of the average factory worker: a miserable sixteen roubles.33 To be sure, many kolkhozniki found other means of income; and some urban inhabitants were able to eke out their miserable wages by means of land allotments on which they grew potatoes and even kept the odd chicken. But conditions were generally abysmal. There was famine in Ukraine and Moldavia, a famine so grievous that cases of cannibalism occurred.
Many rural families elsewhere were left with so little grain after delivering their quotas to the government that they themselves had to buy flour in the towns. Innumerable farms in any case failed to comply with the state’s procurement plan. Agriculture recovery had hardly begun. This meant that it was not unusual for kolkhozniki to receive no payment whatsoever from one year’s end to the next. Such individuals would have no money to buy things from shops.
In the towns, too, there was great hardship. Stalin’s ministers planned a programme of apartment construction (for which his successors took exclusive credit) but little was achieved in the early post-war years. The Soviet welfare state was not universal: social misfits and mentally-unstable individuals were neglected; and pensions were set at a derisory level. Furthermore, they were claimable by only a million people as late as 1950. Certain occupations in the towns offered just twenty roubles monthly, considerably below the poverty level as defined by the United Nations. Admittedly these were the worst-paid jobs. But official statistics also indicated that the average urban wage in 1952 was still no higher than it had been in 1928. Pressure therefore existed not only to get a job but also to seek promotion to higher posts.34
And a similar economic system was simultaneously being imposed on many other countries by the Soviet armed forces and security police and Eastern Europe’s fraternal communist parties. The decisions of Allied political leaders at Moscow and Yalta in 1945 divided the European continent into broad zones of military responsibility; there had also been an assumption that the respective basic interests of the USSR, the USA, the UK and France would be safeguarded after the last shot of the Second World War had been fired.
The Yugoslav communist fighter Milovan Djilas has given a record of Stalin’s musings: ‘This war is not as in the past; whoever occupies a territory also imposes his own social system on it. Everyone imposes his own system as far as his army can reach. It cannot be otherwise.’35 Initially Stalin had to act stealthily since until August 1949 the USSR, unlike the USA, had no A-bomb at its disposal. Initially he therefore geared his diplomacy to protecting his gains in Eastern Europe, where his forces had occupied Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, Hungary and eastern Germany in 1944–5. Among his goals was the arrangement of communist parties’ entrance to government in these countries. Having conquered an outer empire, he intended to reinforce his sway over it; and many Soviet citizens, however much they distrusted him, were proud that the USSR had defeated mighty Germany and had to all intents and purposes acquired an empire stretching across half the continent. Russians in particular had a pride in this military achievement and imperial consolidation lasted through to and beyond the last years of the USSR’s existence.
Still needing to avoid trouble with the Western Allies, he imposed restraints upon the Italian, French and Greek communist parties in the West. These parties had played the major role in the resistance to Nazism in their countries, and several communist leaders assumed that military victory would be followed by political revolution. Palmiro Togliatti consulted with Stalin before returning to Italy after the war,36 and Maurice Thorez anyway accepted anything laid down in the Kremlin for France. In Greece, the communists ignored Stalin’s cautionary instructions and tried to seize power. They paid dearly for their insubordination. Stalin ostentatiously stood aside while the USA and the UK aided the Greek monarchist forces in their defeat of communist guerrillas.
But what to do about the countries directly under Soviet occupation? At the Potsdam Conference of Allied leaders in July 1945 Stalin, on his last ever trip outside the USSR, secured the territorial settlement he demanded. The boundaries of Lithuania and Ukraine were extended westward at the expense of pre-war Poland while Poland was compensated by the gift of land previously belonging to the north-eastern region of Germany.37 Yet the Western Allies refused to recognize the USSR’s annexation of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. Wishing to affirm that the post-war boundaries would be permanent, Stalin therefore decided that Konigsberg and the rest of East Prussia would belong not to Lithuania or Poland but to the RSFSR. Consequently a ‘Russian’ territory was to act as a partial wedge between Poland and Lithuania. The RSFSR would have a military base and an all-season port at Konigsberg — now renamed as Kaliningrad — in order to deter any attempt to redraw the map of Europe.
The Soviet occupying authorities also inserted communists into the coalition government formed in Poland at the war’s end. The same process occurred in Hungary even though the communist party received only seventeen per cent of the votes in the November 1945 election. Elections in Czechoslovakia were delayed until May 1946, when the communists won nearly two fifths of the vote and were the most successful party. A coalition government led by communist Clement Gottwald was established in Prague.
In all countries where the Red Army had fought there were similar arrangements: communists shared power with socialist and agrarian parties and the appearance of democratic procedures was maintained. In reality there was unremitting persecution of the leading non-communist politicians. Everywhere in Eastern Europe the Soviet security police manipulated the situation in favour of the communists. Defamatory propaganda, jerrymandering and arrests were the norm. Teams of police operatives were sent to catch the large number of people who had actively collaborated with the Nazis. In Germany a Soviet organization was installed to transfer industrial machinery to the USSR. Local communist leaders were carefully supervised from the Kremlin. They were selected for their loyalty to Stalin; and they in turn knew that, with the exception of Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, their positions of influence in their own countries would be fragile in the absence of support from the Soviet armed forces.
Yet these same leaders were aware of the awful effects of Stalin’s policies on his own USSR. Polish communists wanted to avoid mass agricultural collectivization; and even the Yugoslav comrades, who generally rebuked the East European communist parties for a lack of revolutionary resolve, refused to de-kulakize their villages. Several parties, including the Poles, Hungarians and Czechoslovaks, aimed to form left-of-centre governmental coalitions; there were few proponents of the need for the immediate formation of one-party states. The Soviet road to socialism was not regarded by them as wholly desirable.38
Stalin went along with these divergences from Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism in 1945–6 while the general world situation remained in flux. But he was unlikely to tolerate heterodoxy for long, and it was only a matter of time before he moved to strap an organizational strait-jacket around European communist parties. Furthermore, in 1946 there was a hardening of the USA’s foreign policy. President Truman resolved to contain any further expansion of Soviet political influence; he also decided in 1947, on the suggestion of his Secretary of State George Marshall, to offer loans for the economic reconstruction of Europe, East and West, on terms that would provide the USA with access to their markets. Stalin was aghast at the prospect. As he saw things, the problem in Eastern Europe was that there was too little communism: a resurgent market economy was the last thing he wanted to see there. The
