First on the agenda was economic reconstruction. Rapid demobilization was essential: the armed forces had to release soldiers, sailors, and airmen for work in the factories and farms. Over 11 million men strong in late 1945, the Red (now Soviet) Army numbered just under three million three years later.
Labour was but one of the factors of production. Another was capital. The state raised money by manipulating its currency, slashing interest rates, and reducing the face value of war bonds. It also showed considerable interest in foreign economic transfers through the continuation of American Lend-Lease, reparations, and exploitation of any territories occupied by the Red Army. In August 1945, however, the Truman administration suspended unconditional Lend-Lease assistance to Russia. Russian expectations for a considerable share of reparations from the western zones of occupied Germany were similarly frustrated (despite the promises that the Soviets felt had been made during the Potsdam Conference in June 1945). In Soviet-held territories matters were different: Soviet authorities openly looted eastern Germany, Austria, Bulgaria, Romania, and Hungary for machinery and equipment (even entire industrial plants were dismantled and shipped back to the Soviet Union). Indeed, self-collected Soviet reparations are estimated to have provided 3 to 4 per cent of total Soviet budgetary receipts. With regard to Eastern Europe (and eventually Manchuria), the Soviet Union established theoretically ‘bilateral joint-stock companies’, which provided raw materials, machines, and finished goods at rock-bottom prices.
Because, however, such methods were insufficient to defray the total bill for the recovery, the government resorted to a traditional expedient—squeezing rural society to finance economic expansion. In September 1946 Stalin signed a decree on the ‘liquidation of the abuses of the statute of the agricultural artel and collective farm’. This and supplemental laws reduced the size of private plots and levelled confiscatory taxes on the income that they were supposed to generate. Cash payments for daily labour on the collective farms dwindled; in 1952 collective farmers in Tula earned just one kopeck a day. At the same time, the regime burdened the rural population with enormous state delivery quotas for agricultural goods. Compulsory deliveries amounted to at least half the collective farm output of grain, meat, and milk from 1945 to 1948; the prices that the state deigned to pay were actually less than production costs. These extortionate policies led in the short term to the famine of 1946 and to the impoverishment and immiseration of the villages. The result was a new exodus from country to town that, by Stalin’s death in 1953, had involved nine million people.
The goal was of course to rebuild the country’s industrial base. The Fourth Five-Year Plan (adopted in March 1946) set the target of matching and exceeding pre-war levels of production by the end of 1950. In fact, the Soviet Union fulfilled this plan in most significant sectors; by 1950 gross industrial output exceeded that of 1940 by 40 per cent.
If reconstruction of the economy was a matter of the highest importance, the imposition of stricter domestic political controls was also a priority. Indeed, the screws began to tighten in the last years of the war. One major sign of this was the mass deportation of over a million indigenous people of the Crimea, Caucasus, and Caspian steppe to Kazakhstan and Siberia, ostensibly for collaboration with the Nazis or ‘objective characteristics’ that predisposed them to do so.
The repression might at first seem to make no sense: after all, the war probably expanded the regime’s base of popular support. At the very least, the Soviet government could legitimize its claim on power by pointing to its military victory over Nazism. Certainly the Communist Party had never been healthier. The war years also witnessed an explosion in party recruitment—from 3.8 million members in 1941 to 5.7 million by May 1945. By the war’s end, 69 per cent of party members had joined since 1942.
But these statistics had to trouble Stalin: the party was his instrument of personal rule. How trustworthy could it be when diluted by hundreds of thousands of new communists admitted under the lax rules and perfunctory screening of wartime? Clearly it would be necessary to purge the party of its slackers and opportunists. Then there was the Soviet military, whose profile at the end of the war was a bit too high for Stalin’s taste. To guard against potential ‘Bonapartism’, Stalin reorganized the High Command, personally assumed the portfolio of Minister of Defence, and conducted a ‘purge of the victors’, i.e. the arrest or demotion of many prominent officers. Insecurity about the reliability of party and army was therefore one reason behind the political and ideological crack-down.
