Russia. A History полностью

Another was the civil war on the westernmost borders of the Soviet state. In Ukraine, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and the Ukrainian Insurrectionary Army were conducting full-blown military operations to prevent the reintegration of Ukraine into the USSR. The scale of the problem was immense: at the end of 1945 the Red Army had deployed over half a million troops against the Ukrainian partisans. This armed resistance in Ukraine persisted until well into the 1950s.

Anti-Soviet guerrillas were also active in Estonia, Latvia, and particularly Lithuania. Annexed by Moscow in 1940 and occupied by Germany during the war, the Baltic republics wanted independence, not Soviet communism. Stalin pacified the Baltics by a tradition hallowed in Muscovite history—the forcible exchange of populations. As a result, by 1949 a quarter of the inhabitants of the Baltic states had been ‘resettled’ to the RSFSR, replaced by ethnic Russians.

Finally, reconstruction on the scale and at the tempo envisioned by Stalin would have been impossible without the reinstitution of the strict pre-war discipline and police controls. The population had to be mobilized, prepared for additional suffering, and shielded from corrupting Western influence. The imperative for stern internal political control produced a massive propaganda campaign, emphasizing sacrifice and vigilance. It was also expressed in the adoption of internal policies of extraordinary and stunning brutality.

In February 1946 Stalin gave his much quoted ‘electoral speech’. This address, which reiterated the old formula that the internal contradictions of capitalism inevitably gave rise to war, baffled those Western politicians who had predicted an era of cordiality with Russia. For Soviet citizens, however, the speech was an unmistakable signal that good relations with the Western allies would not continue in the post-war era, that they were not to expect cultural or political liberalization.

One telling indicator of the retrenchment was the labour-camp population, which swelled by millions after the war. The regime imprisoned hundreds of thousands of displaced persons and so-called ‘enemy elements’ from the Eastern European and Baltic countries. Axis POWs comprised another major source of prisoners, of whom many remained in captivity until the mid-1950s. German POWs played a conspicuous role in the construction of ‘Stalinist teeth’—the ghastly skyscrapers that blighted the Moscow skyline after the war, including the new building of Moscow State University.

The fate of Soviet POWs and slave labourers held by the Nazis was particularly cruel. Approximately a million Soviet prisoners survived the final collapse of Hitler’s Reich. Millions of other Soviet citizens, many of them women, were sent to Germany as Ostarbeiter. Many of these people were recaptured by the Red Army; the Western allies deported hundreds of thousands of others back to the Soviet Union. There execution or lengthy terms in the camps typically awaited them.

Why did they meet such savage treatment? The repatriated did indeed include some collaborators; between five hundred thousand and one million Soviet citizens, including some POWs, had actually served in the Wehrmacht, or in auxiliary or support formations in 1944 and 1945. But Stalin’s definition of guilt was capacious enough to include those whose only crime had been to be taken alive: his Order No. 270 early in the war branded any soldiers who surrendered as traitors. Even before the war was over, the Soviet government sent liberated Russian POWs to special camps for ‘verification’—which usually ended in consignment to the GULAG. As for the Ostarbeiter, Stalin evidently suspected spies to be among them. Even involuntary residence abroad might have left favourable impressions of the West, dangerous if disseminated in Soviet society.

In the cultural sphere, the Central Committee’s decision of August 1946 on the journals Zvezda and Leningrad marked the beginning of the Zhdanovshchina—a xenophobic campaign to purify Soviet intellectual life of Western, bourgeois influences. The campaign derived its name from its organizer, A. A. Zhdanov, one of Stalin’s most prominent lieutenants. Making examples of the poet Anna Akhmatova and the satirist Mikhail Zoshchenko, Zhdanov insisted that formalism, political neutrality, and aestheticism had no place in Soviet literature. The literary establishment scampered to conform with the new party line. Scores of dreary novels celebrated the party’s victory in the Great Patriotic War, taught hostility to the West, and promoted the materialist and professional values that ostensibly appealed to the mid-level managers, engineers, and technicians who were the essential personnel in rebuilding the country. The purpose of fiction and belles-lettres was education and indoctrination, the provision of what Zhdanov woodenly called ‘genuine ideological armament’.