Russia: A History

At four a.m. (Moscow time) on 22 June 1941, several thousand pieces of German ordnance simultaneously thundered into Soviet territory. Operation Barbarossa had begun, initiating four years of the most brutal and destructive war in history. From the very beginning the Soviet–German conflict was waged with a ferocity and savagery that was unparalleled in modern times. When Hitler announced his move against Russia to his highest officers (30 March 1941), he made it absolutely clear that he expected his troops to discard every principle of humanity, chivalry, or international law. This was, he said, to be a war ‘of extermination’.

The 153 divisions of the invasion force formed three army groups—north, centre, and south. Army Group North was to punch through the Baltic republics in the direction of Leningrad. Army Group Centre was supposed to entrap and destroy Soviet units in the western expanses of the country. And, the third force—Army Group South—to drive south-east of the Pripet marshes and slice Ukraine off from the rest of the Soviet state.

It was obviously impossible to mask the colossal military preparations for Barbarossa. Since February, Germany had been concentrating forces on the Soviet frontier, ‘explaining’ this as a defence against British air raids. In the months, weeks, and days prior to 22 June, the Soviet government received over eighty discrete warnings of German attack. None the less, the surprise was virtually total. Though aware of the massing of German forces but unwilling to accept the truth, at 1 a.m. Stalin issued orders to Soviet military commanders not to shoot even if the Germans penetrated Soviet territory so as to avoid ‘dangerous provocations’.

It was in part this ill-conceived order that enabled the Wehrmacht to achieve astonishing results on the very first day of the invasion. By 23 June, for example, elements of Army Group Centre had already advanced sixty miles. Directives from Moscow, commanding Soviet units to launch vigorous counterattacks, only played into German hands. Since most of the Soviet air force had been destroyed on the ground, and since Soviet formations were poorly organized and undermanned, the abortive counter-attacks tore even larger holes in Soviet defensive lines. By mid-July the Germans had conquered Latvia, Lithuania, Belorussia, and most of right-bank Ukraine. By August Army Group North had put Leningrad under siege, Centre had captured Smolensk, and South was investing Odessa on the shores of the Black Sea.

At this point Hitler intervened, redirecting offensive operations to achieve the rapid capture of Leningrad and Ukraine. Although Kiev fell in mid-September, Leningrad continued to resist. Hitler changed his strategic emphasis once again, this time detaching over 1.8 million men for ‘Operation Typhoon’—an assault on Moscow. By mid-October the German army was within sixty miles of the capital.

During these first few dreadful months of war, Germany and her allies—Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, and Finland—had overrun territory larger than France. They took two-thirds of the pre-war Soviet industries and lands that produced one-third of the country’s total agricultural output. By the end of 1941 the invaders had destroyed almost 84 per cent of the pre-war active Soviet armed forces: 1.5 million Soviet troops were dead while another 3 million were German POWs. Two million of the latter would perish by February.

Soviet Weakness in 1941

What accounted for Soviet weakness in June 1941? It clearly did not stem from a neglect of defences. By the late 1930s the Soviet Union was a thoroughly militarized state; Soviet defence outlays in 1941 amounted to over 43 per cent of the country’s GNP. Nor was there a gross imbalance in numbers or technology: in the immediate invasion zone roughly 2.8 million Soviet soldiers confronted about 3 million Germans, supported by twelve Finnish and six Romanian divisions. Similarly, whereas Germany and her allies attacked with 3,600 tanks and 2,500 planes, the Soviet armed forces disposed of over 20,000 tanks (of which 1,862 were modern T-34s or KVs) and at least 10,000 combat aircraft.

What then were the reasons behind Russia’s dismal military performance that summer? One reason was clearly the quality and skill of its enemy. At the operational and tactical levels of war the German Wehrmacht was then the finest army in the world. Other reasons, however, inhered in a series of self-inflicted wounds—a bitter legacy of the 1930s.

One of the gravest was the political purge of the Soviet military. It began in June 1937 with the announcement that Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevskii and seven other prominent Soviet soldiers had been convicted of treason and executed. At the same time Stalin delivered a speech in which he called for the discharge of ‘all vacillating army men’ from their posts—a statement taken by the Soviet political police, the NKVD, as a direct order for comprehensive terror against the Soviet officer corps. The pretext here was the putative existence of a ‘Trotskyite conspiracy’ within the Red Army that was scheming to stage a coup and install a military dictator. Although accurate statistics are still lacking, it would appear that some 35,000–40,000 officers were removed from their commands (many of them shot or condemned to hard labour in the camps). In other words, at least 35 per cent of the officer corps was purged. The eliminated included three of the five Soviet marshals, thirteen of the fifteen army commanders, fifty-seven of the eighty-seven corps commanders, 110 of the 195 divisional commanders, and all but one fleet commander in the navy.

The impact of this repression upon the Soviet armed forces cannot be exaggerated. It served to demoralize the Red Army, not only because of the arrests and executions, but also because Stalin upgraded the role of the political commissars and reinstituted dual command. However, those removed possessed invaluable technical knowledge. Tukhachevskii, for example, had been the prophet of mechanization and motorization; yet the purges eliminated not only Tukhachevskii but also some of his closest associates. Repression was a never-ending spiral: arrest was followed by interrogation and torture, which did not end until the accused confessed and named ‘accomplices’. To be minimally plausible, such accusations typically implicated immediate associates; as a result, the purges were most destructive to the more technical branches, especially armour.

The military purges must be distinguished from other forms of political terror in the 1930s: an investigation by the Party in the Khrushchev era established that the order for the military repression came from the top and used patently fabricated evidence. To this day, the rationale for the military purges remains a mystery. One theory holds that Stalin—misled by what had happened in the Spanish Civil War—had come to believe that Tukhachevskii’s expertise was dispensable. Another is that Stalin sought to check signs of excessive independence within the military, signs that had become visible as far back as the ill-fated Seventeenth Party Congress in 1934. And some believe that Stalin feared Tukhachevskii’s popularity, seeing him as a potential rival. In any event, the purges slowed down when the ‘Winter War’ of 1939–40 with Finland exposed the weaknesses of the Red Army. Certain officers (including such gifted leaders as K. K. Rokossovskii) were released from the camps and reinstated. None the less, on the very eve of the war, three-quarters of Soviet commanders had been in their posts for less than a year. And at the highest echelons, the Red Army was led by talentless sycophants and overrated cavalry men from the civil war era.

Another weakness had to do with doctrine and planning. For a variety of reasons, the Soviet leadership believed that a war with Germany would most likely start after an extended period of crisis, which would give the Red Army time to mobilize. Thus a formal declaration of war would be followed by a brief defensive phase, in which Soviet forces would check and repel the invader near the frontier; the Red Army would then open an offensive into Central Europe. Thus, Soviet military and political élites presupposed a short war, largely fought on the enemy’s soil; they paid little attention to the possibility that the war might become protracted, that it might require the USSR to organize a defence in depth.

The relative de-emphasis on defence also had implications for frontier fortifications. Whereas the Soviet Union possessed a considerable network of these in 1939, expansion by 1941 (as a result of the annexation of the Baltics, eastern Poland, and Bessarabia) had pushed the frontier 150 to 300 kilometres to the west. Work on new lines commenced in 1940, but procrastination and disorganization slowed progress. In February and March 1941 the Soviet command decided to cannibalize existing fortifications in order to build the new ones. The result was that neither set was operational when the war came: only a quarter of the new fortifications had been built on the new borders, while the pillboxes of the 1939 Stalin line were useless, semi-demolished and stripped of their weapons and ammunition.

Finally, the greatest blame for the ruinous start to the war must rest with Stalin himself. After the signing of the Ribbentrop–Molotov Pact in 1939, Stalin had constructed a foreign policy based on co-operation and collusion with the Nazis, evidently hoping that they would exhaust themselves in a lengthy war of attrition against the French and British. This delusion vanished with the fall of France in 1940. Although Stalin thereafter came to believe that an armed confrontation with Germany was unavoidable, he none the less supposed that Moscow—not Berlin—would determine its timing. After all, it was unlikely that Hitler would turn east while Britain remained unsubdued. In the spring of 1941, although Stalin permitted the mobilization of some of the reserves, he insisted that war with Germany would not come until the following May at the earliest. He therefore saw Hitler’s massive military build-up of 1941 as the prelude to negotiations, not war. From Stalin’s perspective, the only real danger was that war might break out accidentally; it was to guard against this contingency that Stalin was so determined to avoid ‘provoking’ Hitler. That is why Stalin disregarded G. K. Zhukov’s advice (May 1941) to launch an immediate preventive attack to disrupt the concentration of the German army, as well as that of S. K. Timoshenko, whose frantic request to transfer forces from the interior to the border was not approved until June. In a very real sense, Stalin’s miscalculations foreordained the military surprise and devastating consequence of the invasion.

Once the fact of German invasion was beyond dispute, the authoritarianism and centralization of Stalin’s regime showed only torpidity and inertia in the face of military emergency. For example, Moscow’s order in the evening of 22 June for the west front to destroy the German concentration at Suvalki was useless: the advancing enemy was no longer there. When Stalin personally began to direct the war effort, his command that the Red Army cede no territory and his refusal to countenance withdrawal squandered tons of equipment and material and consigned hundreds of thousands of troops to death or captivity. Fifty-six per cent of all military casualties suffered by the Soviet Union during the Second World War occurred during the first eighteen of its forty-seven months. The Red Army paid dearly for Stalin’s errors in dealing with Hitler.

Phases of the War

By early autumn, despite a succession of military disasters, morale in the Red Army had stiffened. Party officials reported to Stalin that ‘flights of military units [from the battlefield] have become rarer’, and wounded soldiers were observed bearing their arms with them to the field hospitals, rather than tossing them away, as formerly. As a result of this, as well as better organization and better generalship, Germany’s string of triumphs in Russia came to an abrupt end with the battle of Moscow. The failure of the second German assault on the city in November enabled Zhukov to counter-attack in early December, forcing the Germans to fall back between 100 and 250 kilometres.

At this point Stalin ordered the Red Army to attack, not along one or two axes of advance, but along the entire two thousand kilometres of front from the Black Sea to the Baltic. This overambitious offensive had largely spent itself by April 1942. The Soviet General Staff thereupon recommended a strategic defence in order to reinforce the army and build up stocks of equipment. Stalin agreed at first, but then authorized an attack in May designed to liberate Kharkov. It disastrously misfired. The Russians retired behind the northern Donets and the Germans occupied the Crimean peninsula.

Hitler had a new plan: a south-east advance into the Don, Kuban, and Volga regions as a first step towards the conquest of oil-rich Transcaucasia. Operation Blue began in the spring of 1942. By mid-July 1942 it was evident that the Germans were driving for Stalingrad on the lower reaches of the Volga. In late August, General Friedrich von Paulus’s forces had crossed the Don and attacked Stalingrad. After two weeks of shelling, bombing, and bloody street fighting, the Germans were in possession of most of the city. The Soviets, however, had no intention of capitulating; on 19 November they counter-attacked (‘Operation Uranus’), penetrating and encircling Paulus’s army from both north and south. Now Paulus himself was besieged.

Time was not on the side of the Germans at Stalingrad. Hitler flatly forbade any attempt at a break-out, even though the Soviets succeeded in stalling F. E. Manstein’s relief columns. As the temperature fell, so too did reserves of food and ammunition; the Luftwaffe’s attempt to supply Paulus’s forces by air failed. Finally, at the end of January and in early February 1943, Paulus and the remnants of his sixth army surrendered. One hundred and fifty thousand of his men were casualties; another hundred thousand were prisoners of war. Although the battle of Stalingrad did not predetermine German defeat in the war, it made a total German victory extremely improbable.

Emboldened by success at Stalingrad, the Red Army launched a series of offensives in the early months of 1943. These had three important results. First, the Soviets managed to cut a corridor through German lines to relieve beleaguered Leningrad. Second, by April they had effectively demolished Germany’s positions in the northern Caucasus. Finally by February the Red Army had defeated the German second army near Voronezh, forcing it to retreat two hundred miles, creating a bulge in the German lines known as the Kursk salient.

Hitler saw this salient as a major opportunity: a decisive blow there might shatter Russia’s defences and allow him to regain the initiative. The German plan for ‘Operation Citadel’ entailed two simultaneous thrusts towards Kursk, one south from Orel, the second north from Kharkov. However, Hitler decided to stockpile still more military equipment and postponed Operation Citadel from the spring until the summer of 1943. This delay enabled Soviet intelligence to discover the time and place of the attack and also permitted a massive reinforcement and fortification of the battlefield.

The German preliminary bombardment that began on 5 July was answered by an even more intense counter-bombardment, indicating just how ready the Soviets were. The battle of Kursk was the largest tank battle in world history, with six thousand vehicles engaged on each side. It was also distinguished by an unprecedented scale of carnage and slaughter, even on the eastern front. The upshot was a Soviet victory; by the end of July, Germany had lost half a million soldiers and was forced to retreat another two hundred miles. This battle was a true turning-point in the Second World War, for henceforth the Germans would be largely on the defensive in the east.

By January 1944 the Red Army had raised the siege of Leningrad and had crossed the old 1939 border. In May it had liberated Ukraine and was driving deep into Poland and Romania. The most significant event of the year, however, was ‘Operation Bagration’, the Russian attack on Army Group Centre, which held a salient in Lithuania and Belorussia that protruded into Soviet lines. At the end of June the Soviets struck into the salient with a series of co-ordinated thrusts, even one staged through the Pripet marshes. Offensive operations continued until the end of the summer, utterly destroying seventeen German divisions, and reducing the combat strength of another fifty divisions by half.

By the end of 1944, Soviet armies had already overrun Romania and were swinging north towards Budapest. The central group of Soviet fronts were poised to clear Poland of the enemy, before invading Germany itself. The first step in this process was the Vilna–Oder operation in January and February 1945, where the Red Army used its superior numbers and firepower to smash into East Prussia. Indeed, certain units under Zhukov’s command had crossed the Oder and were but forty miles from Berlin. But because Zhukov’s forces were exhausted and had outrun their supply lines, the Soviet High Command decided to defer the battle for Berlin until the spring. In mid-April 1945, some 2.5 million Soviet troops squared off against 1 million Germans, many of them young boys, cripples, or old men. There was little doubt about the outcome. By 25 April Berlin was encircled; two days later Soviet troops had shot their way into the centre of the city; two days after that Adolf Hitler killed himself. The German government’s emissaries travelled to Zhukov’s headquarters and signed the act of unconditional surrender on 9 May 1945.

With Germany now defeated, Stalin honoured his pledge to the British and American allies to enter the war against Japan. Over the next three months tens of thousands of Soviet soldiers entrained for the Far East. On 9 August (the very day that the atomic bomb fell on Nagasaki) Stalin’s forces erupted into Manchuria and rapidly pulverized the Japanese Kwantung army. Within days Tokyo had decided to treat with its enemies. On 2 September 1945 Soviet representatives were present to witness the Japanese surrender on the deck of the American battleship Missouri.

How the Soviets Won the War

To understand how the Soviet Union managed to prevail in its war with Nazi Germany it is no less important to consider the reasons for German failure as the reasons for Soviet success. In key respects, the Germans undermined their own war effort.

In the first place, German strategy for the invasion of the Soviet Union was based on entirely erroneous intelligence. For example, prior to the war the Germans had calculated that the Red Army had only 200 divisions; by early August 1941 they had identified 360. The German intelligence services also under-counted the Soviet tank park (by at least 50 per cent) and grossly underestimated the scale, and productivity of the Soviet war economy. Nazi racist ideology also contributed to this depreciation of the enemy. Regarding the Russian as an Untermensch, Hitler was supremely confident that the Germans could conquer the Soviet Union to the Urals in three months, for the entire rotten structure of the Soviet state would surely collapse ‘as soon as we kick the door in’. The battle of Moscow, however, soon demonstrated that the war was not going to be brief. And Hitler had given no thought to a protracted war in the east, specifically to its economic and logistical dimensions.

Ideology also dictated German aims in Russia, and this had major implications for the conduct of the war. With one lightning summer campaign, Hitler aimed to reverse thousands of years of Eastern European history: to overthrow the Soviet government, eradicate communism, and annex Soviet territory as far east as the Urals. This newly acquired Lebensraum could then be used to support a population of some 100 million additional Germans or Germanized Scandinavians. In the course of this process, ‘racially undesirable populations’, especially Jews and Gypsies, were to be systematically exterminated. The fate of the Slavs, and the Russians in particular, was not merely slavery but tribalism: denied any future possibility of a state of their own, they were to be confined to squalid villages and maintained in filth and ignorance.

But the Nazis’ genocidal policies in the occupation zone ultimately detracted from the prosecution of the war, diverting thousands of troops, as well as hundreds of locomotives and wagons, from military operations. The Nazis’ bestial treatment of the Slavs was also ultimately self-defeating, since it alienated them by the millions. Hence the German side failed to capitalize on the anti-communist sentiments of the peasants; not until the very end of the war (and even then with reluctance) did the Nazis authorize the raising of entire Russian military units to fight Stalin. Confiscations of food, fuel, tools, and clothing as well as rape, torture, and shootings undercut German efforts to extract economic benefits from occupied territories. After the harvest of 1942, for instance, the Germans permitted peasants to retain only enough grain for two-thirds of a pound of bread a day. These starvation rations depopulated the countryside and engendered flight or sullen non-co-operation among the survivors. The deportation of almost five million people for work in Germany further exacerbated the labour shortage in the occupied zone. Agricultural output fell by 50 per cent in the areas under Hitler’s control: although his armies in the east could be fed locally, very little in the way of a surplus remained for shipment back to the Reich.

The Nazi leadership was slow to grasp that the economy of its eastern conquests had to be rebuilt and managed, not merely plundered. By the time it finally did, the expropriations and atrocities had hardened resistance to German rule and fuelled the growth of the partisan movement, which may have enrolled as many as 200,000 people by 1943.

None the less the Germans were defeated not only by themselves but by their Soviet enemies. Paradoxically the USSR won the war both because of and despite the Stalinist system.

Although the blunders of the Soviet leadership had enabled a surprise attack and a summer of catastrophic defeat, certain characteristics of the regime helped the country weather those initial shocks. Stalin himself observed in November that ‘any other country that had lost as much as we have would have collapsed’, and there was some truth in his remarks. The upheavals and turbulence of the 1930s had taught the mass of Soviet citizens a healthy respect for the power of the state and had inspired belief in its solidity and permanence. This psychic capital, combined with an immediate tightening of the monopoly on information (all radios in the country were confiscated at the end of June) enabled the regime to insulate the population from knowledge of the military débâcle and to combat rumour and panic.

Second, the extreme centralization of the Soviet dictatorship, so cumbrous in the opening phase of the war, eventually proved to be an asset; this authoritarianism permitted the state to mobilize the people and the resources necessary to prosecute total war. Mobilization entailed conscripting millions as soldiers, and millions more as labourers. On the very first day of the war Moscow called up almost all classes of reservists born after 1905. At the same time, it issued a new labour law that compelled vast numbers of Soviet civilians, both men and women, to take up war-related work. Industrial absenteeism was soon declared a felony; railways, waterways, and even many factories were placed under martial law. The State Defence Committee (GKO), created in June 1941 to unify the direction of the war effort, accelerated the evacuation of industrial enterprises from the western borderlands to the Urals, Siberia, and Central Asia. By November of that year the regime had dismantled and shipped 1,523 plants east; roughly 1,200 of them were up and operating by mid-1942.

The management of the Soviet war economy was no easy task, especially in view of the army’s ravenous appetite for fresh manpower. The Soviet Union would eventually draft 16 per cent of its population into the armed forces during the war, thus permitting the Red Army at its height to maintain 11.2 million people under arms. Such unprecedented military conscription stripped the factories and farms of able-bodied men, thereby creating a labour shortage of staggering proportions. The release of prisoners from GULAG (the net outflow was 1.1 million people during the war) provided scant relief. Women, children, and the elderly had to substitute for the absent soldiers. By the end of the summer of 1941 women comprised 70 per cent of the industrial labour force in Moscow.

Matters were still worse in the countryside, as agriculture was feminized, demechanized, and deprived of draft animals. The proportion of women in the rural labour force increased from 40 per cent on the eve of the war to 70 per cent in 1943 and 82 per cent in 1944. The Red Army also requisitioned machines and horses in vast numbers—some 400,000 by the end of 1942, and almost half the horses from the collective farms by the end of the war. Peasant women experimented with harnessing cows to till the fields; others pulled the ploughs themselves. All of this had dire implications for food production, as agricultural yields in the uninvaded zone plummeted in 1943 to less than 50 per cent of the pre-war level. And this paltry stock of food had to sustain a population swollen by twenty-five million refugees.

Despite the severity of the labour and food problems, and despite clumsy inefficiencies in balancing the needs of the army and the needs of the economy, the Soviet Union was clearly winning the industrial war against Nazi Germany even as early as 1942. Although in that year Russia’s supply of steel and coal was only one-third that of Germany, it nevertheless manufactured twice the number of weapons. Simply put, the Soviets outproduced the Germans. All types of new armaments from aircraft and tanks down to automatic pistols were designed, machined, and delivered to the front. New industrial plants were built from scratch and operated twenty-four hours a day. Some of them were gigantic, such as the tank factory in Cheliabinsk, which boasted sixty-four separate assembly lines. Between 1943 and 1945 Soviet factories turned out over 73,000 tanks and self-propelled guns, 82,000 aircraft, and 324,000 artillery pieces.

The USSR thus acquired the wherewithal to fight, and the government deserves some credit for this achievement. Munitions do not, however, win wars all by themselves: skilful generalship is also necessary. Once the rank incompetence of figures such as S. M. Budennyi and K. E. Voroshilov had been amply demonstrated, Stalin’s regime was in fact successful in identifying and promoting dozens of talented commanders; G. K. Zhukov, I. S. Konev, K. K. Rokossovskii, N. F. Vatutin, A. M. Vasilevskii, and B. M. Shaposhnikov—to name but a few—were instrumental in planning campaigns and leading Soviet armies to victory. The Soviet High Command improved throughout the war and in its later phases Soviet generals were responsible for numerous advances in tactics and operational art. Soviet generals also became adept at ‘combined arms’ warfare—that is, the integrated and mutually supportive employment of artillery, armour, infantry, and air power. They evinced brilliance in the use of reconnaissance, camouflage, and deception. And they perfected the mobile force structure that was the hallmark of Soviet offensives from 1943–5.

We come to Stalin himself. What role did his leadership play in the Soviet war effort? That Stalin was a despotic butcher is beyond dispute; he also bears direct responsibility for the catastrophic losses in the first months of the war. Deceived by Hitler, guilty of issuing the inept orders that disorganized the Red Army’s defences, Stalin also sought to divert blame from himself by executing scapegoats. When the western front crumbled under the German onslaught, its commander—General D. G. Pavlov—was arrested in July and shot for treason. (His real crime, it now appears, was to have courageously protested against the military purges in 1938.) Firing-squads claimed the lives of twenty-nine other Soviet generals in 1941 and 1942; Stalin personally signed many of the death warrants.

Nevertheless, one cannot disregard Stalin’s positive contributions. First, for many Soviet citizens, he became a symbol of national unity, an embodiment of the spirit of resistance. Certain of his speeches and writings, such as his first wartime address (3 July 1941) and the famous ‘not one step back’ order-of-theday (29 July 1942) are said to have rallied the people and given invaluable boosts to their morale. Second, so great was the terror that he inspired at the highest echelons of party and state that a rebuke from him, let alone a threat, could elicit impressive performances from factory managers and generals alike. Finally, although Stalin committed military blunders throughout the war, he improved as a strategist—not least because he became aware of his own professional limitations. Unlike Hitler, he encouraged strategic debate and did not hesitate to solicit or accept advice. Zhukov praised his accomplishments in the strategic arena, as did several allied generals.

The Stalinist system then did help the USSR win the war. But without the contribution of the Western allies, victory would not have been achieved as quickly as it was. Without the contribution of the peoples of the Soviet Union, victory would not have been achieved at all.

The Second World War was a war of coalitions, and coalitional warfare typically leads to friction among the alliance partners. Russia’s relationship with her British and American allies was no exception. Thus Stalin held that Roosevelt and Churchill—as leaders of capitalist, imperialist states—were by definition hostile to Soviet interests. The Soviet tyrant worried lest Washington and London collude against him, particularly over the question of the second front. Moscow had been appealing for the opening of a second front to draw German forces away from Russia since late 1941; indeed, Stalin courted his allies with such gestures as abolition of the Communist International in the hope of speeding up their invasion of the continent. Owing to the Pacific war and operations in Africa and Italy, however, D-Day did not come until June 1944. Stalin regarded this as a ‘treacherous delay’, since he had been led to believe that the attack would occur a year earlier. Indeed, his frustration apparently induced him to extend peace feelers to the Germans in 1943.

From the standpoint of London and Washington, Stalin’s evasiveness and penchant for secrecy were irritants. The spectre of a separate Soviet-German peace was, however, truly petrifying: the Western allies were well aware that the Soviet Union bore the brunt of the struggle with Hitler’s legions. Until the Normandy landing, Germany never deployed less than 90 per cent of her best combat troops against the Soviet Union. In the end, 80 per cent of all German casualties in the war would be inflicted on the eastern front. Franklin Roosevelt and Churchill also believed that Soviet participation would be essential for the rapid defeat of Japan. Both of these considerations militated in favour of concessions to Stalin in the interest of keeping the coalition together.

One such concession was the delivery of crucial supplies to Russia with no strings attached. The British and Americans shipped these stocks to Pacific and White Sea ports, or conveyed them overland through occupied Iran. Ten per cent of all Soviet tanks and 12 per cent of all Soviet combat aircraft came from Stalin’s Western allies. American Lend-Lease also furnished 427,000 motor vehicles, one million miles of telephone wire, a quarter of a million field telephones, and fifteen million pairs of boots. The allies also provided aircraft steel, petroleum, zinc, copper, aluminium, and chemicals. Especially important, given the Soviet food crisis, was the transfer of comestibles. The United States alone gave enough concentrated food to the Soviet Union to have supplied twelve million soldiers with half a pound for every day of the war. The total value of British aid came to £420 million; that of the United States to almost $11 billion.

Although the Soviet Union could have won the war without allied supplies, their delivery none the less shortened the war. Allied trucks, jeeps, aircraft fuel, and communications equipment made possible the enormous mobile offensives of 1943–5. Western assistance also allowed the Soviet Union to keep millions of people in uniform (eight million by one calculation) whom it otherwise would have had to withdraw from the front to prevent a collapse of the economy.

In the strictly military arena, the Western allies rendered valuable services to the Soviet Union even before the break-out from Normandy pinned down 105 German divisions. Operations in the Middle East, Sicily, and Italy drained Axis resources. The Anglo-American bombing campaign against Germany was so massive that, in the judgement of some scholars, it constituted a second front all by itself. At the very least, since the German anti-tank gun doubled as an antiaircraft gun, thousands of these weapons were kept trained on British and American aeroplanes, not Soviet tanks. Finally, after November 1943 Hitler’s strategy in Europe was to de-emphasize the Eastern Front and to build up strength to repel the allied invasion that he anticipated in France or Norway. This decision also alleviated the pressure on the USSR.

None the less the greatest credit for victory in the war surely belongs to the Soviet population itself. It was Soviet men and women who sowed the fields, operated the lathes, stormed enemy positions, and survived siege and occupation. They often did so with signal heroism under conditions of unspeakable deprivation.

The war exacted appalling sacrifices from Soviet citizens. The USSR lost more soldiers than did any other belligerent. Nor was the civilian population spared. One million people succumbed to famine or disease during the siege of Leningrad alone—more than all combat deaths sustained by the British, Commonwealth, and American armed forces put together. In the urban areas of the country factory labourers put in twelve-to sixteen-hour working days and achieved record outputs. And they did so despite malnutrition: by 1942 official rations provided a caloric consumption nearly a quarter less than the prewar norm. This led to an explosion in black marketeering and grotesquely inflated prices; in 1945 a kilo of butter in Rostov-on-the-Don cost 1,000 roubles. Rural Russia felt hunger and want too. The government’s official rationing system deliberately excluded peasants, and left them to their own provisions. Consumption of bread (the chief staple in the peasant diet) declined to 40 per cent of pre-war levels. Manufactured goods, including such necessities as clothing and medicine, were virtually unavailable.

What sustained the people through these trials? What kept them working and fighting? Revulsion from the barbarism of the Nazis was certainly one motivation. On a deeper level, however, there was a sense that the war was a national struggle. For millions of people the war was for the survival of Russia, not necessarily for the defence of communism. No doubt for that reason the regime itself chose to sell the war to the population by using symbols and images from pre-revolutionary Russian history, not socialist bromides. Stalin relaxed ideological controls: the poems, novels, and journalism of the early war years were remarkably free from cant. He also initially put some restraints on the activities of the secret police, and in 1943 permitted the Orthodox Church to re-establish the Patriarchate. Such measures of liberalization encouraged the belief that victory would bring still more substantive reforms. Agents in occupied territories fed these expectations by apparently spreading the rumour that Stalin intended to de-collectivize agriculture as soon as Hitler had been beaten. Nevertheless, millions of ardent communists marched off to war; millions more joined the Communist Party during the war. But most of those who waged war did so not because they wanted to preserve the Soviet Union as it was, but in the hope that it would soon evolve into something better. This is yet another sense in which the war was won despite the Soviet regime.

The Costs of the War

By the time the war was over 8.6 million Soviet troops and at least 17 million civilians had been killed. Twenty-five million survivors were homeless; zemlianki, or earthen huts, provided the only shelter for hundreds of thousands. The war had destroyed 1,700 towns, 70,000 villages, 30,000 factories, and 65,000 kilometres of railway. It has been estimated that one-third of the national wealth had been obliterated. The gross yield of all foodstuffs produced in the country in 1945 was only 60 per cent of what it had been in 1940. Still worse, severe drought would visit the harvest of 1946, bringing famine and typhus in its train.

Nevertheless, the Soviet Union had gained power and prestige from the war. Battered at it was, the USSR was the strongest land power left standing on the continent of Europe. In the post-war era, the Soviet Union had to rebuild its economy, while coping with unique opportunities (and dangers) abroad.

Soviet Domestic Policies after the War

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.

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’.

It was shortly the turn of the cinema industry. In September 1946 the Central Committee attacked several recent films, including those by the highly regarded directors V. I. Pudovkin and S. M. Eisenstein. The film that brought Eisenstein to grief was his historical epic Ivan the Terrible, part II. Stalin had greatly enjoyed the first part in 1944; he may even have identified with its depiction of Ivan IV as a fearless nationalist and decisive leader surrounded by traitorous boyars. But the second part, which showed a doubting, half-crazed tsar unleashing a reign of terror, was too much for the Soviet despot. Eisenstein was compelled publicly to apologize for his mistakes.

Other spheres of thought and culture also underwent ideological purification in the post-war years, from theatre and art to philosophy and economics. Nor was music spared; in February 1948 the party censured such distinguished composers as D. D. Shostakovich, S. S. Prokofiev, and A. I. Khachaturian for ‘formalism’ and insufficient use of folk themes. Even the natural sciences were not immune from persecution. Thus the expulsion of twelve persons from the Academy of Agricultural Sciences in August 1948 confirmed the triumph of the quack agronomist T. D. Lysenko, whose bizarre theory—that characteristics acquired by an organism in one generation could be genetically transmitted to the next—was utterly incompatible with modern biology and genetics. But the regime embraced Lysenko, whose ‘discoveries’ held the promise of limitless human power over nature. Soviet agriculture and biological science were to bear the scars of Lysenkoism for years.

Zhdanov died in the summer of 1948, but the cultural repression persisted. In early 1949 the press exposed an ‘unpatriotic group of drama critics’. And at the Nineteenth Congress of the Party in 1952, G. M. Malenkov was still insisting that the typicality of a novel’s characters bore witness to the correctness of the author’s ideological attitude.

Foreign Policy and the Cold War

Wartime alliances almost never persist once the threat that brought them into existence disappears. It is hardly surprising, therefore that the bonds of the Grand Alliance predictably weakened in the aftermath of the war. The deteriorating relationship between the Soviet Union and its former allies soon gave way to the overt hostility of the Cold War. From Washington, it appeared that Stalin was orchestrating a world-wide campaign of aggression against the West. The year 1946 saw Soviet pressure on Turkey over the Dardanelles, a communist insurrection in Greece, and the establishment of Soviet-backed Azeri and Kurdish regimes in northern Iran. Simultaneously the communization of Eastern Europe proceeded apace, culminating in the dramatic Czechoslovak coup of February 1948. Later that same summer, Stalin blockaded the western zones of occupied Berlin. The following year Mao Tse-tung defeated his nationalist enemies and proclaimed the People’s Republic of China. And in 1950 Kim Il Sung’s forces swarmed across the 38th parallel, touching off the Korean War.

There are, of course, many theories about the origins of the Cold War. Some of the more fanciful blossomed precisely because the dearth of reliable information about the Soviet side made it impossible ultimately to disprove them. Thus while some works argued that Stalin initially sought accommodation with the West and only took the path of confrontation in 1948, others argued the exact reverse—that Stalin was harshest towards the West prior to that date and at his most conciliatory thereafter. Still other studies concluded that Stalin was weaker after the Second World War than before, and accounted for the evolution of Soviet foreign policy largely in terms of domestic politics or the clashing preferences of his subordinates.

With the partial opening of Soviet archives, we now have more evidence than before. The data are, however, far from complete; no definitive interpretation of Soviet foreign relations has yet emerged. The discussion that follows is based on three premises: that Stalin was firmly in charge of international affairs; that he was both an ideologue and a geopolitician; and that two signal post-war objectives were to avoid war while strengthening Soviet control over foreign communist parties.

Stalin was not, in principle, averse to war. In fact, his Marxist Weltanschauung predisposed him to believe in inevitable armed conflict between the Soviet Union and the capitalist world. In the spring of 1945, as Soviet tanks rolled towards Berlin, he informed a horrified delegation of Yugoslavian communists that ‘the war will soon be over. We shall recover in fifteen or twenty years and then we will have another go at it.’

As that comment suggests, Stalin was aware that the Soviet Union was too devastated to wage war in the near future. Then, too, the United States had emerged from the Second World War with greatly increased relative strength and with the atomic bomb. But here was the rub: Soviet ideology made all capitalist regimes ipso facto anti-communist. What then would prevent a great capitalist coalition, led by the United States, from exploiting the Soviet Union’s temporary debility to launch an annihilating attack? How was Stalin to shield the USSR from such a blow?

The answer was to bluff—to project an exaggerated image of Soviet military might. This entailed denying the West accurate knowledge about the true situation within the Soviet Union by waging a massive counter-intelligence campaign, by prohibiting even the most mundane contacts between Soviet citizens and foreigners, and by severely curtailing the movements and activities of Western diplomats, attachés, journalists, even tourists. Swathed in an impermeable miasma, thought to be possessed of overwhelming military power, the Soviet Union would buy the time necessary to rebuild, rearm, and acquire nuclear weapons. Thus, paradoxically and counter-intuitively the best way to avoid war was to pretend that the USSR was in fact ready to risk one.

Simultaneously Stalin had to avoid unnecessarily provoking the West or arousing Western suspicions, but to take a hard line against the plots that the imperialists would surely concoct against the USSR. In 1946, for instance, he backed the Azeri and Kurdish separatists in northern Iran (in response to what he saw as British oil intrigues). His government condemned the Marshall Plan in 1947 and ordered the French and Italian communists to sabotage it. And in June 1948, he retaliated to a Western currency reform (which he thought prefigured the establishment of a capitalist West Germany) by imposing the Berlin blockade.

Yet Stalin was willing to retreat when the price of confrontation grew too high or threatened war. For example, he pulled out of northern Iran, informing the Azeri communists that he did not want to give Britain an excuse to remain in Egypt, Syria, and Indonesia. And after eight months of tension he lifted the blockade of Berlin.

Stalin thus attempted to strike an extremely delicate balance in the conduct of foreign relations, but if successful the Soviet Union might benefit in both the long and short term. After all, Soviet truculence might persuade Western governments that the USSR was too hard a nut to crack. In that event, capitalist states might soon revert to their usual rapacious competition for markets. With any luck, such commercial rivalry might produce internecine wars among the capitalist states, which could debilitate them all, thereby advantageously positioning the USSR for the eventual day of military reckoning.

Another important objective for Stalin was to reimpose discipline and centralized control over the international communist movement. There were several considerations operating here. First, Stalin believed that he alone could formulate the correct strategy and tactics, which should be binding on communists everywhere. His leadership was particularly necessary to prevent headstrong foreign communists from unduly alarming the Western powers. Second, if directed by Moscow, non-ruling communist parties and front groups might pressure Western governments to act in ways favourable to Soviet interests. Third, the maximum economic exploitation of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe would only be possible if communist governments were installed there. Although Stalin might have been delighted by the prospect of further acquisitions in Europe and Asia, these could be forgone. But Eastern Europe was nonnegotiable; it was the great prize the Soviet Union had won in the Second World War. The East European countries were to be Sovietized; as Stalin put it, ‘whoever occupies a territory also imposes on it his own social system. Everyone imposes his own system as far as his army can reach. It cannot be otherwise.’ It goes without saying that Stalin expected the Eastern European communists to submit obediently to his dictation.

The problem, however, was that many foreign communists exhibited an annoying independence. Non-ruling parties were eager to make gains; communists who had seized power in Eastern Europe were often too ideologically fervid to heed Stalin’s cautionary advice. The Chinese communists are a good example: despite Stalin’s suggestion that they form a coalition with the nationalists, they made a hard push for military victory in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. Similarly Stalin opposed the Greek communist insurrection of 1946–8 as premature. The Czechoslovakian coup of February 1948—an event usually interpreted as awakening even the most generous Western observers to Stalin’s ambitions—was very likely launched by the Czech communists themselves, not at Moscow’s behest. Finally, the Soviet–Yugoslavian rupture of 1948 originated in Stalin’s inability to moderate Tito’s recklessness either at home or abroad.

Stalin sought to impose his will on the Eastern European communists by a variety of means. One was territorial expansion. A series of post-war treaties annexed large parts of eastern Prussia, eastern Poland, Bessarabia, and Ruthenia to the Soviet state. This westward expansion gave the Soviet Union a common border with its Czechoslovak and Hungarian client states. Another instrument was the Cominform (Communist Information Bureau), established in 1948, specifically to ensure Soviet dominance in Eastern Europe. Finally after the break with Tito, Stalin resorted to an ‘anti-nationalism’ campaign of terror and purges. Important communist leaders such as R. Slansky (Czechoslovakia), T. Kostov (Bulgaria), W. Gomulka (Poland), and L. Rajk (Hungary) were imprisoned or executed, as were thousands of others.

Certain elements of Stalin’s post-war domestic and foreign agendas were closely interrelated. The key imperatives—war avoidance and economic reconstruction—were obviously congruent. The explosion in the labour camp population also served to fulfil several of Stalin’s goals; it mobilized forced labour to rebuild the country and insulated Soviet society from first-hand testimony about the West. And, significantly, Stalin did achieve several key objectives. A robust Soviet economy rose out of the rubble of war; the USSR enhanced its military power. Stalin’s regime made significant investments in military research and development, developed a plan to modernize its military hardware, and broke the American nuclear monopoly by acquiring its own atomic bomb in 1949.

Yet it is also obvious that other components in Stalin’s programme were contradictory. Bellicose rhetoric, if essential to justify the demands on the Soviet population, invalidated both the Soviet peace offensives as well as efforts to confuse the West about Soviet intentions. The same point applies to efforts to control Eastern Europe. Since Stalin’s authority over the foreign communists was at first imperfect, he could not prevent such events as the Greek civil war from frightening Western statesmen. But his own territorial expansion and political terror, used to solidify his power in Eastern Europe, tended to confirm, rather than allay, Western suspicions. The most important contradictions lay in the irreconcilability among Stalin’s domestic and foreign objectives. In 1945 Stalin had expected a rapid American withdrawal from a weakened, squabbling Europe. By 1949, largely because of his own policies, he found himself confronting European states that were reacquiring confidence and repairing the damage of war. NATO was cementing Western unity and the United States had extended an open-ended political commitment to the new alliance. After Stalin authorized the Korean War (partially as a subtle bid to enhance his influence with Mao Tse-tung) that American commitment became much more military.

Stalin’s Last Years

In December 1949 Stalin celebrated his seventieth birthday. It was an occasion of national jubilation. The price of many consumer goods was lowered. Party and state organizations all over the country vied with each other in tendering gifts and extravagant professions of loyalty to the great leader. A special exhibition—‘J. V. Stalin in Representational Art’—opened, featuring scores of paintings and sculptures to glorify every phase of his life. The official review of the exhibition bore the title: ‘An Inexhaustible Source of Creative Inspiration’.

The post-war era was the apogee of Stalin’s cult of personality. Stalin was accorded god-like veneration: he was the hero of plays and the subject of folksongs; symphonies and odes were composed in his honour; canals and dams were dedicated to his name. Statues of gypsum, concrete, granite, and marble were erected in his image. Orators praised him as ‘the father of the peoples’, ‘the coryphaeus of all sciences’, the ‘highest genius of mankind’, and ‘the best friend of all children’. Rapturous enthusiasm greeted his every pronouncement. When he took it into his head to author a treatise on linguistics, learned philologists wrote letters to the newspapers humbly thanking the leader for setting them straight.

However gratifying, universal adulation did not relax Stalin’s vigilant concern for his personal power. In the last years of his reign the tyrant took pains to keep his closest associates in a constant state of poisonous antagonism and mutual suspicion. It is not known whether his motivation was authentic fear of conspiracy, belief in the efficacy of divide et impera, or mere perversity. Immediately after the war, Stalin elevated Zhdanov as a counterweight to Malenkov Upon the former’s death, Stalin permitted Malenkov and the chief of the secret police, Beria, to purge Zhdanov’s old power base in Leningrad on the charge of ‘anti-party activity’. This ‘Leningrad affair’ resulted in the expulsion of two thousand communists from party and state jobs and two hundred executions, including that of N. A. Voznesenskii, a member of the Politburo. Stalin then summoned N. S. Khrushchev from Ukraine to Moscow as a counterweight to Malenkov. As for Beria, the Georgian purges of 1951 exterminated many of his staunchest supporters and political clients.

The most ominous manifestation of Stalin’s mistrust of his subordinates occurred in the very last months of his life. In January 1953 the press announced the arrest of nine physicians for conspiring to assassinate the top Soviet leadership with toxic medical treatments. Anti-Semitism, on the ascent in the USSR since the end of the war, figured prominently in the ‘doctor’s plot’—seven of the accused were Jewish. The ‘plot’, it has been speculated, was the first step in a campaign of terror against Jews. In any event, Stalin most probably instigated the affair of the ‘doctor murderers’ to serve as a pretext for the elimination of Beria, and perhaps other high figures in the regime.

Before any of this could happen, on 5 March 1953 Stalin finally died of a stroke. The official announcement of his passing evoked shock and then grief from millions. The dictator’s body reposed in state within the Kremlin, and columns of mourners paid their last respects. Even as a corpse Stalin brought calamity: five hundred people were trampled to death in Moscow because of poor security on the day of his funeral. Stalin was gone, but Stalinism remained. There would ensue a struggle for the succession. And when this was over, Stalin’s heirs would undertake the reconstruction and reform of the system he had bequeathed them.