Hitler had now lost the war. All that he could do was feed more men and equipment into the meat grinder in the hope of staving off the inevitable defeat. By the early summer of 1944 the Soviets were ready to launch a huge offensive through Belorussia; the offensive was timed to coincide with the landings at Normandy. In this one operation the Red Army encircled the whole of the German army group Center, hundreds of thousands of German soldiers, and moved into Poland. There they faced an unpleasant surprise. Without informing the Soviet command, the Polish Home Army, the main underground resistance group, staged an uprising against the Germans in Warsaw. The Soviet army was at the end of its operational line, on the other bank of the Vistula, with little capacity to help the Poles quickly. Molotov wanted to push on, not to help the Poles but just to exploit the victory. Zhukov was against any new offensive, for the army was exhausted and needed to rest and reequip. In any case, Stalin decided that it was not necessary; he was not going to help his opponents in the Polish Home Army and the Poles were left to fight on alone. In the same summer the Soviets moved south into Rumania, and the pro-German governments in Rumania and Bulgaria collapsed. In Yugoslavia the Red Army linked up with Tito’s partisans and went north toward Hungary. In Budapest the Germans put up furious resistance, but the Soviets were able to crush the resistance and move on to Vienna. Hitler’s coalition continued to collapse. In Finland, Baron Mannerheim, the commander in chief of the army, became the president of the country and immediately took Finland out of the war, signing an armistice in September.
The Red Army was now pounding at the gates of Hitler’s Germany. The Nazi command placed the bulk of their army in Poland and Eastern Germany facing the Soviets, even with the Americans and British moving rapidly to the German western border. The last year of the war brought incredible slaughter, as the now desperate Wehrmacht faced a well-equipped and huge Red Army. The Soviet command had learned how to fight and now had the equipment to do it, and Stalin had learned to work with his generals. The Russians fought their way through Poland, in the process liberating those prisoners of Auschwitz and other Nazi death camps who were still alive. Soviet soldiers, many of whom had spent time in Soviet labor camps, had a glimpse of something even more sinister in the gas chambers and crematoria. As they moved into Germany, they found a country in ruins but still showing the signs of pre-war prosperity. As one Soviet soldier said to a Western journalist, “if they had all this, why did they attack us?” As the Soviets approached Berlin, Hitler threw everything he had into battle. Northeast of the Nazi capital stood SS Charlemagne, the French SS brigade, and high school boys were mobilized to fight Soviet tanks with hand-held anti-tank weapons. None such desperate measures nor the persistence of the German army could stand up to the huge barrages by 152-millimeter self-propelled guns, rockets, and masses of heavy Stalin tanks. Even with such overwhelming force, the encirclement of Hitler’s capital and the final assault through the flaming ruins of the city cost the Red Army hundreds of thousands of men. By early May of 1945, they had fought their way into the city and raised the Soviet flag over the Reichstag. The Red Army had pounded a stake into the heart of the Third Reich.
21 Growth, Consolidation, and Stagnation
The Soviet Union emerged from the war victorious but with tremendous population losses and economic damage. The number of dead was at least twenty million, twenty-seven million by some estimates, including three million prisoners of war, some seven million soldiers killed in battle, two million Soviet Jews, and at least fifteen million Russian, Ukrainian, and Belorussian civilians. All areas occupied by the Germans were devastated, including the USSR’s richest agricultural land and the whole Ukrainian industrial complex, which had supplied the country with almost half of its products on the eve of the war. Housing stock and city services were smashed, and even in unoccupied areas the strain of the war showed everywhere. To make things worse, a bad harvest in 1946 led to famine conditions in much of the country. Soviet reparations from Germany and Eastern European countries helped somewhat, but the scale of loss and destruction was so great that even such measures provided only small recompense for the losses.
At the same time, the victory brought with it a new order in the Kremlin. Soon after the war, Stalin ordered the People’s Commissariats to be called Ministries, for he announced (in private) that such names had been appropriate to a revolutionary state, but that the Soviet Union had now consolidated itself enough to operate with more permanent institutions. For the first time Stalin and his inner circle began to delegate power to a series of state committees, usually headed by the principal ministers who managed the main areas of the economy. In principle, Stalin was no longer going to monitor all the details of government and economic activity, and some new faces joined the pre-war leadership. Beria and Zhdanov (until his death in 1948) continued on in Stalin’s inner circle, while Molotov, Mikoyan, Kaganovich, and Voroshilov remained from the pre-war years but were less powerful, especially Voroshilov, disgraced by his military failures. New faces in the top leadership were Malenkov (vice-chairman of the Council of Minsters under Stalin’s chairmanship), Nikolai Bulganin (minister of defense and a longtime economic manager), and Khrushchev, until 1949 head of the Ukrainian party organization and then of the Moscow city party. To a large extent the system did work in a more regular fashion for the last eight years of Stalin’s life, but at the same time he did not refrain from scolding and bullying his closest collaborators and from directing a series of political “cases” with murderous results. The cult of Stalin reached its apogee in the post-war years. Besides the ubiquitous portraits and statues an official adulatory biography appeared on his seventieth birthday. The press produced endless accolades to the “great leader of peoples,” the great Marxist, and the genius military commander Stalin. As much as he may have realized that the USSR needed a more normal mode of government, Stalin could not let go of the reins of power, and continued to behave like a revolutionary commissar of the civil war era, jumping into the middle of the fray with a firing squad ready.
The main task before the Soviet leadership was first of all reconstruction of the war damage, and then the continuation of “socialist construction,” including the progressive technical modernization of industry.
In some ways reconstruction was the easy part, for it meant the rebuilding of previously existing plants and infrastructure, and it was largely completed by 1950. The expansion and modernization of industry was more complicated. It is the case that the growth rates of the post-war era were some of the highest (actual) growth rates in Soviet history. In those years many of the pre-war investments began to pay off, with huge growth in the Urals-Western Siberian metallurgical and mining areas. To a large extent the crucial Soviet industries came up to world standards, and an enormous nuclear industry came into being, at this time largely for military purposes but with planning for power generation and other civilian uses in the future. What did not happen was proportionate investment in consumer goods or agriculture, the latter still hampered by the leadership’s fascination with agronomic fantasies such as the “grass-field” system of crop rotation. Reconstruction brought housing only to the pre-war level, with most people living (at best) in communal apartments. A rare improvement of the post-war years was in medicine, for the number of doctors grew again by seventy-five percent, and the 1946 famine did not lead to massive epidemics, as had occurred in 1932–33.