were made in the form of complete factories that were dismantled, transported to the Soviet Union, and reassembled there.
In the end the Plan could well be considered a success in industry, much like its predecessors, in spite of the frequently inferior quality of products and uneven results, which included large overfulfillments and underfulfillments. While industry was rebuilt and even expanded in Ukraine and other western areas, the Plan marked a further industrial shift east, which grew in relative economic importance compared to the prewar period. By mobilizing resources the Soviet Union managed to maintain during the Fourth and Fifth Five-Year Plans the very high annual industrial growth rate characteristic of the first three plans and estimated by Western economists at some 12 to 14 per cent on the average - a figure composed of much higher rates in the late forties and much lower in the early fifties. The Fifth Five-Year Plan lasted from 1951 to 1955 and thus continued beyond Stalin's rule. Similar to all the others in nature and accomplishments, it apparently made great advances in such complex fields as aviation and armament industries and atomic energy. Its completed projects included the Volga-Don canal.
Agriculture, as usual, formed an essential aspect of the plans and, again as usual, proved particularly difficult to manage successfully. The war, to repeat, produced sweeping destruction, a further sharp decline in the already insufficient supply of domestic animals, and at the same time a breakdown of discipline in many kolkhozes, where members proceeded to divide the land and farm it individually or at least to expand their private plots at the expense of the collective. Discipline was soon restored. By September 1, 1947, about fourteen million acres had been taken away from the private holdings of members of collectives as exceeding the permissible norm. Moreover, the Politburo and the government mounted a new offensive aimed at turning the peasants at long last into good socialists. This was to be done by greatly increasing the size of the collectives - thereby decreasing their number - and at the same time increasing the size of working units in a collective, in the interests of further mechanization and division of labor. Nikita Khrushchev, who emerged as one of the leaders in postwar Soviet agriculture, spoke even of grouping peasants in agrogoroda, veritable agricultural towns, which would do away once and for all with the diffusion of labor, the isolation, and the backwardness characteristic of the countryside. The agrogoroda proved unrealistic, or at least premature, but authorities did move to consolidate some 250,000 kolkhozes into fewer than 100,000 larger units. In spite of all the efforts - some hostile critics believe largely because of them - peasants failed to satisfy the demands of Soviet leaders, and insufficient agricultural production remained a major weakness of the Soviet economy, as Khrushchev in effect admitted after Stalin's death.
Politics and Administration
The postwar period also brought some political changes. As already mentioned, the Soviet Union acquired five new republics during the time of the Russo-German agreement. They were lost, together with other large territories, when Germany and its allies invaded the U.S.S.R. and reacquired when the Red Army advanced west. The five Soviet Socialist Republics, the Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Karelo-Finnish, and Moldavian, raised the total number of component units of the U.S.S.R. to sixteen. In July 1956, however, the Karelo-Finnish S.S.R. was downgraded to its prewar status of an autonomous republic within the R.S.F.S.R., reducing the number of union republics to fifteen. The Karelo-Finnish Republic, consisting both of some older Soviet lands and of territory acquired from Finland in 1940 and again in 1944, largely failed as an expression of Finnish culture and nationality; in particular, because the inhabitants had a choice of staying or moving to Finland, virtually no people remained in the area that the Soviet Union annexed from Finland. The downgrading, therefore, seemed logical, although it might have been connected with the desire to Russify that strategic area still more effectively. While the number of union republics increased as a result of the Second World War, the number of autonomous republics was reduced: five of the latter, the Volga-German Autonomous Republic and four in the Crimea, the northern Caucasus, and adjacent areas were disbanded for sympathizing with or assisting the Germans, their populations being transported to distant regions. In the case of the Volga Germans, the N.K.V.D. apparently staged a fake parachute raid, pretending to be a Nazi spearhead in order to uncover the sympathies of the people. Mass deportations also took place in the newly acquired areas that were rapidly and ruthlessly incorporated into the Soviet system. For example, most of the members of the upper and middle classes, including a great many intellectuals, disappeared from the Baltic republics. The concentration-camp empire of Stalin and Beria bulged at the seams.
By contrast, although the Union expanded and rigorous measures were applied to bring all parts of it into conformity with the established order, the Soviet political system itself changed little. Union-wide elections were held in 1946 for the first time since 1937, and again in 1950. The new Supreme Soviets acted, of course, as no more than rubber stamps for Stalin and the government. Republican and other local elections also took place. The minimum age for office holders was raised from eighteen to twenty-three. In 1946 people's commissariats became ministries. More important, their number was reduced in the postwar years and they were more strongly centralized in Moscow. Shortly before his death, Stalin carried out a po-
tentially important change in the top Party administration: the Politburo as well as the Organizational Bureau were abolished and replaced by the Presidium to consist of ten Politburo members, the eleventh being dropped, plus another fifteen high Soviet leaders. But Stalin died without calling together the Presidium. After his death its announced membership was reduced to ten, so that as an institution it differed from the Politburo in nothing but name, and even the name was restored after Khrushchev's fall.
The postwar years witnessed also a militant reaffirmation of Communist orthodoxy in ideology and culture. While more will be said about this subject in a later chapter, it might be noted here that scholarship, literature, and the arts all suffered from the imposition of a Party strait jacket. Moreover, Andrew Zhdanov, a member of the Politburo and the Party boss of Leningrad during the frightful siege, who led the campaign to restore orthodoxy, emerged as Stalin's most prominent lieutenant from 1946 until Zhdanov's sudden death in August 1948. That death - engineered by Stalin in the opinion of some specialists - again left the problem of succession wide open. The aging dictator was surrounded during his last years by a few surviving old leaders, his long-time associates, such as Molotov, Marshal Clement Voroshilov, Lazarus Kaganovich, and Anastasius Miko-yan, as well as by some younger men who had become prominent after the great purge, notably Beria, Khrushchev, and George Malenkov. Malenkov in particular appeared to gain consistently in importance and to loom as Stalin's most likely successor.
Foreign Policy
Stalin's last decade saw extremely important developments in Soviet foreign policy. Crucial events of the postwar years included the expansion of Soviet power in eastern Europe, the breakdown of the wartime cooperation between the U.S.S.R. and its Western allies, and the polarization of the world into the Communist and the anti-Communist blocs, headed by the Soviet Union and the United States respectively. That the Soviet Union proved intractable in its dealings with the West, that it did what it could to expand its own bloc, and that it received support from the Communist movement all over the world, followed logically from the nature and new opportunities of Soviet communism. A persistent refusal on the part of many circles in the West to face reality testified simply to their wishful thinking or ignorance. Yet it does not follow that every Soviet move was a cleverly calculated step of a prearranged conspiracy. It appears more likely that the Soviet leaders, too, had prepared little for the postwar period, and that in their preparation they had concentrated on such objectives as rendering Germany permanently harmless. The sweeping Soviet expansion in eastern Europe occurred at least in part because of special