Thus, even when he met the ruling group informally, the participants always had a feeling that something important was taking place. For that reason, when they were invited to his dacha, none of the elite wanted “to miss a single dinner, even when ill. It was there that everything of any importance was brought up, discussed, and sometimes conclusively decided.”26
At the dictator’s whim, he called them to discuss even crucial policy matters, without agenda, minutes, or secretaries. They usually met in the evening or at night. He might invite them to watch one of the American movies captured in Germany or elsewhere during the war. The films had no subtitles, and he loved to curse them for being so primitive. One night he commanded the USSR minister of cinematography Ivan Bolshakov to give a running translation. The poor man did not dare say he knew no English, so he improvised and imagined what the actors were saying. Stalin’s cronies chuckled because they knew the truth.27
The custom of the all-night dinners had begun in the late 1930s, and the rituals deteriorated in the latter part of the war, when Stalin recovered from the shock of the Nazi invasion and began to sense victory. Instead of serenely basking in the limelight, the ruler reverted to teasing and insisting on never-ending toasts until guests were completely drunk. They emerged from the ordeal at dawn and then had to face work at their offices. The bizarre hours, stress, and excessive drinking had disastrous effects on their health, but that did not stop the Boss from playing childish games, like “fining” someone an extra shot of vodka if they polished off the last one too slowly. The meals sometimes degenerated into food fights. But no matter how boisterous, silly, and fun-filled these occasions, he could turn on someone in the blink of an eye. What made the man so terrifying, as one distinguished writer put it, “was that any slip in dealing with him was like mishandling a detonator: You would do it only once in your life; there was no chance to correct it.”28
With foreign guests Stalin was more restrained though always political. Milovan Djilas, for example, on a visit with a Yugoslavian delegation just before the Allied landings in Normandy, saw that behind the banter over food and drink, Stalin was trying to intimidate them and get them to break with the West.29
It is also true that after the war the old man became desperate for companionship. When Khrushchev would arrive from Ukraine on business, Stalin would invite him home and keep him in Moscow until he begged permission to leave. Then all he would get was: “What’s your hurry? Stay here a while. Give your comrades the opportunity of working without you.” His daughter, Svetlana, was no longer nearby, for she had married (against his wishes) in 1944, and again in 1949, leaving him on his own. He had no woman friend who might have helped temper his harshness. Getting these comrades from the upper reaches of society to socialize with him, one surmises, was partly an attempt to fill the gap in his life that was otherwise devoid of human contact.30
A BADLY WOUNDED SOCIETY
The great victory celebrations in 1945 could not conceal a harsh reality: the Soviet Union had been bled white by the war, so badly affected that recovery would take far longer than ordinary people hoped or leaders in Moscow feared. Stalin played down the human costs that had been paid because he did not want to reveal how the war had weakened his country.
In March 1946, during an interview with Pravda, he mentioned in passing that the USSR had suffered 7 million deaths, which, he rightly observed, was vastly more than the combined losses of Britain and the United States.31
That number stuck for a long time, until the late 1980s when President Mikhail Gorbachev ordered new investigations. Studies by the Soviet General Staff then reported that 26.6 million had died in the war, 8,668,400 of them men and women in uniform. The military figures alone are astonishing, and as two British scholars have noted, if spread over four years, “Red Army losses on an average day ran at twice the Allied losses on D-Day.”32 The official Soviet statistics should be taken as a minimum. For example, the fatalities include 1.8 million Red Army prisoners who died in captivity. German statistics state, however, that there were at least 3.3 million such deaths. Some reliable Russian historians put military deaths at 10 million.33 The “medical casualties” went up to 18,344,148, though some were “double-counted” because they were wounded more than once.34
If we take the more or less “official” calculation that 26.6 million people died from all causes in the Soviet Union and subtract the 8.6 million or so military deaths, the result means that 18 million or more civilians died prematurely. These figures are complicated because no precise counting was done at the time, and they have to be estimated. It is true that several million died through Stalinist wartime terror and ethnic cleansing, but they were war-related, and a net loss of people.35 Still more almost certainly died because the government had made almost no plans for civilian needs in the event of war, and they were left to face chronic shortages and hunger.36
Stalin sought to compensate for the population deficit by refusing to repatriate Axis prisoners of war, the last of whom left the Soviet Union only in 1956. Of course their labors could not come close to making up for the losses.37
The birthrate had been falling since the 1920s, as it continues to do up to the present. There was also a gender imbalance, accentuated by the war that left 20 million more females than males.38 In the early postwar period, that one-sidedness particularly affected rural areas, where sometimes only a handful of men returned to their village.39
The property damage from the war was staggering. In November 1945, Molotov announced some findings from a special investigating commission’s research. He said that metropolitan areas and cultural centers, like Stalingrad, Kiev, Minsk, Smolensk, Kharkov, and many other major cities, were reduced to smoldering ruins. “The Hitlerites,” as he and Stalin called them, burned or destroyed 1,710 towns and 70,000 villages. They demolished 6 million buildings and left 25 million people homeless. A total of 31,580 industrial enterprises were destroyed, cutting 60 percent of the country’s metal and mine production. In the countryside, anything that could be moved was stolen, and the rest destroyed. As they retreated, the Wehrmacht methodically tore up forty thousand miles of railway track and destroyed all the stations and bridges. Molotov listed the devastation to tens of thousands of schools, libraries, hospitals, technical institutes, and universities.40
More recent research suggests that, if anything, he understated the damage; according to one estimate, the country lost one-quarter of its prewar physical assets.41 The productive activity of whole generations went up in smoke, so much so that in 1945 the Soviet Union looked more like one of the defeated countries than one of the winners.
The years immediately following the war were among the most desperate in all of the twentieth century across Europe and worst of all in the Soviet Union, where poverty and want were rampant. Even at the end of 1946, young soldiers returning from war-torn Germany were shocked at how their country looked by comparison. When their train stopped at railway stations, they were beseeched by those on the platform: “Uncle, give us a little piece of bread!” The scenes were so bad in Dnepropetrovsk that the soldiers could not bear to look anymore.42