In the country as a whole, housing was also miserable. Postwar urban rebuilding lagged behind even the modest population growth. New and rushed construction was often substandard and cluttered with every imaginable defect. By 1950 the total square footage of housing per person was still less than it had been a decade earlier, when there was already a shortage. Fewer than half of all Moscow’s homes had running water and sewage disposal. In the Urals and Western Siberia, where much industry had been located in the 1930s, the feverish creation of factories was not matched by enough living quarters. Conditions in the overcrowded dormitories of mill towns sound like those of the mid-nineteenth century. In a city like Chelyabinsk, people slept in kitchens and bathrooms of homes, in recreation and toilet facilities of factories, in schools, railway cars, and garages.
Uncounted thousands had only dugouts or mud huts (zemlyanki). Since the 1930s, such “dwellings” were taken for granted and not just in developing areas; the Soviets gave only secondary consideration to housing for workers. A survey in 1956 of the cities, towns, and regions once occupied by the German invaders found there were still thousands living in holes in the ground and other spaces unfit for human habitation.66
The first waves of returning soldiers were applauded and reintegrated into society, at least if they were in one piece. Many of them became true-blue Stalinists, but some wondered about the Communist system after the relative prosperity they had seen. There were vets who criticized, and a few—fearing war with America or England—dared to say, “It was wrong not to destroy the ‘allies’ after the fall of Berlin.”67 Most returned to impoverishment in the countryside. Victory Day was proclaimed a holiday, until Stalin realized there was little to be gained by focusing on the past, and in 1947 he decided to drop the celebration. He discouraged his generals from writing their memoirs, partly because he preferred to saturate the public discourse with attacks on the new enemies in the Cold War.
The Soviet Union’s estimated 2.75 million invalids were given humble pensions, and many had to resort to begging or hawking cigarettes at markets. By 1947 Stalin had seen enough and ordered the streets cleared of all beggars.68
THE GULAG
There was no better symbol of Stalin’s postwar restoration of dictatorship than the Gulag. At the beginning of 1939, the combined total of prisoners in labor camps and colonies stood at 1.6 million. The number went up to 1.9 million in 1941 then fell off until 1944, when it stood at 1.1 million. Prisoners preferred volunteering to fight rather than rotting away. In 1945 the total in all the camps went back up to 1.4 million, and every year thereafter it increased until 1950, when there were 2.5 million in the system. The number was the same the next year and barely fell until 1953, when the count reached 2.4 million. In 1948 these prisoners were divided about equally into labor camps (ITL) and labor colonies (ITK), but by 1953, 70 percent were in the camps. They were distributed in 476 separate complexes containing numerous smaller camps.69
Female prisoners in the Gulag were always fewer in number, but their fate, movingly described by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, was far worse. In the three years 1943 to 1945, the number of women in the camps and colonies stood (respectively) at 17.3 percent; 24.9 percent; and 28.4 percent of the total.70 These proportions were higher than usual because many men volunteered to serve and were accepted into the military. After the war, female prisoners made up between 22 percent of the total (in 1948) and 17 percent in 1951 and 1952.71
There was a parallel system of special camps that is usually overlooked in studies of the Gulag. In 1945 it held just over 2 million people, and the number increased until the census of January 1, 1953, when it contained no less than 2,819,776 people. Included in that figure were 885,717 children up to age sixteen. The story of these settlers (spetsposelentsy) has been investigated for the 1930s though not yet for the postwar years, when there were even more of them. Whereas before the war most were “kulaks,” in the 1940s and 1950s they were mainly persecuted nationality groups, such as those from the Caucasus, the Baltic, and the Crimea. In 1953 the largest group (1.2 million) was made up of Germans.72
Taken together, these systems contained a captive population of more than 5 million. We can imagine how many lives were touched by this terror if we think of the relatives and friends left behind.
Solzhenitsyn, an officer in the Red Army until February 1945, when he was arrested and sentenced, told the story of the Gulag more vividly than anyone. His own offense was to criticize the regime in a private letter while on service at the front. He was then denounced and given ten years in the camps, where life was every bit as dreadful after the war as before.73
These institutions were by no means all in the distant east or far north. After the war prisoners worked everywhere and were impossible to overlook. Thus in the late 1940s and early 1950s, there were more than fifty Gulag divisions in the Moscow region (oblast). Slaves were “rented out” to work on construction sites or in factories. But no matter what the managers did, they could not make this system economically self-sufficient.
What was as bad or worse than its economic cost was that Russian historian Galina Ivanova suggests that the entire operation corrupted society. The hundreds of thousands of people employed to work in the Gulag, as guards, administrators, and managers, became used to acting like slaveholders, and many raised their children in an atmosphere dominated by the camp. Participating in that world, even witnessing it on an ongoing basis, helped to ingrain antisocial attitudes—for example, that it was perfectly acceptable to mistreat others, to cut corners, cheat, chisel, and steal. A whole way of life developed that was at odds with common decency. The Communist system, along with its inbred chronic shortages, fostered a “new Soviet man” who was in reality a far cry from the ideal any revolutionaries ever had in mind.74
The camps were gradually dissolved only after Stalin’s death. Even before then, the Gulag was reaching a dead end. Too many prisoners became unfit because they were overexploited. The able-bodied were inefficiently used, too often with the weakest and oldest assigned to hard labor, while the barely literate and healthy could end up in the front office. For Stalin the main goal of the punitive system was not economic productivity but to terrorize the population and uphold the political system he wanted. That was why the Gulag was untouchable until he died.
At any rate, by 1947 the dictatorship and all its repressive trappings was firmly back in place, and the country was increasingly closed off to the outside world. That process was reinforced by, and became entangled in, conflicts with the West and the looming Cold War.
PART II
SHADOWS OF THE COLD WAR
CHAPTER 8
Stalin and Truman: False Starts
On April 13, 1945, Averill Harriman assured Stalin that President Truman would continue FDR’s policies. The U.S. ambassador added that it would be useful for Commissar Molotov to make a courtesy call in Washington on his way to the founding meeting of the United Nations in San Francisco, scheduled for April 25. The Kremlin had been dragging its feet about participating, in spite of having been urged to go by FDR. When Harriman brought up the matter on April 13, Molotov was in the room, and though he fussed and fidgeted at the mention of such a trip to the United States, Stalin overruled him on the spot and ordered him to go.1 The Soviet dictator was still hoping to obtain his political objectives with the cooperation of the Americans and British, and he was more than willing to try his luck with the new man in the White House.2