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By the end of the war the Red Army was no longer an army of riflemen supported by a few tanks and aircraft but a modern combined armed force. But successful modernisation did not bar soldiers from traditional pursuits such as looting and sexual violence, respectively encouraged and permitted by the Red Army on a wide scale in occupied Germany in the spring of 1945.

Government and politics

The war ended in triumph for Soviet power. Whether or not the Soviet Union has left anything else of lasting value, it did at least put a stop to Hitler's imperial dreams and murderous designs. This may have been the Soviet Union's most positive contribution to the balance sheet of the twentieth century.

Millions of ordinary people were intoxicated with joy at the announcement of the victory and celebrated it wildly in city squares and village streets. But some of the aspirations with which they greeted the post-war period were not met. Many hoped that the enemy's defeat could be followed by political relaxation and greater cultural openness. They felt the war had shown the people deserved to be trusted more by its leaders. But this was not a lesson that the leaders drew. The Soviet state became more secretive, Soviet society became more cut off and Stalin prepared new purges.[44] Ten years would pass before Khrushchev opened up social and historical discourse in a way that was radical and shocking compared with the stuffy conformity of Stalinism, but pathetically limited by the standards of the wider world.

As for the social divisions that the war had opened up, Stalin preferred vengeance to reconciliation. While the Germans retreated he selected entire national minorities suspected of collaboration for mass deportation to Siberia. The Vlasov officers were executed and the men imprisoned without forgive­ness. No one returned from forced labour in Germany or from prisoner-of-war camp without being 'filtered' by the NKVD. Party members who had survived German occupation had to account for their wartime conduct and show that they had resisted actively.[45]

There were other consequences. The Soviet victory projected the Red Army into the heart of Europe. It transformed the Soviet Union from a regional power to a global superpower; Stalin became a world leader. It strengthened his dictatorship and the role of the secret police.

Nothing illustrates Stalin's personal predominance better than the lack of challenge to his leadership at the most critical moments of the war. As head of GKO and Sovnarkom, defence commissar, supreme commander-in-chief and General Secretary of the Communist Party, Stalin's authority over Soviet political, economic and military affairs was absolute. From the moment when his colleagues asked him to lead the war cabinet Stalin exercised greater influ­ence over his country's war effort than any other national leader in the Second World War. Washing away his mistakes and miscalculations in 1941 and 1942, the victory of 1945 further strengthened his already unassailable position.

The establishment of the five-man GKO was a first step to a comprehen­sive system of wartime administration that institutionalised pre-war trends. GKO functioned with marked informality. Meetings were convened at short notice, without written agendas or minutes, with a wide and varying cast of supernumeraries. It had only a small staff; responsibility for executing deci­sions was delegated to plenipotentiaries and to local defence committees with sweeping powers. But it was vested, in Stalin's words, with 'all the power and authority of the State'. Its decisions bound every Soviet organisation and citizen. No Soviet political institution before or after possessed such powers. Another pre-war trend that continued in wartime was the growth in influ­ence of the government apparatus through which most GKO decisions were implemented. Its heightened importance was reflected in Stalin's becoming chairman of Sovnarkom on the eve of war and thus head of government.

The role of central party bodies declined correspondingly. The purges of 1937/ 8 had already diminished the role of the Politburo. Before the war it met with declining frequency; all important decisions were taken by Stalin with a few of its members, and issued in its name. During the war the Politburo met infrequently and the Central Committee only once; there were no party congresses or conferences. It was at the local level that the party played an important role in mobilising the population and organising propaganda. It did this despite the departure of many members for the front; in many areas party cells ceased to exist.

The NKVD played several key roles. While repressing discontent and defeatism, it reported on mass opinion to Stalin. In military affairs it organ­ised partisans and the 'penal battalions' recruited from labour camps. In the economy it supplied forced labour to logging, mining and construction, and to high-security branches of industry. These roles gave it a central place in wartime government. Beria, its head, was a member of GKO throughout the war and deputy chairman from 1944, as well as deputy chairman of Sovnarkom. Not accidentally, reports from him and other security chiefs constituted the largest part of Stalin's wartime correspondence.

In economic life the overall results of the war were conservative and fur­ther entrenched the command system. The war gave a halo of legitimacy to centralised planning, mass production and standardisation. It showed that the Soviet economy's mobilisation capacities, tried out before the war in the cam­paigns to 'build socialism' by collectivising peasant farming and industrialising the country, could be used just as effectively for military purposes: the Soviet economy had devoted the same high proportion of national resources to the war as much wealthier market economies without collapsing.[46]

Had the war changed anything? At one level Hitler had made his point. Germany had fought two world wars to divert Europe from the class struggle and polarise it on national lines. The Second World War largely put an end to class warfare in the Soviet Union. By the end of the war nationality and ethnicity had replaced class origin in Soviet society as a basis of selection for promotion and repression.33

Other influences made the post-war economy and society more militarised than before. The country had paid a heavy price in 1941 for lack ofpreparedness. In the post-war years a higher level of economic preparedness was sustained so as to avoid a lengthy conversion period in the opening phase of the next war. This implied larger peacetime allocations to maintain combat-ready stocks of weapons and reserve production facilities to be mobilised quickly at need.

After an initial post-war demobilisation, the Soviet defence industry began to grow again in the context of the US nuclear threat and the Korean war. Before the Second World War, defence plants were heavily concentrated in the western and southern regions of the European USSR, often relying on far-flung suppliers. The Second World War shifted the centre of gravity of the Soviet defence industry hundreds of kilometres eastward to the Urals and Western Siberia. There, huge evacuated factories were grafted onto remote rural localities. A by-product was that the defence industry was increasingly concentrated on Russian Federation territory.

After the war, despite some westward reverse evacuation, the new war economy of the Urals and Siberia was kept in existence. The weapon facto­ries of the remote interior were developed into giant, vertically integrated production complexes based on closed, self-sufficient 'company towns'. Their existence was a closely guarded secret: they were literally taken off the map.

The post-war Soviet economy carried a defence burden that was heavier in proportion to GNP than the burdens carried by the main NATO powers. Whether or how this contributed to slow Soviet post-war economic growth or the eventual breakdown of the economy are questions on which economists find it hard to agree; there was certainly a substantial loss to Soviet consumers that accumulated over many years.

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44

Yoram Gorlizki, 'Ordinary Stalinism: The Council of Ministers and the Soviet Neo- Patrimonial State, 1946-1953', Journal of Modern History 74, 4 (2002): 699-736.

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45

Weiner, Making Sense of War.

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46

Harrison, Accounting for War. 33 Weiner, Making Sense of War.