In 1949 the USSR officially announced it had the atomic bomb52 and in 1953 the hydrogen bomb.53 Stalin could be completely satisfied with himself: The Soviet Union had become an atomic power.
In 1950 the USSR started the first postwar stage of the arms race. Direct military spending in 1952, on the eve of Stalin's death, accounted for nearly one-fourth of the total annual budget.54 The restoration of heavy industry was largely complete at the end of 1950. Production of steel, rolled iron, and petroleum increased substantially over prewar levels.55 New metallurgical plants were built in the Baltic states, Transcaucasia, Central Asia, and Kazakhstan.
In contrast, the production of consumer goods at the end of the Fourth Five-Year Plan still had not reached the prewar level. As before, the population suffered from shortages of basic necessities and the severe housing crisis. In Moscow, however, investments were being made, in skyscrapers, giant structures meant to immortalize the Stalin era, and the Soviet government generously distributed gifts among its Eastern satellites, such as universities, institutes, and hospitals.
The state invested major sums in the development of health care in this period. Preventive medicine was improved in the cities, but the hospital situation was always dismal. There were shortages of beds, staff, and essential medicine. Medical personnel, doctors and nurses—to say nothing of technicians—remained among the lowest-paid categories.
The nation's economic development limped along, hampered as before by the perennial problems of the Soviet system. All economic questions, regardless of their size, were decided by the central government, while initiative by local economic agencies was kept to a minimum. Moscow set the plan for each enterprise, often without any realistic assessment of its capabilities. Each factory inevitably depended on other sectors of industry for the supply of raw materials and related enterprises. The transportation system was constantly late with deliveries. The absurdity of this supercen- tralized system was such that thousands of kilometers existed between suppliers, producers, and related enterprises. It was not unusual to have raw materials produced in the Far East delivered to central Russia when the same material could have been found close at hand, but in the possession of some other agency or department. Bad management and chaos engendered interruptions of production, "storming" at the end of the planning period, and enormous material waste.
The concentration of decision making at the center also led to a swelling of the bureaucratic apparatus. A multitude of unnecessary central inspection operations were instituted. Industries were caving in under the avalanche of commissions, inquests, and investigations. A huge army of "fixers" (itolkachi), employees especially charged with procuring raw materials and hard-to-get items, motors and the like, invaded factories, offices, and ministries. Bribery became the accepted way of doing business. The government attempted to fight corruption but could accomplish nothing because corruption had become an integral part of the system.
Another pillar of the system was "pokazukha" the practice of deliberately deceiving the higher authority about the rate of production and the fulfillment of plan targets. Plant managers were often afraid to tell the truth concerning the state of production and preferred to submit triumphant- sounding reports claiming fulfillment or overfulfillment of the plan or higher labor productivity. They would scheme endlessly to avoid being ranked among the "delayers." For this reason, official statistics must be viewed with great caution; many statistics, as was later officially admitted, were simply false.
The lie became a way of life. Enterprises deceived ministries. District party committees misled regional committees, which in turn provided false information to the Central Committee. As for the Central Committee members, especially the top leaders, they in turn lied to the people, to themselves, and to all humanity.
During the 1950s construction projects for hydroelectric complexes on the Dnepr and the Volga began. In 1952, with prison camp labor, the 101- kilometer Volga—Don Canal was completed, linking the White, Baltic, Caspian, Azov, and Black seas into a single water transport system.
The canals, the power plants, the factories using their power, and man- made "seas" of artificial lakes were built, as a rule, without the least regard for the ecology. Rivers passing through large populated areas were polluted with industrial waste. Animal life in the rivers began to die off. Fishing on the Volga and its tributaries, which had long been the pride of all Russia, was endangered. Valuable forested areas and lowlands were flooded and adjacent land turned into marshes—for example, in the area of the "Sea of Rybinsk."56 Scientists, local authorities, and ordinary people tried to stop this pitiless destruction of natural resources, but in vain. Once a plan had been approved by the central government, it could not be changed.
After the war, administrative reforms were frequently introduced and the nature and functions of specific economic bodies changed, but no essential change in economic planning and management resulted.
On March 15, 1946, the title people's commissar was changed back to the old term, minister. In its own way this underlined the autonomous power of the state, which had long since ceased to depend on "the people." On Stalin's orders, the employees of many ministries—waterworks, justice, foreign affairs—began wearing the same uniforms as military personnel, police, agents of state security, and railroad employees. Civilian as well as military ranks and titles were also introduced in all areas.57
Evidence of the deep reaction that came over the Soviet Union in these years was the 1947 law forbidding marriages between Soviet citizens and foreigners.
The terror of the 1930s had undermined the basic social unit, the family. Ideological divisions and the informer system shook the foundations of the urban family, already unstable after the revolution. As for the rural family, it was disintegrating under the impact of forced collectivization, impoverishment, and the flight to the cities. The loss of an important part of the male population during the war had thrown millions of families into difficult, often dire conditions. Families with single mothers constituted a category numbering in the millions.
The code of family law in effect before and during the war, with its simple procedures for divorce and the right of abortion (but only on the basis of medical necessity), reflected the Marxist concepts of equality between the sexes and free love and had played an important part in the development of the Soviet society at its early stage. In and of itself, the law was commendable: it proclaimed total equality between men and women. But legal equality in all fields, including production, and the verbal assurance of free access for women to all jobs and professions, was not backed up by economic and social conditions guaranteeing real equality. A woman had to face the dual obligation of materially supporting her family and performing the domestic tasks connected with childrearing. True, in all major industrial centers the state assumed the obligation of setting up child care centers, nurseries, and kindergartens, but their numbers were insufficient. The problem was solved to some extent by the age-old institution known as grandmother.
At the end of the war, the state returned to the old "bourgeois" concept of the family as the basic unit of society. Stalin understood that a stable family would make the job of controlling the people much easier. Unregistered marriages and free love ran counter to the aims and practices of the Soviet state, with its policies of limiting movement and monitoring the lives of citizens through the internal passport system.