Russia at war 1941-1945

registration of marriage compulsory before the father could incur any legal and financial responsibilities for the children. De facto marriages, without registration, were no longer legally valid, and the children remained officially "fatherless", even if the father was a model family man. The decree of August 8, 1944, besides providing various financial

benefits relating to pregnancy and confinement, also imposed a heavy tax on bachelors over twenty-five and a smaller tax on couples with fewer than three children. The law of 1936 prohibiting abortion remained in force, and was not to be changed until many years after the war.

As important as the population problem after the war was that of the economic restoration of the country. Hundreds of cities and towns and thousands of villages had been wholly or partially destroyed by the Germans, much livestock and agricultural machinery had been taken, and the great question that began to be discussed at top level as early as 1943

was how this economic restoration was to be financed. There were, in principle, three possible sources: the Soviet Union's own admittedly depleted resources; a large foreign loan—inevitably from the United States; and, finally, substantial German reparations in kind, and similar reparations, on a smaller scale, from Germany's allies. (The ideal would have been a combination of all three). The armistice terms accepted by Finland and

Rumania in 1944 were the first examples of such limited reparations agreements. Finland, for example, agreed to pay 300 million dollars over a period of six years, later extended to eight years. At Yalta, Stalin was to propose that Germany pay Russia ten billion

dollars in kind, a figure to which Churchill, in particular, strongly objected.

A further source of "reconstruction expenses", as the post-war years were to show, were the various trade agreements and other financial arrangements made between Russia and the countries of Eastern Europe.

[The Yugoslavs were the first to rebel against such agreements which were highly

advantageous to Russia, but unfavourable to them.]

But this was still in the future, and the problem that preoccupied Stalin and the other Russian leaders, from 1943 on, was an American loan of seven billion dollars or more.

American visitors to Russia, representing important business interests, such as Donald M.

Nelson and Eric Johnston, favourable to a programme of large-scale American exports to Russia after the war, and seeing this as a precaution against a possible post-war slump in the USA, were taken very seriously by the Russians, especially at the height of the Big-Three harmony, roughly between the middle of 1943 and the Yalta Conference in

February 1945. At the same time, the Russians felt certain ideological and political inhibitions about such a loan, since they feared that excessive financial dependence on the United States might well go counter to their own security considerations. Put perhaps a little crudely, there was a conflict between reconstruction and security. Speedy and relatively easy reconstruction meant a certain dependence on the United States, but it also inevitably meant a greatly-reduced degree of Soviet control over eastern Europe and parts of central Europe, which represented, in the Russian military conception of 1944-5, an indispensable security precaution against a new German aggression or against any kind of aggression from the West. Loose talk in the United States about a "war with Russia in fifteen years' time" had already begun in 1944, and was to become more and more widespread once the first American atom bomb had been dropped.

In the end, the American loan of seven billion dollars came to nothing. But it seems certain that the Russian leadership was to some extent divided on the question and that, inside the Party itself, there were roughly three tendencies, often in conflict inside the minds of the same people. There were, to quote William Appleman Williams's definition, the "softies", the "conservatives" and the "doctrinaire revolutionaries".

[ The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (New York, 1962), pp. 222-3.]

Since many Soviet leaders combined all three tendencies in varying degrees, it is

impossible to say how large each "school of thought" was. The pattern also varied greatly from year to year. There were certainly far more "softies" in 1944 than there were to be in 1947 or 1948.

Perhaps the most diehard "softy" was Litvinov, who remained one even as late as 1947. I had a conversation with him at the reception given by Molotov on Red-Army Day in

February 1947 which threw some light on what had happened. Taking me aside, he

suddenly started pouring his heart out. He said he was extremely unhappy about the way the Cold War was getting worse and worse every day. By the end of the war, he said,