Russia at war 1941-1945

she snapped back, thinking ouvertura to be some unfamiliar term of abuse. Or else there was the story of the Marshal's wife who had so many silver foxes that she decided to wear only one, but to pin to her chest the tails of the remaining nine, to show that she had ten altogether.]

There is good reason to suppose that this verbal propaganda, a fairly familiar device in Russia, had been put about on instructions from the Party hierarchy.

Nor was it very long before the official propaganda began to discourage boastfulness on the part of officers and soldiers; the war was declared to be a thing of the past, and the soldiers could not be allowed to rest on their laurels. Very soon after the end of the Japanese war there appeared a poem by one Nedogonov, called The Flag over the Village Soviet which was given wide publicity: Its main theme was summed up in the Unes:

"And if you won't work hard on the kolkhoz, we shall spit on all your medals and decorations."

This systematic debunking of the war hero came later, but the first signs of it could already be detected only a couple of months after the victory over Germany.

Economic Hardships Continue

All this was, in a way, ungracious and hurtful; and yet it was understandable. In 1945

Russia was in a serious economic situation; it was essential to demobilise as much of the Red Army as possible, and to get down to the hard realities of peace-time reconstruction.

Hundreds of towns, tens of thousands of villages had been partly or completely destroyed by the Germans; the industrial areas of Kharkov, Kiev, Stalingrad, Odessa, Rostov, the Donbas, Zaporozhie and Krivoi Rog, besides many others, had been laid waste; millions of Russians and Ukrainians had been deported to Germany and most of them had

returned in bad or indifferent health; altogether (though this figure was not to be

mentioned until much later) twenty million people had lost their lives—or one-tenth of the entire population, an appalling proportion equalled only by Poland and Yugoslavia.

There were also millions of war invalids.

The civilian population of the Soviet Union had not only been underfed, but also grossly overworked during the war years, and many had died under the strain. The whole of the country's agriculture had been run almost entirely by women, and it was the women too who had kept the country's industries going in wartime. In 1945, fifty-one percent of all industrial workers in the Soviet Union were women. Many of the other workers were adolescents.

Despite this intensive effort on the part of the Soviet people to keep the war-time

industries going—and without this mass-effort Russia could never have won the war—

the whole industrial situation was little short of disastrous by the end of the war. With the recovery of some of the industrial areas in 1943-4 and the intensification of production in the east and in central Russia, the production figures for the first half of 1945 showed a slight improvement, compared with the first half of 1944. But this was very little,

compared with the not overwhelmingly good pre-war figures:

During the first half of 1945, the Soviet Union produced only 77% of the coal

produced in the first half of 1941; 54% of the oil; 77% of the electric power; 46% of the pig-iron; 52% of the steel; 54% of the coke; 65% of the machine-tools.. .

[ IVOVSS, vol. V, pp. 376-84.]

Almost everything had had to go into the war industries which in the first half of 1945, had produced nearly 21,000 aircraft, 29,000 aircraft engines, over 9,000 tanks, over 6,000

mobile guns, 62,000 guns, 873,000 rifles and machine-guns, 82m. shells, bombs and

mines, over 3 billion cartridges, etc. The industrial might of the Soviet Union had been practically cut in half since 1941. In 1945 she was producing only one-eighth as much steel as the USA. She was faced with the gigantic problem of reconstruction,

reconversion and development. Agriculture had to be re-equipped with machinery almost from scratch, and supplied with chemical fertilisers. The production of agricultural machinery and of fertilisers was one of the first things to be stepped up immediately the war in Europe was over.

The number of livestock, very far from enormous in 1940 (when the after-effects of

collectivisation were still keenly felt), was much lower still in 1945. In 1945, there were only 47.4 m. head of cattle (which was 3.2 m. more than in 1944). By the end of 1945 the total number of cattle was only 87% of the 1940 figure; cows, 82%; sheep and goats,