Stalin: A Biography

Yet Stalin, while masterminding an image of omnipotence for the Soviet state, did not himself believe in it. The USSR had daunting problems. He ordered the security agencies to collate information with a view to making the Soviet case for reparations when the Allies next conferred. Catalogues of devastation were compiled. Twenty-six million Soviet citizens had perished in the Second World War. Stalin was not innocent of blame: his policies of imprisonment and deportation had added to the total (as had his disastrous policy of agricultural collectivisation, which impeded the USSR’s capacity to feed itself). But most victims died at the front or under Nazi occupation. Some 1.8 million Soviet civilians were reportedly killed by the Germans in the RSFSR; double that number was recorded for Ukraine.¹¹ The dead were not the only human losses in the USSR. Millions of people were left badly wounded or malnourished, their lives having been wrecked beyond repair. Countless children had been orphaned and fended for themselves without public support or private charity. Whole districts in the western borderlands had been depopulated so drastically that farming had ceased. The Soviet Union had paid a high price for its victory, and it would take years to recover.

As the NKVD completed its cataloguing tasks (while not ceasing to discharge the duty of arresting all enemies of Stalin and the state), the scale of the catastrophe was made clear. In the zone of the USSR previously under German occupation scarcely a factory, mine or commercial enterprise had escaped destruction. The Wehrmacht was not the sole culprit: Stalin had adopted a scorched-earth policy after 22 June 1941 so as to deprive Hitler of material assets. Yet the subsequent German retreat in 1943–4 had taken place over a lengthier period, and this had provided the Wehrmacht with time to carry out systematic destruction. The record put together by NKVD almost defies belief. No fewer than 1,710 Soviet towns had been obliterated by the Germans along with around seventy thousand villages. Even where the Wehrmacht failed to set fire to entire townships, it succeeded in burning down hospitals, radio stations, schools and libraries. Cultural vandalism was as near to comprehensive as Hitler could make it. If Stalin had a crisis in the availability of human resources, he faced an equally appalling set of tasks in consequence of the devastation of the material environment.

Not only that: the structure of administrative control was much more shaky than it had been before the war. Displaced persons were everywhere; and as the troops came back from Europe, the chaos increased. No picture of this was permitted to appear in the newspapers or the newsreels. The emphasis continued to fall upon the bravery and efficiency of the Red Army in Germany and the other occupied countries of central and eastern Europe. The reality was very different. The Soviet order was most easily restored in the larger cities, especially those which had never been under German rule. But the intense concentration on military tasks in the Great Patriotic War had led to the running down of those aspects of civilian administration which were not narrowly connected with the fight against the Germans. In the zone previously occupied by the Wehrmacht the shambles of organisation was acute. In places it was hard to believe that the Soviet order had ever existed as peasants reverted to a way of life which predated the October Revolution. Private trade and popular social customs had reasserted themselves over communist requirements. Stalin’s writ was unchallengeable in Moscow, Leningrad and other conurbations, but in smaller localities, especially the villages (where most of the population still lived), the arm of the authorities was not long enough to affect daily lives.

And despite the Red Army’s triumph in Europe there were problems in several countries under Soviet occupation. The military, security, diplomatic and political agencies of the USSR, already stretched to the limit before 1945, had somehow to cope with the responsibilities of peace. Yugoslavia was unusual in as much as its own internal forces under Tito had liberated it from the Germans. Elsewhere the Reds had played the crucial part in defeating the Wehrmacht. Victory proved simpler than occupation. Few people in central and eastern Europe wished to be subject to communist rule. Stalin and the Politburo knew how effectively the communists had been eradicated by Hitler and his allies and how little support the national communist leaders in Moscow-based emigration had in their homelands.