7.2 Devastation and reconstruction

At the end of the war, many people in the West saw the Soviet Union, the country that had vanquished Hitler’s Germany, as a mighty power, boundlessly ambitious and ready for new conquests. In fact, the country had been devastated beyond the imagination of Westerners, and the primary goal of the Stalinist leadership was not to push the borders of the Soviet Union to the Atlantic Ocean, but to reimpose discipline and order at home. This was not an easy task. In the territories conquered between 1939 and 1941, desperate guerrillas continued to fight against the troops of the NKVD and the Red Army for several years. Millions of citizens who had been exposed to foreign influences – and therefore, from the paranoid Stalinist point of view, were not fully reliable – had to be reintegrated into Soviet society. Ideological orthodoxy that had been dangerously diluted during the war had to be reimposed. The collective farm system was in disarray. Even if the leadership had been bent on further conquests (as it was not), under the circumstances it lacked the means. The war stretched the resources of the country to the furthest limits.

The human and material losses suffered by the Soviet Union were on a different scale from those inflicted on the other ex-belligerent countries. Even today, after the partial opening of the archives, the numbers are imprecise, but we may estimate that during the war 26–27 million Soviet citizens died. Among citizens of Ukraine and Belarus, the death rate was particularly high; after all, these were the districts where the fighting was the heaviest and German occupation had lasted longest. According to numbers published after the collapse of the Soviet Union, more than eight-and-a-half million soldiers died on the battlefields.3 Although there are no comparably exact figures, several million prisoners of war died in German camps, where they had been cruelly mistreated. The rest died as a result of enemy bombardment, starvation and cold, mass executions carried out by the Nazis, or became victims of Stalinist terror and died in concentration camps or in places of exile. In addition, tens of thousands managed to escape forced repatriation and stayed in the West.

Even this extraordinarily high number of dead does not provide a complete picture of the demographic calamity. On the battlefield it was above all young men who died, and therefore in the immediate postwar years the working-age population in particular was reduced. The demographic imbalance between males and females that began at the time of the First World War, and had been exacerbated during famines (men are less able to endure starvation) and purges (which targeted men more then women) now reached extraordinary proportions. As late as 1951 there were 21 million more females than males in the Soviet population; and, according to the 1970 census for every 620 men in the age group that served in the war (those born between 1916 and 1925) there were 1,000 women.4 In other words, women had trouble finding husbands, mothers brought up their children without fathers, and the birth rate came to be depressed.

The Soviet people had experienced material deprivation before: the civil war and collectivization were both followed by famine. Subjectively, however, the post-Second World War period was perhaps the worst. People endured cold and hunger during the war, firmly believing that their misery was only temporary, and consoled themselves with visions of a richer and brighter future. But that better future was slow in coming. Farm equipment (25 percent of tractors) and animal herds (87 percent of hogs, 60 percent of horses) had been destroyed. In 1956 there were still fewer cows in the Soviet Union than there had been before the First World War in the Russian empire. In 1945 the output of agriculture was only 60 percent of what it had been before the war, and the overwhelmingly important grain output was less than half what it had been in 1940.5 To the baneful consequences of the war a series of droughts were added, to producing a dreadful result. In 1946 the grain output was only a little over a third what it had been in 1940. The peoples of the Soviet Union once again suffered a famine: the regions of the country that had been occupied by the Germans, and Ukraine in particular, were most hard hit. The regime, as in the 1930s, took no pity on the victims: not only did it fail to organize famine relief, but it covered up evidence of starvation, continued compulsory grain deliveries in the affected regions, and even exported grain. Indeed, how could the regime admit it could not feed its own people and at the same time claim to be a superpower, a state that had achieved socialism, an example for others to follow? Remarkably perhaps, the most shocking picture of misery comes from the memoirs of Nikita S. Khrushchev, who was at the time first secretary of the Ukrainian party organization. Reports came to him showing that people went mad of hunger and ate their own children. Corpses were discovered showing evidence that meat had been gnawed from the bones. If we are to believe Khrushchev, he was moved by these examples of suffering and pleaded with Stalin for help, but in vain.

It was under these extraordinarily difficult conditions that the task of economic reconstruction began. At the heart of the difficulties was the perennial problem sector of the economy, agriculture. After the ravages of collectivization there had been some improvement in the second half of the 1930s, largely because the regime allowed collective farm peasants to cultivate tiny private plots. But the improvements of the second five-year plan period were wiped out by the war. From the point of view of the regime there were two agricultural issues: how to increase production in order to provide the population with food, and how to reassert control over the villages. The party leaders pretended that the two goals were not only consistent, but in fact closely connected. The government was more successful in achieving the second goal than the first.

During the war discipline on the collective farms was substantially loosened. At least in some places, the peasants were able to expand their private plots at the expense of the collective, and the peasants grew what they wanted without state intervention. Indeed, some relatively few fortunate ones who lived near cities were able to take advantage of the shortage of food and sell their produce in the markets for high profit. During the war there had been rumors among the peasants, which the regime did nothing to contradict, that following victory the system of collective farms would be abolished. The government, however, following the disastrous harvest of 1946, issued a decree that compelled the peasants to return all lands that had previously belonged to the collectives, and reasserted the primary obligation of the collective farms to provide deliveries to the state. Not only were the collective farms not abolished, but between 1947 and 1949 the system was extended to the Baltic states: the methods, the resistance, the consequences were the same as they had been in the previous decade in the rest of the country. In their desperation many Baltic peasants joined the guerrillas who were still fighting the Soviet state. The machine tractor stations, these outposts of the regime in the countryside, one again organized “political departments,” which had the task of supervising the collective farms.

The peasantry was the stepchild of the Soviet regime. Conditions on the collective farms were deplorable. The majority of villages had no electricity, and hardly any of the peasant houses, most of them overcrowded shacks, had running water. During the war young men had been drafted from the villages into the army; many did not survive, and others, who did survive, showed no eagerness to return to the miserable conditions prevailing in the countryside. In any case, the regime constantly fearing subversion, had a policy of not allowing those who had been abroad to return to their villages. The Stalinists assumed that the returning soldiers or prisoners of war would be less likely to confide in strangers. Already in the 1930s people were overmotivated to leave the villages, but now the desire to escape became even greater. The consequence was that the labor force in the collective farms was a residue: disproportionately old, female, and ill educated. Combined with the shortage of investment in agriculture, and the low prices paid for agricultural products, it is understandable that productivity recovered very slowly. Not until the mid-1950s did Russia reach the per-acre productivity of 1913. The overall grain output in 1954 was still smaller than in 1913, and the per-hectare productivity of 1963 was only a shade higher than in 1913.6

The decisions of the Soviet government were partially responsible for the slow recovery. Limiting private plots was occasioned by ideological rather than practical considerations. But most importantly, the government continued to favor industry and was unwilling to pay the price that would have been necessary to increase farm production. The share of investment in agriculture, as long as Stalin was alive, remained pitifully low. The procurement prices the government paid for compulsory deliveries not only failed to pay for the cost of production, but on occasion did not even pay for the cost of transportation to the delivery points. Under the circumstances incentives remained nonexistent. Just as before the war, the building of industry was based on the exploitation of the peasantry.

The Stalinist leadership hoped to improve agriculture without paying for the improvement. Constant reorganizations had always been a characteristic feature of the Soviet political system. Totalitarian Soviet society was never immobile. The desire to reorganize was based on the gap between high expectations and a reality that was not easy to mold. The leaders time and again thought they had found the right solution to their problems, that everything would work out fine, as ideology had promised. Needless to say, they were disappointed each time.

At first the regime put its faith in the so-called link system. That system, associated with the name of Andrei A. Andreev, the member of the Politburo responsible for agriculture, was introduced before the war. It meant that a few people (ranging from five to eight) assumed responsibility for cultivating a strip of land, and their income depended on their performance. The advantage of the system was that it offered some incentive to the workers, and in some aspects at least freed them from the constant intervention of the collective farm authorities. In the immediate postwar period the issue, much discussed in the press, was how suitable this form of organization was, especially for the most important product, grain. The MTSs understandably, opposed the links, pointing out that they made the rational use of tractors more difficult.

The link system was also suspect for reasons of ideology: it smacked too much of individual enterprise and a return to private farming. Some even feared that the system undermined the very foundations of the collective farm. Perhaps if the system had led to a great increase in productivity, it would have been allowed to exist. But given the circumstances, it could not by itself solve the problems of the collective farms, and agriculture continued to languish.

The link system came to be repudiated, and with it its chief sponsor, Andreev. The new organization favored by the regime was the brigade, a much larger entity, sometimes including as many as one hundred peasants. The brigade was built on assumptions that were the very antithesis of those on which the links were founded. This was the system associated with Nikita S. Khrushchev. Instead of making the working collectives smaller and therefore better connected with their work, the new system, adopted in 1950, aimed to make the collective farms larger. Soviet leaders had always assumed that giant size, both in industry and in agriculture, was superior and somehow more “modern.” Furthermore, at a time when the regime found it difficult to establish control over the farms, the party and the government considered it easier to control a few big ones rather than many small ones. As a consequence of the new policy, the collective farms came to be amalgamated, and their number was thereby greatly reduced. The ultimate extension of the idea was to make peasants live like workers in apartment houses – in effect, in small cities. The peasants would have ceased to be peasants, and would have received higher income and some of the social benefits enjoyed by workers. This would be the realization of the age-old Marxist dream of eliminating the distinction between the town and the country.

Nothing came of this plan; indeed, it was explicitly repudiated in 1952 at the nineteenth party congress. Society did not have the means to realize it, and furthermore, the party leaders understood that the peasants would resist the idea just as furiously as they had resisted collectivization – not so much because they hated to be parted from their villages, but because they would have lost their private plots, the economic mainstay of their existence.

Unlike agriculture, the recovery of industry was impressively quick. Aside from the many dreadful consequences of the war there was also something positive: as the Germans advanced, the Soviet authorities moved factories to the east. In the long run, the dispersal of factories benefited the country and contributed to industrialization of Siberia.

The industrial policy of the regime during the postwar years had the same features as it had during the great industrialization drive. The economy remained greatly overcentralized. As one would expect, the Stalinist leadership gave primary attention to the rebuilding of the producer goods segment of the economy, which by 1950, according to the unreliable Soviet figures, greatly surpassed pre-war standards (although industries that produced consumer goods took much longer to rebuild). Even if we take into consideration the exaggerations built into Soviet statistics, it is still indisputable that the Stalinist methods worked, and that the speed of reconstruction was impressive.

The Soviet Union benefited from stripping industries from the defeated countries, primarily from eastern Germany, and to a lesser extent from the other countries of communist Eastern Europe. At the same time, the wealth that the Soviet Union thus acquired made up only a tiny fraction of its dreadful losses. Soviet economic achievements in the postwar period cannot be explained by pointing to the exploitation of the defeated.

Although the industrial working class did not suffer the abysmal poverty of the peasantry, standards of living in the cities did not catch up with low pre-war standards for several years following the war. Immediately after the war the government eliminated the two-tiered price system for food, which meant the elimination of government subsidies. In 1947 the government introduced a financial reform which devalued the ruble ten to one. The purpose of this move was to confiscate the money that some peasants had managed to accumulate and deposit in the banks.

After 1948 there was a gradual improvement in living standards in the cities, but nevertheless people suffered from shortages of almost everything. The favored Soviet method of improving standards of living of the urban inhabitants was a gradual lowering of prices for food. The decision to lower prices repeatedly was made on political, rather than economic, grounds. After all, food remained in extremely short supply. The leaders rightly believed that lowering prices would make a greater positive impression than increased wages. The artificial changing of the price structure further worsened the position of the peasantry vis-á-vis the rest of the population.

The diet of the working classes was monotonous: it was largely limited during the winter to potatoes, cabbage, and bread. Clothing was of bad quality and so expensive that everything – coats, shoes, and shirts – had to last for a long time. The situation was most desperate in housing. The industrialization drive that preceded World War I created a proletariat that was poorly housed in the fast-growing cities. (In 1913, an urban family had seven square meters per person of living space.) The Soviet authorities, bent on a breakneck pace of industrialization, badly neglected housing construction, and the situation was getting worse. The war demolished entire cities: Leningrad, Kiev, Stalingrad, and dozens of others were almost completely destroyed. Housing in the countryside was not spared: in 1945, 25 million people were left homeless. In the following two decades people in the cities lived in circumstances that are difficult to imagine. Six or seven families would share old apartments, most of them in buildings constructed before World War I. Women had to wait their turn at the stove. There were instances when rooms were assigned to several families and there was not enough space for beds, so people had to sleep on mattresses on the floor. (Average living space per person in 1955 was still only 5.1 square meters. On average, even as late as 1958, 3.2 persons shared one room.) Communal living and utter lack of privacy were among the most characteristic features of Soviet life in those years.

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