Victory over Nazi Germany and its allies came
as an immense relief to the Soviet Union. No vic-
torious power had suffered more. The war had
devastated European Russia, 25 million were
homeless, factories were destroyed, railways dis-
rupted, mechanised farm machinery virtually non-
existent. Of the population of 194 million before
the war, 28 million had lost their lives; more than
one in four Russians had been killed or wounded.
Stalin did not expect much help from the capi-
talist US once the defeat of the common enemies
was accomplished. Supplies had been shipped
to Russia under the wartime Lend-Lease pro-
gramme, but this was severely curtailed after
the victory over Germany and was ended alto-
gether in August 1945, after Japan’s defeat, for
all countries. But crucial Western food supplies
still reached the Soviet Union in 1946 under
the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation
Administration (UNRRA), mainly financed by
the US. This programme saved devastated regions
from famine.
The Soviet Union tried to obtain immediate
assistance by taking away from the former enemy
countries everything that was movable: rails,
factory machines and all kinds of equipment. It
was an inefficient operation and probably only a
small proportion could be used again when it
reached the Soviet Union. The rest rusted away
in railway sidings. Joint Soviet and Eastern
European companies were formed on terms dic-
tated by the Russians; special trade agreementswere reached with former allies, generally favour-
ing the Soviet Union. Another important source
of help came from reparations, exacted not only
from the Soviet zones of Germany and Austria
but, for a short time, with Anglo-American coop-
eration, from the Western occupation zones as
agreed at Potsdam. Destruction in the Soviet
Union was on a scale almost unimaginable, and
during the war the Germans had treated the
Russians worse than animals. This helps to explain
the Soviet insistence on huge reparations from the
production of West German industry. But Soviet
demands soon ran counter to Western occupation
policies. The Western Allies realised that it was
they who would in the end have to make good
these losses or continue to support the Germans
in the Western zones with their own subsidies for
years to come. The inter-Allied conflict on the
reparations issue became one of the causes of the
Cold War.
There were desultory negotiations for a US
loan after the war which never came to anything.
In the last resort, Stalin had to rely on the sweat
of the Russian people. There was work for the
millions demobilised from the Red Army. During
the war there had been some ideological relax-
ation. Now there was a return to orthodoxy.
Stalin had not mellowed in old age: coercion
resumed and an army of forced labour was herded
into the Gulag Archipelago, the vast network of
labour camps east of Moscow. Hundreds of thou-
sands labelled as traitors were transported from(^1) Chapter 27
THE SOVIET UNION
THE PRICE OF VICTORY AND THE EXPANDING
EMPIRE