the Baltic states, which had been annexed in
1940; many more from all over the Russian
empire were also deported to virtual slavery. The
Communist Party was allowed to re-emerge as
Stalin’s instrument of control over Soviet society.
There was rigid ideological censorship of science
and all forms of culture, even of composers. The
party exploited to the maximum the labour of the
peasants and the workers. Military heroes were
relegated to the status of ordinary citizens.
The last decade of Stalin’s rule was stifling.
Terror returned. Stalin’s Soviet Union was a
country of immense hardship. Nascent internal
nationalism was savagely crushed but could never
be entirely suppressed. Jewish national feelings,
especially after the foundation of Israel, drew
world attention to another aspect of Soviet per-
secution. Rights, taken for granted in the West,
did not exist in Stalin’s Russia.
As in the 1930s, Stalin’s economic plans gave
precedence to heavy industry at the expense of
consumer goods, so the standard of living recov-
ered only to a rudimentary level. Draconian
labour laws deprived workers of all freedom and
exposed them to punishment for lateness or
drunkenness. Heavy burdens were laid particu-
larly on the peasantry: the collectives were more
tightly regulated and controlled; the productive
private plots of the peasantry were taken away; in
1947 collectivisation was extended to the former
Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. But
agricultural production, unlike industrial activity,
hardly recovered from the wartime lows. Food
was forcibly taken from the peasantry for ridicu-
lously low prices. There was widespread famine in
the Ukraine in 1946–7. By 1952 the grain and
potato harvests had still not reached the 1940
pre-war level. The failure of ‘socialist’ agriculture
has remained a feature of the Soviet economy.
Stalin’s emphasis on heavy industry was condi-
tioned by his fear of Western industrial superior-
ity. He took for granted the implacable hostility of
the capitalist West to the Soviet Union. His grip
over Eastern Europe and the maintenance of a
large peacetime Red Army were to compensate for
Russia’s economic inferiority. Every effort was also
made to catch up in the field of nuclear weapons.
But Stalin clearly wished to avoid a war with the
West. In 1946 he cautiously withdrew demands
made earlier on Turkey, and later pulled the Red
Army out of northern Iran and Manchuria. Yet the
Soviet position in the post-war world would
depend in the first instance on the Red Army.
Globally the Soviet Union stood on its own,
exhausted and deeply wounded by war.
Stalin feared that the Red Army, as it advanced
westwards, would become aware of the much
higher standard of living enjoyed by the ‘fascists’
and capitalists. The success of Soviet propaganda
depended on keeping the Russian peoples from
Western contact. Fraternisation with local popu-
lations was therefore severely limited where it was
allowed to occur at all. Within the Soviet Union,
rigid censorship about the world outside contin-
ued and a distorted picture of Western hostility
and hate was propagated. The party and Stalin’s
leadership were glorified.
Stalin’s post-war revenge was indiscriminate.
The victims of Yalta, those Russians who were
forcibly repatriated by the British and Americans
after the war from the zones of occupation, were
lucky if they ended up in the Gulag Archipelago.
Others were simply shot. But these thousands of
men, women and children were just the tip of the
iceberg. Whole national groups, such as the
Muslim Tatars and Kalmycks, were deported with
great brutality from the Caucasus when it was
reoccupied by Soviet armies in 1943 and 1944.
More than 1 million people were collectively pun-
ished and deported. Stalin’s ferocity exposed his
fanatical determination to wipe out any danger to
‘Russian’ communist power and Soviet unity from
within. The years from 1945 to Stalin’s death in
1953 were as repressive as the terrible 1930s had
been. Stalin ruled by coercion and terror; he was
omnipresent yet totally remote, never meeting the
Russian people face to face. His character was, in
Khrushchev’s words, capricious and despotic,
brutal tendencies that only increased as his facul-
ties weakened in old age. But he never lacked
henchmen and supporters for his policies; policies
that no one man could have carried through
alone. Coercion and terror formed one essential
element; the other was compliance. To this end,
Stalin’s immediate helpers received material ben-
efits. A slave army of millions of Russians, arrested