Stalin’s Soviet Union · CHAPTER 11 ·
High Stalinism (1945–53)
Chapter 11 of The Soviet Union under Stalin, 1924–1953: “High Stalinism”
After victory in 1945 Stalin’s rule hardened rather than relaxed. The regime rebuilt heavy industry first, a famine in 1946–47 killed an estimated 1 to 2 million, campaigns targeted writers, scientists and Jews, and satellite states from East Germany to Bulgaria took orders from Moscow.
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The map above is the world of The Soviet Union, October 1949 — NATO, the GDR and the People’s Republic of China.
Every state on the map that year: The world in 1950 · Europe in 1950.
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SHORT EXPLANATION
The end of the war brought Soviet citizens a reason to hope for an easier life. Many wanted more food, fewer controls and an end to the collective farms into which peasants had been forced in 1929–33. Stalin’s government chose another course. During High Stalinism, the years from 1945 to his death in 1953, it put heavy industry first, allowed an estimated 1 to 2 million people to die in the famine of 1946–47, and attacked writers, scientists and Jews.
Victory had also given Stalin a wider sphere of power. On the map, hatched red identifies the lands annexed in 1939–45. The grey-tan countries from East Germany to Bulgaria were satellite states: formally independent, but governed by communist leaders who took orders from Moscow. China became a communist ally in 1949; to the west stood the blue NATO states, members of the military alliance founded that year. An atomic test in Kazakhstan in August 1949 made the Soviet Union a nuclear power.
The new extent of Soviet authority did not mean that everyone accepted it. Dashed outlines mark insurgencies in western Ukraine and the Baltic states. The NKVD and its successor, the MGB, forerunners of the KGB, fought them with mass arrests and the deportations shown by the arrows. In Eastern Europe Stalin imposed communist governments, but Tito refused to take orders in Yugoslavia. He was expelled from the communist bloc in 1948, and suspected “Titoists” faced trials elsewhere.
Power was dangerous even for people near Stalin. The Leningrad Affair destroyed senior leaders, and the Doctors’ Plot of January 1953 accused mostly Jewish doctors of murder. When Stalin died in March, many feared that these accusations might have led to another Great Terror like the mass arrests and shootings of 1937–38.
The full story
The government faced a devastated country after the war. Its choices during the famine of 1946–47 show how reconstruction was to proceed. Drought struck Ukraine, Moldavia and the Volga in 1946, but farms still had to meet high procurement quotas: the grain they were obliged to deliver to the state. The government retained large reserves and continued exports to Eastern Europe while people went hungry. Estimates of the dead range from under 1 million to about 2 million, many in Moldavia, which the Soviet Union had annexed only in 1940.
Resources went first to rebuilding state power. Ukraine’s mines and the Dnieper dam were restored within a few years, even as millions lived in dugouts. In June 1947 new laws made theft of state property punishable by up to 25 years in camps. The Gulag, the forced-labor camp system, reached a peak of about 2.5 million prisoners. The contrast between restored industry and inadequate shelter tells us who bore the cost of the government’s priorities.
The government also demanded obedience in culture and science. A party resolution in August 1946 condemned the Leningrad journals Zvezda and Leningrad; the poet Anna Akhmatova and satirist Mikhail Zoshchenko were driven out of literary life. This was the beginning of the Zhdanovshchina, named for party secretary Andrei Zhdanov, which required writers and artists to follow the party line. In 1948 composers including Shostakovich and Prokofiev were accused of ‘formalism,’ the party’s charge against art it considered too experimental for ordinary people. The agronomist Trofim Lysenko had genetics banned that same year.
Other campaigns selected people as enemies. From 1949 the attack on “rootless cosmopolitans” targeted Jewish intellectuals; members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee were shot in 1952. The Leningrad Affair of 1949–50 eliminated leaders who had risen during the war, among them party secretary Aleksei Kuznetsov and chief planner Nikolai Voznesensky. On 13 January 1953 the regime announced the Doctors’ Plot, falsely accusing Kremlin doctors of murdering Soviet leaders. As the Cold War hardened, the government repeatedly identified enemies within, although Soviet power had never been more secure.
Stalin’s authority extended across Eastern Europe, but it rested on institutions and force. With the backing of the Red Army, the Soviet armed forces, communist parties took power in Poland, Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary between 1945 and 1948. A coup brought them to power in Czechoslovakia in February 1948. The Cominform, founded in 1947 as a bureau of European communist parties, gave Moscow a means of directing these nominally independent satellites.
Yugoslavia showed that a communist government could resist that direction. Tito survived his expulsion in June 1948 and became the first communist ruler to defy Moscow successfully. Another attempt to exert pressure failed in Berlin: Stalin’s blockade of West Berlin in 1948–49 helped bring about NATO, the Western defensive alliance, and a West German state.
In the annexed borderlands, opposition continued as a guerrilla war. The Ukrainian Insurgent Army fought into the early 1950s; the Baltic ‘forest brothers,’ guerrillas who lived in the woods, lost about 20,000 men in Lithuania alone. The arrows show the routes of Operation Priboi, which deported about 95,000 people from the Baltic states in March 1949. Removing the people on whom the partisans depended helped break their resistance.
FULL EXPLANATION
Late Stalinism as a system
Ministry and Politburo records reveal two different sides of Stalin’s last government. In Cold Peace (2004), Yoram Gorlizki and Oleg Khlevniuk show ministries and the Council of Ministers conducting economic affairs through more bureaucratic, predictable routines after 1945. Stalin intervened selectively, often from his dachas. Yet the people at the top lived with uncertainty. He worked through small groups of favorites and kept them off balance: the Leningrad group was destroyed, Beria was threatened by the Mingrelian Affair in Georgia, and Molotov and Mikoyan were humiliated in 1952. The authors call this a “neo-patrimonial” state, in which formal institutions existed alongside personal loyalty to the ruler. Economic recovery and a decline in elite violence from 1937–38 could coexist with danger near Stalin. The Doctors’ Plot, initially a case against Kremlin physicians, showed how rapidly his choice could send the system toward terror again.
The campaign against “cosmopolitans”
The Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee had served Soviet foreign policy during the war, seeking support abroad. By the end of Stalin’s life, its members had become targets. Security police murdered its chairman, the actor Solomon Mikhoels, in a staged accident in January 1948. The Soviet Union recognized Israel in May, but the leadership was alarmed when Moscow’s Jews enthusiastically welcomed Israel’s envoy Golda Meir that autumn. It dissolved the committee in November 1948; thirteen members were shot after a secret trial in August 1952. Meanwhile, from 1949, newspapers attacked ‘rootless cosmopolitans,’ a code for Jewish intellectuals, and Jews were removed from many posts. Gennadi Kostyrchenko and Joshua Rubenstein document these events, though historians still debate the antisemitic turn’s extent and aims. Memoirs claim that Stalin planned a mass deportation of Jews after the Doctors’ Plot. No order has been found in the archives, and most historians regard the question as open.
The war after the war
The Second World War ended in 1945, but fighting continued in territories the Soviet Union had annexed in 1939–40. In western Ukraine the Ukrainian Insurgent Army fought Soviet rule into the early 1950s. It had fought both Germans and Soviets, and in 1943 had carried out mass killings of Poles in Volhynia. Tens of thousands of Baltic “forest brothers” fought from the woods of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. Soviet forces responded with arrests, burned farms and the deportation of whole families. Operation West sent about 76,000 people east from western Ukraine in October 1947; Operation Priboi removed about 95,000 from the Baltic republics in four days in March 1949. Soviet security records used by Jeffrey Burds and Alexander Statiev count about 150,000 people killed as insurgents or helpers in western Ukraine in 1944–53; some 20,000 partisans died in Lithuania alone. The historians show why deportation and collectivization mattered alongside combat: guerrillas relied on villages for support, and these measures removed that base. The memory of the fighting and the deportations still divides Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Poles and Russians.
Key places on the map
On this day
Why it happened
Victory confirmed Stalin’s methods. Victory seemed to Stalin to vindicate the system of collective farms, plans and purges under which the country had survived. War had nevertheless loosened some controls: peasants expanded private plots and soldiers saw how Europeans lived. The regime saw opportunities for dangerous comparisons in those experiences and moved to restore control.
The Cold War revived the fear of enemies. The wartime alliance broke down in 1946–47. Stalin read the Marshall Plan and the American atomic monopoly, Churchill’s Fulton speech of March 1946 and the Truman Doctrine of 1947 as signs that capitalist powers were preparing for war. Under that suspicion, foreign connections could become evidence against a person: returning prisoners of war and Jewish intellectuals with relatives abroad could be treated as potential spies.
Reconstruction demanded sacrifice. Much of the western Soviet Union had been devastated. The Fourth Five-Year Plan of 1946–50 directed reconstruction toward steel, coal, electricity and arms, including the atomic bomb. Food, housing and consumer goods came last. The famine of 1946–47 and harsh labor and theft laws followed these choices, making the population pay for state priorities as it had in the 1930s.
The new borderlands rejected Soviet rule. The borderlands annexed in 1939–40 had experienced Soviet rule for less than two years before the German invasion, including the resented deportations of 1940–41. After 1944 armed nationalist movements resisted renewed rule, forced collectivization and the arrival of Russian-speaking officials and settlers. The regime treated these rebellious regions as counterinsurgency zones long after war ended elsewhere, making deportation its main weapon.
THE TURNING POINT
Tito’s expulsion, 28 June 1948. Tito could refuse Stalin because he had resources of his own: an army, a revolution and popular support. Yugoslavia survived Soviet threats and economic blockade after its expulsion from the Cominform on 28 June 1948. This first successful defiance within the communist world exposed a limit to Moscow’s authority. Stalin tightened control elsewhere and put alleged Titoists on trial in Hungary, Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia, including László Rajk in 1949 and Rudolf Slánský in 1952. The break showed how much Soviet power depended on the Red Army, a dependence that would matter again in Hungary in 1956.
What it changed
An empire held by force. The Eastern European satellites remained under Soviet control until 1989. Rigged elections, purges and Soviet advisers in security services had installed governments whose leaders knew they lacked popular legitimacy. Revolts in East Germany in 1953, Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 exposed their continued dependence on force.
The Gulag at its height. Postwar theft laws and new arrests sent people to the camps alongside repatriated prisoners of war and borderland insurgents. By 1950–53 the camps held about 2.5 million people, with another 2.7 million special settlers. Their size and cost had become a burden even to the regime. After Stalin’s death, camp officials and his successors moved quickly to reduce them.
A frightened leadership waiting for change. Malenkov, Beria, Khrushchev and Bulganin had watched colleagues fall and feared for themselves. The 1952 purge of Molotov and Mikoyan and the Doctors’ Plot raised the prospect of another terror. Within weeks of Stalin’s death in March 1953, his colleagues released the doctors and reduced the camps; the speed of their action shows how strongly they wanted change.
Nuclear power and a frozen society. The atomic bomb of 1949 made the Soviet Union a superpower and gave a reason for the secrecy and mobilization of late Stalinism. Yet the same period constrained culture and science. Lysenko’s rejection of genetics damaged Soviet biology and agriculture for a generation. A powerful state and a constrained society emerged together, shaping the next forty years.
DISCUSSION QUESTION — Was High Stalinism a continuation of the terror of the 1930s, or a different kind of dictatorship?
The answer depends on where we look. Society continued to experience massive repression: the Gulag reached its greatest size, theft laws imprisoned millions, deportations broke borderland resistance, and famine was again allowed to kill in 1946–47. At the top, violence targeted groups such as the Leningrad leaders and the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee rather than repeating the mass killing of 1937–38. Gorlizki and Khlevniuk find that ordinary government became more routine and bureaucratic. Stalin’s personal power was, if anything, greater, and his cult peaked in 1949; the possibility of a purge helped keep the elite obedient. The Doctors’ Plot suggests another terror might have followed had he lived, although historians disagree about its possible extent. High Stalinism thus kept the earlier dictatorship’s tools while using fear and violence differently. It shows how a dictatorship can use attacks on a few, and the threat of more, to discipline many.
An interesting fact
The bomb tested at Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan on 29 August 1949 was the Soviet Union’s first atomic weapon. It closely copied the American “Fat Man” dropped on Nagasaki. Klaus Fuchs, a physicist at Los Alamos, had passed its design to Soviet intelligence. Scientific director Igor Kurchatov chose to build the proven design first, avoiding any risk of failure while Beria watched; a Soviet design followed in 1951. Western intelligence had expected a Soviet bomb no earlier than the early 1950s. The test shocked Washington and helped push the United States toward the hydrogen bomb.
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