Was High Stalinism a continuation of the 1930s terror?

The short answer

• Victory confirmed Stalin’s methods. The war appeared to prove that the collective farms, the plans and the purges had made the country strong enough to survive. Stalin had no reason to change a system that had won, and every reason to restore the controls that had loosened during the fighting, when peasants had expanded private plots and soldiers had seen how Europeans lived. The regime now treated such contacts as a source of dangerous comparisons.
• The Cold War revived the fear of enemies. The breakdown of the wartime alliance in 1946–47, the Marshall Plan and the American atomic monopoly convinced Stalin that the capitalist powers were again preparing for war. Churchill’s Fulton speech of March 1946 and the Truman Doctrine of 1947 confirmed this reading for Stalin. Contacts with the West became suspect, and anyone with foreign connections, from returning prisoners of war to Jewish intellectuals with relatives abroad, could be treated as a potential spy.
• Reconstruction demanded sacrifice. The war had destroyed much of the western Soviet Union, and the Fourth Five-Year Plan of 1946–50 gave priority to steel, coal, electricity and arms, including the atomic bomb. Food, housing and consumer goods again came last. The famine of 1946–47 and the harsh labour and theft laws followed from the decision to rebuild heavy industry first, so the population again paid for the state’s priorities as it had in the 1930s.
• The new borderlands rejected Soviet rule. The lands annexed in 1939–40 had lived under Soviet rule for less than two years before the German invasion and resented the deportations of 1940–41. After 1944 armed nationalist movements, forced collectivisation and the arrival of Russian-speaking officials and settlers made them the most rebellious regions of the Union, and the regime treated them as zones of counter-insurgency long after the war had ended elsewhere. Deportation became its main weapon there.

What it changed

An empire held by force. The satellite states of Eastern Europe remained under Soviet control until 1989, but the methods used to install them, rigged elections, purges and Soviet advisers in their security services, left them without popular legitimacy, and their leaders knew it. Revolts in East Germany in 1953, Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 followed, because what force had installed only force could keep.

The Gulag at its height. Postwar theft laws, repatriated prisoners of war, insurgents from the borderlands and new waves of arrests drove the camp population to about 2.5 million by 1950–53, with another 2.7 million special settlers. The camps had become too large and too costly, and after Stalin’s death their own officials and his successors moved quickly to shrink them, which shows that even the regime saw the camps as a burden.

A frightened leadership waiting for change. Stalin’s heirs, Malenkov, Beria, Khrushchev and Bulganin, had all seen colleagues destroyed and feared being next. The Doctors’ Plot and the purge of Molotov and Mikoyan in 1952 suggested a new round of terror. When Stalin died in March 1953, his colleagues acted within weeks to release the doctors and reduce the camps, which shows how much they had wanted change.

Nuclear power and a frozen society. The atomic bomb of 1949 made the Soviet Union a superpower and justified the secrecy and mobilisation of the late Stalin years. The same years froze culture and science, as Lysenko’s rejection of genetics damaged Soviet biology and agriculture for a generation. The postwar settlement left a powerful state and a constrained society, a combination that shaped the next forty years.