Reconstruction and Late Stalinism, 1945–53

The period between the end of World War II and Stalin’s death in March 1953 began in victory celebrations across the Soviet Union. The joy soon dissipated in the struggle to mourn the dead, heal the wounded, and rebuild the country. The war had ravaged a generation: three‑quarters of the military dead were men aged nineteen to thirty‑five; 90 percent of the draftees born in 1921 were killed. Severe shortages of food, consumer goods, and housing continued for years. The people of southern Russia and Ukraine knew famine again in 1946–47, because of drought and government mismanagement. But by the early 1950s, most of the country’s economic infrastructure had been restored. Social reconstruction also proceeded rapidly. People got back in touch with their kin, married, and bore their “beautiful children,” as Olga Korzh put it. Among those new mothers were 1,700,000 single women who registered for government benefits between 1945 and 1950.⁶⁸

It is a tragic irony that the process of restoration included recriminations against the women who had served in the military. Some people said that the female veterans had become lesbians. Others spread rumors about heterosexual liaisons at the front. “Who have you got married to?” wailed Tamara Umniagina’s new mother‑in‑law to her soldier son in 1945. “An army girl. Why, you have two younger sisters. Who will marry them now?” Similar aspersions had been cast on the members of the women’s battalions in 1917 and on civil war veterans. Some returning World War II veterans also bore the disgrace of having been captured. Anna Egorova wrote bitterly, “I hadn’t returned from the war like a victorious knight on his horse, but amid shame and accusations.” Most women learned to keep their military service a secret. The large‑scale enlistment of women in the military ended, never to be renewed.⁶⁹

Beginning in 1943, the government, realizing that peace was coming, began to stress once again the importance of women attending to their domestic tasks. This theme reverberated through the post‑war years, but it was not accompanied by the massive layoffs of working women that happened in the United States and Britain. The Soviet government and people alike believed that women had to play a crucial role in the economy.⁷⁰ There was no choice, for the deaths of so many made the need for female labor even greater than in the past. The war also strengthened the leadership’s conviction that the military, and the heavy industrial sector on which it depended, should receive a substantial proportion of future resources. Women’s double shift–working outside the home and doing most of the housework–would continue.

Some women yielded their jobs to returning men. This was particularly true in the countryside, where men reclaimed leadership positions on the collective farms and climbed aboard the tractors again. The percentage of women among heavy machine operators fell from a high of 55 percent in 1943 to a mere 5 percent in 1949. For years after the war, women’s advancement in the paid‑labor force was also negatively affected by the policy of giving male veterans preferential treatment in education, employment, and recruitment into the party. Women did keep some of the gains that they had made in the professions, in industrial management, and the middle ranks of government bureaucracies.⁷¹

In 1945, many Soviet citizens hoped that the easing of the dictatorship that had occurred during the war would continue, and that the government would reward the people for the supreme achievement of defeating the Nazis by granting them more liberty. They were soon disappointed. In 1945, when victory was certain, the Politburo tightened the reins again. Returning POWs were executed or shipped off to the Gulag. Ethnic groups from Ukraine and the Caucasus–Balkars, Chechens, Crimean Tatars, Ingush, Kalmyks, Karachais, Kemshils, Kurds, Meshketian Turks, and Volga Germans–were deported from their homelands on charges that they had collaborated with the enemy. Later in the 1940s, intellectuals, particularly Jewish ones, were arrested on bogus accusations of treason. This continuing persecution made the last years of Stalin’s rule a time of high anxiety and deep disappointment in the Soviet Union.

Conclusions

Stalin died on March 5, 1953. Evgenia Ginzburg was in Magadan when she heard the news. “I collapsed on the table, sobbing loudly. My body shook. It was my unwinding, not only for these last months spent awaiting my third arrest; I was also weeping for two lost decades. In the space of a minute the whole procession of events swept before my eyes. All the tortures and all the prison cells. All the long files of those who had suffered the final penalty, and the countless legions of those who had been made to suffer. And my own life destroyed by his diabolical will. And my boy, my dead son.”⁷²

Women who had been spared Stalin’s assaults mourned his death for very different reasons. Many of them believed that he had been a stern but benevolent leader who had looked after his people and led them in their greatest achievement, the defeat of Hitler. Pasha Angelina spoke for these women when, in her 1948 autobiography, she described Stalin as “the man who raised my whole generation, a man who is associated with everything that is good in your lives and mine, with all our hopes for the future.”⁷³ Ginzburg understood that it would take generations to count the dead and weigh their suffering against the achievements of the Soviet Union under Stalin’s rule. This painful moral calculus is still ongoing today.

The Stalin regime institutionalized Bolshevik feminism in a fashion that suited its purposes, and in so doing propagated the ideals of emancipation broadly and changed public attitudes profoundly. Education and women’s participation in the paid‑labor force expanded quickly in the 1930s. This enabled women to make crucial contributions to the construction of heavy industry, social services, and government bureaucracy during that decade, even while doing most of the housework and childcare. When war came, the majority of the workers who produced the weapons the soldiers fought with and the food they ate were women. After the war, they labored on to rebuild the nation.

Individual women’s experiences of these years ran the gamut from Ginzburg to Angelina. Many suffered from overwork and government persecution. Many became the first in their families to get an education or hold a white‑collar job. Many took up projects that had engaged earlier generations of female activists, such as building daycare centers and teaching in adult literacy programs. Others volunteered for service in new industries and on the frontiers. By so doing they greatly expanded women’s participation in the public world. Soviet women could feel tremendous pride in what they had accomplished during the Stalin years. With the dictator dead, they could also dare to hope that better times were coming.