Post-war Stalinism
This domain covers 1945–1953: reconstruction, ideological campaigns, the onset of the Cold War, and the late Stalinist purges that were cut short by Stalin's death on 5 March 1953.
Reconstruction and ideological control
The Fourth Five-Year Plan (1946–1950) restored heavy industry quickly - output reached pre-war levels in most branches by 1948–1950 - while agriculture and housing lagged and consumption stayed austere. The 1947 currency reform and the end of rationing hit savers but stabilized money. The Zhdanovshchina, running from 1946, attacked "kowtowing to the West" in literature, music, and science; the 1948 session of the agricultural academy endorsed Lysenko's genetics and damaged biology for a generation. The Leningrad Affair (1949) destroyed Voznesensky and Kuznetsov, signaling that even senior figures were expendable.
Cold War and repression
The Truman Doctrine (March 1947) and the Marshall Plan were answered by the Cominform (September 1947) and Comecon (1949); Yugoslavia was expelled from Cominform in June 1948 for Tito's independent line. The Berlin blockade ran 1948–49, NATO formed in 1949, and the USSR tested an atomic bomb in August 1949. At home the camps reached their largest population, nationalist resistance in the Baltics and western Ukraine was crushed, and campaigns against "rootless cosmopolitans" prepared the way for the Doctors' Plot announced in January 1953.
Worked example
Question: why did the Doctors' Plot surface in early 1953? Reasoning: it followed a broader anti-Jewish turn after the creation of Israel and the 1949 closing of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, and it served a ruler who had just destroyed the Leningrad group and was testing Beria's security machine. A strong answer links the campaign to the Mingrelian case in Georgia and notes that Stalin's death ended it before the intended purge occurred.
Traps
- Zhdanov died in 1948, but the Zhdanovshchina continued; do not date the campaign by his death.
- The 1947 currency reform is Stalinist, not a Khrushchev reform.
- Do not confuse the 1948 Yugoslav expulsion with the 1956 Hungarian crisis.
- The Soviet atomic test is August 1949; the Berlin blockade and NATO are also 1948–49 and must be sequenced correctly.