The Environment of Postwar Stalinism

Abstract

The postwar Soviet Union was full of shit. Many cities had such a poor sanitation infrastructure that courtyards were awash in filth from leaky cesspits and covered in piles of fecal matter. Residents of small industrial cities sometimes faced a disgusting combination of an open-gutter sewerage system, location in a non-desiccated swampland, and lack of sidewalks. People in these places were forced to traverse excrement-filled muck just to go about their daily lives. These conditions were an extreme manifestation of the impoverished circumstances of many European countries after the Second World War. But they also reflected the hardships of late Stalinism, especially since the cities in question had not been subject to devastation during military campaigns. Historians of the social and cultural history of the Soviet Union in the last decade of Stalin's reign have been busy painting a portrait of this era as a dynamic and transformative period instead of as simply the solidification of totalitarianism. Almost all assessments of social and economic circumstances between 1943 and 1948 highlight the pervasive misery of these years. With over twenty-five million dead from the war and a million more to perish during a famine in 1946-7, state attempts to culturally harness social support for reconstruction faltered. A different set of carrots and sticks characterized state policy toward society between 1948 and 1953 as material conditions gradually improved. Scholarly consensus, furthermore, points out that some form of liberalization and reduction of repressive measures had become almost necessary for the government to maintain political control after Stalin.1