New Superpowers: The United States and the Soviet Union

Only two countries were still powerful in 1945: the United States and the Soviet Union. The United States was now the richest nation in the world. Its industrial output had increased by a remarkable 15 percent annually between 1940 and 1944. By 1947, the United States controlled almost two-thirds of the world’s gold bullion and launched more than half of the world’s commercial shipping. Continued spending on industrial and military research added to postwar prosperity. In contrast to the post–World War I policy of isolationism, Americans embraced global leadership. Many had learned about the world while tracking the war’s progress. Despite widespread fear of nuclear annihilation, a wave of suburban housing development and consumer spending kept the economy buoyant. A baby boom exploded from the late 1940s through the early 1960s in response to prosperity.

The Soviets also emerged from the war with a well-justified sense of accomplishment. Despite horrendous losses—now estimated to be as many as forty-five million lives lost in the war itself—they had resisted the most massive onslaught ever launched against a nation. Indeed many Europeans and Americans gratefully acknowledged the Soviet contribution to Hitler’s defeat. Ordinary Soviet citizens believed that the victory would lead to improvement in everyday conditions. Rumors spread among the peasants that the collective farms would be divided and returned to them as individual property. “Life will become pleasant,” one writer prophesied. “There will be much coming and going, and a lot of contacts with the West.” The Stalinist goals of industrialization and defense against Nazism had been won, and thus many Soviets, among them Boris Pasternak, anticipated an end to decades of hardship and repression.

Stalin took a different view and moved ruthlessly to reassert control. In 1946, his new five-year plan set increased production goals and mandated more stringent collectivization of agriculture. For him, rapid recovery meant more work, not less, and more order, not greater freedom. Stalin also turned his attention to the low birthrate, a result of wartime male casualties and women’s long, arduous working days. He introduced an intense propaganda campaign emphasizing that women should hold down jobs and also fulfill their “true nature” by producing many children. A new round of purges began in which people were told that enemies among them were threatening the state. Jews were especially targeted, and in 1953 the government announced that doctors—most of them Jews—had long been assassinating Soviet leaders, murdering newborns and patients in hospitals, and plotting to poison water supplies. Hysteria gripped the nation, and people feared for their lives. “I am a simple worker and not an anti-Semite,” one Moscow resident wrote, “but I say . . . it’s time to clean these people out.” With this rebirth of Stalinism, an atmosphere of fear returned to feed the cold war.