FROM 1944 TO THE DEATH OF STALIN

The Second World War left the world of east European Jewry devastated. Although the Nazis had been defeated, they had succeeded in murdering a large proportion of the Jews of eastern Europe. In Poland approximately 90 per cent of the pre-war Jewish population did not survive the war, while in Lithuania the proportion was even higher. More Jews survived in the Soviet Union. Of the 5.3 million Jews in the country in June 1941, perhaps 2.8 million survived. Everywhere the structures of Jewish life had been destroyed and the survivors faced great difficulties in re-establishing themselves in a world that was also radically altered by the war. (See Map 21.)

Stalin also took advantage of his victory to create a sphere of influence in eastern Europe. Although many of the countries liberated from Nazi rule were originally ruled by genuine popular fronts, these were soon transformed with Soviet help into communist dictatorships in which the key role in political life was played by the security apparatus and ultimate power lay in the Kremlin. As a result, these years were marked by a struggle for power in Poland, which in many ways resembled a civil war and culminated in early 1947 in the creation of a regime dominated by a small elite of communists trained and influenced by Moscow.

These developments inevitably led to a progressive deterioration of relations between the Soviet Union and its Western allies, who came slowly to recognize the far-reaching character of Stalin's goals and to resist them, as he proceeded to secure a dominant position for the Soviets in the countries of eastern Europe. The period that followed, which lasted until Stalin's death in March 1953, was characterized by the worst tension of the cold war and by the outbreak of armed conflict in Korea in 1950. In addition, these years were marked by a heightened ideological conflict between the two camps, with the Soviets attempting to mobilize ‘progressive’ opinion on a worldwide basis, and the United States and its allies responding by defending liberal democratic values against Soviet totalitarianism.

The deterioration of the international climate went along with the renewal of purges and terror in the Soviet Union.