In the closing months of the war, Stalin was forced to recognize that his policy of maintaining the wartime coalition into the postwar period, and at the same time tightening his grip on the Eurasian borderlands, was coming apart. Although the show of unity among the Big Three at Potsdam appeared to paste over the growing divergence, it was increasingly evident that the British, and especially the Americans, were no longer prepared to accept the Soviet interpretation of the Declaration on Liberated Territories or what constituted the essential elements in Stalin's view of a “friendly country.” Moreover, the anti-Communist elements abroad and in the territories liberated, or, as they insisted, “occupied” by the Red Army, took encouragement from the public disagreements among the erstwhile allies. They hoped for a breakup of the wartime alliance and even anticipated an armed conflict between the Western powers and the Soviet Union. From Stalin's point of view these hopes and expectations resembled those expressed by Hitler and Goebbels during the last stages of the war, and confirmed his already deeply held suspicions that resistance of any kind to the Soviet definition of a “friendly government” was “objectively” speaking tantamount to fascism.

Consequently, Stalin began to withdraw to his traditional borderland thesis, conceiving the Soviet Union as an embattled fortress but now buttressed by defensive outworks that could at some future, more auspicious time become the launching pads for a renewed political offensive. This shift meant that the consolidation of the inner periphery assumed greater importance, evolving into a series of concentric security zones. In the first zone, the re-sovietization of the liberated regions of the USSR within its 1940 borders accelerated as hostilities came to an end in Europe. At the same time, within the Soviet core Stalin dashed wartime hopes for a relaxation of controls and an end to repressive measures. The restoration of the collective farm system and the suppression of anti-Soviet guerrilla bands in the forests of Belorussia and West Ukraine, and the deportations of national minorities from frontier areas, alternated with amnesties and hard-driving political work.