The Soviet Union was by all measures a much poorer nation on 9 May 1945 than it had been on 21 June 1941. The last chapter of Catherine Merridale's Ivan's War describes the situation. Her book is one of, if not the best English-language depiction of the average Soviet soldier's life during the war.

Pages 337-338

It is a testimony to the scale of wartime carnage that the estimates of military losses should vary by margins of millions. The nearest anyone has come to a consensus is to say that no fewer than 8.6 million Soviet military personnel were killed during the war ...

The Soviet dead included many of the country's best, fittest, and most productive citizens. Three-quarters of the men and women who died in military uniform were between 19 and 35 years old. Of the generation of young men born in 1921, the conscripts who had been called up in time for the battles of Kiev and Kharkov or for the cavalry of Stalingrad, up to 90 percent were dead. The war left whole towns without young adults, and for some years into the future there would be fewer young couples and fewer children.

And in terms of strict profit and loss, the war had cost just under three and a half trillion rubles, an estimated one-third of the Soviet Union's national wealth. For the exhausted and depleted labor force, the prospect of rebuilding must have seemed almost as daunting as another winter under fire.

Let me digress here. National wealth is a term that encompasses not just everything being produced by a country, but every produced item that exists in a country. That means houses and stores, windows and doors, toasters and radios -- everything. One-third of EVERYTHING in the Soviet Union was destroyed by the war.

Page 362

In 1946 the harvest failed. In Ukraine and southern Russia the people starved, their bodies swelled, tales of strange murders, and even of cannibalism, began to circulate. Some returnees might well have wondered what it was that they had fought and suffered for.

There were millions of maimed men, and there were shortages of hospitals, prosthetic limbs and postwar care. Psychological treatment for PTSD was almost nonexistent.

How, then did the Soviet Union rebound? For the Soviet Union, the war didn't truly end until after 1950. Forced labor and compulsory unpaid "voluntary" work continued more than five years after the war's official end. By 1950, the Soviet economy was claimed to be twice the size it had been in 1945 -- but that was still less than it had been in 1941. Keep in mind, too, that these gains were not in consumer goods, things that would make Soviet life easier and more pleasant -- they were in hard industry, machine tools and concrete plants, steel mills and hydroelectric dams.

On 24 June 1945, Stalin let his intentions be known. After a grand parade in Red Square, he held a banquet for 2,500 Red Army officers and proposed a toast. Instead of praising their sacrifice and hailing them as heroes, he instead referred to them as "the little screws and bolts" in the engine of the state.