The short answer is yes, there was a huge impact but not, perhaps, as much as you might expect. Let me talk a bit about the immediate post-war years.

To recap, the scale of the devastation visited upon the USSR was immense. I touch on the material impact here but the headline figure is around 20% of pre-war industrial capacity lost, plus years of underinvestment and crisis. It's not much of an exaggeration to say that much of European Russia was reduced to rubble and the rest of the country badly neglected. Population losses were hardly less severe: Estimates vary as to direct casualties of war but the overall population deficit in 1945 (ie including the decrease in birth rate) was probably around 35m citizens. That's not a small number.

All of which makes the subsequent economic recovery all the more impressive. It took decades for the physical reconstruction to be completed - many towns/cities were still in ruins well into the 1950s - but the Fourth Five Year Plan (1945-50) was something of a success. Despite a difficult demobilisation and famine conditions in 1946/47, by 1950 industrial production had met or surpassed 1940 levels. The recovery was even greater in key sectors (eg coal, steel, tractors) which managed to significantly exceed the planned figures.

Reparations helped, of course, but more important was the ability of the Soviets to build on the surviving industrial base - particularly in the Urals which had seen significant wartime growth - and reactive the damaged mines and dams in the formerly occupied areas. A contrast with WWI and the Civil War is helpful: then industry didn't recover until 1927, when it began bumping against the need for new capital investment. In contrast, from 1945 the USSR already possessed the substantial industrial base needed to drive a large recovery programme.

So on the obvious level the damage to the economy had largely been healed by 1950 and, a lost decade notwithstanding, overall rates of growth soon picked up to pre-war levels (until the late 1960s). Dig slightly deeper and the war did have some long-term effects: productivity growth took decades to recover from the war's shock and, despite the renewed influx of peasants into the cities, the pre-war labour shortage only worsened. It almost goes without saying as well that these were extremely lean years for the general population... but that wasn't a great change to the pre-war regime.

Also unchanging was the nature of this economy. In brief, the war had forced the centre to release some of its economic controls, delegating powers from central ministries to regional authorities. This was a product of necessity, a radical simplification of administration to meet the immediate needs of the war effort. The experiment didn't long survive the war and the post-war years saw a swift retrenchment of central authority. The war experience would inspire Khrushchev's later 1960s reforms however.

So that's a quick overview of the immediate post-war recovery. It was generally pretty quick, if hard, but did have some long-term impacts. I've just touched on the ones I'm most familiar with, others can perhaps comment on the longer-term impact of the immense demographic losses.

Sources

• Michael Ellman, Soviet Deaths in the Great Patriotic War

• Donald Filtzer, Hazards of Urban Life in Late Stalinist Russia

• Mark Harrison, Trends in Soviet Labour Productivity

• Alec Nove, Economic History of the USSR