Postwar Stalinism, the Doctors' Plot, and Stalin's Death

Economic reconstruction proceeded at an accelerated pace after the devastation of the war, driven by new Five-Year Plans, while resources and machinery were extracted from occupied territories in eastern Germany as reparations. A new wave of political repression targeted repatriated Soviet prisoners of war, suspected of "collaborationism," and populations of the territories annexed in 1939-1940 and reoccupied in 1944-1945 faced deportation and repression, as did armed nationalist movements in western Ukraine and the Baltic states, which were suppressed well into the 1950s. Strict ideological control over culture was reimposed through the Zhdanov Doctrine of 1946, part of a broader campaign against writers and artists deemed "cosmopolitan" or influenced by the West, while in biology Mendelian genetics was persecuted in favor of the pseudoscience of Lysenkoism. The communist bloc in Eastern Europe was consolidated under direct Soviet control, though Stalin broke with Tito's Yugoslavia in 1948 over its political independence from Moscow, and the Berlin Blockade (1948-1949) became a central episode of the early Cold War as the Soviet nuclear program advanced to its first atomic bomb test in 1949. A fresh wave of internal purges followed, including the "Leningrad Affair" (1949-1950).