Superputerea extenuată. Societatea și economia Uniunii Sovietice (1945-1953)
The Exhausted Superpower. The Soviet Union’s Society and Economy (1945-1953)

Summary/Abstract: The Soviet victory in the war against Nazi Germany has proved to be the most difficult challenge for the system created by Lenin and consolidated by Stalin. Following the power vacuum left by the disappearance of the German power and the voluntary withdrawal of the West from Central and Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union became, almost automatically, the dominant power in the region. Although victorious and having more people under arms than all the other Allies combined, the Union was in a state of exhaustion similar to the defeated Germany. With its economy decomposed and a dramatic decrease of the active population, the Soviet leaders had to cope with a mass current claiming that it was time for a historic compromise between the power and the subjects. Stalin's response was to focus almost all the country’s resources towards strengthening the international status, towards the modernization of the military power and the restoration of a political control similar to the one in the '30s. Contrary to the impression of economic and social dynamics, in post-war Soviet Union the effects of the technological gap and the system’s bureaucratic degeneration were already being felt. The Soviet „investment” in its great power status was extremely expensive and the outcomes was uncertain outcomes due to the absence of a strategy destined to improve the status and the internal modernization. Having entered the nuclear era, the Soviet Union was still a country with a predominantly impoverished population, with large areas insufficiently absorbed and with an economy efficient only in the controlled statistical calculations; in a nutshell, the Soviet Union was a marginal superpower.

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