The victory of the Allied Forces over Nazi Germany is owed mainly to the Red Army, which crushed the overwhelming majority of the German military, thus liberating a number of countries and paving the way for people 's democracies.

However, after 1945 an intense class struggle began to take place in the USSR. Without really appearing on the surface, it was this struggle which would result in the coup following Stalin's death in 1953.

This class struggle does not owe so much to the pre-1941 period, as to the circumstances brought about by the Second imperialistic World War.

As a matter of fact, war cost the lives of 2 million communists. This means that a whole generation of people who had had first-hand experience of ideological struggle was wiped out. This was a huge strategical problem for the bolshevik party.

In practice, veterans only made up 17 % of party members. Ministries, due to the emergencies of war, had acquired a clear independence from the party. In a way, this was the situation of 1923 in reverse, a time when the congress of the bolshevik party decided to form a bureau, supervised by Molotov and Kaganovitch, to recruit state officers.

For the year 1923 alone, after the victory in the Civil War, a selection of candidates had to be made for 18 000 positions, and validated by the central committee.

Significantly, in 1946, this number goes up to 46 000. In practice, the whole state apparatus had to be renewed.

And renewal means a change in generations. In 1946, 50 % of the male population was born after 1914, and grew up under the new regime. But there was the issue of ideological transmission and heritage, which had been interrupted by the war.

In practice, soldiers and officers were rapidly going to occupy a large majority of high responsibility posts in industry, and a large minority within the party and the state. Thus, a contradiction was already growing between industry on the one hand, and the party and the state on the other hand. Material emergencies tends to produce practical necessities that put ideology in jeopardy.

Here is the main post-war document, dating from February 1946, in which Stalin gives an overview of economic production in 1940, compared to that of 1913, and of military production for the years 1943-1945. He insists on the technical and productive emergencies caused by the Nazi invasion :

“As regards 1940, in that year the following was produced in our country: 15,000,000 tons of pig iron, i.e., nearly four times as much as in 1913; 18,300,000 tons of steel, i.e., four and a hallf times as much as in 1913; 166,000,000 tons of coal, i.e., five and a half times as much as in 1913; 31,000,000 tons of oil, i.e., three and a half times as much as in 1913; 38,300,000 tons of market grain, i.e., 17,000,000 tons more than in 1913; 2,700,000 tons of raw cotton, i.e., three and a half times as much as in 1913.

Such were the material potentialities of our country when she entered the Second World War (…)

It is well known, that during the last three years of the war our tank industry produced annually an average of over 30,000 tanks, self propelled guns and armoured cars. (Loud applause.)

It is well known, further, that in the same period our aircraft industry produced annually up to 40,000 airplanes. (Loud applause.)

It is also well known that our artillery industry in the same period produced annually up to 120,000 guns of all calibres (loud applause ), up to 450,000 light and heavy machine guns (loud applause ), over 3,000,000 rifles (applause ) and about 2,000,000 automatic rifles. (Applause.)

Lastly, it is well known that our mortar industry in the period of 1942-44 produced annually an average of up to 100,000 mortars. (Loud applause.)

It goes without saying that simultaneously we produced corresponding quantities of artillery shells, mines of various kinds, air bombs, and rifle and machine-gun cartridges.

It is well known, for example, that in 1944 alone we produced over 240,000,000 shells, bombs and mines (applause ) and 7,400,000,000 cartridges. (Loud applause.)

Such is the general picture of the way the Red Army was supplied with arms and ammunition”.

(Speech delivered by J.V. Stalin at a meeting of voters of the Stalin electoral district, Moscow)

Very concretely, this means that by the middle of the year 2006, 6000 high officers within the state apparatus had been in office for a year, but were still waiting for their appointment to be confirmed by the central committee. In the same way, the ministries, in order to face emergencies and especially when they were important in size, could act relatively independently from the body responsible for appointments.

The bolshevik then took resolutions to address these problems effectively. First, it took measures to dissolve commissions internal to the party in the fields of economy, transports and agriculture. From then on, these commissions would in practice consist of directly appointed officials in the concerned ministries.

The aim was to undermine the influence of autonomous ministries, which had sometimes achieved hegemony over the party, notably by means of corruption. There were, indeed, several mafias in the USSR. The main one was based on “guilds” which took advantage of weak spots in the planning process.

The guilds has relays in the workplace, persons who fiddled with measurements and stole goods (by changing tank sizes, pretending goods were damaged or disguising figures).

Guild members then organized the distribution of the stolen goods through various ventures, and kept the profits. During the economic crisis from the sixties to the nineties, when the USSR had become a capitalist country again, company directors used the guild as their main way to make up for supply problems.

This means a return to bartering, and the nomination of the heads of guilds to managerial posts so they could get an above-the-board income.

However, the guilds did not operate solely through company managers. They also had links with gangs headed by so-called “Brothers”. Just like in a strict religious order, a “Brother” could not marry or start a family; he could not have an education or employment. He must not serve in the army or have private property.

There was about thirty “Brothers” in the fifties, each one had around 300 persons at their service, their lieutenants being their “brothers” (from their actual family), and simple members being “number sixes”. The tattoo culture of these gangs is huge, it has its origins in labour camps and consistently uses elements from Nazi ideology.

Of course, these gangs took part in extorsions, black market trafficking, commercial “protections”, prostitution, gambling etc. In the eighties, companies gained large autonomy which caused a de facto merging of guilds with the gangs, and prefigured the notorious “Russian mafia” of the nineties.

In the fifties however, the gangs were at a rather embryonic state, even though they were organized by “Brothers”. The “Red Buccaneers” were prominent in the mafia, and they used pirates' methods to intercept commodities and gain profit from them.

Likewise, there was a generalization of the “Brotherhoods” in the sixties, with the appearance of pressure groups spearheaded by veterans. After 1945, war veterans obtained very little social advantages, only discounts and travels, etc.. but nothing of substance. These advantages were even removed in 1947, and even Victory Day ceased to be a Holiday.

The position of the Bolshevik Party was that soldiers who served the USSR as a whole could not form a separate cast. After Stalin's death and the revisionist clique's coming to power, the new regime created veterans' associations as soon as 1956. These associations were going to grow considerably and reached an all time high under Brejnev.

In the fifties however, the gangs were at a rather embryonic state, even though they were organized by “Brothers”. The “Red Buccaneers” were prominent in the mafia, and they used pirates' methods to intercept commodities and gain profit from them.

Likewise, there was a generalization of the “Brotherhoods” in the sixties, with the appearance of pressure groups spearheaded by veterans. After 1945, war veterans obtained very little social advantages, only discounts and travels, etc.. but nothing of substance. These advantages were even removed in 1947, and even Victory Day ceased to be a Holiday.

The position of the Bolshevik Party was that soldiers who served the USSR as a whole could not form a separate cast. After Stalin's death and the revisionist clique's coming to power, the new regime created veterans' associations as soon as 1956. These associations were going to grow considerably and reached an all time high under Brejnev.

All this illustrates the intense class struggle which took place after 1945, as bourgeois ideology has contacts in the mafias and with some officials, and was capable of corrupting Party leaders. To this, we can add a central element of contradiction: the post-war reorganization of the commission in charge of appointing officials.

From the moment this commission was reorganized, and wartime emergency measures ceased, ministries could not appoint their members without the approval of the Central Committee; this means that all bourgeois endeavours were deemed to be aimed at the commission itself.

Intense rectification campains were launched within the staff of ministries and the Party itself. Jdanov played a great role in this battle for the ideological recovery of the state system, through a real cultural revolution aimed at those who could be qualified as “pragmatic-Machiavellian deviants”.

For this reason, repression was lead against a new Leningrad-based “group” which advocated reforms whereby companies would enjoy greater autonomy. As a consequence, two thousand people were expelled from the Party or exiled from Leningrad, 213 persons were judged and condemned, 23 of those being sentenced to death. Three hundred professors from the University of Leningrad, eighteen university rectors and twenty-nine Heads of Economics Departments were expelled.

These measures were insufficient, as was the approach to the struggle against the counter-revolution.