ABSTRACT
In February 1946 elections to the USSR Supreme Soviet were held in Daugavpils city and district, which gave the local party the opportunity to assess its position. Although it accepted it had little genuine support, it was pleased that the campaign had thrown up a reasonable core of activists, that some of these activists were people new to politics and, in the district at least, that several of these activists were Latvian by ethnicity. However, Stalin had called these elections for reasons of greater significance than the state of the Daugavpils party organisation. Their real purpose was to give Stalin a mandate for his policy of post-war reconstruction through the same system of five-year plans that had so characterised the Soviet Union in the 1930s. For Daugavpils this meant contributing to the greater national design, but it also meant Daugavpils would benefit from the planning system. Post-war reconstruction through Soviet planning brought Daugavpils a tram network.
