ABSTRACT
The eight years between the end of World War II and Stalin's death in 1953 witnessed a major development. On the international scene, the Soviet Union joined the United States as one of the world's two superpowers, and the two countries became embroiled in a potentially catastrophic confrontation, destined to outlive Stalin by more than three decades, known as the Cold War. Domestically, the postwar years were a period of conservative retrenchment as Stalin struggled to keep intact the system his policies had forged during the 1930s. In the Eastern European countries he controlled, Stalin imposed entirely new social systems based on the Soviet model. This included the Communist Party's monopoly of political power, purges, terror, concentration camps, planned industrialization, and collectivization. At the same time, as one of the world's two nuclear powers, the Soviet Union enjoyed a status in international affairs that matched or exceeded that achieved by Russia after the Napoleonic Wars.
