ABSTRACT
The great aim uniting millions of people and the principle of victory at any price as the means of achieving that aim created a special spirit in postwar society, formed a kind of spiritual bond among contemporaries. Public consciousness began gradually to focus on the boundary between wartime and peacetime, a focus that by itself constituted a demand for reforms, an alteration of the previous outlook. By 1948 the industrial production of the prewar period was fundamentally restored. About the same time the demobilization of the army was completed. A short time earlier, in December 1947, the rationing system, that quintessential symbol of wartime, was abolished. Hopes of possible rehabilitation and restoration of political autonomy rose among the deported peoples after the war. The memory of collectivization, the exile of the kulaks, and postwar grievances were alive and well in the villages.
