ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with the Soviet balance sheet of losses and gains as they appeared during the closing stages of the war. It is essential to keep in mind the great contrast between domestic losses and opportunities for diplomatic success abroad, because Stalin’s policy from about 1944 onwards, both in its internal and its external aspects, consisted in weighing up the salient factors of the two situations and then fixing the most expedient relationship between them. At the end of the war, the Soviet nation girded its loins for an economic struggle that was scarcely less taxing than the military campaign that had preceded it. Soviet relations with the Allies probably had a similar disturbing effect, but they were confined for the most part to the higher echelons of society, whereas every Russian peasant in the armies advancing on Berlin could form his own ideas about capitalist Europe.
