ABSTRACT
In the years just after the war, the reinforced legitimacy of Stalin and Stalinist institutions ran strongly against other, weaker currents welling up from below. The war experience would also supply a smothered impulse to reform. There was a widespread desire for liberalisation and relaxation, in politics as in culture and economic affairs. Veterans of military service and war work, whose loyalty to the Soviet system had passed the severest test, may have expected the system to reward them with greater trust and increased rights of participation, not just free bus passes. Some also believed that the war had revealed the weaknesses of Stalinist dictatorship, above all in 1941-2, and the necessity of limiting the arbitrary powers of individual leaders. The war had given many the opportunity to exercise their own personal initiative and responsibility on a wider scale than in peacetime, as military commanders, factory managers, farmers, war administrators, war writers and reporters, and had taught them that mere unthinking obedience to superior orders was not enough.
