In September 1941, with the German army rapidly closing in, the Moscow and Leningrad feature film studios were relocated to Alma-Ata, Kazakhstan, although facilities for newsreel production remained in Moscow. Censorship was dramatically streamlined; under these emergency conditions, the country could not afford the time-consuming process of endless script revisions. Nevertheless until summer 1942, production consisted mainly of newsreels, documentary compilations, and short fiction films very much like the agitki of the Civil War.

By mid-1942, the newly relocated studios began releasing films, and by the end of the war Soviet filmmakers had completed 102 fiction films, 70 of them full-length features. Forty-eight of these were directly related to the war. War films enjoyed great prestige during the war and dominated the Stalin prizes for 1943 and 1944. Of the nine Stalin prizes awarded to films, six went to war pictures.

In the first two years of the war in particular, Soviet combat films ignored the regular army to focus on the partisans, especially on the role of women in the partisan movement. The canonical movie of the war years came in 1943: Fridrikh Ermler's She Defends the Motherland (Ona zashchishchaet rodinu, released in the U.S. as No Greater Love). The film represents the prototypical narrative for the heroine films: halcyon days on the eve of the war turn to terrible tragedy as the bestial Germans kills husband/children/parents while the mother/wife/lover survives to be transformed into an avenging angel. The "she" of the title is Praskovia (Pasha) Lukianova, a lovely young wife, mother, and champion tractor driver. Characteristically confident, calm, and self-sacrificing, she organizes the evacuation of her village. Her self-possession evaporates when she discovers her husband's body on a truck carting dead and wounded soldiers, then her baby son is killed by a demonic German. She is dragged away and raped. After these horrors, the pretty, vibrant young woman has been transformed overnight into the stone-faced icon of the popular "The Motherland Calls You" recruiting poster. Pasha quickly emerges from her nearly catatonic state to reassume her leadership role with the surviving villagers, forming a partisan band. As Comrade P., Pasha picks up an ax to lead her followers into hand-to-hand combat with the Germans. Under her leadership, the partisans become the scourge of the occupying army, attacking convoys, burning buildings, even kidnapping a German general. She exacts poetic justice by running down the German who killed her child with his own tank.

As stereotyped as this film sounds, signs of Ermler's considerable talent are obvious throughout. Pasha is far from a wholesome cheerleader for Soviet power. Religious symbols and references abound, in keeping with the wartime relaxation of the constraints against religion. Ordinary citizens are presented as defeatists, demoralized by the shortcomings in Soviet society. In the end, however, despite the heavy losses the little partisan group sustains, positive and activist thinking dominates. Comrade P.'s loyal followers rescue her just as the hangman's noose is tightening around her neck. Pasha lives to fight another day. The message was clear and inspirational: ordinary people, especially women, had an essential role to play in their country's defense. Years later, Vera Maretskaia, who played Pasha, recalled her role, noting: "I would say that in this picture, she won the war."

Comrade P. was followed by other partisan heroines, like Olena Kostiukh in Mark Donskoi's The Rainbow (Raduga, 1943, released 1944) and Zoia Kosmodemianskaia in Leo Arnshtam's Zoia (1944). By mid-1944, however, women warriors were gradually being displaced by male soldiers, sailors, and pilots. Light hearted or hackneyed films began to predominate, like Ivan Pyrev's Six o'Clock in the Evening after the War (V shest chasov vechera posle voiny, 1944) and Igor Savchenko's Ivan Nikulin: Russian Sailor (Ivan Nikulin, russkii matros, 1944). The traces of artistic freedom that were visible in Soviet wartime cinema were about to disappear.

The political turbulence, economic devastation, and social flux that Russia has experienced since the collapse of the Soviet Union has inspired a good deal of nostalgia for an earlier time of political stability and economic predictability. Despite the association of the Brezhnev administration with "stagnation," a term that was frequently invoked by Mikhail Gorbachev to justify his program of reforms, many Russians cite the 1970s as a period of domestic tranquility. Yet, it was precisely during the early 1970s that the first signs of pessimism and even cynicism emerged about the Soviet system's ability to sustain economic growth and provide its citizens with the conditions for meaningful lives.

Gauging public moods is never easy, leastwise in Soviet-type societies. Nevertheless, in lieu of more reliable public opinion data, one can point to such phenomena as the retreat into the private, the popularity of books, films and songs about lonely heroes who seem out of step with the canons of approved behavior, the proliferation of anekdoty (jokes) about the absurdity of official claims to the supremacy of the Soviet system and the hypocrisy of Soviet officialdom, and invidious comparisons with life in the "West" and (perhaps even more significantly given the similarity of systems) with the relatively prosperous if prosaic life in East European capital cities to which Soviet citizens traveled in increasing numbers as tourists.

These signs were most evident among white-collar professionals, whose numbers expanded from 3.3 to 21.4 million between 1950 and 1974, representing an increase from five to eighteen percent of the entire Soviet work force. Contributing factors to this change of outlook included the exaggerated expectations of material abundance that had been fostered under Khrushchev, the secular decline in Soviet economic performance from one five-year plan to the next, and the ubiquity of black- and gray-market transactions, which, while hardly new, were increasingly tolerated by the authorities. It should be stressed that the pessimistic Soviet citizen of the early 1970s was rarely a political dissident. This was not an overtly political phenomenon, but it did have political consequences of far-reaching magnitude.

The Cold War may be defined as the rivalry for world domination between East and West, that is, between the Soviet bloc on the one hand and the American-dominated "Free World" on the other, that was fought on many fronts -- ideological, political, economic, military, and cultural -- in the aftermath of the Second World War. No consensus exists among scholars about when the Cold War began (or ended) or which side was responsible for starting it. The orthodox (or liberal) view was that the Cold War was essentially caused by Soviet expansionism. "Revisionist" historians have argued that it was the product of mutual suspicion, that far from being expansionist or revolutionary-minded, Stalin was coldly rational and cautious, and that -- at least in the "hard revisionist" version -- the need for capitalism to expand by breaking down trade barriers everywhere was an essential part of the dynamic.

Although the Grand Alliance of the United States, the Soviet Union and Great Britain showed signs of fracturing already before the end of the World War, it was not until 1947 that divisions between East and West could be said to have become irrevocable. In that year, George F. Kennan, the chief of mission at the American Embassy in Moscow, published (as "X") his Long Telegram in Foreign Affairs that urged a "long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies;" President Harry Truman enunciated his "Doctrine" of supporting "free peoples" (specifically Greece and Turkey) against "subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressure;" and Secretary of State George Marshall announced his Plan for extending credits to European states to enable them to rebuild their economies in an integrated fashion. Also in 1947, a coalition of Communists and Socialists in Poland came to power as a result of elections marked by intense pressure on voters and ballot-box stuffing; and leading Communists from eastern and central Europe met along with Stalin's principal representative, Andrei Zhdanov, to map out a common strategy for consolidating Communist Party rule and thwarting what Zhdanov referred to as "the aggressive and frankly expansionist course to which American imperialism has committed itself since the end of World War II." They agreed to form a Communist Information Bureau (Cominform) with its headquarters initially in Belgrade. The appointment of a Communist-dominated government in Czechoslovakia (commonly referred to as the "Czech coup") in early 1948 marked the final act in the post-war division of Europe between East and West.

The establishment of respective military alliances (NATO and the Warsaw Pact), the triumph of the Communists in China, the Korean War that involved UN-sponsored American troops in combat against contingents of the Chinese Red Army, and the nuclear arms race followed. In addition to the creation of a bi-polar world, the Cold War had immense consequences for the domestic policies and political climates of both the United States and the Soviet Union.

On June 2, 1962 several thousand workers from the Novocherkassk Electric Locomotive Works (NEVZ) and supporters marched to the Communist Party's headquarters in the center of the city to protest nation-wide price increases for meat and dairy products that had been announced two days earlier. Failing to heed a warning from the general in charge of troops stationed in and around the building, the crowd was dispersed by gunfire. A total of twenty-four people died and dozens were wounded. Subsequently, 114 persons were convicted on charges of causing "mass disorders" and committing "banditry," and seven were sentenced to death and executed.

As the KGB reported at the time, numerous individuals throughout the country expressed their disgruntlement with the price increases, called for strikes, and produced leaflets denouncing the decision. Why only at the NEVZ did workers walk off their jobs, seize the factory's administration building, and engage in other acts of civil disobedience? Part of the answer lay in a recently implemented upward revision of work norms and the factory's participation in a socialist competition campaign, both of which presupposed greater effort on the part of workers. It also would appear that the particularly insensitive factory director -- who reportedly uttered to a protesting worker the Marie Antoinette-like phrase, "If there isn't enough money for meat and sausage, let them eat pirozhki with liver" -- added fuel to the flames.

Whatever the provocation, the fact that the protest culminated in a massacre can be attributed to the indecision and disagreements among the four Politbiuro members who flew to Novocherkassk, and, ultimately, to fears among the authorities that the protesters were gaining the upper hand. In the aftermath of the shooting, the authorities did their best to cover up what had happened, but information of varying accuracy soon leaked out of the USSR and was relayed back to the country via Radio Liberty broadcasts. The first article devoted to the Novocherkassk events that was published by a Soviet newspaper appeared in June 1988, and it was followed by dozens of exposes. Since 1991, documentary films, articles, and books have appeared, and the entire affair was subjected to an official investigation by the Chief Military Procuracy. A monument has been erected on the site.

The swift German advance of 1941 forced millions of Soviet citizens to evacuate from the western borders of the country to regions in the east and south, with the Urals, Western Siberia and Central Asia serving as the country's three primary receiving areas. The first wave of the evacuation began in late June 1941 and lasted through the end of December, and the second wave took place during the summer and fall of 1942. Historians have debated the size of the wartime civilian evacuation for decades due to the paucity of demographic records, and current estimates range from 17 to 25 million evacuees. Thousands of organizations were also evacuated to safer regions during 1941 and 1942, including 1,523 large enterprises involved in defense production. A major goal of the evacuation effort was to defend and develop the Soviet military capability, so defense workers and factories were evacuated with the highest priority. The Soviet wartime evacuation of civilians and industry was hampered by a lack of pre-war planning, however, because Stalin feared that this type of planning might encourage defeatism.

After the war started, Stalin's State Defense Committee created a series of ad hoc committees to direct the evacuation process, such as the Evacuation Council, the Civilian Evacuation, and the Evacuation Commission. These ad hoc committees worked with all-Union ministries and the State Defense Committee to oversee the evacuation effort on the national level, and they sent plenipotentiaries to evacuating and receiving areas to support local government and industry leaders. In spite of these measures, panic and confusion marred the evacuation of civilians and institutions along the front, with orders to leave arriving too late and officials fleeing instead of managing the evacuation effort. Millions of frightened civilians, both those with evacuation orders and those too scared to stay home, overwhelmed train stations and receiving areas throughout 1941 and 1942.

With huge numbers of evacuees suddenly arriving in the receiving areas, local leaders tried to increase the availability of housing, cafeterias, medical clinics, and day-care centers, but they were not given enough resources to serve the entire evacuated population. There was a significant difference in the administration of non-industrial evacuees and of industrial evacuees. Resources to support non-industrial evacuees (mostly women, children and the elderly) were inadequate throughout the duration of the war. After traveling in crowded cars with little food or water, these evacuees often had to remain in railroad stations for days or even weeks, waiting for a housing assignment or further travel instructions. In contrast, industrial evacuees received larger food rations, higher quality housing, and better medical care.

From 1941 to 1943, the Soviet economy was completely mobilized for military production, leaving the evacuation and resettlement effort without enough personnel or funding to provide adequate services to the evacuees. Many evacuees became ill and died due to malnutrition and exposure. Sickness among the evacuees contributed to widespread epidemics that lasted for years. And yet, while the toll in human lives was extremely high, the massive relocation of industries and workers in 1941 and 1942 resulted in substantial defense production, crucial to the Soviet victory of 1945. As stated by G.A. Kumanev, a leading Russian military historian, the evacuation's "main goal - to save millions of Soviet citizens, a major amount of industrial and agricultural resources, and other material riches - was achieved."