Post-war Letdown

The naive hope that Stalin would reward the victorious Soviet Union by easing up on his heavy- handed policies proved to be misguided. The Orthodox Church, which enjoyed a few years of relative rehabilitation in order to help foster wartime unity, was again repressed, and many repatriated citizens were sent to gulags as politically suspect together with some of the soldiers who had fought in Europe. Stalin particularly hated the solidarity that the blockade experience had created amongst Leningraders and ruthlessly purged the city's Party leadership in the late 1940s.

Leningrad started rebuilding itself immediately after the war, a Herculean task considering that one third of the city's buildings had been damaged and much of its infrastructure (factories, power stations, transportation networks, etc.) destroyed. Following Stalin's death things here stayed reasonably calm through the Khrushchev and Brezhnev years. Moscow was the undisputed center of the USSR although Leningrad remained Russia's cultural center, with many exciting innovations in art, popular music, and literature originating here.