Regime city of the first category: The experience of the return of Soviet power to Kyiv, Ukraine, 1943--1946

This dissertation explores the relationship between state and society in Kyiv, Ukraine, the largest city to be reintegrated into the Stalin regime following the Nazi occupation of Soviet territory during the Second World War. It centers on the inability of the Communist Party of Ukraine - Bolsheviks (KP(b)U) to settle a politically reliable population, to reconstruct industry, and to legitimize the Stalin regime in Kyiv after two years of German rule. Hindered by different segments of the city's population who experienced the Second World War in their own particular ways and expected privileged treatment in return for their sacrifices, the Kyiv City and Oblast Committees KP(b)U were forced to adapt their methods of rule to the political atmosphere resulting from the hyper-centralized Stalin regime's conduct of war against the Nazis. How these Communists came to the realization that only the forced labor of German POWs, the equitable treatment of the formerly occupied Ukrainian population, and the ideological reeducation of the "human capital" within their own party ranks would allow them to remain hegemonic in Kyiv is the story I am about to tell. I argue that despite the inability to reimplement the Stalin regime in Kyiv, the local Communists were given another chance to act on their accrued knowledge in spring 1946 when the Fourth Five-Year Plan and Zhdanovshchina emerged from Moscow. But their efforts to prove to the Kremlin that they were capable of building communism and deserved the privileges accompanying such a role did not go unchallenged by a local population now unafraid to confront Soviet power with its demands.; While the Kyivan Communists hoped to create the standard of living in their city necessary to continue their modus vivendi with Moscow, the political atmosphere engendered by the war indicates the relationship between state and society required to achieve that goal would mean continuing the approach to local governance they learned during 1943--46.; This dissertation seeks to come to an understanding of all that this modus vivendi entailed in a local setting during and after the Soviet Union's victory over Nazi Germany. In particular, my research seeks to explain what role ordinary Soviet people played in the creation of the local policies implemented to meet the Kyivan Communists' side of this deal. My evidence provides the field of Soviet history with a vital look at center-periphery relations during the years 1943--46, when ordinary Kyivans were unsure of just what type of Soviet Union would emerge from the Second World War. My conclusions suggest that as ordinary Kyivans manipulated this wartime situation (and the ideological vacuum that accompanied it) to secure a better future for themselves, the outcome was a state-society relationship at the local level which did not correspond to the command-and-administer relationship within the bureaucratic hierarchies of the Stalin regime. Despite the Stalin regime's hyper-centralization, it was interactions between people at the local level that resulted in historical change in Kyiv in the mid-1940s.