Play as · Cold War 1947 · L5 · Superpower · Eastern Bloc

Soviet Union - 1947

The Soviet Union in 1947 is the power that won the war and is now deciding what to do with the victory. Two years after the Red Army raised its flag over the Reichstag, it stands as the master of the Eurasian landmass east of the Elbe, the largest army on earth camped across half of Europe, and the ideological centre of a movement that expects history to bend its way. It is also a country that lost some twenty-seven million people, whose western republics are ash and rubble, whose 1946-47 harvest failed and left millions hungry, and whose industry is being rebuilt under the fourth Five-Year Plan. Stalin governs a state that is at once the most powerful and the most wounded of the great powers. Its strategic identity this year is the fortress that means to become an empire of security: to convert the territory the Red Army occupies into a permanent belt of friendly regimes, to deny the West any foothold that could again become an invasion route, and to buy the time and the bomb that will make the victory irreversible.

Starting position

The starting board is enormous and precarious at once. Soviet forces or Soviet-backed parties hold Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary and the Soviet zone of Germany; Czechoslovakia still has a coalition government the communists will topple in February 1948; Yugoslavia is a fervent ally that will break with Moscow within the year. The western frontier has been pushed hundreds of kilometres forward - the Baltic states annexed, eastern Poland absorbed, Koenigsberg taken. Against this stands one decisive asymmetry: the United States has the atomic bomb and the Soviet Union does not. Conventional dominance in Europe is total; strategic vulnerability to American air-atomic power is absolute. At home the reconstruction is real but brutal, rationing persists, and the returning millions must be reabsorbed into a command economy that trusts almost no one. Every gain on the map is also a garrison to hold, a border to police, and a promise the centre must keep.

What turns the campaign

What Moscow wants is security defined as control: governments along its borders that can never again host a hostile army, reparations and machinery out of Germany and Manchuria to speed the rebuild, and the closing of any door through which American influence might enter its new sphere. The Marshall Plan, announced in June, is read in the Kremlin as exactly that door - a dollar offensive to buy back eastern Europe - and the answer is to forbid the satellites from taking it and to bind the bloc's parties together through the Cominform founded in September. The fear that drives every move is encirclement: a rearmed western Germany, an Anglo-American atomic monopoly, and capitalist recovery that could isolate the socialist camp before it consolidates. The counter is depth, discipline and speed - a tightened glacis of loyal states, a crash programme to break the atomic monopoly, and an ideological line, Zhdanov's two-camps doctrine, that tells every communist which side the world has split into.

Signature challenge