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Although the Russians fell on Berlin much in the way that hungry Berliners fell on dead horses in the streets, they also saw the German capital as a stage where they could display the virtues of their own system. As General Berzarin, commander-in-chief of Berlin, stated: “Hitler turned Berlin into a city of chaos. We shall make Berlin a city of progress.” Even as some Soviet soldiers continued to loot and rape, the occupiers set about getting things working again. Here the very harshness of their rule was an asset. Just as Berliners were forced to dismantle factories, they were also made to clear rubble from streets, dredge debris from canals, and help repair subway tracks and power lines. Since many of the surviving able-bodied men were either in POW camps or working abroad, much of this labor was done by women—the famous Trümmerfrauen (rubble women), who carted away the ruins brick by brick, stone by stone. As early as May 14, 1945, a path had been cleared for the first busses, and a day later the first U-Bahn subway line reopened. Meanwhile, Soviet army engineers restored electrical power to some districts and set up standpipes where people could obtain potable water. To avert mass starvation, the city’s new rulers handed out food from their own stores and commandeered deliveries from the countryside. As a measure against looting, guards were posted at the few shops that still sold groceries, and purchases were regulated by ration cards.

On the cultural front, too, the Russians sought to repair and rebuild as well as to pillage. Like the Nazis before them, they understood that the arts could serve important psychological and propagandistic functions, especially in a time of stress. Quickly they established a new museum administration to oversee what was left of Berlin’s collections, which they reopened to the public in temporary quarters on May 17. A little later, on May 26, the Berlin Philharmonic gave its first postwar concert in a cinema building that had survived the bombing. Fittingly, the program opened with a piece that had been banned in Berlin since 1933: Mendelssohn’s incidental music to Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. At the end of May the Russians licensed Berlin’s first postwar newspaper, Die Tägliche Rundschau, which Berliners dubbed Die Klägliche Rundschau (The Pitiable Review) because it contained only a few lines of genuine news, the rest being articles praising the Soviet system. In July 1945 Johannes R. Becher, a Communist poet who had been living in exile in Moscow, returned to Berlin and founded Der Kulturbund für die demokratische Erneuerung Deutschlands (Cultural League for the Democratic Renewal of Germany), whose task was to help reestablish Berlin as Central Europe’s foremost center of “progressive” culture.

It was Berlin’s political direction, however, that most preoccupied Moscow in this period. The Soviets wanted to set the course for the first municipal administration that arose amidst the ruins of the vanquished Nazi capital. To achieve this they decided to employ as proxies trusted German Communists who had been living in exile in the USSR. Preparations for the takeover had begun in February 1944 with the creation of a commission of exiles charged with working out the organizational details of a Communist regime. The central figure here was Walter Ulbricht, a pear-shaped and primly goateed Saxon who had served the Communist cause with ruthless efficiency and an unswerving devotion to the party line. After training in the early 1920s at Moscow’s Lenin School, he had become a Communist Reichstag deputy in 1928 and District Secretary of the KPD for Greater Berlin in 1929. Escaping Hitler’s roundup of Communists by fleeing abroad in 1933, he had worked for the party in Paris and Prague, ever careful to keep his distance from the errant Trotskyites. During the Spanish Civil War he had helped Moscow purge the Republican forces of anti-Stalinist elements, which turned out to be good practice for the internal purges he would later conduct as head of the Socialist Unity Party (Sozialistische Einheitspartei, SED) in East Germany. Ulbricht was often ridiculed for his unimposing exterior, castrato-like voice, and Saxon accent. Yet for all his inadequacies he was clearly a tough survivor, and he was determined to make use of his survivor’s talents when appointed by Stalin to head the little group of German exiles dispatched to Marshal Zhukov’s headquarters outside Berlin on April 30, 1945.