In May 1945, the family of a Red Army major, the Ostromogil’skiis, faced a court-ordered eviction from the apartment they had inhabited since Kyiv's liberation. Soon thereafter, an instructor, Dirin, from the Kyiv Obkom's Organization- Instruction Department arranged to meet with the new Kyiv City procurator, Langunovskii, about his decision to allow a man by the name of Vaisberg to inhabit the Ostromogil’skiis’ apartment. Their encounter led Dirin to write to the Ukrainian TsK:

Such an episode suggests that, as returnees like Vaisberg inundated the Ukrainian capital to take advantage of the privileges they had earned during the war, they battled the formerly occupied over scarce resources. While the Ostromogil’skiis managed to stay in their apartment, the local Communists had been unable to prevent this battle from taking place. Dealing with stalled reconstruction and an increasing city population, local Communists spent much of their time trying to meet demands for better living conditions from an ever-growing number of people.

This chapter examines Kyiv's reassembling masses by looking at four groups: the formerly occupied, returnees, mobilized laborers (ranging from youth mobilized through orgnabor to German POWs), and demobilized servicemen.

Kyiv's reassembled elite found it easier than the masses to access scarce resources following the city's liberation. A letter written by a man named Bitniia-Shliakhta to the Kyiv Obkom in summer 1944 sheds some light on this situation:

The outcome of Bitniia-Shliakhta's efforts to recover his family's rooms is unclear. One thing that is clear, however, is that Beregovenko should never have been allowed to occupy them, considering that Bitniia-Shliakhta's brother was in the Red Army. But while procurators usually tried to enforce the laws of the land, the local Communists running the Ukrainian capital often became laws unto themselves during this period.

This chapter examines this reassembled elite, the Communists registered with the Kyiv Gorkom and Obkom. It focuses on full-time party functionaries, for they carried awesome responsibilities and encountered equally great difficulties given Kyiv's position in the war effort. As these elites secured the city's best resources for themselves, or allowed others access to the same, they also risked making enemies among the masses.

During the summer of 1944, the Ukrainian NKVD conducted an investigation of Genia Brand, a returnee from Osh (Kirghiz SSR) accused of spreading ethnic hatred after confronting those she believed had stolen her property during the occupation. On July 13, Brand told her investigators:

While Brand spoke of “Russians,” she likely meant “Ukrainians,” for few trumpeted the latter's interests during the civil war to the city's west. There can be little doubt, however, that some returnees desired revenge against the formerly occupied thought to have taken advantage of an empty Kyiv. The Ukrainian capital's relentless population growth created a vicious cycle of rumors and made the local Communists’ efforts to lead more difficult.

At a session of Kyiv's Ukrainian NKVD Military Tribunal on August 3, 1944, Brand's neighbor, Sophiia Mazur, had her testimony to the investigation read out: “In April 1944, Brand told me the whole population who lived through the occupation would be exiled from Kyiv and from Ukraine itself and that the population that had not lived under the occupants would be settled here. With such conversations, Genia terrorized everyone in the building.” Testimony from one of Brand's acquaintances, Anna Rozhdestvenskaia, contained a similar message: “She told me and other inhabitants of our house that soon there would be many free apartments… . After these conversations, the inhabitants of our building began to worry about the possibility of eviction.