The return of Soviet power to Kyiv, Ukraine, to rule over the city's formerly occupied population during the Second World War came at a time when the Stalin regime was single-mindedly focused on defeating the Nazis. Thus, the Ukrainian NKVD's massoperatsii worked to find men for the Red Army rather than cleanse Kyiv of the “socially dangerous” as in the past, while returning party officials worked to build trust with the formerly occupied so the latter would start contributing to the needs of the front and begin reconstruction. Meanwhile, the allpowerful Moscow-based GKO began to shield Kyiv's population and, eventually, even Kyiv Oblast's agriculture-based population who lived surrounding the capital, from most of the horrors of orgnabor in hopes that they would also help.

Before acknowledging that housing reconstruction was a far-fetched idea given the lack of resources, the Stalin regime also allowed the forced mobilization of young Ukrainian adults to Kyiv in 1944. But when orgnabor desertion in the Donbas and war with the Ukrainian nationalists to the city's west left the republic's “defense-related” industries short of people, this idea was curtailed. By the end of 1944, the Stalin regime had changed to mobilizing primarily German POWs toward Kyiv. Even then, when these prisoners ended up on the production floor of the city's labor-starved industries instead of building the living premises necessary to attract and keep orgnabor laborers, the city's housing reconstruction almost ground to a halt. That Kyiv was to be essentially ignored after the occupation in terms of centrally mandated allocations of labor power and materials was something its Communist leaders only belatedly realized.

They did, however, realize that the resettlement of huge numbers of unorganized returnees from the east might challenge their ability to successfully lead the city after the occupation. By the time the Stalin regime announced the Fourth Five-Year Plan in March 1946, such resettlement meant Kyiv's postoccupation population had tripled to 600,000 with a Jewish minority almost as large in percentage terms as it had been before the war. The Stalin regime's wartime insistence on keeping the partially destroyed Ukrainian capital open for resettlement by members of its victorious armed forces trumped local Communists’ desire for it to be closed off from the world.