Respectfully it's hard to understood that. In 1940 the Soviet Union had a population of around 180,000,000 people. They lost over 26,000,000 people in the war, about 2/3 of them young men, and millions more with physical, and psychological problems. The demographic problems had to be more lasting than that even with the annexations of Moldova, the Baltic States, Kaliningrad, and Eastern Poland. The damage to infrastructure in the territory the Germans occupied was enormous, along with frontline cities like Leningrad. It's impossible to believe that damage was repaired by 1953.
It's impossible to believe... because you say so?
Soviet economic recovery is not out of the ordinary with the European norm, even in nations which suffered proportionally worse. The only country in Europe I can find which had NOT returned to it's pre-war level of industrial output, GDP-per-head, and GDP overall was Germany, which hit that point in 1954. By the standards of other European countries, the Soviet economy of 1945 was not especially depressed. Its growth had been knocked back by ten years, but some other countries had lost more. The Netherlands, for example, required three times the growth-rate to reach its pre-war level when it did so. For the Soviets to have achieved it is hardly unbelievable. Especially given it's incorporation of both Axis industry and lend-lease technology into its reconstruction. In fact, with those prior European examples in mind, it's a bit of a indictment of the command economy that it couldn't manage a faster recovery despite such incorporations.
With the problems in Ukraine how could agricultural production be back to pre-war levels?
What problems in Ukraine? The '46 famine had ended by the harvest of '47. The back of the UPA insurgency had likewise been broken in 1947 and by 1949 it had dissolved into small, uncoordinated bands hiding in the Ukrainian part of the Carpathian Mountains, too far away to affect Soviet agriculture.
I have to wonder were these figures put together by those statisticians that Khruschev said could mold shit into bullets.
I think I'll go with the actual hard numbers and statistics put together by professional economic historians over that of gutfeels and "but it
sounds wrong to me!" logic.
And besides, why does it really matter in this specific situation? Whether it's fully recovered or not, the US is about to nuke it all into the ground in the first few months of war anyway.
This is excellent point, as there was a famine post war that lasted until early 48 and cost almost one million lives, further weakening the Soviets short term
It was, in fact, over by early-'48 and there's no evidence it appreciably weakened the Soviet Union.