ses, Lenin and his take on Sovietism had already outlived their usefulness: the civil war was ended, reunification was established, and the country was still in a state of economic ruin (Hough & Fainsod 133-135). The rise of Josef Stalin, therefore, represented two concurrent political goals: a drive to make Russia a 20th century industrialized nation, combined with a simultaneous reinforcement of autocratic rule to the point of repressive and destructive paranoia. Stalin's gulags and mass murders are well known in the West. What is less considered is the valid and necessary economic programs that Stalin put into overdrive in order to force Russia into modernity.
When Stalin came to power in the mid-1920s, geopolitics had virtually isolated the Soviet Union from the rest of the world. It was a world that was entering the Great Depression anyway and was in no position to extend a helping hand had the inclination been there, which it was not. Rather, as Stalin and Churchill both foresaw, the 1930s was a decade of rising threat from the dangerous entity of N
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