e geographic regions encompassed were hardly out of the Middle Ages in terms of economic development. The Soviet Union was founded on an agrarian basis; there was no proletariat nor industrialized economy from which to go forward with the next tenets of Marxist philosophy (Smith & Evans, 1982, pp. 6-30).
Starting out with that strike against it, it must be noted that in the early days communism had many attractive qualities to offer the new nation. While "capitalist industrialists" hardly existed in the region, the czarist aristocracy had done a good job of exploiting the population for centuries - with a net result being that the economy, never very strong, was totally shattered by the Russian empire's involvement in World War I. The early days of the Soviet Union saw a massive effort at restructuring and modernization aimed at pulling the nation into the 20th Century. It was, perhaps, an effort doomed from the start. Major sections of Central Asia and the Russian steppes, not to mention the Caucasus Mountain regions bordering the Middle East and Balkans, were all traditional cultures. They were mired in centuries-old rivalries and feudal societal organization. Moreover, transportation and communications in the Soviet Union circa 1920 were at a pre-19th Century level compared to the industrialized nations of Western Europe and the United States. Nevertheless, and ruthlessly, Lenin and, then, Stalin proceeded to impose a communist political structure and modern industrial methods upon the populace (Heller & Nekrich, 1985, pp. 15-49).
The results were decidedly mixed. By any standard, the road-building, communications-extending efforts of the '20s and '30s were heroic and impressive. Education, non-existent in most of the former Russian empire, was introduced universally; by the 1950s Soviet scientists would launch the world's first successful orbiting satellite into space, Sputnik. As World War II came and half the nati...