The work of Lenin was continued by the Georgian revolutionary Marxist and the
distinguished Bolshevik Joseph Jugashvili, alias Stalin. He turned out to be an extremely
skilful manipulator and concentrated full political power in his hand. Using fractional battles
within the Bolshevik party, he got rid of his competitors (including the biggest, actual
organizer of the Red Army - the Trotsky Lion). It was thanks to him that the Soviet Union
entered the period of the most dynamic transformations and the most tragic time in its history,
referred to as Stalinism. Understanding that Russia, devastated by the civil war that had just
ended, was unable to fulfil its historic role as an exporter of revolution, Stalin embarked on a
process of modernization in accordance with his own understanding of communism. One of
his first decisions was to move away from the New Economic Policy and replace it with a
system of collective agriculture based on cooperative and state-owned large-hectare farms
(the so-called kolkhozes and sovkhozes). The program of collectivization carried out in 1929-
1938 combined with the propaganda campaign against rich peasants - kulaks (allegedly
responsible for the tragic state of the economy), exceeded everything that had been seen in
Russia so far with its brutality. The peasants were forcibly taken away from the ground and
driven to the kolkhozes that were being set up. The resistant were killed by the GPU or sent to
the Gulag, a network of slave labour camps developed in Lenin's time. Where rebellion took
the form of an armed uprising (such as in the Kuban or the Volga region) or aroused
nationalist feelings (such as in Ukraine), mass terror was used, combined with the most
effective means of suppressing rebellion - hunger. In Ukraine alone, which resisted
collectivisation, some 4 million people died in the planned famine when all food was seized in
a totally isolated republic. According to historians, a total of 13 million citizens of the Soviet
Union died during forced collectivization and the accompanying terror. The goal was
achieved, collectivization was achieved but the country's economy practically collapsed.
Despite the famine raging across the country, the agricultural products obtained were sold
with the greatest difficulty abroad to finance Stalin's next megalomania plan -
industrialisation.
The industrialisation process, carried out through a series of five-year plans for the
development of the economy (the so-called five-year-old plan), was to transform the Soviet
Union from an agricultural country into an industrial power. To a large extent, due to the
inexhaustible source of free labour in the form of gulag prisoners and capital support from
Western countries, it was implemented. The country was filled with a network of powerful
centres of mining, processing and armaments industry, whose task was to prepare the USSR
for the next world war, opening a new the possibility of exporting the revolution. And
although powerful industrial plants had actually contributed to increasing the Soviet Union
potential, there has also been an almost senseless range of projects, created only on the basis
of megalomaniac plans and the sick ambitions of party leaders. One of them was the White
Sea-Baltic Canal to connect the White Sea with Onega Lake, where 85 thousand prisoners of
the gulags died. It reached its peak throughput only at the beginning of the 21st century, but in
the Soviet Union it remained a symbol of the construction possibilities of the communist
system.
Joseph Stalin, who was preparing the country for the next world war, unleashed an
unprecedented terror in Russian history through the NKVD and the SPS. The genocidal
action, which went down in history under the name of Great Purge or Great Terror, was the
culmination of the whole apparatus of violence of the Soviet state. It covered all social strata,
including party and military activists, as well as ordinary residents. The reason for this was
the desire to replace the generation of party and military personnel at all levels so that their
place could be taken by the generation already brought up and trained in the Bolshevik
Russia. It was supposed to be a new type of man, entirely shaped in advance of the Marxist-
Leninist idea - Homo Sovieticus, the future group of the global revolution. The Great Terror
was supposed to be an additional factor for the already scared Soviet society, mobilizing for
even greater sacrifice in the construction of a totalitarian system. In total, between 1934 and
1938, up to 20 million citizens of the Soviet Union were subjected to repression, including
victims of forced collectivisation, court murders, and gulags. The purge followed in waves
and was accompanied by a gigantic propaganda campaign creating a vision of a crackdown on
the spies and saboteurs of a foreign agency, supposed to cover the entire structures of the
system. Thus, under allegations of espionage, both local party activists, and ordinary factory
workers were liquidated. At the end of the day, the terror took such a massive form that the
NKVD authorities did not even try to find an excuse to arrest people. Ordinary people were
arrested on a random basis in order to only fulfil the top-down limits imposed on the detection
of counter-revolutionary agents. The socialist competition so promoted by the state also
included the security apparatus, whose local centres competed in the number of fictitious spy
nets or diversion nets. National minorities, who had previously in the 1920s, been
hypocritically created with special autonomous regions and nationalities, were also subjected
to enormous repression. The gloomy symbol of their fate was the biggest national action
against the Polish population. In the years 1937-1938 alone, 111,000 Poles living in the USSR
were exterminated out of 140,000 arrested. Similarly, Volga Germans, Chinese, Finns or
foreign communist party activists associated in Comintern were dealt with.
At the end of the 1930s the Soviet Union, thanks to Stalin, achieved a gigantic developmental
and industrial leap, which, however, did not translate into any improvement in the standard of
living of its citizens. Everything was subordinated to an unimaginable process of armaments,
as a result of which the USSR already in 1935 had more tanks than all the other countries of
the world put together. The same was true of the army, which was the largest in the world, and
the society subjected to forced militarization in every aspect of its life. As long as
unimaginable armaments continued to exist in the country, the Soviet Union was an advocate
of peace in international politics, taking initiatives in collective security agreements or non-
aggression pacts with its neighbours. It was a cynical policy similar to that pursued by the
Bolsheviks in Russia immediately after they took power. However, when the Red Army was
strong enough to stop fearing any foreign intervention, foreign policy turned 180 degrees,
supporting actions in Europe that could lead to the crisis and disintegration of the Versailles'
post-War order. This was the case, for example, with the civil war in Spain between 1936 and
1939, in which the USSR became involved on the side of the left-wing republicans, while
purging the environments that it regarded as ideologically dangerous - anarchists or
communists who were not linked to the Comintern, known as Trotskyists. It was also the case
during the Sudeten crisis in 1938, when Stalin, openly supporting Czechoslovakia, hoped that
it would resist the aggressive Third Reich, which in turn would lead to the outbreak of war
between the capitalist states. The occasion for this was the establishment of cooperation with
the Third Reich itself, which took place on August 23, 1939, under the signed non-aggression
pact, called the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, named after the signatories' names. Cooperation
with the Germans who in the Kremlin were perceived as the main subversive factor of the
Versailles order was nothing new. As early as in the 1920s and 1930s, under the Rapallo-
Soviet agreement, the Soviets actively supported the German armed forces and the
development of new offensive doctrines providing them with training areas and military
equipment in the USSR. However, it was unusual to cooperate with the Nazis, as both Hitler
and Stalin had so far been perceived as the greatest ideological enemies. But tactical
cooperation with the Third Reich had very practical benefits for the Soviets. In a secret
protocol annexed to the non-aggression pact, both sides agreed on the distribution of spheres
of influence in Central Europe, and Soviet economic aid was invaluable to Hitler in his own
war plans. Stalin's plan, on the other hand, was to cause war in Europe between the capitalist
states, so that they would destroy each other, so that the Red Army could act as a mediator in
due course, bringing Pax Sovietica to the continent.