The Red Emperor was literally creating the future before our very eyes. In ten years, from 1930 to 1940, the Soviet Union went from agrarian Russia to a highly developed industrial power, with advanced science and technology capable of withstanding the onslaught of the most advanced power of European civilization - the Third Reich, which was given control over most of Europe.
For ten years! During this period, Russia has gone from a plow and bast shoes to a T-34 tank and rocket artillery. From the illiterate and illiterate population to millions of scientists, engineers and technicians, mechanics and agronomists, teachers and doctors, skilled workers, pilots and tank crews, sailors and radio operators, geologists and builders. In ten years Russia was completely rebuilt and recreated, thousands of new enterprises were built, agriculture from semi-natural to large commodity, providing the country, cities and the army. In terms of industrial output, the Soviet Union came out on top in Europe, ahead of such advanced industrial powers as Germany, Great Britain and France, and second in the world.
Let me remind you that The USSR of the 1920s is a dead end. The finished country, doomed to new turmoil and collapse, and external intervention, the division of Russia into spheres of influence and colonies by the leading world powers. According to all the analytical calculations, it turned out that the end was ahead of the USSR-Russia: either in the chaos and blood of a new turmoil caused by an economic catastrophe, or after a military defeat.
The New Economic Policy (NEP) stabilized the situation in which Russia found itself after the devastating First World War, the Civil War and the intervention. Industrial production in 1920 was a paltry 13.8% of pre-war volumes. According to the State Planning Commission, in 1925-1926. the consolidated budget (state budget plus local budgets) was equal to 72.4% of the pre-war budget (5024 million rubles). In 1924-1925. gross industrial output was 63.7% and agriculture - 87.3% of the pre-war level (1913 level). Freight turnover of railways in 1924-1925 accounted for 63, 1% of the pre-war. Total foreign trade turnover in 1924-1925 was only 27% of the pre-war. The industrial level of 1913 was reached only in 1926-1927.
At this time, the advanced powers of the West and the Japanese Empire did not stand still and developed rapidly. And in the USSR in the 1920s, not a single large-scale industrial or transport project was implemented. Part of the mining industry, oil fields, etc., was transferred to the western concessions. "Official friends" of Soviet Russia like the famous A. Hammer plundered the country, taking away the historical and cultural values of the Russian people.
The country's economic mechanism was an ugly symbiosis of administrative planning and a speculative market. There was no finance for development. The gold reserves of the Russian Empire were plundered and plundered by the joint efforts of the white, red commissars and foreign predators. Part of the gold and finance was taken out of the country during the tsar's reign. A huge amount of private gold, silver, precious stones, other valuables, cultural and historical monuments were removed and stolen during the civil war. Nobody gave loans. Foreign trade was blocked by the West.
There were no advanced industries. The whole world was going into the future. The industrial era has arrived. And in the USSR there was no motor building, automobile industry, tractor building, instrument making, radio engineering industry, aircraft building and shipbuilding, developed metallurgy, chemical industry. The country required complete electrification of its industry. The industrial backwardness of Soviet Russia from the developed countries was becoming monstrous and deadly. A little more and the armies of the Western industrial powers and militarized Japan could easily have crushed the Red Army, which remained in the past - carts, cavalry, very few cars, armored vehicles and aircraft, with outdated samples, trophies from the First World War. Without developed mechanical engineering and heavy industry, Russia faced death. Strong and dangerous enemies for backward agrarian Russia were not even such great powers as Germany and Japan, but Poland and Finland.
Soviet cities were drowning in poverty, homeless children, unemployment. The dominance of the bureaucracy, which was experiencing a new heyday, the decline in the quality of management led to the growth of bureaucracy. The criminal world flourished. The chaos of two wars (world and civil), revolution led to a criminal revolution. NEP, on the other hand, created an economic and social basis for crime. The 1920s saw a wave of theft and fraud. Suffice it to recall the famous novel "The Golden Calf" by Ilf and Petrov. There was a link between the corrupt bureaucracy, the party-state, the economic apparatus and the criminal world. A similar picture will take place in the country during the late Gorbachev and early 1990s.
Agriculture was thrown back into the Middle Ages, where horses or their own hands were used instead of tractors and mechanical machines. The former large farms (landowners') were destroyed, new ones could not be created. Marketability fell sharply. The village returned to subsistence farming, most of the peasant farms worked only to feed themselves.
In 1927, the grain procurement crisis began. The apparent stability of the NEP was crumbling. Cities with outdated, weak industries could not meet the needs of the countryside. In response, the village refused to give bread. It was necessary to introduce ration cards. The specter of a new peasant war, famine, has again become over the country. In the late 1920s, the USSR was slipping into a new bloody turmoil. To a new confrontation between town and village, the collapse of the "independent" Bantustans, the savage massacre of Russians on the national outskirts.
At the same time, the psychology of the people was distorted by the three-century domination of "Russian Europeans", the Romanov dynasty. The division of the people into masters and serfs. The bloody First World War, which claimed millions of lives of the healthiest men. The catastrophe of 1917, the fratricidal civil war - a real inferno (hell) on earth. The terrible famine of 1921-1922 also left its mark, comparable in its deadly consequences with the medieval “black death”. In this terrible time, the ethics of labor and morality were forgotten. People are used to death and violence. It seemed that violence is a universal and very effective means of solving any problem. There were whole armies of people in the country who were accustomed to violence: professional revolutionaries who, all their conscious life, did nothing but destroy; the intelligentsia, which was originally brought up in hatred of Russia (to the tsarist, in general to "this country"), which could only criticize, subvert, debunk everything - the great powers (empire), the Christian faith and religions in general, "outdated morality", the old art and history, etc.; heroes of the civil war, veterans of the Red Army, and defeated former whites, greens, nationalists, bandits, Basmachi, former Socialist-Revolutionaries, anarchists, etc. Thus, the human capital in the country was at an extremely low level. It was wildness and decay. People were ready to steal, kill, but forgot how to create, produce, forgot about order and discipline.
At the same time, with a new internal turmoil, it was worth waiting for the invasion of the whites, who still retained their cadres, organization and combat capability in Europe and China, and were waiting for a favorable moment to return. On their shoulders, the invaders would again come - the Japanese, Poles, Finns, British, French and Americans. Soviet Russia had no friends. The great powers of the West and Japan planned to dismember Russia, to get its wealth at their complete disposal. Finland, Poland, Romania and other neighbors dreamed of creating their great powers on the ruins of Russia. The old world, and then it was practically the entire planet, was hostile to the Soviet, new world. They planned to destroy and crush Soviet Russia.
With the preservation of NEP in Soviet Russia, the implementation of programs of the left or right opposition within the party, or even the program of the White Project (which was defeated in the civil war), death was inevitable. The detonator of decay, catastrophe was the war lost to the developed West or Japan, or the battle between town and country, a new peasant war. Thus, in the 1920s, a new civilizational catastrophe was brewing, the collapse of the country could have occurred in the 1930s. Gigantic sacrifices in this case were inevitable. The question was whether they would not be in vain and would not lead to the complete and final destruction of Russian civilization. Or will they still materialize a new reality, a new world-civilization of the future and repel the impending blow of the old, predatory capitalist world? Create a Soviet superpower and start promoting a Soviet (Russian) global project to create a just world?
Stalin, the Russian communists set a world-building task - the creation of a new world, a civilization of the future on the basis of social justice, ethics of conscience and labor. Societies of knowledge, creation and service. It was the Soviet (Russian) project of globalization. The Western project to create a global slave-owning civilization, a society of slave-owners and slave-consumers received an alternative.
However, it is not enough to set a goal, it is necessary to materialize it. Create a fabric infrastructure of a new reality: secondary and higher schools, houses of creativity and culture, design bureaus and research institutes, factories and factories, collective farms and machine and tractor stations, rebuild cities for new housing and urban transport, build highways and railways, water pipelines and oil and gas pipelines, power plants and much more. Create the material foundation of a new world. There was practically nothing of this in the USSR after the Civil War. What was there was destroyed, destroyed, plundered.
Stalin understood this perfectly and brilliantly solved the infrastructure problem. In the process of fulfilling the first five-year plan, on February 4, 1931, the Soviet leader said at the First All-Union Conference of Socialist Industry Workers: “To hold back the pace means to lag behind. And the backward ones are beaten … Do you want our socialist fatherland to be beaten and to lose its independence? But if you don’t want that, you must eliminate his backwardness in the shortest possible time and develop real Bolshevik rates in building his socialist economy. There are no other ways. … We are 50-100 years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or they will crush us."
Summing up the results of the first five-year plan of 1929-1933, Stalin said that in the USSR there was no ferrous metallurgy (the basis of industrialization), the tractor and automobile industries - now there is. We were in the last place in the production of electricity, in the production of oil products and coal, now we have moved to the first places. From a country weak and unprepared for defense, the USSR turned into a mighty military power.
By the beginning of World War II, the red emperor was able to create the second most economically powerful power on the planet. Thanks to this economic and military foundation, the USSR won a brilliant victory in the Great Patriotic War, repaid the "debts" of the First World War to Germany and Japan. Thanks to this foundation, the country recovered in a matter of years after the worst war in the history of mankind. It became a superpower that successfully opposed the entire West, that is, the unification of the most developed (in the technological, military-economic sphere), advanced countries on Earth. It was then that the overwhelming majority of industrial enterprises were built and laid, the foundation for a developed agriculture was laid, a transport infrastructure was created, cities and the country's defense were built. We still live by the fruits of that great Stalinist era.
