← Back to the front page

History’s Most Catastrophic Man-made Errors

Khalid Elhassan December 9, 2020 34 min

Wanggongchang Explosion - Beijing — The Wanggongchang Explosion devastated Beijing. Pintrest

26. Industrialization Saved the Soviet Union – But at a High Cost

Peasants forced off during Stalin’s collectivization. Encyclopedia Britannica

The Soviet Union could not have survived the German attack in WWII and gone on to win victory without the vast manufacturing capacity created by Stalin’s industrialization drive. Seen from that perspective, rapid industrialization had borne fruit. However, it had come at a horrific cost that amounted to a humanitarian disaster.

Millions of innocent men, women, and children, had their lives and liberties ruthlessly crushed and sacrificed in order to implement Stalin’s policies. Nowhere was that more evident than in the policy of collectivization, which forced millions of Soviet peasants off their private plots and into large collective farms, which were to be run like factories.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.