A Very Brief Early History of the USSR.

The Russian Empire teetered on the edge of revolution for almost 100 years. Between the mid 17th century and 1861 about a third of the population was held in serfdom, a condition close to chattel slavery; they were bound to the land, lived in extreme poverty, and could be beaten by the landowners they served. Nicholas II in 1861 declared serfdom abolished, but the freed serfs owned far too little property to live on (although they did receive some, in a state financed transfer, it was on the order of 1-3 acres and had severe strings attached). Large numbers, however, were freed to leave the countryside, providing labor for a weak and belated industrial revolution.

In the first World War, Russia suffered the loss of millions of soldiers, as did the nations to its west, but this was on top of still nearly medieval conditions. The new middle classes wanted to bring Russia into the modern world with some sort of constitutional democracy, while the poor in countryside and city suffered from increasingly disfunctional government, and involuntary soldiers starved or were blown up in the trenches.

The old regime fell apart in 1917 leaving proponents of landowner democracy, true democrats, and a few different flavors of socialist to try at first to cooperate somewhat. The followers of Marx were divided into Mensheviks and Bolsheviks
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The different parties eventually descended into a Civil War which lasted several years, but Bolsheviks had effective rule of most of what was renamed the USSR by 1922-24. During the war, an extreme state of martial law was in effect, and the government unceremoniously took what it needed. Afterwards, this policy was seen by many as a necessary evil or war, and some sort of rules of society would have to be rebuilt. One thing that resulted was a loosening of the rule, and resumption of some of the old style of economic life, including a good deal of small to medium scale free trade. This was called the NEP or New Economic Policy.

Winston Churchill said of the Russian people and Lenin: "Their worst misfortune was his birth . . . their next worst his death." This occurred in 1924 due to multiple severe strokes. The Communist Party, at this point was the supreme force in the nation. There was, however, some degree of democracy within the party. Lenin was a harsh believer in the efficacy and rightness of violence for reshaping the world. He had, however, a vision of ultimately improving people's lives, which is not to say his plans would have worked, but he was not such an ideogue as to be totally out of touch with reality, and the actual results of current policies, and the NEP was a response to the realization that current policies were generating widespread misery and starvation.

What followed was 12-13 years of clawing for power, in which for the winning party (Stalin) at least, ideology was more of a tool than a guide. There was a sequence of two or three man executive coalitions of which Stalin tended to be the one constant. If another party was blocking Stalin's advancement, he was prone to shift his ideological position so as to oppose theirs, find new partners, demonize the other position, and do his best to permanently wreck his strongest rival's reputation, and drum them out of the party. His overall strongest rival, Trotsky, he managed to exile first to Siberia (at this point, at least in Trotsky's case, an exile to the middle of nowhere rather than an imprisonment in a "Gulag"), and after Siberia, he was put on a steamer and deposited in Turkey, from which he began wanderings that led him to Mexico.

Stalin's last position involved the "liquidation of the Kulaks" and mass collectivization, Kulaks being small property holders able to support themselves and maintain independence by raising and selling food. This was only after idological maneuvers in which Stalin leaned towards the NEP and some degree of reasonableness, and demonized those who wanted to proceed more quickly towards the Communist ideal. With them out of the way, having been forced to confess their ideological errors, he became the most extreme of the forced marchers and began to demonize and get rid of the moderates.

In 1928, Stalin began the forced collectivization which resulted in the starvation of millions in the countryside, coupled with the declaration of the first "Five Year Plan" for the building up of heavy industry, in which the USSR was still far behind the west.