Stalin sought to destroy his enemies while transforming Soviet society with central planning, in particular through the forced collectivization of agriculture and rapid development of heavy industry.

Stalin's methods in achieving his goals, which included party purges, ethnic cleansings, political repression of the general population, and forced collectivization, led to millions of deaths: in Gulag labor camps[1] and during famine.

Government bureaucrats, who had been given a rudimentary education on farming techniques, were dispatched to the countryside to "teach" peasants the new ways of socialist agriculture, relying largely on theoretical ideas that had little basis in reality.

[citation needed] Although in practice these goals were not reached, the efforts to achieve them and the statement of theoretical equality led to a general improvement in the socio-economic status of women.

The occurrences of these diseases dropped to record-low numbers and infant mortality rates were substantially reduced, resulting in the life expectancy for both men and women to increase by over 20 years by the mid-to-late 1950s.

Most of the delegates present at the 17th congress in 1934 were gone, and Stalin was heavily praised by Litvinov and the western democracies criticized for failing to adopt the principles of "collective security" against Nazi Germany.

Moscow's support of the government gave the Republicans a Communist taint in the eyes of anti-Bolsheviks in Britain and France, weakening the calls for Anglo-French intervention in the war.

[66] Nazi Germany promulgated an Anti-Comintern Pact with Imperialist Japan and Fascist Italy, along with various Central and Eastern European states (such as Hungary), ostensibly to suppress Communist activity but more realistically to forge an alliance against the USSR.

On 26 June 1940 the Soviet government issued an ultimatum to the Romanian minister in Moscow, demanding the Kingdom of Romania immediately cede Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina.

In addition, in 1941, 1943 and 1944 several whole nationalities had been deported to Siberia, Kazakhstan, and Central Asia, including, among others, the Volga Germans, Chechens, Ingush, Balkars, Crimean Tatars, and Meskhetian Turks.

I drink, before all, to the health of the Russian people, because in this war they earned general recognition as the leading force of the Soviet Union among all the nationalities of our country... And this trust of the Russian people in the Soviet Government was the decisive strength, which secured the historic victory over the enemy of humanity – over fascism..."[85] World War II resulted in enormous destruction of infrastructure and populations throughout Eurasia, from the Atlantic to the Pacific oceans, with almost no country left unscathed.

Economist Holland Hunter, in addition, argues in his Overambitious First Soviet Five-Year Plan, that an array "of alternative paths were available, evolving out of the situation existing at the end of the 1920s... that could have been as good as those achieved by, say, 1936 yet with far less turbulence, waste, destruction and sacrifice."

In the aftermath of World War II, the Soviet Union extended its political and military influence over Eastern Europe, in a move that was seen by some as a continuation of the older policies of the Russian Empire.

Finally, by the late 1940s, pro-Soviet Communist Parties won the elections in five countries of Central and Eastern Europe (specifically Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria) and subsequently became People's Democracies.

[89][90][91] In 1950, the Soviet Union protested against the fact that the Chinese seat at the United Nations Security Council was held by the Nationalist government of China, and boycotted the meetings.

Soviet biology studies were heavily influenced by the now-discredited biologist Trofim Lysenko, who rejected the concept of Mendelian inheritance in favor of a form of Lamarckism.

[94] Stalin's cult of personality reached its height in the postwar period, with his picture displayed in every school, factory, and government office, yet he rarely appeared in public.

The Orthodox Church was generally left unmolested after the war and was even allowed to print small amounts of religious literature, but persecution of minority religions was resumed.

[100] After 1945, this loosening of social control was never completely undone as instead the state sought to co-opt the certain elements of the population, allowing certain rules to be contravened provided that the populace remained overall loyal.

[99] Another example of the "big deal" was the publication starting in the late 1940s of a series of romance novels aimed at a female audience; a choice of subject matter that would have been unthinkable before the war.

[100] Another post-war social trend was the emergence of greater individualism and a search for privacy as the demand grew for private apartments while those in urban areas sought to spend more time in the countryside, where the state had less control over daily life.

[105] Another example of the social trend towards a greater personal spaces for ordinary people was the rise in popularity of underground poetry and of the samizdat literature that criticized the Soviet system.

[110] Much to the worry of the authorities, American films such as Stagecoach, The Roaring Twenties, The Count of Monte Cristo, and Sun Valley proved to be extremely popular with Soviet audiences.

[110] The musician Bulat Okudzhava recalled: "It was the one and only thing in Tbilisi for which everyone went out of their minds, the trophy film, The Girl of My Dreams, with the extraordinary and indescribable Marika Rökk in the main role.

[110] As early as the late 1940s, the Austrian scholar Franz Borkenau contended that the Soviet government was not a monolithic totalitarian machine, but instead divided into vast chefstvo (patronage) networks extending down from the elite to the lowest ranks of power with Stalin more as the ultimate arbiter of the various factions instead of being the leader of a 1984 type state.

Stalin became less active in the day-to-day running of the state and instead of party meetings, preferred to invite the Politburo members to all-night dinners where he would watch movies and force them to get drunk and embarrass themselves or say something incriminating.

[121] The collective leadership included the following eight senior members of the Presidium of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union listed according to the order of precedence presented formally on 5 March 1953: Georgy Malenkov, Lavrentiy Beria, Vyacheslav Molotov, Kliment Voroshilov, Nikita Khrushchev, Nikolai Bulganin, Lazar Kaganovich and Anastas Mikoyan.

[123] Economic reform scaled back the mass construction projects, placed a new emphasis on house building, and eased the levels of taxation on the peasantry to stimulate production.

[124] The new leaders sought rapprochement with the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and a less hostile relationship with the United States,[125] pursuing a negotiated end to the Korean War in July 1953.

[127] A mass amnesty of 1953 for certain categories of imprisoned was issued, halving the country's inmate population, while the state security and Gulag systems were reformed, with torture being banned in April 1953.