There were huge achievements in the building of new cities, built wholly around industry, bringing new life to previously derelict areas. Dams and hydroelectric power plants were built all around the country and transport and communications flourished with huge new waterways being built e.g. Baltic- White Sea Canal and the Moscow- Volga Canal. Russia was only importing 10% of farm machinery needed compared to the 80% imported in the beginning of the plans. Production doubled in electricity, coal and steel industries and there was virtually no unemployment. Education and healthcare was made available and easily accessible to all who needed it. Girls and boys, men and women were encouraged to become literate and the education was provided for them. With huge collectivized farms or Kolkhoz and new machinery to increase efficiency fewer peasants were needed to work the farms and moved to the cities to work in the factories. There was enough grain being produced so that it could be exported too. Stalin's most important success was that the communists, with himself as the ruler, had complete control over Russia.
Another, less pleasant result, was that all these successes came at great human cost. An estimated 12 million people died as a result of Stalin's labour camps, starvation, hard physical labour or punishment for not working hard enough. The question is, how did Stalin motivate people to industrialize at such a frightening pace and not complain about the conditions, the disappearing people and the terror? The most common viewpoint is that he did it with his bombardment of propaganda; fear of punishment and as system of rewards and incentives. At the time the majority of factory workers were still young and impressionable, still intoxicated by the communist theory. Many were willing to suffer a "few years of hardship for the promised land of a better society."1 Posters, signs, books and radio programmes extolled the virtues of hard work and rapid industrialization so that workers were bombarded with Stalin's thoughts and ideas and beliefs from every direction, almost forcing them to see things the way he did and no other.
From people like Hitler, Stalin, and even more recently, Milosevic, we can see that these madmen come in all shapes and forms. ... These were done for no other reason than they had not credited his genius, or were not entertained at one of his shows. ... Nero was not quite the monster that television and movies nowadays make him out to be. ...
