Right, slave labor can be incredibly efficient in certain circumstances. Plantation owners in the southern states and the Caribbean had already proven that a hundred or more years before Stalin.
It’s not particularly surprising that if you literally work a few million to death and distribute the surplus they created amongst the rest of the population (the one innovation I’ll grant USSR) you can have some impressive growth figures. In fact the more people starve to death or die in the gulags the more per capita productivity increases.
> who had in living memory been serfs, into an industrialized powerhouse with a quite high standard of living.
Right. You can probably say the same about many states in Germany. Russia was just 40 or so years late. It not unreasonable to believe that it’s industrial output would had reached similar levels without the revolution in comparable timeframe (probably with considerably higher inequality but with a magnitude or two less murder, however higher inequality would probably meant that more people would have died from preventable diseases which would potentially offset a million or two who were executed).
