Party in the USSR

[Sarmatian]

And that is why Stalin invaded Finland, the Baltic states, Poland, Romania, China... Or was it Trotsky (who since 1928 lived abroad) that directed this policy?

There was a world war in preparation. Britain planned to invade Norway (even before German invasion) and then Sweden, to deprive Germany of Swedish ore. Niceties in general go out the window in those cases.

And there's the always popular good ole empire building. USA in South America and Asia, Japan in Asia, Soviets in Europe and Asia, Italy in Africa, Germany in Europe and Africa, China in Asia sometime later and so on... Doesn't really prove that Stalin was an evil warmonger anymore than, let's say, Roosevelt was.

Um, no.

Industrialisation came before the Empire, really, it allowed the mass-production of weapons, notably muskets and cannon, that facilitated Imperial Expansion, the Empire then used their industrialised military capacity to subdue new territories in order to sell them good produced in Britain's factories.

Not Empire, just empire. Even though British Empire refers usually to a specific time period, British imperialism is much older. Colonies in the America and elsewhere, served similar purpose even though they predate the period of British Empire. Queen Victoria didn't have to be crowned Empress of India for that to be in effect. Huge population density in several urban centers, cheap raw material and a rather big market forced to buy British industrial products - those factors were in effect already. Thinking they had absolutely no effect on industrialization is laughable really.

Also, the term "brutal urbanisation" is miss-leading because it implies that people were rounded up and forced to work in factories, when in fact it was economic change that pulled people towards cities looking for work.

That's why there was mass poverty in London in the mid 19th century? 16 hour work days? Child labour? They weren't forced at gun point, no, but as the economic paradigm of the world changed, they were forced to move to cities to look for work.

Well, because British Industrialisation was not conducted according to a deliberate government "five year plan" that quite literally put people through mills and saw them as nothing more than input to generate output despite the very same government claiming to be Socialist. There were no objections from the middle class or intelligentsia because they were purged and there were no benevolent factory owners because religion was effectively banned and everything was run by the state.

Bollocks. There were only traces of the middle class in Russia in those years. Middle class was created during Soviet times, and religion never stopped factory owners to overwork their employees and use children.

So, despite the government being run by allegedly intelligent people and allegedly for the masses of the downtrodden they managed to outdo Britain's Industrial "race to the bottom" and in half the time, to boot.

In Britain the brutality of Industrialisation was the result of greedy and grasping individuals and was mitigated by more benevolent industrialists, notably Quakers and Methodists. In Russia brutality was a matter od State policy - and it reached heights not seen under the Tsar.

Again, bollocks.

First off, it took decades for Britain and other western countries to industrialize. SU did it in 5-10 years. Brutal, but effective.

And it is not just a matter of factory building. The modern society was created in a very short time. Basically everything was built, and all over the country, not just Moscow, Leningrad and Kiev. It was basically building a modern country from scratch. It's not just building 10 factories that were gonna build a 100 hospitals. You have to have staff for those hospital and there weren't nearly enough. So, you have to educate them, but you don't have enough universities. So you have to build universities and learning centers. You have to build them all over the country, so you need a railroad network. After that is in place, you need a road network, for civilian travel and other transports. That's not always practical and of course you need to import and export stuff, so you need ports and airports in addition to roads and railroads. Now there are issues with raw materials, so you need to expand existing mines and create new ones. More railroads connecting them to cities, but it goes slowly as the very materials you need to build railroad are extracted in the Urals, and they can't be transported quickly and cheaply because, get this, there are no railroads. And to power it all, you need a huge amount of energy. Coal, oil, electricity...
Then you have to reorganize agriculture as you need to feed all those people who are leaving their farms, and, of course, houses and apartments for them to live in.

All that with keeping up in military stuff, as the world war is looming.

After communists consolidated power in the early thirties, Soviet Union was basically a feudal country in everything but name. Just 30 years after, in the 1960, it was a fully industrialized modern country.

You can choose a parameter at random, not just industrial production, but any parameter, like literacy rate, university education, infant mortality rate... Really anything. You'd find a massive improvement in every single one. In the span of 30 years, a single generation, the entire country was transformed. With all the destruction suffered in the war.

The effectiveness of it all can not be over emphasized, really. Neither can the brutality, really, but the results were there for all to see.

Industrialisation had already begun - it is part of what caused the revolution. Industrial workers were the foundation of the Soviets.

No. Communists were aware that there weren't enough of them, so they included the farmers, which weren't give much attention in the communist theories so far. That's why there was that sickle in the flag.