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Koba the Dread, Iosif the Terrible. Stalin’s regime was one of brutality,
fear, and twenty million lives lost – in the labour camps, from starvation,
and in state-approved executions. Lenin’s legacy from his attempts to bring
about socialism on the Soviet Union a decade earlier was a fully-functional
police state; now in the early 1930’s, Stalin used the same tactics to
destroy the primitive peasant economy and force industrialisation. Grain
stores were requisitioned without payment and exported to finance the
scheme, resulting in the worst famine in European history. Cannibalism
became widespread, and the Bolshevik party employed increasing force to
prevent food being hidden.