A state can look fearsome and be frightened at its core. This book follows the systems that turned fear into policy: how quotas, denunciations and myth produced Stalinist terror, how the great purge reset power, and how the soviet secret police reached from factory floors to kitchen tables.
Across farms and furnaces, collectivisation secured grain while trust collapsed, culminating in the collectivisation famine that financed steel. Inside plants, five-year plans pushed output faster than skills, while industrial mobilisation stitched shortages into workarounds. The army, shorn by Red Army purges, learned to fight with fewer veterans and more slogans. A cult of personality coordinated decisions, and Soviet propaganda turned failures into stories of sabotage. Diplomacy bought time; everyday life paid the bill.
For readers of serious history, policy professionals and anyone assessing state capacity, this is a clear lens on strength built on coercion. You will leave knowing how to read statistics on incentives, how to separate capacity from capability, and how to spot brittle power in the prewar Soviet Union and beyond. The result is not outrage or apology, but understanding: a practical framework for judging what fear can build, and what it quietly breaks.