/u/captainjacksparrow, /u/viaovid, anyone else reading this thread - please don't listen to /u/existentialadvisor. The information this user has posted is just wrong. I'm going to provide an answer by deconstructing parts of their answer - and so this answer will be somewhat broader than the original question (but I'll get around to that as well).
Stalin wanted to continue the theories put forth by Marx and Lenin, but his theory was called "Socialism in one country." This was in opposition to Lenin and Trotsky who believed in international movement of socialist States. Stalin's "socialism in one country" effectively attempted to focus internally, and became a means of nationalization.
Socialism in One Country was a theory put first forward by Stalin in December 1924, which argued that socialism could successfully be established in a primarily agrarian country like Russia. It was posed as a counterpoint to Trotsky's theory of Permanent Revolution, which was seen as implying that the success of the Russian Revolution rested on a need for other revolutions, particularly in other European states. Stalin did not ever put forward the theory of Socialism in One Country in opposition to Lenin. Yes, it was not an idea that Lenin ever espoused, but Stalin went to great lengths to go through Lenin's writings to find phrases and paragraphs which appear to support his own ideas.
After Lenin's death in January 1924, a huge cult of personality surrounding him sprang up in the Soviet Union. Stalin was one of the main figures who encouraged the growth of this personality cult. At the same time this personality cult began to develop, Lenin and his writings gradually became the ultimate source of political authority in the USSR. If you wanted to attack someone's political views, you denounced them as anti-Leninist. The article in which Stalin first proposed Socialism in One Country spends most of its time demonstrating how Trotsky's theory of Permanent Revolution deviate from the ideas of Lenin - ideas which Stalin argued were best echoed in his theory of Socialism in One Country.
Socialism in One Country did have an internal focus. At the time it was proposed, any hope that Europe would see its own wave of communist revolutions had pretty much died out: not a single communist uprising there since the end of the war had succeeded. A 'Soviet stabilisation' was needed to match this 'capitalist stabilisation' in Europe, and Socialism in One Country was the piece of doctrine that was needed to justify this.
Socialism in One Country was not, however, a means of nationalisation. The Bolsheviks nationalised much of private industry in Russia shortly after they seized power in October 1917.
In 1928, Stalin enacted his first five year plan. The first plan saw the collectivization of farms ... The second five year planned began in 1932 and it targeted the industries ... Not all the goals were met particularly in areas of coal and oil but it did increase women's rights, literacy, and better wages for the laborers.
Again, this is incorrect.
Firstly, womens' rights did not improve in the 1930s. Stalin turned his back on the revolution's liberal social policies aimed at improving the lives of women. In 1930, the women's department of the Party, the Zhenotdel, was closed down. Soviet policy focused on protected the traditional family unit: divorce became more difficult to obtain, abortion was banned, women were encouraged to have as many children as possible, families (especially mothers) were held more accountable for poor behaviour of children. Wealthier women were expected to maintain traditional roles, supporting their husbands at work, and working-class women were expected to take on the double-burden of childcare and full-time work.
The First Five Year Plan was not simply focused on agriculture and collectivisation. It included plans for the rapid expansion of industry, and for those at the top industrialisation was the most important aspect of this 'revolution from above' which occurred under Stalin in the 1930s. Industrialisation was the means by which the Soviet Union would drag itself out of peasant 'backwardness', would become a superpower, and would be able to defend itself from an increasingly hostile capitalist world (part of the impetus for industrialisation came from the war scare which occurred in 1927, after the British withdrew diplomatic relations with the USSR). Initially, this industrialisation drive was to be paid for by agriculture. Collectivisation was a means through which the state would bring the peasantry, often seen as an ideologically hostile force, under its own control.
Industrialisation in the 1930s changed the Soviet Union almost beyond belief. Factories and towns were erected across the country, in dazzlingly short spaces of time. Between 1926 and 1939, the proportion of the population which lived in urban areas rose from under one fifth to almost a third - from 26 to 56 million people. The Soviet Union industrialised on an unparalleled scale, although it is difficult to actually define rates of growth because many Soviet sources exaggerate achievement. The USSR transformed itself rapidly from an agrarian state into an industrial one - this is what Stalin set out to achieve.
Does this transformation make the 1930s a success? It depends what you mean by success.
Collectivisation is often widely regarded as a failure - initially it was to take place on a voluntary basis, but Stalin pushed for a more forceful approach and the violence and hostility used in establishing the collective farms produced hug resistance from the peasantry and actually hampered the development of agriculture. This forceful method of collectivisation went hand in hand with 'dekulakisation', a process by which the kulaks (wealthy peasants) were attacked, in the hope they would be eradicated from the peasantry. However, 'kulak' was an ill-defined group and a number of poor and middle-income peasants were classified as 'ideological kulaks' simply because they resisted forced collectivisation. It is also important to remember that collectivisation was a huge interruption to the traditional peasant way of life, and during the 1920s the peasants were treated fairly leniently. Grain was taken by force, resistant peasants were deported en-masse, and peasants often killed livestock rather than hand it over to officials and the new collective farms. By 1931, the force of peasant resistance caused Stalin to renounce forcible collectivisation - and, in the wake of this, a significant number of peasants actually left the collective farms. The Soviet countryside was polarised, and peasants remained indifferent or hostile to Soviet rule. Furthermore, the Ukrainian famine of 1932-3 was caused by policies of grain requisition - this particular event is a very poignant reminder of the devastation and suffering Soviet agricultural policies caused.
Moving back to industry - industry in the 1930s was built too quickly to be safe or efficient. Goods produced were often of a poor quality, and managers had a flagrant disregard for health and safety, which made the working environment pretty dangerous, something partially due to the constant raising of economic targets by the centre. The focus was on heavy industry; consumer goods were neglected, leading to shortages. Plans were often unrealistic, and industry was hugely inefficient. Living conditions declined, and workers lost a number of privileges: factory managers became less accountable to their workforces; the state issued internal passports and ration cards in an attempt to limit workers' freedom of movement (one way for a worker protest the decline in conditions was just to pack up and move to another factory, something they could initially do fairly easily thanks to a huge labour shortage); disciplinary measures became increasingly harsh, and workers could even be sent to prison for seemingly minor infractions; in 1932, Stalin even denounced the principle of wage equality, which led to the breakup of egalitarianism in the workforce, something many workers liked. Despite difficult conditions, and a dearth of material rewards, many workers were motivated to keep working by the knowledge that they were actively helping to build socialism with their labour. For factory managers, the industrialisation of the 1930s was also an incredibly stressful time: the pressure to continually increase productivity and output by superhuman quantities was immense, and in the later 1930s, managers of those factories which 'fell behind' often fell victim to the Purges.
In the 1930s, agriculture was significantly transformed and the Soviet Union was urbanised and industrialised at a pace that no other country has come close to matching. All of this, however, was achieved at great cost, and the changes did not necessarily lead to greater efficiency. Was this a success or a failure? That's for you to decide.
Sources:
Ronald Suny, The Soviet Experiment
Moshe Lewin, Russian Peasants and Soviet Power
Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain
Graeme Gill, The Origins of the Stalinist Political System
E.H. Carr, Socialism in One Country
Wendy Goldman, Women, the State, and Revolution
/u/llamastingray has provided an excellent answer that I largely agree with (and wish I'd written). But I want to add a quick note on the question of 'success' in this context.
There has always been a problematic trend in Soviet historiography to lapse into talk of 'achievements' versus 'costs'. 'Success' being the difference between the two. At its worst this leads to outright apologism, in which success is judged according to the priorities of the regime. Even if we avoid this, the approach implies a very discrete and mathematical approach to history: let's separate the good from the bad and then add them up. So yes, Stalinism was responsible for millions of deaths but it also played a key role in crushing fascism. This tendency is evident even in historical contributions as valuable as Carr and Deutscher.
The trend was understandably particularly pronounced during the Cold War, when the merits of the Soviet model was more than a historical question. Today I’d like to think that our understanding of Stalinism is much more nuanced. There’s more appreciation of the extreme hardship that industrialisation caused, its stunning inefficiencies and how the model was ultimately unsustainable. No one seriously maintains that it is a model to be emulated. Historians have largely moved past trying to determine whether Stalinism was a 'success', towards understanding it as a 'civilisation'.
Yet.
It’s easy to understand the impression that the Five Year Plans made on observers. They were wasteful, built on repression, didn't function as plans and did little for the vast majority of Soviet citizens. But they happened. That alone struck many as a near-miracle. As one foreign observer put it:
The unprejudiced visitor may be struck by the waste, the perpetual outbreaks of anarchy; but he is still bound to recognise that the Soviets have raised a regular industrial town [ie Magnitogorsk] here out of the ground within two years. After that their boasts do not seem quite so ridiculous. (Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain.)
Where a previous generation of historians hailed these 'achievements', I'd argue that we can appreciate the events and energy of those years without necessarily forcing ourselves to accept the sum total as 'success' or 'failure'. Was all the pain and dislocation worth it? The repression, the lean years the excess deaths? Better to try to understand these states of extreme flux than do moral mathematics as to what constitutes 'success'.
By the beginning of WW2 and the signing of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, it was clear Soviet ideology had been supplanted by the material needs and desperation of the Russian populace and its leaders. The state, swept up in the economic nightmare of post war consolidation, lost its value of political freedom in its desperate need to survive. People needed to eat. The state became obsessed with providing for its citizenry and soon realized collective action and democracy were hugely ineffective. The state became gradually more & more centralized in an effort to control an economy in chaos. The result was nationalization of agriculture, industry and all means of production as well as state education and other facets of public life. Thus, the culmination of Russia’s postwar fury and chaos was the need for unified strength and direction. With a firm understanding of this, claims that Stalin was driven solely by his own ambitions seem empty. It would seem he was a man caught between the realities of his country and a vision he hoped to achieve. As with all totalitarian regimes, this struggle was made manifest in the hardships of collectivization, industrialization, and the purges he carried out. He viewed sacrifice as a necessary evil in the development of Communism. This same sentiment is echoed by John Scott’s analysis of the purges in his book Behind the Urals.
“The purge had devastating effects on several millions of soviet citizens, who were arrested and exiled. Most of these people were innocent, but some were guilty, and some, like Udkin, might have become excellent Nazi fifth columnists. Stalin considered the investment a good one.” (206)
It is impossible to rightly justify the killing of millions for an ennobled cause. However, Scott’s words at least give us an understanding of the rational. Scott in the years directly following his departure from Magnitogorsk, where he worked as a welder, and in the many iterations of his autobiography, struggled with the brutality of the purges, which he claims broke his spirit.
“I mentioned this to Syemichkin when I went around to bid him good-bye. His attitude was much mire sane and balanced than mine, ‘if I am not mistaken,’ he said, ‘you in America tolerated chattel slavery for nearly a century after your great constitution of freedom went into force. You elections were travesties of universal suffrage during the first decades after your revolution. Our Soviet constitution is a building, and we will built it too.” (247)
Having internalized this message, he finally asserts Stalin’s course was just.
“He had done well in steering the Soviet Ship of State through the stormy seas of recent European politics. He might make mistakes sometimes but by and large he knew his business.” (264)
It would seem that for Scott the ends did indeed justify the means. From a purely materialistic standpoint, Russia was stronger than it ever had been. Its population was well trained, optimistic and educated. Once again in the course of history we are confronted with a titanic figure whose accomplishments and crimes are so great and horrific they seemingly depart from the realm of human rational. However, fair analysis brings us understanding. In his 'Life of Nicias', Plutarch rightly states 'detail' is never 'unnecessary', because it contains fundamental truths: '… passing on the essence that promotes the appreciation of character and temperament.' Thus, as historians we cannot be caught up in easy assumptions or jump to conclusions. A balanced analysis wipes away the prejudice of history and allows us to examine our own past on level footing.
/u/captainjacksparrow, /u/llamastingray let me know what you think of this analysis.
Some useful sources:
Marjorie L. Hilton, Selling to the Masses: Retailing in Russia, 1880-1930
Geoffrey A. Hosking The First Socialist Society: A History of the Soviet Union from within
Simon Sebag Montefiore, Humanizing Stalin? BBC News
Raskolnikov's Open Letter to Stalin.
Joseph Stalin, Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR
John Scott, Behind the Urals: An American Worker in Russia's City of Steel
Lev Kopelev, Education of a True Believer