One of the characteristics of Stalin's rule which made it particularly difficult to bear even compared to other dictatorial regimes was his paranoia. The result of this was that Stalin trusted absolutely no one except himself, not even his own family. In practice, this meant that whether you became food for the gulags was entirely random. Even the most committed and hard-working New Soviet Man could not guarantee his safety. One small mistake here, one inappropriate laugh at an anti-regime joke there, and off to the gulags you went. Even being a bit too brilliant was dangerous. In fact, in some cases, completely innocent people were caught just to fill quotas.

But suppose you were one of those who somehow managed to remain on the good side of the regime throughout. What was your life like? Not particularly good, if you belonged to an ethnic group which the regime had taken a dislike to. The Ukrainian Holodomor and the Kazakh famine of 1932-33 could've killed as many as 6 million people together (including 40% of the entire Kazakh population. Needless to say, the deaths here included all social classes, but mostly poor peasants, the very class whom the revolution had supposedly come to help. The famine was a man-made attempt at genocide against these ethnic groups. These were hardly the only ethnic groups to be affected. Others, such as the Chechens, the Ingush, the Crimean Tatars, and many more, lost hundreds of thousands of people through forced deportations into Siberia and Soviet Central Asia. Once again, these groups lost members of all social classes, especially peasants.

But suppose you were someone against whom there was absolutely nothing the regime could construe as "anti-revolutionary". (You were an ethnic Russian, you didn't have even the slightest trace of bourgeois ancestry, you had not even the remotest link to anti-revolutionary sentiment, etc.) What then? Well, the first five-year plan emphasised heavy industry at the cost of everything else. The result was an extreme shortage of even the most basic consumer goods. And while the famines caused by forced collectivisation would've affected industrial workers less than others due to them receiving priority under the government, that didn't mean that there was an abundance of food. And finally, the biggest problem was the unreasonable demands placed on the workers. The Stakhanovite movement was an attempt to make workers work harder through using ideological fervour. Aleksei Stakhanov was a miner who supposedly (it was later revealed that he'd had a large number of unmentioned 'helpers') 102 tons of coal (14 times his quota) in just 6 hours. Other workers were "encouraged" to emulate his example. In reality, it was forced labour (AKA slavery) on a massive scale in the service of the regime.

So, in conclusion, there was absolutely no one except Stalin himself (not even his inner circle, who were repeatedly liquidated in various purges) who benefitted from the system he created. For everyone else, it was a life of endless misery if they were lucky, or death in a gulag or through famine and deportation, if they were unlucky.