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poor starving peasants don't make good revolutionaries
after the industrial revolution in the 1800s, they had a tiny bit of education, enough food to survive and there were enough roads built to allow for communication. But life was still shit and everyone still lived in absolute poverty (except the relatively well of factory owners)
this provided them with the means to do something about their condition, and the source of everyone's misery seemed to be capitalism, socialism offered a pretty good solution. Also marx had a cool beard. Little did they know however, economies grow exponentially and everything got better later on.
Turns out, the only stable societies are wealthy democracies and dictatorships, hence why socialist revolutions happened in the first place.
stalin knew this very well, if he didn't he would've been overthrown in another revolution. after a civil war, a world war and invasion from us, japan and britain, the only thing russia had left was a lot of people and barely enough grain to feed them all (farming in russia sucks).
the only solution was to harvest all the grain by force to trade it for machinery to industrialise the nation and to bring food to the cities to promote a growing working class. This lead to insane economic growth but many peasants starved.
in the end capitalist nations won because:
>you can industrialise quickly without having to steal food by having another capitalist nation invest into yours
>people didn't matter in communist societies, as life improved slightly after stalin died, people were once again at the point where they were just above the brink of starvation to have the means and want for change
>they were less efficient in micromanaging huge economies and quickly satiating demand
>capitalism got better, communism is less enticing when life doesn't suck
>stalin didn't promote merit, he promoted order. There were no leaders after him who knew what they were doing, though that is not the fault of communism.
