Do You Want Our Socialist Fatherland to be Beaten and to lose Its Independence?

Forced industrialization was Stalin’s policy. He won the argument over the collectivization of agriculture, and now emphasized his desire for fast industrial growth to push Russia into the Machine Age. At stake was the Bolshevik boast to be creating a modern society. And in a hostile world, which had already tried to snuff out the Revolution at birth, the Soviet Union needed rapid industrialization to safeguard socialism. In February 1931 Stalin made a remarkable prophecy. “Do you want our socialist fatherland to be beaten and to lose its independence?” he asked. “If you do not want this, you must put an end to its backwardness in the shortest possible time and develop a genuine Bolshevik tempo in building up its socialist economy … We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must catch up this distance in ten years. Either we do it or we go under.”  Operation Barbarossa was exactly a decade away.

--Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century (New York: Vintage Books, 2000), 120-121.