During the second half of the 1920s, Joseph Stalin set the stage for gaining absolute power by employing police repression against opposition elements within the Communist Party. The machinery of coercion had previously been used only against opponents of Bolshevism, not against party members themselves.

Serving in the Russian Civil War before overseeing the Soviet Union’s establishment in 1922, Stalin assumed leadership over the country following Lenin’s 1924 death.

many factors enabled Stalin to gain power in 1925. These include Trotsky’s mistakes, Stalin’s cunning, luck and Lenin’s testament. Once Stalin gained power he enforced his power through several different methods, including fear, cult of personality, education and youth groups, propaganda, purges and force & compulsion.

In the decades after it was established, the Russian-dominated Soviet Union grew into one of the world’s most powerful and influential states and eventually encompassed 15 republics–Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, Belorussia, Uzbekistan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Latvia.

Of course there were no legal millionaires in the Soviet Union (and illegal ones, too). One million rubles was a HUGE amount as the salary for most of the people was about 100 rubles (or 200–300 rubles at best for very high-level people) and the official price of a new car was several thousand rubles.

Under the Imperial Russian penal system, those convicted of less serious crimes were sent to corrective prisons and also made to work. Forced exile to Siberia had been in use since the seventeenth century for a wide range of offenses and was a common punishment for political dissidents and revolutionaries.

‘Gulags’ (Glavnoe upravlenie lagerej) were formally closed in 1960, and starting in 1953 there were significant reductions in their population. But it shows that the Gulag system was already on the way out. However, forced labor persists even after the formal dissolution of the Gulag.