From my reading ("Stalin's Secret War," the "KGB Chronicles" and others), beyond the millions sent to the Gulag for "political incorrectness", there were the hundreds of thousands of POWs freed from German captors to be returned home, only to be shot or exiled because "they had seen the West."

This was not new with Stalin, but concentration camps (long used by the Tsars under less harsh conditions -- food, clothing, labor, etc) were re-employed by Lenin by 1919 to combat anti-revolutionary rebellions across the country. At least according to Solzhenitsyn.

On my first trip to Ukraine, I visited the remains of a Baptist church which was destroyed in the late 1930's -- every man in the church was sent to the camps and never returned because... they were Baptists. Many Orthodox and Catholic priests suffered the same fate.

Industrialization? Perhaps. But behind the "building of a nation" was the single-minded 'power of the State.'