Then it was a state with a task: to build socialism by imitating capitalism and then overcoming it. Stalinism was a vision of the future that justified millions of deaths by starvation and another million or so by execution in the 1930s. The Second World War changed the story. Stalin and his supporters and successors all claimed after 1945 that the self-inflicted carnage of the 1930s had been necessary to defeat the Germans in the 1940s. If the 1930s were about the 1940s, then they were not about a distant future of socialism.
