In the late 1920s, the ruling Communist Party of the Soviet Union, under theleadership of its General Secretary, Joseph Stalin, launched a series of‘socialist offensives’, a revolution that transformed the country.Within a few short years, the USSR bore little resemblance to the country it hadbeen. In the 1920s, the Soviet Union was a minor industrial power, a poor butresource-rich country, based on a large but primitive agrarian network ofsmall-hold peasant farms. By the late 1930s, very few individual farms remained.The country’s agricultural production had been forcibly reorganised on amassive and mechanised scale. Most of the rural population lived on hugestate-managed agrifarm complexes. Through state planning and forced investment,industrial production had doubled, then tripled and quadrupled. By the beginningof the Second World War, the Soviet Union had become an industrial military poweron the scale of the most advanced countries. The Great Patriotic War, as theSecond World War was called, accelerated these modernising processes, and broughtabout other major changes. The country, which had been nearly 80 per cent rural inthe late 1920s, was, by the early 1950s, becoming increasingly urbanised, mobileand educated. Literacy rates had soared as the result of intensive state spendingon education. Roads, rail lines, radio and air travel connected the previouslyisolated parts of the country. Cultures that had had no language boasted their ownschools, organised national institutions, written literary traditions and legalstatus as nations within the Soviet state.