On the one hand, I want to say that Stalinism not only created the ability for Russia to wage industrial warfare, it also created the adversary and the necessity for doing so: the third period of the Comintern, when Nazis and Communists shared the conviction that the destruction of the Weimar Republic was job 1.
On the other hand, I have to admit that once the Nazis and Communists had destroyed the Weimar Republic, the rest of us have turned out to owe an enormous debt to the workers of Magnitogorsk, without whom we would in all likelihood be living inside an even more dystopian novel than we are today.
Brad DeLong