From Moscow to St. Petersburg, from St. Petersburg to Volkhov and Vitegra, and to Luza, Onega, and Arkhangelsk, accompanied by General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Sverdlov and other high-level leaders, Natsuki and his entourage visited dozens of Russian towns and cities along the way by special train, and traveled a long journey of more than 1,500 kilometers. Pen ~ Fun ~ Pavilion www.biquge.info In this era of rapid development of the aviation industry, taking a train may seem inefficient, but it is a good choice to appreciate the customs along the way, understand the achievements of national construction and the actual situation.

Whether it is stopping on the pitch of the St. Petersburg Naval Academy or looking out on the shores of the Barents Sea, Natsuki is full of emotion. His last visit to Russia was in the winter of 1918, when the Russian Empire had just suffered a crushing defeat in World War I, and the whole country was like a tree with a dry outer skin and a crisp inside, and could no longer withstand the wind and rain. More than 20 years later, the imperial power of Tsarist Russia has long since disappeared, and Russia under the leadership of the Soviet power has shown the world its strong recovery through great industrial and military achievements, but is this red ship really as unstoppable as the outside world thinks?

In this world, the fall of Tsarist Russia and the birth of Soviet Russia were slightly later than the old time and space, and when the Soviet power overthrew the Tsarist Empire, the country's territory had shrunk from more than 22 million square kilometers to 17 million square kilometers, and the ruling population had plummeted from 170 million to 110 million. As a result of the devastating blow of the war, Russia's agricultural output was only 55% of its pre-war level, its industrial output fell by 90%, the power industry and the machine-building industry were still in their infancy, and there were almost no machine tool industries, chemical plants, and automobile factories. On a per capita level, it was undoubtedly the most backward country in Europe - in 1918 Russian pig iron production was 20 kilograms per year, 302 kilograms in Germany, 208 kilograms in Great Britain and 316 kilograms in the United States. Coal production is 0.2 tonnes per person in Russia, 3.3 tonnes in Germany, 6.3 tonnes in the United Kingdom, 5.3 tonnes in the United States, and 2.5 kilograms per person in Russia, 27 kilograms in Germany, 19 kilograms in the United Kingdom, and 14 kilograms in the United States. Two of the best examples of the situation are that during the Great War, the Russian army conscripted a total of 15 million soldiers, but its military industry only made 3 million rifles; At the level of industry in 1918, without taking into account imports, a Russian peasant who bought a plough and a harrow in 1920 could not count on buying these things again until 2045.

Fortunately for the Russians, the founder of the Bolshevik Party, the founder of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, the great teacher and spiritual leader of the international proletarian revolution, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, that is, Comrade Lenin, lived in this time and space until 1931. During his 15 years in power, there was no terrible purge in Soviet Russia, nor did it move towards bad totalitarianism, and the New Economic Policy for the transition to socialism continued until the end of the 20s, which played a crucial role in the cultivation and recuperation of Soviet Russia (the core of the New Economic Policy was to replace the surplus grain collection system with a grain tax, which greatly reduced the burden on the peasants, increased the enthusiasm of the peasants to engage in agricultural production, and allowed foreign-funded enterprises and the state to temporarily manage enterprises that were unable to operate, restore the role of commodity-money relations in regulating production). By the time Lenin died and Sverdlov came to power, Soviet Russia had basically gotten rid of the situation of poverty and whiteness, the people were not only able to fill their stomachs, but also had the conditions and energy to improve their lives, the social unemployment rate fell to zero, and the scale of industry dwarfed many European countries: 4.02 million tons of pig iron per year, 3.4 million tons of steel, and 47 million tons of coal. The per capita value of these three industrial outputs has doubled compared with the peak value of the Tsarist era, and an independent automobile, tractor and aircraft industry has been established, which can manufacture 14,000 cars, 22,000 tractors, 22,000 and 1,500 airplanes every year, thus driving the modernization and rapid development of the whole society, agricultural output has increased year after year, and the total grain output is 40% higher than that of Tsarist Russia, which had the "granary of Ukraine" in those years!

During Sverdlov's 16 years in power, the overall strength of Soviet Russia continued the previous development trend: the total population increased to 140 million, the natural resources of Siberia and the Far East were exploited, the scale of industry continued to expand, and the level of technology increased rapidly, especially after the occupation of Northeast China, the economic power of Soviet Russia was further improved. According to official data from the Russian government, in 1946 the total power generation reached 120 billion kWh, coal production exceeded 90 million tons, and steel production exceeded 10 million tons for the first time. In addition, during the Soviet-Japanese War of 1942-1944, through the introduction and absorption of Western technology, the military industry of Soviet Russia was qualitatively improved compared with the pre-war period, and a variety of high-performance fighters and bombers were put into production one after another, so that the Russian Air Force for the first time had a capital comparable to that of Western powers, and the modernization and heavyness of armored combat vehicles greatly improved the combat effectiveness of the Soviet Russian Army, and its national defense strategy also changed from strategic defense to both offensive and defensive......

After Ireland and Wales were on a good track of national functioning, Natsuki was able to take a break from his tedious routine work and focus partly on his family, and partly on the field of mechanical design and military organization, which he was interested in and excelled in, while he also kept a close eye on the world and the developments of major countries, and Russia, a close European neighbor, has always been one of his focuses. Thanks to the unremitting efforts of two generations of Soviet and Russian leaders, the country's industrial and economic strength has leapt into the ranks of great powers, but its agriculture has not been able to escape the regrets of the old time and space. The "NEP" has achieved remarkable results, but in the consciousness of the leaders of Soviet Russia, it is a transitional policy with a capital nature, a special method in a special period. As the formulator and promoter of the "New Economic Policy", Lenin was always in mind about the idea of collectivization of agriculture, and he felt that "small production produces capitalism and the bourgeoisie on a regular basis, every hour of the day, spontaneously and in large quantities", and Sverdlov, as Lenin's right-hand man and faithful believer, inherited this idea ideologically. On the basis of several years of experimentation and exploration, the Russian government officially abolished the "New Economic Policy" in 1933 and set sail at full speed towards the goal of "total collectivization". In 1933, 8 per cent of the total number of peasant households participated in collective farms, in 1934 it increased to 27 per cent, in 1935 it was 59 per cent, in 1936 it was 64 per cent, in 1937 it was 70 per cent, in 1938 it was 79 per cent. In the course of the general collectivization movement, the Soviet Russian government pursued a policy of relying on the poor peasants, uniting the middle peasants, and eliminating the kulaks, forcibly converting the confiscated kulak property into collective farm provident funds, and expelling the kulaks from their own districts and oblasts, and forbidding them to join the collective farms. In order to facilitate the collectivization movement, the government gave preferential treatment to collective farms in the distribution of land, the supply of machinery and tractors, seeds, the reduction of taxes, the granting of loans, etc.

"The ideal is very full, but the reality is very backbone." This sentence is a fitting summary of the effectiveness of the collectivization of agriculture in Soviet Russia. In 1938, when the Soviet Russian government announced that "the goal of agricultural collectivization has been basically achieved," grain output was only 72 percent of that in 1931, which was lower than the bottom line of grain self-sufficiency, not only because agricultural collectivization seriously dampened the peasants' enthusiasm and initiative in production, but also because the policy infringed on the interests of the middle peasants in the process of implementation, and did not give the rich peasants a way out, causing the peasants everywhere to strongly resist, and even poisoning their livestock and burning grain. According to statistics, in the process of collectivization, millions of peasants were expelled, a considerable number of them, especially sick women and children, lost their lives in the process of exile, and about 60 percent of their horses, 70 percent of their cattle and sheep, and 80 percent of their pigs were reported missing in the process of compulsory rural collectivization...... Natsuki and his entourage visited many collective farms along the way, and although they all showed the visitors the theoretical superiority of agricultural collectivization, the forced smiles of the laborers and the concealment of the stockpiled materials could not escape the eyes of the shrewd!

After visiting the limited industrial facilities in the port of Arkhangelsk in January, the group headed north to the last stop of the trip, Murmansk. When the port was founded in 1899, it was a small, remote and inhospitable naval base, but in 1916 Murmansk really developed after the opening of the railway connecting the Russian hinterland. As the only ice-free port in northern Russia, Murmansk today has become a large port city with a population of nearly one million, chimneys and cranes, warehouses and factories.

The overall strength of the modern Tsarist Russian Navy is not weak, but its ships are not as concentrated as the British Home Fleet or the German High Seas Fleet, but are scattered and deployed in the four major sea areas of the North, the Baltic Sea, the Black Sea, and the Pacific Ocean. In the Russo-Japanese War, the Japanese Navy, which was not superior in strength, made full use of this point and adopted the tactic of destroying one by one, first annihilating the Russian Pacific Fleet, and then thwarting the 2nd Pacific Fleet, which was composed of ships drawn from the Russian Baltic Fleet and the Black Sea Fleet, resulting in a great loss of vitality of the Tsarist Russian Navy. After that, until the fall of Tsarist Russia, the Russian navy never returned to its pre-1904 appearance. When the Russian Red Navy was founded, it inherited from the Tsarist Navy a dilapidated mess, not only with defective ships and aging equipment, but worse, the independence of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia made Russia's strategic situation in the Baltic Sea deteriorate, and the fall of Ukraine caused Russia to lose its shipbuilding base in the Black Sea. In such a strategic environment, the Northern Fleet, which was previously the weakest, gradually became one of the main forces of the Soviet Russian government's emphasis on development, not only nearly half of the main ships were deployed here for a long time, but also established the Northern Shipbuilding Industrial Zone with Murmansk as the center. By the 40s, the shipbuilding industry in the Murmansk region had surpassed Leningrad on the Baltic coast and Vladivostok on the Pacific coast, becoming the largest shipbuilding center in Soviet Russia, and the Northern Shipyard located in the port of Murmansk was known as the "first shipyard" of Soviet Russia, with the ability to build light and heavy cruisers and large submarines, and the first aircraft carrier in Russia's history, the medium aircraft carrier with the code name W, was built here in the spring of 1945.

(End of chapter)