[jabl]

I'm not sure the forced collectivization failed in the metrics that mattered to Stalin. The collectivization did really massively increase agricultural productivity enabling huge numbers of workers to be moved into factory work in the cities. Many people, including in the West, were in awe of the supposed communist productivity miracle.

Now, in retrospect we can say it was just the process of industrialization played out in a super-compressed timeline, and not due to the inherent economic superiority of communism. But it wasn't clear at the time, it was really an open question whether communism was a economically superior system. Which made the capitalist class really afraid, and caused various forms of communist repression in the West like McCarthyism.

As an aside, it wasn't like industrialization as a process was all roses in the West either. Enclosure of the commons drove masses of subsistence farmers into brutal factory work in the cities.