I Became Stalin?!

Chapter 196

“How should I thank you for this honor, Comrade Secretary?”

“Hahaha, you are the one who worked hard on this project, aren’t you? You deserve this glory.”

In the outskirts of Moscow, hundreds and thousands of new apartments were being built after the war.

The apartment parts produced in the factory were loaded on large trucks and transported to the construction sites near the big cities. In no time, skilled construction workers assembled several apartments a day.

These apartments were officially named ‘Hrusholka’.

They were named after Hrushchev, who had made great contributions to the plan for the reconstruction and welfare improvement of the Soviet people. 

That’s what they announced, and Hrushchev seemed to think so too.

But he didn’t like it when people called them ‘Stalinka’. Why did they put Stalin’s name on something that was mass-produced and inevitably not very high-quality? So he dumped it on Hrushchev, who was oblivious and touched.

“Minsk, Smolensk, and L’vov are also being rebuilt as a priority. We applied different urban plans to the three cities, as instructed by Comrade Secretary…”

“Hmm, is that so?”

Moscow was spared from the horrors of war, but the western big cities were brutally destroyed by the German army.

They planned to supply tens of thousands of Hrusholkas to rebuild these cities. No, they planned to redesign the cities from scratch.

The cities that had been around for almost a thousand years and had undergone indiscriminate expansion and sprawling for hundreds of years were not very suitable for modern life.

Narrow roads, twisted railways, low-rise buildings that were hard to increase in density, etc. 

These cities were millions of light-years away from ‘modern cities’ and had to be redeveloped someday.

The Soviet leadership also knew the advantages and needs of urban development, but they had no money and couldn’t tear down the cities.

But now they could do both.

So the Soviet Union was playing ‘SimCity’ with the world’s largest country as its background.

“Oh… Is this the new city plan?”

Building a city was not usually a complicated task. 

There were many elements in the city.

First, they needed residential areas where people could live. 

They needed convenience districts and recreational facilities such as parks where they could get their necessities. 

And they also needed production facilities such as factories where the people who lived there could work.

They had to arrange transportation means such as roads and urban railways to connect them, and they also had to include a wide-area railway that would let the things produced in the city flow out. 

They also needed water and electricity, which were essential for urban life, and hinterlands that supplied agricultural products.

The Soviet Union decided to solve this problem in a terribly Soviet way.

“Yes! This is the template that will create our Soviet Union’s new cities.”

They mobilized various mathematicians, urbanists, and experts from each field to create a few standard urban plans, and then copied them and stuck them all over the country.

And according to my command, some modern, or rather futuristic, improvements were introduced.

“But… Aren’t the roads too wide? Do they need to be this wide?”

“That… Point was specially ordered by Comrade Secretary…”

When one of the officers asked, Hrushchev looked at me awkwardly. 

They all seemed to be surprised, but I didn’t bother to press them here.

“First of all, we have to prepare for the possibility of the city expanding further. Considering the population growth and urbanization for the next few decades, the city will naturally expand, won’t it? What will we do if the roads are too narrow to accommodate the population? We can’t tear down all the buildings.”

“Ah… You are indeed Comrade Secretary!”

“And we will supply cars to every household in our Soviet Union! The automotive industry is not only a symbol of the wealth of the people, but also the essence of engineering and a means to show our Soviet Union’s national power to the world.”

Boom! 

As I declared, some of the quick-witted Politburo members nodded.

Cars! 

Cars were the epitome of modern engineering technology and the device that could show it to the people most directly.

Most of the people in the Soviet Union, where they first encountered cars in the army, were shocked by my declaration that we would supply them to every household. But the high-ranking officials understood what it meant.

Hrushchev, who had become the top expert in reconstruction, started to explain my declaration to the people.

“Cars are the industry that will be responsible for our Soviet Union’s heavy industry-based production structure. Along with construction and chemical industry. Maybe we can see these two and cars as the tricycle that supports the heavy industry.”

“Ah…”

“Steel, glass, textiles, precision machining and control measurement, engine, rubber and chemical industry for fuel, etc. The essence of technology that is created by combining modern science and technology is cars. The country that can produce a lot of cars is the great power!”

It was the same in real history. 

Except for the so-called ‘great powers’, the US, Japan, Germany, France, Britain, and Italy, there were not many countries that could produce cars with their own technology.

At best, China and India, which were big countries in terms of population, or some small Nordic countries, and Korea.

Without the automotive industry, they could not develop many other industries that followed it. 

A big country like the Soviet Union had to develop the automotive industry and make it the national core industry.

In real history, they only made shoddy cars by pouring money into the arms race.

“Molotov, you know that, right?”

“Ah! Yes, yes. We decided to develop a cooperation system among the socialist brother countries for this.”

The socialist ‘brother countries’ (another name for satellite countries) also had their own developed industries, so they could produce cars. 

Except for the four occupied countries that had most of their industrial facilities dismantled.

We decided to work with them to jointly develop and produce cars.

“As you know… We don’t need to increase the variety of cars unnecessarily, do we? We need to learn from their advanced technology and take advantage of mass production, so we need to cooperate.”

And there was one more thing, the intention of the Soviet side.

Cars were, as I said before, the total of the science and technology of that country.

If they made it in the Soviet style under the leadership of the Soviet Union, it was no different from putting the science and technology of a country under the Soviet standard.

Would they refuse the familiar Soviet style and accept a new style? Or would they try to create a new independent standard at the cost of inefficiency?

The Soviet Union did not need to show off its hard power to the satellite countries. 

No, showing off was dangerous. 

It was better to inject this soft power into each country and indirectly influence them.

It was the same in Korea and in Europe.

The Soviet leaders had to be ‘fine’.

“And think about it! We can get their technology for almost nothing through joint ventures, and export our machines at a fair price to get the goods we need. And we can also show off our ‘generosity’, can’t we?”

The United States was the country that used this strategy best in real history.

Many people admired the American lifestyle, and enjoyed the American fashion, food, and culture. 

The American troops stationed all over the world drank Coca-Cola, ate McDonald’s, and gave chocolate to the children, and this planted the image of ‘America’ in the people’s minds.

We were planning to do something similar.

The Soviet-style apartments built by the Soviet Union, the Soviet cars developed and poured in with the Soviet Union! What would the families who got a family car at a cheap price thanks to the Soviet Union think of the Soviet Union?

And on top of that, the ‘KFC’ (Kaliningrad Fried Chicken) that was prepared as a rival to McDonald’s, and the Soviet food made from the new varieties of wheat that grew and covered the Central Asian plains!

The United States took dollars strictly, but we didn’t have that in mind, so it was worth a try. 

And while military expansion would raise suspicion, who would care about this non-military expansion?

“We… have a lot of gratitude for our German friends. Don’t we?”

“Hahahaha, yes, Comrade Secretary!”

And the reason why the Soviet Union could plan to compete with the United States in culture was not without the contribution of the Germans.

The German technicians we arrested and brought in were spitting out advanced technology while being ‘canned’ with the Soviet technicians. 

Our technicians, who chewed and tasted and enjoyed the car production facilities that were torn from Germany and Italy, were immersed in research with the feeling of opening up a new frontier.

Now, from our point of view, a new way of importing advanced technology was opened, not the United States!

The German technicians promised us not to treat them badly, and actually did so, and they spilled out what they knew.

“Especially… the various materials that Germany experimented with in the military machine field were very helpful. The fascists made all kinds of weird things!”

“Is that so? Oh, what about Dr. Korolev?”

“Yes! He was very impressed by the data of a man named von Braun. He said that if this goes on, he will achieve the second stage development goal in a few years…”

As expected! Korolev, one of the greatest geniuses born by the Soviet Union, was amazing. 

The United States had not even established NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) yet, and had no idea about space development.

They were just scrapping the Manhattan Project and tearing apart the nuclear bomb we gave them, trying to learn nuclear weapons development, but we were moving ahead.

Korolev, who received the ‘resource concentration’ that was both the advantage and disadvantage of the centralized state, was raising the space development tech, and he was confident that he could say that this was the victory of the Soviet science and technology.

“That… artificial satellite?”

“Yes! Korolev Design Bureau pledged to put an ‘artificial satellite’ in Earth orbit within the next five years.”

The people who knew what this meant opened their mouths.

Now, space was no longer a place where humans could not reach. What if a mechanical device that could be called the territory of the Soviet Union flew around in the area that was the answer to the question of humanity? 

The Sputnik shock would probably be treated as a joke.

And the smart students around the world would admire the Soviet Union as the master of science and technology. 

That’s what we wanted.