It was a difficult journey: first the revolution and the civil war, the famine of 1921, and the premature death of the visionary leader Vladimir Lenin in 1924. Then came a new upheaval in the late 1920s under Lenin's successor, Joseph Stalin, with the rapid pace of forced industrialization and the collectivization of agriculture, resulting in the famine of 1932-1933. This was followed by the terrible bloodshed of the Great Purge in 1937-1938, which particularly harshly affected the communist elite, soon to be followed by World War II, when the previously pariah state became an ally of the West. With the end of the war and the hard-won victory came the unexpected and sudden rise of the Soviet Union as a superpower within the framework of a Cold War with the West.