Socialist programs such as collectivization have increased the quality of life for the people of the Soviet Union, lengthening their lives and industrializing the nation. It's not magic, however, as the country is still based in the same geography that impoverished it to begin with. Regardless of the policies which are implemented, the Soviet Union will still have summer bogs and winter freezing -- those things are imaginably very difficult to change. However, consider the alternative -- for Russia to have remained as it were, suffering the full force of every famine, which before collectivization came every ten years. After the program matured, however, there was not a single major famine in the USSR after 1947, and even at that one it was suffered largely as a result of the war.