In the first years of the USSR, the entire society was in chaos. Due to issues such as forced collectivization and bad planning there were famines, paranoia in the upper echelons of power led to massive purges and thousands of skilled people were killed and in addition to that they were largely cut off from the world.

The mass mobilisation of society due to the German invasion changed a lot of that, and after that Soviet society industrialised very quickly and became a powerhouse. The post-war years were actually very productive, and that coincided with the Soviet Union becoming a superpower that was stronger than any country aside from the United States.

Very little of their economic growth had anything to do with forced labour or the GULAG system. The prisoners did do some of the work on some of the Soviet Union's major infrastructure projects like the White Sea-Baltic Canal and many of the country's mineworkers and steelworkers were forced labourers but all in all they made up quite a small percentage of the Soviet Union's workforce. In 1953 there were approximately 1,700,000 people in work camps which seems like quite a lot of people but keep in mind that the population of the Soviet Union in 1951 was over 182,000,000.