First, I'm not quite sure you appreciate the cost of that industrialization. The USSR achieved fast extensive growth in its early years by forcing a very high savings rate. What does that mean? They exported lots of grain to buy machinery. Where did the grain come from? The peasants. What did the peasants do after their grain was taken? They starved. The general attitude during this time (which helped the Party consolidate power) was not so much of withholding food from dissidents, but rather withholding food from anyone who couldn't make a convincing case for how they were benefiting the party or the state. So most of the progress in bring up the USSR industrial capacity per person was due to increasing industrial capacity, but a notable part of it was due to decreasing the number of people as well.
Second, forced savings is a good strategy for playing catchup industrially when there are lots of obvious ways you can invest the savings (called extensive growth). Its possible to mess this up (see the Great Leap Forward) but if the beaurocrats are competent its possible. But when you've urbanized and need to start specializing more to keep growing the economy finding efficient ways to do so becomes harder (you're in intensive growth). Its here that government directed industrial policies tend to fail (or at least work more slowly than less directed solutions) due to coordination problems.