in the beginning-mid 20th century many countries experienced huge economic growth by transferring the resources from the ineffective agrarian sector to the much more effective industrial sector

No they didn’t. Brazil was comparable in all statistics to USSR in 1917 in population size, huge country size, literacy rates, life expectancy etc.

Look at Brazil today… It’s a basket case completely a pawn of Western imperialism with it’s people living in the shanty towns and favelas

or is this damage inevitable and stalin basically had no choice and his strategy was the only effective and fast one?

Stalin led the USSR through hell. The question here is was the first 5 year plan which threw the country into turmoil necessary? Could the USSR have slowed down industrialisation (as Bukharin had wanted to do) given the fact the USSR was on a timer until the Nazi invasion of 1941?

Well here’s what Issac Deutscher thinks

The truth was the war could not have been won without the intensive industrialisation of Russia, and of her eastern provinces in particular. Nor could it have been won without the collectivsation of large numbers of farms.

The muzhik of 1930, who had never handled a tractor or any other machine would have been of little use in modern war. Collectivised farming, with its machine-tractor statiosn scattered all over the country, had been the peasants ‘preparatory school’ for mechanised warfare.

The rapid raising of the average standard of education had also enabled the Red Army to draw on its considerable reserve of intelligent officers and men. “We are fifty to a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this lag in 10 years. Either we do it, or they crush us.” - So Stalin had spoken exactly ten years before Hitler set out to conquer Russia.

His words, when they were recalled now, could not but impress people as a prophecy brilliantly fulfilled, as a most timely call to action.

And indeed, a few years delay in the modernisation of Russia might have made all the difference between victory and defeat .

• Isac Deutscher, Stalin biography

Deutscher argues that if there was even a tiny lag in this industrialisation the the Soviet Union loses world war 2 (which I agree with).

And let’s not mince words over what that means for the Soviet people and the Soviet Union if they did lose. It means Hitler gets the Ukrainian oil fields, the industrial might of the USSR and the peasants for slave labour. It means he conquers Britain quite quickly afterward so you have a Hitler empire stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

I’ll reproduce the table the Nazis had planned for extermination of the Slavic race under General Plan Ost which was basically a copy of what the Americans did to the natives

Ethnic group / Nationality targeted Percentages of ethnic groups to be eliminated by Nazi Germany from future settlement areas.[17][18][19]

Russians[20] 70 million

Estonians[19][21] almost 50%

Latvians[19] 50%

Czechs[18] 50%

Ukrainians[18][22] 65% to be deported from West Ukraine, 35% to be Germanized

Belarusians[18] 75%

Poles[18] 20 million, or 80–85%

Lithuanians[19] 85%

Latgalians[19] 100%

Not only did Stalin play a huge part in Russia not being a total basket case like Brazil today (if he had gone down some bullshit liberal democracy) but he was instrumental in A) Raising the Soviet people and the slavic race into equals with the West and preventing their extermination as a peoples B) Winning world war 2 and C) Literally saved the world from Nazism

Can you tell us more about the background of your ancestors? I want to give you an earnest answer that could hopefully help clarify the situation for you, contributing some more to what @XiangMai@lemmygrad.ml said and zooming in a little further towards the ground situation in the USSR at the time. Before I can do that, I need to know what the specific situation of your ancestors was.

What happened to them? What was their ethnic and class background? What were their political tendencies? What area did they live in? In what period did these severe actions against your ancestors occur and what do you personally know about the specific circumstances of the incidents in question? You are right to say that there were certainly casualties of Stalin’s policies, but whether or not your ancestors would have been better off under different circumstances depends greatly on the answer to these questions. If they were Ukrainian, Belarussian or a multitude of other ethnicities, including the predominant Russians, they would have almost certainly have been genocided by a successful Nazi invasion, for example. The historical context of Stalin’s policies are absolutely key to recognising why things turned out the way they did; why certain cruelties occurred, why state priorities were what they were.