Here is the paragraph before it:
The trauma of these years broke the Russian working class. By 1921, Lenin would go so far as to argue that the working class, “owing to the war and to the desperate poverty and ruin, has become declassed, i.e., dislodged from its class groove, and has ceased to exist as a proletariat.” The withering away of the state had reversed. In place of local working-class militias organizing themselves, the Bolsheviks were forced to professionalize the Red Army. In place of vibrant democracy and frequent elections, famine and unemployment discouraged political participation. In place of a multiparty state with competing parties, the other political parties turned on the Bolsheviks and were in turn banned under the exigencies of civil war. The material conditions for a healthy workers’ state were destroyed. Antidemocratic measures initially justified as wartime necessities mutated into virtues as the revolutionaries grimly hung on for dear life.
It’s conflating Stalin’s paranoia over getting backstabbed by other party leaders and other political interests with the practical operation of the collective economy, without drawing a thread from “Stalin offing someone he thought was going to off him” to “workers having less control over their worksites.” Also, a comrade on here argued that it was more so Kruschev who was responsible for state consolidation of production than Stalin (if someone had better knowledge of this than I please chime in).
You're only paranoid if they're not really out to get you.
As it turned out, Stalin wasn't paranoid.