Russian Revolution In 1922, as a result of the Russian Revolution, a new political party emerged: the USSR or the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was the world’s first communist state. Communism was a new political and economic model that was supposed to get rid of class distinction. From the beginning, communism opposed capitalism and capitalist countries like the United States. The Russian Revolution united the socialists against the capitalists, with the USSR, a communist country, siding with the socialists.
STALIN Stalin had both positive and negative effects on the Soviet Union during his time of rule. He brought forth many great ideas, but these ideas also affected the Union in a negative way. The five year plan was a system that Stalin came up with. This meant that they would follow a plan for five years, then when that five years was up, they would follow a different plan. He believed that this would help the Soviet Union keep up at a pace that the rest of the world was moving.
From 1928, when the plan started, to 1932 to its end, many factories, dams, power stations and even cities were being built. Despite there being harsh penalties implemented to workers for failure to meet their targets, there was still a significant increase in Russia’s industrial growth in a very short period of time. Just like the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, under Tsar Alexander II, in protest of Stalin’s policies, the peasants, in protest, refused to work harder than they needed too, causing them to destroy livestock and crops, which eventually lead to their unnecessary death. Stalin, just like the Tsarist autocratic regime, was not committed to collectivism but preferred capitalism in his ruling of the Soviet Union. This caused a lot of rebellion from the Kulaks who opposed collectivism.
This was similar to the United States of America, as the US was also trying to industrialize with a purpose of factories and people working in them. A big factor of the industrialization that both America and Russia shared was that both of these countries had a very unfair system for workers. The pay was not great, and people who were poor had it even worse. There is even an old saying that fits this very well, “The rich get richer”. This is true because the people who were already poor, who were working for the money so they could afford things like homes, food, water, and clothing, were staying poor, because their pay was so low that at the rate of them using their money for necessities, they were earning barely enough to afford them.
Following the death of Vladimir Lenin in 1914, Joseph Stalin took up his position as leader of the Soviet Union. After rising to power, Stalin made drastic changes to Russia that was still torn from war at the time. With his power, Stalin aimed to bring Russia to the top of the world. In the end, while he pushed the Soviet Union’s economy to new heights, his methods were cruel and had negative impacts. After the war, Stalin was determined to turn Russia into a great industrial power.
This created a mass genocide of the poor peasants in the Ukraine. The starvation created cannibalistic tendencies within the people. Many people were convicted of cannibalism, “There was cannibalism in our village. On my farmstead, an 18 year-old boy, Danylo Hukhlib, died, that his mot younger sisters and brothers cut him up and ate him.” (Document 3).
Steel production and the electricity generation increased. Another focus for Stalin was on agriculture. His plan was to use collective farming to produce more food by less people. The people working these farms objected the idea and often destroyed their crops and livestock rather than giving it to the government. Stalin’s response to this was to take the food by force and kill any protesters.
The Five-Year Plans were a series of goals which each took five years to complete, that were aimed at quickly improving the economy and industrialisation of the USSR so that it could compete with Western Capitalist countries. According to Stalin in a speech on 7 January 1933, the first Five Year Plan was a great success in terms of its outputs, and furthermore because the working class was able to complete the first Plan ahead of schedule in only four years16(Source B).The Plan was successful in creating an iron and steel industry, a tractor industry, a machine-tool industry, a chemical industry, an agricultural machinery industry and an aircraft industry16(Source B). In addition, the USSR now ranked among the first for electricity, oil products and coal outputs in the world16(Source B).In another speech delivered by Stalin in April 1928, Stalin discusses the modernisation of agriculture and puts forward his idea of Collectivization to increase agricultural outputs for the USSR17(Source C). Stalin knew that agricultural production and development was very slow, and was thus negatively affecting the country’s economy17(Source C). Stalin blamed this slow development on the fact that the USSR still had an “insecure” and “primitive” system of economy because of
It was a really tragic thing that could have happened. 2. Five-year Plan: What is the five-year plan and what was it for? The five-year plan was a plan “launched by Stalin in 1928, and termed the revolution from above, aimed at modernizing the Soviet Union”. This helps see that Stalin wanted a better Soviet Union that was stronger.
Stalin obtained a significant focus on heavy industry, for he knew it would only bring benefits to those who follow him; however, his viewpoint of what could be accomplished opposed to what people in the USSR believed can be achievable. The first plan adopted by the party in 1928 “set goals that were unrealtic- a 250 percent increase in overall industrial development and a 330 percent expansion in heavy industry alone” (Document 1). People believed that the USSR was still in its developing stage; therefore, a demand in increasing industrial production by a large amount will not happen in a short period of time. Problems began to evolve due to the unrealistic demands Stalin put into place. Managers and company owners believed that the quote they had to achieve was unreasonable leading to conflict.
The Mexican Revolution of 1910 and the Russian Revolution of 1917 both had similar goals, to give power to the working class. However, they had very different outcomes, one oppressive, and one victorious. The goals of the Russian Revolution was to remove power from the aristocracy. Russia had suffered under centuries of oppression.
During the 1930s the Soviet Union went through several changes economically and socially. Some historians see what happened in the Soviet Union at this time as a Second Revolution. However, this is an understatement as the Soviet Union actually went through more than one revolution at this time. This period saw rapid political, social, industrial and agricultural change that shaped the future of the Soviet Union and arguably the 20th century as a whole. All four of these changes worked together to form a rapid socioeconomic revolution.
Under the breadths of communism, Stalin reorganized the economy and changed labor prioritization. Executing a total of 3 individual 5-year plan installments, Stalin began to change the long ancient farmland based economy into an industrial superpower. These centralized economic plans were instated by a state planning committee that followed communistic economic principles. In this manner, the 5-year plans called for rapid industrialization through heavy industry. Joshua R. Keefe wrote for the Student Pulse: “ . . .
The French Revolution and the Russian Revolution have an astronomical amount of similarities. Such as in their government, the poverty/class structure and the radical uprisings. For example, both countries had strict rule, France having absolute monarchy and Russia having autocracy, prior to the revolutions. Poverty and bread shortages were very common amongst the peasantry during both revolutions. Another example is they both had a high populations of peasants and workers in their time.
Furthermore, the achievement of the First Five-year Plan during its first year further displayed that Soviet Russia had the initial means the allow the Plan to be a success. That said, it was Stalin’s overambitious resetting of the goals that ultimately led to the Plan’s failure to meet its desired means. The overall goals that Stalin had set for the First Five-Year Plan had proven themselves to be unobtainable, as the outcomes of the industry did not meet his endeavors in the long run. Thus, it was Stalin’s own ego while setting goals that caused the actually successful increases to be undermined as failures in comparison to Stalin’s unrealistic
