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.
According to Doc. 4, the USSR produced 35.4 million tons of coal, 11.7 million tons of oil, 3.3 million tons of iron, and 4 million tons of steel in 1927. With Stalin in office, these numbers increased greatly in 1932. According to the Background Doc., “Stalin implemented collectivization which combined all of the agricultural farms into large state-owned farms and forced the peasants to work on them,
Post WWl, Russia was still not industrialized, suffering economically and politically and in no doubt in need of a leader after Lenin’s death. “His successor, Joseph Stalin, a ruthless dictator, seized power and turned Russia into a totalitarian state where the government controls all aspects of private and public life.” Stalin showed these traits by using methods of enforcement, state control of individuals and state control of society. The journey of Stalin begins now.
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.
When the Ukraine was part of the USSR, it had the most productive farms that produced many vegetables and fruits. Then, this was all taken, from collective farming, and Ukrainians starved, “That summer, the vegetables couldn’t even ripen - people pulled them out of the ground - still green - and ate them.” (Document 3). Ukraine was full of starving and dying people. A mass famine was generating.
3: Dr. Oleh W. Gerus, “The Great Ukrainian Famine-Genocide,” Centre for Ukrainian Canadian Studies, University of Manitoba, August 4, 2001 (adapted)) Stalin’s policies had stripped Ukrainians of their hard-working, individualistic values, turning the country into a voiceless machine used to make more grain to be
Natasha Sazonova and Lana Babij (2015), state that Stalin enforced a program called “agricultural collectivization.” Through this Stalin “forced [Ukrainian] farmer to give up their private land, equipment and livestock, and join state owned, factory-like
Litvin illustrated one of the numerous examples of Soviet nationalism when he discussed how the military collected food from the collective farms. Litvin Claims, “Times were very difficult for the people in these regions because land had been devastated by war… the army did not have to seize food from the peasants—Soviet authority engaged in this.” The above passage paints the Soviets’ handling of peasants in a positive light and does nothing to ponder the impact that collectivization had on agriculture in the country. Certainly, the harsh occupation by the Germans did not help the agriculture production, but the relentless collectivization of farming ruined the efficiency of agriculture in the Soviet Union. However, Litvin in no way paints Stalin in a negative light, but rather boasts about how Soviet authorities procured agriculture goods from peasants.
Joseph Stalin became dictator of the Soviet Union in 1928 (“Joseph Stalin – Powerful Communist Ruler”) after the death of Russia’s former ruler Vladimir Lenin (“Joseph Stalin”). In the late 1920’s he created a sequence of five year plans which were created to alter the Soviet Union from a peasant society into a country that was industrially advanced (“Joseph Stalin.”) after he realised Russia was far behind in comparison to the west (“Joseph Stalin.”). The idea was for the government to control the economy in which they forced collectivization of Soviet agriculture, the idea in which the government controlled farming.
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 author, Robert Conquest, argues that the Ukrainian Famine was indeed and should be considered a genocide. In his chapter of “The End of the Free Peasantry” Conquest argues that collectivization was to impact in the industrialization in Russia during the time of Stalin; without having the grain and agricultural benefits of the Ukraine, Russia would not be able to keep up with movement of industrialization and feeding those who worked in the factories, hence the taking of grain from Ukraine was essential. In order to support his argument, Conquest provides data to demonstrate the percentage amounts of exporting grain from Ukraine into Russia, and how in some cases each year the amount would increase leaving less amounts for the Ukrainians
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 Bolsheviks which was a political party soon to be called “the Communist party” led by Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky had maintained control of the country’s economy during the civil war (November 1917 – October 1922). At the end of the war Lenin decided that if they returned to a market economy it would help the country recover from the three years of destruction that the war had brought. Lenin’s “New Economic Policy”, or NEP, helped the Soviet Union to have some time to live in prosperity and it allowed the government to strengthen its political position and also time to rebuild the country’s infrastructure.
Joseph Stalin was and still is universally known for his harsh leadership in the Soviet Union. To examine the extent of his cruelness, World Civilization II: The Rise and Fall of Empires© 1500-present stated, "Stalin was not a communist; he was a sociopath. He enjoyed hurting people and ordering their deaths. In his time as dictator of the Soviet Union, he was responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of his people, and the cruel torture and imprisonment of millions more" (Sattler, 71).
I would rather live under Stalin's rule. I chose this as Hitler was racist and prejudice and targeted anyone that wasn't part of the Aryan race, while Stalin killed specifically out of cowardice. Though both of these men have no reason for what they did, Stalin’s rule would be much easier to live under. This is because to survive you would just need to keep to yourself and not give any reason to cause suspicion to yourself. While under Hitler’s rule if you could be a devout Christian who supported his rule but yet have an ancestor that happen to be Jewish you were immediately deemed inferior.
