What Was Joseph Stalin's Five Year Plan

Joseph Stalin is one of the most controversial leaders in world history. He transformed the Soviet Union into a totalitarian regime and an industrial and political power.Stalin was born in 1878, in Georgia, a Southern region in Russia. He became general secretary of the communist party in 1922 after Lenin’s stroke, and climbed up to the head of the government. Stalin’s goal was to have a perfect communist state through totalitarian rule. Stalin’s ways to achieve this were cruel and lead to an estimated 34 million to 49 million deaths from causes such as starvation and execution. I think that Stalin was a cruel ruler who wanted too much power and control. He ruled with the help of fear, and did what would benefit him the most without taking

It set ridiculously high quotas and impossible goals to increase the Soviet Union’s coal, steel, oil, and electricity output. According to Document 2 the goal was to increase electricity output by 11.95 million kWh, increase coal production from 35.4 million tonnes to 68 million tonnes, oil production from 11.7 million tonnes to 19 million tonnes, and steel production from 4 million tonnes to 8.3 million tonnes in only 5 years. These goals were impractical and inaccessible. Stalin released another Five-Year Plan in 1933, where he wanted to increase steel production by 25%. Because of the excessive objectives that had to be reached the government limited production of the consumer’s goods. This lead to famine, and housing, clothing, and other necessities shortages. Document 3 shows that coal production increased by 110 million metric tons in ten years from 1928 to 1938, during the two Five-Year Plans. However, Document 5 shows how drastically livestock decreased during the two Five-Year Plans. In ten years the livestock population decreased by 16 million. As a result of the Five-Year Plans the industrial output was 5.8 times larger than in 1913 in 1937, and the Soviet Union was the first European country with that volume of mass production. In 1940, there were 9,971,000 industrial workers, three times the amount in 1928 before the Five-Year Plans. This meant that the working class was

The Kulaks in Ukraine resisted collectivization, and murdered officials, torched the property of collectives, and even burned down their own crops in protest. Stalin declared that they should liquidate the Kulaks as a class. Adrian Karatnycky wrote “Ukrainian victims of starvation at 4.5 million to 7 million... Stalin used the forced famine as a part of a political strategy whose aim was to crush all vestiges of Ukrainian national sentiments.”(Document 7) Stalin took away Ukrainian’s food, causing mass starvation and famine. More than 3 million Ukrainians were shot, exiled, or imprisoned. About 6 million people died from the government-engineered famine. Stalin eliminate the Kulaks because they didn’t support him to show that he did controll Ukraine. In 1937 and 1938 the French ambassador attended the public trials that were a part of the “Great Purges”. He wrote “The lessons they (the accused) recited must have been forced from them... It is most likely the GPU [secret police] touched at his weak point...Some would give in to save their families, others in the hope of saving their own lives.” (Document 9) This is saying that at the trials, and outside of the trials people were being controlled by the secret police and desperately trying to keep their families