The USSR at this stage had been devastated by the war. To What Extent did Stalin Transform the Society and Economy of the Soviet Union? Scott describes the inability of the workers to run the machinery they had been so busy building: “Semi-trained workers were unable to operate the complicated machines which had been erected. It is not intended to provide medical or other professional advice. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1973. As Commissar of Nationalities (a position he acquired in 1917), Stalin widened his contacts with the Bolshevik leaders of the borderlands, many of whom became part of his entourage at the Kremlin later on. Stalin industrialized the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, forcibly collectivized its agriculture, consolidated his position by intensive police terror, helped to defeat Germany in 1941–45, and extended Soviet controls to include a belt of eastern European states. Between 1926 and 1932 the urban population grew from 26 million to 38.7 million. Scholars will debate whether Stalin’s massive terror campaigns were the inevitable outcome of communism for many years, but what became clear during this period is that the violence employed by the Bolsheviks in taking power would only intensify. The Birth of the Propaganda State. Living conditions also remained abysmal. A leadership contest followed throughout the 1920s in which there were five central competitors: Nikolai Bukharin, Lev Kamenev, Joseph Stalin, Leon Trotsky, and Grigory Zinoviev. Many children had been born out of marriage and Moscow by 1930 was awash with a very high number of homeless children who had no family and, as such, were a stain on the perfect communist society that Stalin was trying to create. It is estimated that five to seven million people starved to death (Kenez, 100). Ultimately, the Soviet Union, created in the midst of a battle between Lenin and Stalin, became a compromise between two visions and approaches. ISSN: 2153-5760. His Red Army helped defeat Nazi Germany during WWII. In general, and for most of the population, life in the Soviet Union became extremely difficult and dangerous under Stalin. New York: University of Cambridge Press, 1985. The results of collectivization were not what the regime had hoped. The above segment also exemplifies his knack for hypophora, a literary device where the speaker raises a question and then immediately answers it. Once again, he achieved this through smart adaptation. Stalin and the Drive to Industrialize the Soviet Union. It is time to adopt a new policy, a policy adopted to the present times--the policy of interfering in everything” (Daniels, 182). Often multiple families were forced to share small rooms (Kenez, 96). He presented the need to industrialize as a life or death struggle. Equipment was ruined, men were crushed, gassed and poisoned, money was spent in astronomical quantities” (Scott, 137). It’s easy and free to post your thinking on any topic. Inquiries Journal/Student Pulse [Online], 1. The waste and inefficiency that plagued the struggle to make heavy industry work left over few resources for light industry and consumer goods. About The Journal | Submissions Following two failed assassination attempts, Lenin, following a suggestion from a military leader named Joseph Stalin, authorized the start of the Red Terror, an execution order of former government officials under the Czar and Provisional Government, as well as the royal family. During the first five year plan (1929-1934) there was a fifty percent increase in overall industrial output and an average annual growth rate of eighteen percent. Bukharin fared little better. Many of the workers were from the peasantry and lacked any sort of education, and as a result, heavy industry was run inefficiently. He recognised — unlike some of his opponents — that waiting for a global communist revolution wasn’t very appealing, there was no excitement for such a policy given that the West seemed unlikely to follow suit. He was a very ruthless and paranoid leader who was not afraid to execute those who disagreed with him. As Peter Kenez notes, grain production at the end of the NEP era, a time in which peasants were encouraged to sell their grain and create markets, was still only ninety percent of what it was in 1913, but more importantly, the amount of grain that made it to the market was only half of what it was before the revolution. The collectivization process began in 1927, at which time the decision to move onto collective farms was voluntary. Industrialization was the main component of Stalin’s revolution. His plan relied on government control of the economy and forced the collectivization of Soviet agriculture. By initiating a war on the kulaks, Stalin’s regime succeeded in dividing the peasant class, making them less likely to resist collectivization. Behind the Urals: An American Worker In Russia's City of Steel. , Keefe, Joshua R. 2009. His real name was Josef Besarionis de Jughashvili. By emphasizing output only, and by intentionally setting the target output levels unrealistically high, the Soviet leaders created a system in which poor quality done quickly was preferable to producing quality products at a slower rate. In November 1927, Joseph Stalin launched his “revolution from above” by setting two extraordinary goals for Soviet domestic policy: rapid industrialization and collectivization of agriculture. Lenin, despite possibly good intentions, did not set up the Soviet Union as a particularly democratic state… even though the Constitution of the Soviet Union reads pretty democratic, for the most part. After World War II, the Soviet legal model also was imposed on Soviet-dominated regimes in eastern and central Europe.Later, ruling communist parties in China, Cuba, North Korea, and Vietnam adopted variations of Soviet law. Soon, however, the regime favored the kolhoz, or collective farms, in which the peasants lived and farmed together, and had to pay the state a proportion of their harvest, (usually around forty percent) which was more exploitive and therefore preferable since the peasants had to suffer whatever shortages arose, not the state. Often times in history, one person in particular becomes remembered as the icon of a movement or an event. All the leaders of the Bolshevik revolution understood the inherent problem in starting a communist revolution in Russia: the country was not sufficiently capitalist to become socialist, and subsequently, communist. The Soviet Union was greatly affected by I. Stalin’s death. Of course not! Learn more | Blog | Submit. Furthermore, from the beginning of 1919, he was the only permanent liaison officer between the Politburo and the Orgbureau. Yet, his foolhardy opposition made his task considerably easier. The Stalin Revolution: Foundations of the Totalitarian Era, Behind the Urals: An American Worker In Russia's City of Steel, http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/a?id=1684, Religion, Commodity, or Escape: Sports in Modern American Culture, Redskin and All-American: Jim Thorpe's Malleable Symbolic Significance, Invasion of the Invaded: NAFTA and the Rise of Illegal Immigration, The American Military and the Press: From Vietnam to Iraq. The mass mobilization under Stalin had costs millions of lives. Writer from England. These were owned and operated by the state, with wages paid to the peasants who worked their. Home | Current Issue | Blog | Archives | How did Stalin change the lives of the Soviet people? Stalin saw increased centralization as the means to make the industrialization drive successful. When Stalin accepted the need for collectivisation he also had to change his mind about industrialisation. The Soviet Union was annoyed at what seemed to it to be a long delay by the allies in opening a “second front” of the Allied offensive against Germany. The transition from the old Russia to a truly communist state would require industrialization on a massive scale. It was during this period Stalin consolidated his grip on power and was allowed to rule with impunity, instituting his “revolution from above” on the Soviet people. The Soviet nationality policy for Central Asia in the early twentieth century was an acceleration of the processes of modernization that the Russian Empire had already begun. The kolhozes were forced to hand over a percentage of their crops to the MTS for the use of its equipment, usually around twenty percent. Khrushchev had been a member of Stalin’s inner circle in the early 1930s (records suggest he was a regular attendant at high-level meetings and at Stalin’s private residence for dinners). In order for you to never miss a story, you can subscribe to this monthly newsletter that will keep you up to date with the latest and greatest articles published each week. In the end, the peasants were forced, oftentimes violently, to subsidize the industrialization of Russia by giving up larger and larger amounts of their grain while gaining nothing in return. As was always the case in Stalin’s Russia, terror was the most convincing means of coercion. Vladimir Lenin died on January 21st, 1924. Initially, the state endorsed the soukhoz, or state farms. Yet, he still had to find a way to take down Bukharin. The increases in production were dramatic. Horror Even In Death. The result was that peasants sold their grain to NEP men and others who offered better prices than the government (Kenez 82-3). (Kenez, 82). After Stalin defeated all political opposition, however, collectivization became mandatory, and increasingly violent. According to Marxist theory, only through a modern industrialized economy could a true proletariat class be developed as Marx makes no mention of a peasant class. At that time the largest of the farms were broken up into smaller ones, and the peasants were once again allowed private garden plots, which were more productive then the farms themselves. During the NEP years less than a quarter of the industrial workers were female, by the end of the 1930’s they made up forty percent of the industrial workforce (Kenez 94). By the end of the 1920s, the leadership struggle was over. During his reign, Stalin launched a series of five-year plans. In Stalin’s mind the only way to create ‘ communism within one country’ was through an industrialised Russia, he also believed that the USSR was 100 years behind many capitalist countries and the only way to transform Russia into a key player in the global market was through industrialisation. “Do you want our socialist fatherland to be beaten and to lose its independence?” he asked in a famous February, 1931 speech. Answered 2011-10-31 02:40:29. To turn the Soviet Union into a modern world power. Stalin abandoned Lenin's NEP and took "One Great Leap Foward" to communism. He was ethnically Georgian, but Georgia was part of the Tsarist Russian Empire. Joseph Stalin was a former general secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist party of the Soviet Union. At the end of the 1920s, Stalin launched radical economic policies that literally changed the face of Russia, creating a new industrial and agricultural landscape. Stalin totally hanged the country. Obtaining the maximum amount of grain would require a whole new agricultural system. It gave the Bolshevik Party a sense of agency. Few volunteered. Inquiries Journal/Student Pulse, 1(10). He actively transformed the culture of the time, giving birth to a new Russian nationalism, rejecting the earlier Bolshevik conviction that the family was a bourgeois institution, and even forcing artists and writers to embrace “socialist realism.”. Local districts were required to fill quotas of Kulaks to identify (Kenez, 86). The human costs of both these initiatives were monstrous. The MTSs also had a political department that reported to a national body (Kenez, 98). In a speech to the Central Committee in April of 1929, Stalin insisted that the state must use new measures in order to expedite the process of “obtaining from [the peasants] the maximum grain surplus necessary to be able to dispense with imported grain and save foreign currency for the development of industry” (Daniels, 172). The solution, he said, “lies in the transition from the small, backward and scattered peasant farms to amalgamated, large scale socialized farms […] the way out lies […] in expanding and strengthening the old state farms, and in organizing and developing new, large state farms” (Daniels, 161). However, this wasn’t down to luck. They all seem to share an acceptance of deprivation today in exchange for the utopia of tomorrow. The concentration camps were predecessors of the Soviet gulags, forced labor camps where Stalin enslaved tens of millions of Russians from 1929 to … Starvation was rampant and between 1932 and 1933 the Soviet Union suffered a cataclysmic famine. Russia would pay a terrible price for this in World War II. Stalin called this a “supertax” on the peasants, but was convinced it was necessary (Daniels, 171). He actively transformed the culture of the time, giving birth to a new Russian nationalism, rejecting the earlier Bolshevik conviction that the family was a bourgeois institution, and even forcing artists and writers to embrace … Nevertheless, the program did not prevent friction from developing between the Soviet Union and the other members of the anti-Hitler alliance. In many ways they had reason for this optimism: society was fundamentally changing. Shabkov, a kulak, describes how his family’s property was arbitrarily taken and his brother murdered, only to conclude: “But then, after all, look at what we’re doing. Joseph Stalin ruled the Soviet Union between 1928 and 1954, effectively as a dictator. It was during this period Stalin consolidated his grip on power and was allowed to rule with impunity, instituting his “revolution from above” on the Soviet people. The combination of Stalin’s influence over the party, his skill as an orator, and his ability to adapt to different contexts meant his ascension was inevitable. Stalin was the dictator of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics from 1929 to 1953. By the spring of 1930, the proportion of collectivized household skyrocketed to sixty percent (Kenez 85). How did stalin use the show trials to consolidate power.pdf View Download 80k: v. 3 : Nov 13, 2013, 9:11 AM: John Carvill: Ċ: To What Extent did Stalin Transform the Society and Economy of the Soviet Union.pdf On December 18th, 1879, in the Russian peasant village of Gori, Georgia, Joseph Stalin was born. Joseph Stalin ruled the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1952. Disclaimer: content on this website is for informational purposes only. Between 1928 and 1932 the number of employed jumped from 11.5 million to 24 million (Kenez, 93). Lenin’s final testament wasn’t favourable towards Stalin. According to Kenez, “‘planning’ was reduced to naming target figures which had little more than propaganda significance” (Kenez, 90). Khrushchev gave tacit support to Stalin’s murderous purges during the mid-1930s. As is well known, at the lower stage of communism productive forces are not yet sufficiently… The Soviet Nationality Policy in Central Asia, Comparing the Tsarist Russian and Soviet Empires, Lenin's New Economic Policy: What it was and how it Changed the Soviet Union, Did Stalin Plan to Attack Hitler in 1941? One man complains about the lack of food, then reverses course saying “But then – if we are going to build blast furnaces we have to eat less for awhile” (Scott, 13). To Instead of studying theology and the Bible, he embra… If nothing else, the country was prepared for the sacrifices of World War II.
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