After the end of World War 1 and the Russian Civil War, Russia was suffering major setbacks, especially economically. The Soviet Union was receiving threats from western countries which increased a need for faster industrialization. Vladimir Lenin, created a plan called the New Economic Policy, which was a plan to help rebuild the Russian economy, focusing more agrigculturally rather than industrially, over a longer period of time. After Lenin died, Joseph Stalin rose to power and created a demand on faster industrialization. In 1928, Joseph Stalin created a plan that would change Russian industrialization for the better. This plan was called the Five Year Plan. The plan focused on new developments on steel, machine-tools, and the …show more content…
In Time, Forward!, it talks about a Shock Brigade in Magnitogorsk, Russia who competes with another plant to break the world record for pouring concrete the fastest. This paper argues how Kataev’s Time, Forward is an example of how the Soviet Union “speeds up time” using Stalin’s Five Year Plan and the grueling stipulations that came along with this plan to increase forward industrialization to an emerging USSR. After finding out about the world record set at a different plant for the fastest concrete poured, the engineer in charge of construction, David Margulies and many of the other workers immediately want to beat the record. Margulies plans everything out and finds out that it is very possible to beat the record and the crew gets to work. While these men are trying to beat the record, they work in terrible working conditions and their lives are oftern put into danger. They are trying to beat this record in 24 hours with little to no sleep to begin with. It also talks about a strong storm passing through and they continue to work through that, despite the strong wind and the hard rain. Due to the storm one of the workers smashes his hand in railcar doors. “Smetana stood on the railroad track between the two couplings that had been knocked together. The canvas glove dangled from his left arm like a rag.” (273). This shows that despite harsh working conditions many factory workers faced, they worked through it anyway so that Stalin’s Five Year Plan could
His first five year plan was during 1928-1933 and this was the heavy industry plan which was making industries, transportation, and power supplies. The first of his methods was to use collectivization. Collectivization was the making of small farms into one big farm, and this would help increase the amount of products they make, and that would increase the amount of profit. Afterwards the people who were working on the farms would go into the city and be forced to work in the factories. The money then would be used to buy more more equipment which is industrial products which can help boost their profits yet again. Stalin was shown to be a heavy thinker, and to get his plans through, he made propaganda signs and speeches. He would focuses on telling his people the consequences if they didn’t work hard enough as a country, as they would be “falling behind... and those who fall behind are beaten”(Document 1). The propaganda speeches did work most of the time, but they felt hesitant as the goal for his five year plan was averaging to double the amount of, and “tripling in electricity (milliard kWh) from 5.05 to 17.0 in the end of 1933” (Document 2). Stalin
Stalin’s policy priorities were not building a ‘worker’s paradise’ or a classless society, but protecting Russia from war and invasion. In 1928, Stalin launched the first of two ambitious five-year plans to modernize and industrialize the Soviet economy. These programs brought rapid progress – but also significant death and suffering. Stalin’s decision to nationalize agricultural production dispossessed millions of peasants, forcing them from their land to labor on gigantic state-run collective farms. Grain was sold abroad to finance Soviet industrial projects, leading to food shortages and disastrous famines in the mid-1930s. Soviet Russia was dragged into the 20th century, transforming from a backward agrarian empire into a modern industrial superpower – but this came at extraordinary human cost.
In Document 7, The Land of the Soviets published an excerpt in the U.S.S.R (Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics) which stated “the first and second five year Plans strengthened the Soviet Union’s economic position and turned it into a powerful industrial state. In 1937 the industrial output of the USSR was 5.8 times larger than in 1913. This shows the massive improvements in production caused by the first and second five year plan.
The second revolution occurred eight months later and brought what would be known as the Communisits to power. Between these two revolutions, many groups wanted more freedom and justice for themselves and others. Civil war and Allied intervention followed the Communist takeover, but the Communist government survived and instituted the New Economic Policy in 1921. This stabilizing measure, though, was disrupted in 1928 when the government introduced the first Fiver-Year plan and the collectivization of agriculture. One of Stalin's main goals was to increase the output of industrial goods, and he placed emphasis on electrical power, capital
Stalin's plan was to help Soviet industry switch to wartime production and improve the military options the Soviet commanders had. A major factor that helped this was the Soviets adaptability and experience of industrialisation having experienced Stalin’s 5 year plan. This meant the Soviet people were a lot more efficient when contributing to the war economy. Stalin spoke in 1931 about the Soviet Union needing to advance fifty to one hundred years in the next ten years to catch up with the rest of the world. When Germany attacked in 1941 ten years had passed. The Soviets had improved the infrastructure of industry. However, major drawbacks were still in place. The major problem involved the distance between the 3,500 new factories and the front line of the battlefield. The factories were spread out across the Soviet Union. The majority of the factories were located in the south but stretched from Stalingrad in the west to Siberia in the east. During the early years of World War II Stalingrad was instructed by the centralized Communist Party in Leningrad. Stalingrad was chosen due to its proximity and access to the
instead of capitalism. The Plan itself “was a huge propaganda project, aimed at convincing the Soviet people that they were engaged in a great industrial enterprise of their own making.” In Source C, due to the rapid urban development in the U.S.S.R., “A new perspective emerged in official documents, one that viewed the increased employment of women not in terms of its effects on women but as essential to the fulfillment of the economic plans.” The purpose was to “'ensure the fulfillment of the production program of the Five Year Plan, it was necessary to draw more wives of workers into production.'” In Source D, it says that “the mass arrests of the late 1930s may have been carried out to satisfy Stalin's desire for slave labor” because “more prison laborers were urgently needed.” There were camps where mass number of slave laborers were kept. The more the slave laborers, the more the work, and the faster the Five Year Plan's goals would be achieved. In Source E, the poster is for the purpose of propaganda, showing
“We are 50 or 100 years behind the advanced countries… we must make good this distance in 10 years… Either we do so, or we shall go under,” ("Joseph Stalin: National Hero or a Cold-Blooded Murderer?"). Russia had been behind all of the advanced countries for many years, using primitive farming practices, machinery, factories, and building. As a result, Stalin decided to enforce the Five Year Plan which would catch Russia up with everyone else in the world and dramatically increase industrialization. He believed that if he did not industrialize, Russia would have been taken over by other nearby Nationalist countries ("Joseph Stalin: National Hero or a Cold-Blooded Murderer?"). However, to do so in ten years, he had to enforce strict laws and
As one of the most ruthless Communist dictators of all time, Joseph Stalin only strived to lead the Soviet Union in becoming a powerhouse and a key player in the global market. Stalin concluded that in order for the Soviet Union to compete against the economic successes of the Western world, rapid industrialization needed to occur. In 1928, Stalin switched the economic plans from Lenin’s NEP (New Economic Policy) to the Five Year Plan. The plan’s goal was to convert the Soviet Union from an agricultural state to an industrial country through urbanization. Before Stalin came to power, the Soviet Union was almost a medieval country where the roads were not paved and the people lived in villages deprived of electricity. However, the Five Year Plan was Stalin’s attempt to transform the Soviet Union’s economy.
The Third Five Year Plan lasted for only three years, as it was interrupted by Germany’s declaration of war on the Soviet Union during World War II. As war seemed imminent, this plan focused on the production of weapons and other wartime materials (Trueman). The Soviet Union mainly contributed resources to the development of weapons, and constructed additional military factories as needed. Stalin continued to use additional Five Year Plans in the years following WWII, in an attempt keep his promise in 1945 to make the Soviet Union the leading industrial power by 1960. By 1952, industrial production was nearly double the 1941 level. Stalin’s Five Year Plans helped transform the Soviet Union from an untrained society of peasants to an advanced industrial economy. So through out this plan of hopefully saving Russia that Stalin has created products that could not be used and unintelligent citizens who were only trained to only do only one skill.
An abrupt change of policy, made by Joseph Stalin, was the start of modernization in the economy. Stalin acquired the need of collectivization, altering his thoughts on industrialization. A plan consisting a fixation on iron, steel, machine-tools, electric power, and transportation was set to be put in action. In the book Animal Farm, the construction and decomposition of a windmill was used as a representation for the five-year plan.
The Bolsheviks believed they had to industrialise to achieve national strength and maintain independence. This was a shared view of non-Bolshevik predecessors such as Count Sergei Witte a former Russian minister. The Soviet Union needed a modern industry, especially a heavy industry, as there was the idea that they had to defend the revolution. They believed the Russian revolution was in constant danger from capitalist countries, which were militarily and technically far stronger than them. Then there was the belief that the building of socialism or communism involved industrialisation, and that a proletarian dictatorship was insecure so long as it ruled in an overwhelmingly peasant environment . Industrialisation was introduced to eradicate the backwardness that had plagued the country for so long so they could rise and defeat capitalism. In his speech in 1931 Stalin stated ‘we are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or we shall go under’ and that ‘it is the jungle law of capitalism. You are backward, you are weak - therefore you are wrong; hence you can be beaten and enslaved. You are mighty - therefore you are right; hence we must be wary of you. This is why we must no longer lag behind’ . These show the need for the Soviet Union to advance and become stronger than capitalist countries. Industrialisation also allowed the Soviet
It was an idea based on ambition and imagination; an idea that worked so well, it managed to drag an entire country out of starvation and chaos and drive it onto the road to quick economic and industrial recovery. It created capitalism in a socialist state and cabaret-style debauchery under a military-communist regime. And like many other great yet paradoxical projects, perhaps, the Soviet Union’s New Economic Policy of the 1920s was too visionary to remain sustainable for long.
Due to the extreme focus on heavy industry, there were shortages of consumer goods, and subsequently, inflation grew. To satisfy the state’s increasing need for food supplies, the First Five Year Plan introduced the concept of collectivization. Collectivization entailed compounding peasants’ land and animals, and state farms to provide food to the growing industrial sector. The collectivization movement was not received well by the peasants, and as a result, Stalin altered his plan of action. In 1933, he introduced the Second Five-Year Plan. With this plan, he set more realistic goals, and increased the focus on producing consumer goods and increasing industrial output in general. By 1940, after a Third Five-Year Plan was implemented, the Soviet economy was completely industrialized.
Russia, three times the size of USA today needed industrialization to help improve Russia’s current economic state in the 18th century. The five year plans was one but he also made other changes to help the growth of the economy. One was collectivization in agriculture, another liquidating the kulaks. The five year plans was to help modernize Russia as it still remained solely on agriculture, 82% of Russians were peasants which made it harder to control the country. Stalin’s aims was to ensure that Russia was stable, modern and powerful, some historians may say that the five year plans were successful as they reached Stalin’s
The Soviet Union was a vast but underdeveloped country when Joseph Stalin came to power in the mid-1920s, and agriculture was not doing well during that time. Russia had gone through worst periods that left the economy worse off. Rapid industrialization began to being implemented by Stalin from 1928. Unrealistic goals were set with the overall industrial development expected to grow by 250 percent, and heavy industry expansion was to take a 330 percent. Trade unions were converted into mechanisms for raising worker productivity, central planners granted managers predetermined output quotas, all industries and services nationalized. Thousands of new plants were established in Russia, and many new industrial centers being developed primarily in the Ural Mountains. Widespread shortages of