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Russia After The End Of World War I And The Russian Civil War

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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
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