Stalin 's Five Year Plan

Propaganda flourished in the public as posters, newspapers, and other print media all praised Stalin, communism, the military, and his ideals. Soviet schools were controlled by Stalin from nursery to college. [“Censorship under Stalin.”] Industrialization allowed women to gain more rights in the workforce (factories). Other groups were not as lucky. From 1941-1949, Stalin ordered mass deportations and sent 3.3 million Ukrainians, Poles, Koreans, Greeks, Bulgarians and Jews to Siberia and Central Asian Republics. [Languages Of The World, 10 Mar. 2015,] Collectivism and industrialization were his two biggest economic policies under his Five Year Plan implemented in 1928. The idea of collectivization was meant to allow peasants to grow crops on the farms using machinery tractors from the state. Peasants would be compensated and they would keep a small plot of land near their homes for personal use. Stalin wanted to see increases in the USSR’s crop growth quickly. By the end of 1931, the goal set for grain was met but there was a drop in the grain production. Many factors that caused this. Stalin’s activists did not have a wide range of farm knowledge or the skills. Also, the amount of animals were not enough to pull the plows because the hungry peasants ate them. A drought occurred throughout large parts of the USSR and Ukraine during 1931-32. Because all of this, collectivism ultimately failed.

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.

“The class of the wholly property laws, who are obliged to sell their labor to the bourgeoisie in order to get in exchange, the means of subsistence for their support. This is class of the class of proletarians, or the proletariat.” As we know that “The communism is a theoretical statement of the conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat.” It is the doctrine of the liberation of the proletariat. There were no such labor and rich people cannot own any worker. In society everybody have his or her own farmland, but all the production is owned by the state. How much food each person will get is depending on how much food they contributed to the country. In the idea of communism everybody has to share, and there are no such individual secrets. All the people should have the same interests. According to the research few students at Stanford University did, “in a communist society, the individual’s best interests are indistinguishable from the society’s best interest. Thus the idea of an individual freedom is incompatible with communist ideology. The reason to hold an individual speech and information rights would likely be met only in certain instances rather then across time. Making the default a lack of freedom.” Not only share and have same interest, they also share their benefit together. Communist focuses on the benefits to society instead of individual. All the land was

controlled by the bourgeoisie. 3 The plan of communism is to make land into common property,

In his speech, Stalin also mentions that kulaks, which were wealthy peasants, must be eliminated as a class. (Document 3) In this speech Stalin explained that agriculture must change in order to feed the growing population of industrial workers. The collective farms would receive the needed modern technology and scientific equipment, and it would all result in increased food production. Stalin made clear that the kulaks must be driven out in order for the plan to be successful. Once again, Stalin is using the power of speech to gain support for his collectivization plan. An excerpt from A History Civilization describes the horrific effects of Stalin’s collectivization. Stalin began deporting the capitalistic farmers (kulaks) to forced labor camps or Siberia, and peasants were being machine-gunned into submission. Peasants slaughtered huge amounts of horses, cattle, sheep and goats, burned crops and broke plows in desperate revolts. The amount of Russian livestock lost due to collectivization was immense. (Document 4)

Communism is a political and social act where everything was controlled by the Government and the citizens having no say. Life in Russia has forever been different than that of Canada. Although Russia claims to be a democracy, its citizens do not fully know the idea of freedom. Joseph Stalin had a plan to make Russia the super power of the world but ultimately failed because communism never works. Stalin released new ideas that he thought would help improve the economy but never actually did. From the time that Stalin came into power in 1924, up until his death in 1953 he transformed Russia’s previously more week society into an active military and industrial superpower striking fear and terror into its citizens. Stalin did play a huge role in defeating the Axis power in WWII but is seen as a communist who was a ruthless ruler responsible for the deaths of over 20 million people. Although some people believe that Joseph Stalin’s plan for communism was good, in reality many horrors affected his people, the economy, and the future of Russia.

Revolutionary socialist Karl Marx believed that the economic calculation problem should be solved adopting a communist approach; he expressed his ideas in his most notable work “The Communist Manifesto” in 1848. Marx believed that capitalism should be replaced by socialism and eventually communism and it should be done through abolishing markets, prices and private property. To understand Marx’s ideas it is important to define capitalism socialism and communism. Capitalism can be defined as ‘an economic and political system in which a country’s trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state’. On the other hand socialism can be defined as ‘a political and economic theory of social organization, which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole’.

Marx’s primarily aims to explain how communism will free men, end the class struggle. The work argues that class struggles, and the exploitation of one class by another is the source of all inequality. Marx’s theories become one the motivating force behind all historical developments. The work strongly advocates the freedom of the proletariats which Marx’s claims can only be achieved when property and other goods cease to be privately owned. He see’s that private property has been a problem through out history, capital that aids the ruling class to maintain control. Marx argues that the lower class come together in a revolution and gain power and eventually take the power away from the upper class.

of the common wealth, more or less according to their need." In 1917 the rise

Before the nation of Russia became the international powerhouse that we knew as the USSR, it was first the small backwater country, whose economy ran on the use of serfs, Czar 's ruled every aspect, and the chance of growth was limited; however, once the year 1917 came along, the entire aspect of what was to be the Russia nation changed into a very strange and new one, called the United of Soviet Socialist Republics. The Soviet Union was, at one point, second only to the United States of America and had the power to destroy the entire planet with the single acknowledgement of their leader, because of their nuclear capabilities and their political power. The Russian country became the great Communist powerhouse after a great revolution in

Stalin’s plan was to make Russia an industrial giant, so Stalin created the five-year plan to work on the farms and factories of Russia. Stalin’s five-year plans were a series of nation wide centralized economic plans in the Soviet Union (Wikipedia). What that meant was that peasants who didn’t have jobs were required to work on a specific goal that Stalin had to increase what was considered as an economy booster. The first Five Year Plan introduced in 1928, concentrated on the development of iron and steel, machine-tools, electric power and transport. Joseph Stalin set the workers high

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

Adding to the deplorable oppression borne by the proletariat during the Five Year Plans, Stalin introduced a collectivisation campaign which not only sparked a persecution of kulaks, but also induced a widespread famine. The Stalin government’s compulsory agricultural policy was largely a failure with regard to its goals. Beginning in 1929, all farms were to be collectivised, with the aim of improving agricultural output and hence, industrialisation. The USSR’s initial system of farming was inefficient, but the introduction of fertilisation and tractors modernised agricultural techniques, increasing the nation’s capacity for production, supporting Historian Jamieson’s statement. However, the policy was catastrophic due to the mass movement of peasant resistance that saw farmers defiantly burning crops and slaughtering livestock, regarding the campaign as a violation of their freedom. By 1933, agricultural production fell dramatically; grain by 17 million tonnes and cows and pigs by a total of 23 million, to below what it was in 1913 (Downey, 1989, p. 19). This

After World War I the economy in the USSR was failing, they were producing very little and were hit hard economically. Stalin developed many economic policies for three main reasons. The first was that he wanted to turn the USSR into a modern world power; he wanted it to be self-sufficient and to have a strong military. Secondly, he wanted to show the eminence of communism over capitalism by proving that a modernized USSR can overtake the capitalist countries. Lastly, he wanted to improve the livelihood of all the Soviet citizens. In order to do this, his main goal in order to do that, he made sure the agriculture section of the economy was productive. The first policy that Stalin created was collectivization. By 1928, the grain produced was insufficient to feed the people. Stalin addressed this issue and took action by joining small farms and making a collective group called Kolkhoz. This policy was unsuccessful. The one good side was that farmers received a wage from