To What Extent Was Josef Stalin’s Employment of Collectivisation a Successful Endeavour for the Soviet Economy?

Food is one of their main struggles. There is nothing much left to eat in Russia during that time because the government only has a limited supply of food so they can only give out a small number of ration cards to their people. This disturbs normal daily life and happiness like bread for example. Lev narrates “The entire city was starving, no one had enough to eat, and still, everyone cursed the bread, the sawdust. flavor, how hard it got in the cold. People broke their teeth trying to chew it” (Benioff, 11). The bakeries have to make bread with cottonseed, cellulose, and sawdust as the flour and grain grew scarce. This is not right because people can’t have real food. Meanwhile, the delicious tasting, beautiful sight, and good touch of actual food bring true happiness on people face. Yet, making bread is not the only thing that people can’t enjoy.

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 Irish Potato Famine was the worst tragedy in the history of Ireland. The outcome of the famine would result in hundreds of thousands dead, an failure of the economy in Ireland, and millions of emigrants forced to leave their home and country just to try to survive. The famine would effect countries other than Ireland as well. Some of these countries included England, America,

1921 peasant revolts through war communism – grain hoarding – protests for it, major famine- Bolsheviks taking grain. Red

In the beginning of 1932, the Soviet government had sharply increased the Ukraine's production quotas in the collectivized farms. This ensured that the people would not be able to meet them. This resulted in an even larger widespread of starvation. In the summer of 1932, Stalin ordered a decree that called for the arrest or execution of any person that was caught taking any amount of grain or food item from their place of work. This led to military blockades stationed around many Ukrainian villages, preventing food from coming in and the starving people from going out in search of food. Soviet guards were brought into the villages to confiscate any hidden grain. Eventually all food from any farmer’s home was taken. When news of the Famine reached the outside world, food supplies were sent from the United States and Britain, however through Stalin, the shipments were denied and new policies from the Soviet Union that denied their part in the famine refused all outside aid were instilled. Stalin refused entry even to journalists, as he feared the media would reveal the Soviet Unions’ crimes against the Ukraine.

These effects however were more severe under Lenin and Stalin as they sought to increase grain production by coercion. While Lenin under War communism used grain requisitioning to forcefully collect peasant surpluses from them Stalin used collectivisation to force peasants to collaborate to produce as much food as possible. Similarly in both cases the peasants refused to conform; knowing that any surplus would be confiscated the peasant produced the barest minimum to feed themselves and their family and even less food was available for Russia. One of the greatest impacts were the famines that occurred in 1921 under Lenin where the grain harvest produced less than half the amount gathered in 1931 and Russia had international help from countries such as the USA. However these impacts were the greatest under Stalin. The amount of bread produced fell from 250.4 (kilograms per head) in 1928 to 214.6 in 1932. The impacts of collectivisation were at its worst in 1932-32 when occurred what many people describe as a self-made national famine. Stalin’s ‘’official silence’’ of the situation meant it wasn’t addressed and thus collectivisation killed between 10-15 million peasants and failed to increase agricultural output. Though a similar devastating famine occurred under

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)

Later, bad weather conditions led to the great famine

The peasants in Germany were “aggrieved by the appropriation by individuals of meadows and fields which at one time belonged to a community” (1) because what was shared land was now taken exclusively by the landholders to grow cash crops and to prevent the peasants from supplementing themselves in a time of shortages. The Little Ice age had made crops more unreliable, and although it was a natural event that caused this dearth of food, the landholders required the peasants to toil much harder. This increase in already strenuous labor caused disease, death, and overworked peasants, which lead to decreases in production and population. The infectious and fatal Black Death also caused people to be more susceptible to disease and inevitably death. The peasants in Bohemia worked laboriously because Eastern Europe was heavily dependent on agriculture sales to Western Europe. The productivity on farms was imperative for economic balance in Europe, due to the current increase in urbanization. Document 4 does show that the government was interested in investigating these severe conditions, although they were unaware that the nobles did not “have the best intentions” (4) for the peasants. Originally, the government agreed to this serfdom, because it was returned with loyalty for the ruler, but the labors have gotten much worse.

Similar to other dictatorships, one of the momentous changes that happened under Stalin was the cultural change that was present in society. Importantly the peasantry ceased to be the national social unit as urbanisation took its effect. Urbanisation occurred due to the use of collective farming in agriculture sector and due to the rapid industrialisation of the cities. As the demand for workers increased many moved to the industrial heartland of the Soviet Union. Under Stalinism both industrial and agricultural industries began to be looked at as sing societal units. Urbanisation changed the way people lived their lives thus adding to the controls that Soviet policy was already introducing.

In 1917, Tsar Nicholas ll is the current ruler of Russia. Russia’s economic growth is increased by the czar’s reforms of the production of more factories. Since, Russia desperately needed to keep up with the rest of Europe’s industry. This reform worked out perfectly, but the working conditions of these factories didn’t please factory workers. After the events of the Russo-Japenese War, “Bloody Sunday”, and WW1, all of Russia was in utter chaos under the czar’s ghastly leadership. With no signs of the czar’s attempt to solve the problems that kept coming up, all of Russia banded together and filled the streets with strikes and riots. A revolution was peaking among the peasants. The uprising brought Nicholas ll no choice but to abdicate

The concept of Stalinism, being the ideologies and policies adopted by Stalin, including centralization, totalitarianism and communism, impacted, to an extent, on the soviet state until 1941. After competing with prominent Bolshevik party members Stalin emerged as the sole leader of the party in 1929. From this moment, Stalinism pervaded every level of society. Despite the hindrance caused by the bureaucracy, the impact of Stalinism was achieved through the implementation of collectivization and the 5-year plans, Stalin’s Political domination and Cultural influence, including the ‘Cult of the Personality’. This therefore depicts the influence of Stalinism over the Soviet State in the period up to 1941.

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

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.

Rapid industrialization and collectivization of agriculture were the two extraordinary goals set for the Soviet domestic policy in November 1927. Transforming the Soviet Union as quickly as possible and erasing all capitalism traces that had penetrated under New Economic policy were some of his primary aims. Joseph Stalin was determined to do this regardless of what the cost would be as long as he industrialized the place, and the state would be an entirely