To What Extent Was Stalin’s Collectivization Successful?

Over the period from 1855 to 1964, Russia saw various reforms and policies under the Tsars and the Communist leaders that had great impacts on its economy and society both positive and negative. Lenin definitely implanted polices that changed society and the economy for example with war communism. However whether his policies had the greatest impact is debatable and in this essay I will be assessing the view whether Lenin had the greatest impact on Russia’s economy and society than any other ruler between the period from 1855-1964.

The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution was the seizure of power by the radical Marxists led by Vladimir Lenin and was one of the pivotal moments of the 20th Century. The ramifications of the event, and the subsequent establishment of the world's first Communist regime were immediately obvious, but also had continuing repercussions for decades. This essay will argue that although Lenin and Stalin seemed to have conflicting views, in reality they shared very similar policies; Stalin just took these policies to an extreme.

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.

Joseph Stalin’s three decade long dictatorship rule that ended in 1953, left a lasting, yet damaging imprint on the Soviet Union in political, economic and social terms. “Under his inspiration Russia has modernised her society and educated her masses…Stalin found Russia working with a wooden plough and left her equipped with nuclear power” (Jamieson, 1971). Although his policies of collectivisation and industrialisation placed the nation as a leading superpower on the global stage and significantly ahead of its economic position during the Romanov rule, this was not without huge sacrifices. Devastating living and working standards for the proletariat, widespread famine, the Purges, and labour camps had crippling impacts on Russia’s social

To define how Stalin’s methods in removing opposition is effective, compared to tsarist and other communist leaders, his methods of suppression alongside the tsars and other communists are assessed to see how successful they were in defeating opposition without evoking further opposition in their regimes. Therefore, Stalin’s reforms of collectivisation, Five-Year-Plans, Gulags, and labour camps etc. have been successful in appeasing opposition with his increased and radicalized input of terror compared to Lenin’s use of terror during the Civil War in 1917-1921, which does not equate to the same economic success that Stalin achieved with his policies. This is similar but different to the social and economic change after the 1905 revolution with Stolypin’s Duma and October manifesto used to supress revolutionaries but resulted in another assassination after reforms in 1911 with Stolypin and Alexander 2nd in 1881 with the Emancipation Edict in 1861. Whereas, Stalin’s strict rule of repression there was little room for revolutionaries to overthrow Stalin as during 1930 to 1933 the death toll in the camps were 10 million higher than the First World War to which, in 1936 the prisoners were nearly extinct in 1940 . Alongside this, Nicholas 2nd’s control of the army during the 1905 revolution, which went for stability to a catastrophic lack of control as the military conflict sparked economic and political disorder which led to Nicholas 2nd abdicating in 1917; similar to the

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.

Joseph Stalin greatly influenced Russia in the years 1924 through 1932. His rise to this power can be explained by the Russian Revolutionary experience that allowed him to gain authority in Russia. Although historians often refer to Stalin as a ruthless, mindless dictator, he redirected the Russian Revolution to major economic development. Stalin’s character in Russia during the Revolution catalyzed the many events that took place during the time period. Because of Stalin’s ability to both appeal to the masses, and take advantage of events, like Lenin’s death, Stalin was able to rise to power. Essentially, the Russian Revolution fostered the development of Stalin’s dictatorship leading the country into a state of economic growth and influence. The Revolution fostered Stalin’s ability to maintain a central leadership, use violence to gain control, and regenerate a previously disconnected economy.

Many would argue that the wide range of economic measures used to enforce control over the population allowed Stalin to succeed in gaining total control over the state. This was evident in Gosplan’s expectation of meeting basic targets and the setting of much higher, optimum targets, for increasing production, prices, wages and allocated manpower/ resources, which ensured there would

In 1922, by gradually consolidating his influence and isolating and outmaneuvering his rivals within the party, Stalin became the undisputed leader of the Soviet Union and, established totalitarian rule, which contains a series of radical economic reformations, aiming at thoroughly change the agricultural and industrial structure. The new policies, known as Stalinism, indicate that the New Economic Policy has been annihilated. Stalinist policies and ideas, as developed in the Soviet Union, included rapid industrialization, the theory of socialism in one country, a centralized state, collectivization of agriculture, cult of personality (Jan Plamper, 2012) and

Stalin’s cult of personality, derived through propaganda, censorship and education, was an essential element of Stalinism which had a significant impact on the society and culture of the Soviet State between until 1941. Stalin’s 50th birthday on 21 December 1929 initiated the moment in Stalin’s dictatorship in which the leader became an object of worship. Millions of party member came to compare Stalin to Lenin, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Eventually the cult of Stalin saw him as a political, military, scientific and philosophical genius. While the people feared Stalin, they were still drawn to his patriotism and love for the Motherland.

The Red Terror was a period of political repression and associated mass killings perpetrated by the Bolsheviks during the Russian Civil War (1917-1922). These crimes were carried out by the Red Army, though mostly under the guise of unfortunate wartime casualties, and the Cheka, the Bolshevik’s secret police force. The target was anyone against the new Soviet socialist regime or any of the peasantry who refused or were unable to produce the crop yields that had become mandatory under the socialist rule of the new Russian Communist Party (Payne 493). Estimates of number killed during the Red Terror vary wildly from 10,000 to 1.5 million. Historians have come to agree that the likely number is somewhere in the hundreds of thousands. When taking into account the atrocities of the Red Terror, Lenin’s insistence upon these practices would seem to fly in the face of any sane rationale for implementing a new economic state, no matter how strongly one feels about its necessity. Lenin, however, believed that human

Nearly eighty years ago, Ukraine, “the breadbasket of Europe” suffered an awful famine caused by the Soviet Union. The starvation affected nearly every part of Ukraine, but it was most murderous in the south and east regions of the republic. On January 5, 1930, the Communist Party started Collectivization, the most inefficient agricultural system in existence, which is when trouble began to brew. This process forced all peasants to live on different food surrogates. Because they endured communal farming in their past, the Russian peasantry did not revolt against Moscow. The Ukrainian peasants, on the other hand, were used to an independent and individualized farming tradition, so the Russian communism was completely foreign to them, and they opposed Moscow bitterly. The slaughtering of their livestock before joining was one way the Ukrainian farmers showed disapproval to collectivization. The government later passed a death penalty for this kind of action. Although the Holocaust in Ukraine had been just as cruel as the rest of it anywhere else during World War II, many history books overlook the terrible genocide

The first of several primary sources is "Industrialization of the Country and the Right Deviation in the C.P.S.U." by Joseph Stalin. Coming from the figurehead of stalinism, the piece is very much a declaration of Stalinist beliefs in regards towards urbanization. It’s original purpose seems to be uniting the soviet people in a push to create more technological advancements, as Stalin states that the U.S.S.R. is falling behind other countries such as Russia in that regards. It could also serve as a propaganda piece, as the views seem rather nationalistic. One thing this piece does not do however, is create a direct link between the Soviet Union’s plans and Cambodia’s seeing as it was written decades before the Khmer Rouge came into power. Yet,

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