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The Soviet Union under Stalin
Impact of stalinism on Russian society
Stalins rise to power and Stalins policy
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In 1934 to 1938 many thousands of his real or assumed opponents were executed as traitors and millions were imprison or sent to force labour camps When stalin took famers land to start his industrial power not many farmers didn’t like his idea and they were punished or shot at He was to blame of 20 million people during his curel rule Writers,poets, and playwrights were jailed for producing anything other than good propagranda He wasn’t really a good father, in fact when his son got captured they offered Stalin to give him back in an exchange for a soldier and he refused the offer and his son died
He goes with some other workers to a state run farm outside of Magnitogorsk to help repair tractors he remarks, “everything, in fact, had been thought of, he said, 'except good land and men to work it'.”7 This was the issue with Stalin's “revolution from above” be built these grand cities that were essentially just large plants like Magnitogorsk, but the people lived in horrible conditions, the collectivized farms that were meant to support the food supply for the workers of Magnitogorsk had bad land and nobody to work to the farms. In theory Stalin's plans could work, but the people, the land, the infrastructure could not feasibly attain the end result that was needed, it just wasn’t possible. For Stalin's plans to have worked he needed to be in the right place and the Soviet Union, and the unforgiving landscape just was not it. Things got so bad that Scott writes, “ the new Bolshevik government sent inspectors to every village to look for hoarded bread.”8 Scott writes, “ during the early thirties the main energies of the Soviet Union went into construction. New plants, mines, whole industries, sprang up all over the country” but he also recalls, “the new aggregates failed to work normally.
Stalin's Authority Over the USSR During the period between Lenin's death, 1924, and the end of the 'Great Purge', 1939, Stalin managed to assert personal authority over the USSR by gaining complete control of the Communist Party and using terror to eliminate opposition to his role as leader. After a successful joint effort with Kamenev and Zinoviev to remove Trotsky from the Communist Party, Stalin turned his attention towards eliminating Kamenev and Zinoviev themselves, as they were a threat to his influence over the party. Both had attacked Stalin's authority and criticised the idea of having one single leader in the party.
The Great Purges led to thousands of party members, military officials and civilians being executed or sent to the GULAGS. Whether the purges did remove enemies of Stalin is questionable, due to the fantastical. methods of the NKVD. The NKVD set quotas, and operated using public information to the public. By 1936 it is estimated 1 in 5 people were NKVD.
death in 1953. But how is it that Stalin emerged as the new leader of
He implemented a tremendous amount of forced labor camps, called the GULAG. These camps were where citizens would go to serve time for their crimes. If a peasant was caught stealing anything, arriving late to work three times, or making jokes about high ranking Communist officials, they would be sent off to the concentration camps to serve as punishment (“Gulag”). These camps and strict policies were a large part of the reason that Stalin was considered to be so feared. No one every opposed him or tried to revolt because of his reputation for being so
The first five-year plan, approved in 1929, proposed that state and collective farms provide 15 percent of agriculture output. The predominance of private farming seemed assured, as many farmers resisted collectivization. By late 1929, Stalin moved abruptly to break peasant resistance and secure the resources required for industrialization. He saw that voluntary collectivism had failed, and many “Soviet economists doubted that the first plan could even be implimented.”1 Stalin may have viewed collectivization as a means to win support from younger party leaders, rather than from the peasants and Lenin’s men. “Privately he advocated, industrializing the country with the help of internal accumulation” 2 Once the peasantry had been split, Stalin believed that the rural proletarians would embrace collectivization . Before this idea had a chance to work, a grain shortage induced the Politburo to support Stalin’s sudden decision for immediate, massive collectivization.
If a person goes back in history of Ukraine, he or she can easily see why Stalin might target this place to install his idea in. Ukraine is the “breadbasket of Europe” in which the USSR gets its grain to feed its empire. In 1929, the Central Committee of the Soviet Union's Communist Party decided to introduce a program of collectivization to the farmers of Ukraine. This forced the farmers to give up all private property: lands, livestock, and farming equipment. By doing this Stalin hoped to feed the industry workers in the cities and export the product to other countries in hope to gain profit to help him fund his industry plans. Private farmers were to be completely being replaced by collective farming or known in Ukraine as kolkhozes. Many of these private farmers, who sought for independence, refused to join collective farming because it resembled early serfdom in that region. Stalin intr...
During Stalin’s reign, he didn't kill so many million Russians because of some evil inborn of his nature but because he had to eliminate those who refused to willingly turn over property and wealth to the state. Thus, the people who supported industrialization are as responsible for the death of those millions because they failed to understand that such violence would be the ending result.
After the emancipation of the Russian Peasantry, land was given to the peasants. This was between 1861 and 1866, but because the nobility had lost their land when the peasants were given land, the peasants had to pay a tax until 1905. As the years passed, the land allotted to each person decreased from 13.8 acres to 7.3 acres as the population increased. Due to this increase in population and decrease in land, a series of famines struck the rural areas. As the peasants mainly occupied the rural areas, they were perceived to be living in poor conditions by the Russian people, and as response to their conditions, peasants started taking a stand, and voicing their opinions; change was proposed in the end when peasants were given more freedom,
After the second World War, it became obvious that Joseph Stalin was a cruel, communist dictator as stories of his crimes began to be leaked, and he started to give the go ahead to some morally dubious movements. This tensions escalated towards this date in history, where the Soviet Union made one such movement in blockading East Berlin from the American side with the Berlin Wall. Described as the war that was almost the third World War, the Cold War was one that was fought with proxy wars, and to influence other countries towards communism, fighting against capitalism. Of course, Coca-Cola was the beverage that was closely associated with capitalism, therefore it was often outlawed in communist countries or the bottling factories were destroyed
He would always try to stay one step ahead of other countries and try to begin new projects which seemed to fail. Joseph Stalin had many people suffering and killed when he was
Tsars and communists use of institutions to supress opposition were successful to an extent but Stalin’s use of the institutions proved effective because of his repressive policies, which made institutions carry out his rigid methods of stability which removed opposition. Polices like collectivisation, Five-Year Plans etc. not only supressed opposition to the extent that the masses felt powerless, but strengthened the economy with rapid industrialisation. Whereas, with Nicholas 2nd, his reforms made it easier for oppositional groups like the kadets to take over and with Stolypin, his reforms embarked upon repressive measures for social change, which focuses on some change, some continuity compared to Stalin’s regime. For example, there is some continuity with Alexander 3rd with previous dumas as the extensions in freedom of civil liberties in the October Manifesto and the limited Fundamental Law in 1906 established that Nicholas 2nd used to the duma silence the masses want of constitutional reform.
...eliminate this group of people. Peasants were forced into collective farms. the grain could be centrally controlled, but they resisted by bringing about a famine in 1932 through slaughtering their livestock. Collectivisation was a huge failure for agriculture and Stalin had to make concessions to the peasants to prevent total collapse.
Joseph Stalin is a polarizing figure. Decades after his death his legacy still continues to create debate about his tumultuous years as the leader of the Soviet Union. This is evident throughout the four documents while some praise Stalin as impeccable others criticize his policies and lack of political, economic, and social progress during his regime. Even though Stalin was behind various violations of human rights he was able to maintain the Soviet Union during a time of turmoil both domestically and internationally as a result he has earned notoriety as a great leader and advocate for Marxist ideology.
Discussion on Whether Stalin Was a Necessary Evil Marxism was a doctrine formulated by Karl Marx about the elimination of economic inequality and class conflicts. According to Marxism social and political relationships depend on economic factors because whichever group in society controls the "means of production" also has political control. Marx believed that historical change was a series of stages that were influenced by economic forces and that each stage had to be completed before the next could begin. In a classes and stateless society, co-operation will replace competition and this final and perfect stage of human history would be communism.