Lessons of the Socialist Planned Soviet Economy
A long time ago the chancellor of Germany, Bismarck, said the following after reading the “Communist Manifesto” by Marx and Engels, “This is very interesting. But now we have to find a country that we wouldn’t pity to do an experiment on”. Russia was to be the country that this experiment would take place in.
The main part of the experiment consisted of running a Socialist planned economy which is defined as the state of economy, where all production sections are governed and owned by government institutions. Before the country could implement the planned economy it had to adapt some policies. First the country had to start industrializing, or as some economists call it the “big push” (industry-first strategy). The growth of the industrial sector was the ultimate goal.
But since Russian economy was so backward it required a transitional period that was called state capitalism. In stated capitalism, through nationalization, the state would control major sectors of the economy and use this control to influence the remaining private sectors. Nationalization gave the state not only the control of the means of production, but it also insured the control over the output. Another policy that had to be adapted was the collectivization. After 1927, when the voluntary grain output fell below government target, Stalin ordered the collectivization of agriculture by forcibly establishing collective farms. Millions of peasants who resisted collectivization were arrested, and then executed or deported. Even in the post-Soviet era, the collectivization of agriculture was Soviet economy’s sore spot; it never achieved its economic goals.
To hold all this together there had to be an organization big enough to balance what had now been known as the input-output economy. In 1922, Gosplan was created to exclusively and explicitly deal with planning. In the early stages Gosplan delivered the control figures and planed targets. In 1925 Gosplan assumed responsibility for drawing up Five Year Plans. The Five Year Plan called for industrialization at a maximum pace with a conception that some major construction projects had to be done. By the end of 1930s the nationalization was completed, agriculture collectivized, and the national planning mechanism established.
The Soviet economic system was one of the most complex organizational arrangements, especially among the different layers of organizations.
In order to establish whether Lenin did, indeed lay the foundation for Stalinism, two questions need to be answered; what were Lenin’s plans for the future of Russia and what exactly gave rise to Stalinism? Official Soviet historians of the time at which Stalin was in power would have argued that each one answers the other. Similarly, Western historians saw Lenin as an important figure in the establishment of Stalin’s socialist state. This can be partly attributed to the prevailing current of pro-Stalin anti-Hitler sentiments amongst westerners until the outbreak of the cold war.
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.
The Russian revolution of February 1917 was a momentous event in the course of Russian history. The causes of the revolution were very critical and even today historians debate on what was the primary cause of the revolution. The revolution began in Petrograd as “a workers’ revolt” in response to bread shortages. It removed Russia from the war and brought about the transformation of the Russian Empire into the Union of Soviet Socialist Republic, replacing Russia’s monarchy with the world’s first Communist state. The revolution opened the door for Russia to fully enter the industrial age. Before 1917, Russia was a mostly agrarian nation. The Russian working class had been for many years fed up with the ways they had to live and work and it was only a matter of time before they had to take a stand. Peasants worked many hours for low wages and no land, which caused many families to lose their lives. Some would argue that World War I led to the intense downfall of Russia, while others believe that the main cause was the peasant unrest because of harsh living conditions. Although World War I cost Russia many resources and much land, the primary cause of the Russian Revolution was the peasant unrest due to living conditions because even before the war began in Russia there were outbreaks from peasants due to the lack of food and land that were only going to get worse with time.
Drawing from scholarly academic research about what goes into the formula of creating these kinds of family-based sitcoms, production work, relevancy of each show’s topic and storyline in the era they’re aired, I will present the ultimate heart of my argument of seeing if there truly is a pattern or formula to family sitcoms and if there are parallels between the characters of both Full House and Modern Family that makes the shows as similar yet different to one
When describing the sitcom all that comes to mind is hope and the sense of change that the show
Communism was the ideology followed by the Soviet Union. Originally founded by Karl Marx, it said that everything should be owned by the government and then divided up equally among the people who would then all work for it. For the communist party in Russia, their political system was always in danger. From the start of the Russian Revolution there have been dangers to communism. Before World War II most of the western nations ignored Russia simply because it was a communist state and the western nations actually supported Hitler because they believed that Germany would provided a buffer against Communism. The permanent threat against Russia gave the incentive to expand and spread communist influence as much as possible to keep their way of life intact, it was very much Russia against the world. However not only was the Soviet Union communist, they were totalitarian, meaning all the power was with the rulers. While this was effective for keeping the standard average of living the same for everyone and preventing poverty, it also led to a poor work ethic among the working population...
“The social causes by the Russian revolution mainly became of centuries of domination over the lower classes by the Tsarist regime, and Nicholas’s failures in World War one.”5 As the rural agricultural peasants had been limitless from serfdom in the year 1861, the peasants still refused paying redemption payments to the state and demanded to be the private owner of the land that they worked. The only problem was further compounded by the never lasting failure of Sergei Witte’s land reforms during the early twentieth century. Peasant disturbances increased which sometimes ended up becoming revolts, with only the goal of securing the ownership of the land they worked. At that time Russia consisted mainly of poor farming peasants, which made up one and a half percent of the population owning twenty-five percent of the land.
at age 26. He no idea what was involved, what to do and went along
ideal system ? In this paper I will explore the rise of the Soviet power and
The Effects of Stalin's Economic and Social Policies. One of Russia's most prominent political leaders of all time, was a. man named Joseph Dzhugashvili. A man, who at one time was being trained to become a priest, and would one day become a major. revolutionary in the history of the USSR.
The Soviet Union, which was once a world superpower in the 19th century saw itself in chaos going into the 20th century. These chaoses were marked by the new ideas brought in by the new leaders who had emerged eventually into power. Almost every aspect of the Soviet Union was crumbling at this period both politically and socially, as well as the economy. There were underlying reasons for the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and eventually Eastern Europe. The economy is the most significant aspect of every government. The soviet economy was highly centralized with a “command economy” (p.1. fsmitha.com), which had been broken down due to its complexity and centrally controlled with corruption involved in it. A strong government needs a strong economy to maintain its power and influence, but in this case the economic planning of the Soviet Union was just not working, which had an influence in other communist nations in Eastern Europe as they declined to collapse.
Another goal of his new policy was to erase all capitalistic elements previously imposed by Lenin within Russia. Russian peasants just won their land from the nobles after the revolution, and now Stalin was taking it all back. Peasants were not happy with this. Many began to protest by killing livestock and burning fields. Stalin soon began killing many of these protestors or sending them to gulags. Eventually all farms became governmental property and soon giant collectivized farms were established. By the end of the 1930’s wheat production had risen exponentially. In the end, many peasants were able to leave the countryside and work in factories. Russia was also able to export much of its grain in order to fund further industrialization. But again, the human cost of this policy was monumental. Many people starved because of the protesting and many also were murdered by the government in order to force others to
Lenin's Economic Policies in 1924 When the Bolsheviks seized power in October 1917 they inherited many of the problems faced by the old Tsarist regime as well as those of the Provisional Government after the Tsars abdication. Lenin, as leader of the Bolsheviks took many measures to try and solve these problems, each with varying degrees of success. This essay will, therefore, go on to look at and discuss the various measures that Lenin and the Bolshevik party took, and, whether these measures created more problems for Russia in the end or in fact made significant progress towards the communist society that Lenin had prophesised for Russia. In the early days of Bolshevik rule, there were many problems facing Lenin.
Promotion. Finally comes promotion - informing the customer on the qualities and advantages of the product so that the potential buyer learns about the product, prefers it to those of the competitors, and has an opportunity to buy it at some place.
Have you ever wondered why people have certain reactions? I chose chapter eight on emotions for my reflection paper because emotions are something that everyone has and feels, yet cannot always explain or react to in the way you would expect. Personally, I have never been great at responding to emotions in a way that I would not regret in the future. Thus, naturally being drawn to this chapter as a way to expand my knowledge on how to react to things more positively. I also wanted to learn why I feel a certain way after events that would not affect most people and be reassured about my feelings. Opposite to that, it is nice to see that, while not always productive, others have the same reaction habits. Overall, emotions are a complicated