There were several reasons. Stalin sought to reorganize the Soviet Union via his Five Year Plans, which called for a radical industrialization as well as collectivisation to increase agricultural production and efficiency. This increased agricultural output was necessary to support the rapid industrialization he espoused; how else could the workers be fed? Many peasants who had been awarded or taken their land...to liquidating the kulaks as a class" (Document 5.3 Collectivisation 181). Millions were sent to labor camps, deported and died. The impossible demands made on the peasant farmers of increased production, only to turn everything over to the state, resulted in peasants that remained on the land at first hiding, then burning their crops/killing their animals rather than give them up "Stock was slaughtered every night..." (History in Quotations #5). An infuriated Stalin sent industrial workers into the country to show the peasants 'Bolshevik firmness' "without any rotten liberalism...[or] bourgeois humanitarianism...[and with]extreme measures" to get the grain. (Document 5.4 Horror in the Village…
The truth, tons of revealing mysteries, hidden secrets, the true motives of one infamous dictator of the Soviet Union. It is time to find out the true motives of Stalin and his rise to power in the Soviet Union. The book titled “Stalin’s Curse” that is written by Robert Gellately goes all the way back in history to his life as an exile before being a ruler. There are many books written by Gellately that look into the life of Hitler, Stalin, and Lenin. Writing many books, Gellately is one of the leading historians of Europe especially in the time of World War II and the Cold War. To make this book even more interesting, it does not only focus on Stalin and his adventures, but also includes the roles of Lenin and Hitler in the time of World War II. Leaders of their times, these significant people are depicted as we journey through the life of Stalin.…
An aspect of the Soviet Union that changed between 1801 and 1939 was the shift of the government from a czar ruled totalitarian government to a more distributed communist government. In March of 1801, Paul I was killed and his son Alexander I of Russia was appointed the ruler. Czar Alexander I was not too harsh of a leader. He led a government that was not too strict upon its people unlike his father. But this changed when the next czar came into power, Nicholas I in 1825. Anybody who was leading or supporting the Decembrist Revolt was executed. Nicholas I undid everything that Alexander I did. He censored media, ran secret police, and exiled 150,000 people. Alexander II was the next one in power who was extremely different from Nicholas I. He freed the serfs but did not let them leave. But he did allot power to the people by creating local councils called Zemstvos to give them control of their land and women the right to vote. Alexander III went back into a strict totalitarian government, censoring media and deploying secret police. Alexander III also wanted all Russian minorities to speak Russian and convert to Russian Orthodox. Russian Jews were specifically targeted; they had to live in ghettos and eventually many Jews fled to the United States. The last of the czars in this time period, Nicholas II, came into power in 1894. A decade after his appointment, over three thousand workers grouped outside the czar’s palace asking for reforms. The czar was not home, but he still did not approve the order to fire at the protestors. In order to bring back his name, he enabled a national assembly called Duma that would allow the people of Russia to elect. As one of his reforms, he gave more land to…
Stalin imposed collectivism, which took all the farm land from the Kulaks, leaving them homeless and unemployed It was forbidden to give aid to the Kulaks, and eventually they were forced in to slavery to survive, and any Kulak who refused slavery was deported Forced Famine under the rule of Joseph Stalin By 1932, 75% of all farmland had been acquired by Stalin’s regime and he was exporting so much food from this region, there was no food left to feed the Ukranian people (Trueman, 2013) The Ukranian Communist party reached out for support from the Soviet Communist party and were soon stamped out by Stalin’s loyal soldiers, sent to subdue the Ukranians Starvation was so prevalent that people fled the country side to larger cities, only to find starvation there as well, with bodies of the dead lining the streets Forced Famine under the rule of Joseph Stalin…
As Stephen Cohen states in the introduction, Soviet Fates and lost alternatives was written out of a personal fascination for alternative roads that 'could have been' the path of history. Cohen's approach is indeed personal as he tries to show that the communist party consisted (and always has consisted) of people, and not out of a fixed idea. People shape history, not economical- political- or other crises. And to every person that shaped Soviet history, there was an alternative person that would have shaped it otherwise. Another main goal of Cohen's book seems to be to question (and prove wrong) the general assumption of Western historians on the inevitability of the Soviet Union to be as totalitarian and destructive as it was. This last goal appears to be personal for two reasons. First, out of Cohen's personal frustration that many (mainly) American historians view the Soviet history by their own standards and fail to see it in its own terms. And second, Cohen appears to favor a Soviet alternative to the actual historical result of a collapse of the Soviet Union.…
Kulaks: a category of relatively affluent farmers in the later Russian Empire, Soviet Russia, and early Soviet Union.…
George Orwell’s 1984 depicts a culture of terror, suspicion, and hatred which forces all human bonds to no longer exist and isolation to remain a way of life. Although the overall situation in Oceania seems outrageous and impossible, many of the inventions and beliefs put forth by the novel have existed during Joseph Stalin’s rule in the 20th century. 1984 presents a totalitarian dystopian world where there is no freedom and citizens are being brainwashed constantly. While writing the novel shortly after World War Two, George Orwell was influenced and inspired by regimes such as Hitler’s Nazi-Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union. Many features of Big Brother and Oceania mimic those of Stalin and the USSR. Through propaganda and media control, citizens glorify their leaders as their heroes and saviours. With the ability to manipulate the past, present, and future, this allows leaders to change history thus controlling their citizens’ ways of thought. Both Big Brother and Stalin carefully keep tight surveillance of citizens in order to monitor and keep track of all activities during all times. Through Orwell’s depiction of Big Brother, and the demonstration of Stalin’s rule, the two show us the horrors of totalitarianism and the control of information and history.…
Let’s talk a little but about how Russia was before Stalin came into power and changed up the whole game for Russia. As soon as the Czar of Russia (Nicholas II) was kicked off his throne, Russia’s peasant population came strong and in numbers. These peasants all set up something that was called the Provisional Government. The Provisional Government was formed in Petrograd, and was led first by Prince Georgy L'vov and then by socialist Alexander Kerensky, a prominent…
Joseph Stalin is one of the most well known dictators. He is known to be the savior of Russia. He was also known to be a cruel leader that didn’t let anyone get in his way. This lead Stalin to be feared by many people in Russia. Stalin was the dictator that ruled over communist Russia in 1928. In his time of leading this totalitarian country, he accomplished many good and terrible things.…
The system of serfdom is where an agricultural worker in feudal Russia who cultivates land and belongs to a landowner. The emancipation of the serfs happened for a mired of reasons. Most of which are tied to Russia as a nation. The defeat in the Crimean war for example was a huge blow to Russia as a world power. The national prestige was lost as Russia lost the Crimean war to the allied powers of Britain, France, the Ottoman Empire, and the Kingdom of Sardinia. The humiliation that was felt through losing this war was based off of Alexander II’s viewing of a serf army falling at the hands of free men from Britain and France. This implied a certain lack of conviction that the militarized serfs portrayed. Alexander II felt that the best way to gain back military prowess was to free the serfs and give them self worth, and perhaps in turn give them something to fight for.[1] There are three parts of the emancipation of the serfs. The first is of the defeat of the serf armies in the Crimean war. The great dishonor of the prize of the Russian empire could not be pushed aside so Alexander II did whatever it took to regain that military prestige. The second is whether or not the emancipation did the serfs any good. And the third is the view that the emancipation was due to the symptomatic unwillingness of the tsarist system to embrace much needed total reform.…
“It has been estimated between 600,000 and 3 million people died at the hands of the Soviet government during the Purge.” This is the estimated number of people that died during Stalin’s Great Terror…
Joseph Stalin was one of key figures in 20th century history. He transformed Russia during his time in power. In this essay, I will be discussing the violence Joseph Stalin had imposed against the Soviet Union and the world. Stalin had a long life and a long political career too. Stalin started off studying the marxist revolution and later spent his time and attention towards the revolutionary movement against the Russian monarchy (Gellately, 2013). Stalin later became an activist for fifteen years. Finally, he was a dictator of Soviet Russia from 1929 right up until his death in 1953 (Gellately, 2013). He transformed Russia from a minor rural country into a great and powerful industrial nation. Stalin was the most vicious politician…
The term 'totalitarianism' emerged in the 1920s and '30s, to describe the dictatorial regimes which appeared at that time in Germany and the USSR. The Soviet Union was undoubtedly totalitarian by the late 1930s. However, Stalin's power was anything but absolute up until that time. It took the Great Terror, the cult of personality and two decades of political patronage to put him in a position where he could abandon the pretences of law and rule like a tsarist despot.…
After the completion of my Bachelor’s Degree in Family Studies at Texas Woman's University, I plan on attending the Master of Occupational Therapy program at Texas Woman's University. From there, I do plan on advancing in the field of occupational therapy and aim to become board certified in either physical rehabilitation or mental health. I also plan on obtaining my Doctorate of Occupational Therapy and would also like to earn a teacher’s certification that would allow me to teach new practitioners in the field of occupational therapy.…
It even affected their relationships with other countries. Regardless, the Cold War was one of the most prominent wars of this decade. During the Cold War, Feminism was sparking within women in the suburbs. These areas eventually gained nicknames, such as “Family Rooms”, “ Fertility Valley”, and “The Rabbit Hutch”.…