Preview

Stalin's Five Year Plans

Better Essays
Open Document
Open Document
1080 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Stalin's Five Year Plans
Curtis, Sierra
Mrs. Dedrickson
Honors English 9
21 March 2013
Stalin’s Five Year Plans Around 60 million people died in World War 2 (World War par.1). In the end, the Allied Powers won. What would have happened if America had lost? In August of 1939, Russia and Germany signed a nonaggression pact that kept Russia from entering the war on either side. It was not until June 22, 1941 that German forces invaded Russia. Russia almost fell to the Nazis and if such a thing had occurred the result of the war could have been very different. The Nazis quickly claimed crucial victories when they invaded Russia. It was the harsh winter that stopped the army right before they entered Moscow. In that time, the armies of Russian soldiers fought back and were able to protect the capital (Nor 5). Twenty years before Russia was a severely agrarian society. They farmed on outdated equipment and did not have sufficient factories to have ever supported the manufacturing of weapons and supplies for a whole army. In 1928, Joseph Stalin rose to the significant power of second only to Vladimir Lenin, who later died. When Lenin died Stalin eliminated his rivals and was the uncontested leader of Russia. When he rose to power, he saw that “…Russia was far behind the west and that she would have to modernize her economy very quickly if she was to survive” (Stalin par. 2). So, he created several effective and ruthless five year plans to industrialize Russia. Stalin’s five year plans industrialized Russia in 15 years although it took other countries 100; changed an agrarian society into an industrial one; and raised the economic stand of the country enough to protect it from the outside forces that threatened it. Stalin’s first of three five year plans was the collectivization of all private farms and lands. Those lands were then given to the government. It was the beginning of the Bolvestic kleptocracy in Russia. Anyone who expressively defied the collectivization was killed. In

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    Soviet Union DBQ

    • 840 Words
    • 3 Pages

    Stalin was a part of the Bolsheviks which was the communist party of the Soviet Union. The Kulaks were the wealthy landowners and they were capitalists and did not approve of Stalin’s beliefs and methods. One of the changes Stalin implemented in order to achieve his one of his many goals, was to collective farms. Collectivization is the act of seizing land from the wealthy (which in this case were the Kulaks) and using it for communal use. This means that the Kulaks’ farms would get broken up to little parts and given to the peasants. In document 4, an excerpt from a speech that Stalin delivered in 1929 he says, “The socialist way, which is to set up collective farms and state farms into large collective farms, technically and scientifically equipped, and to the squeezing out of the capitalist elements from agriculture.” Stalin was determined to remove any and all capitalist that were not in his favor. Another change Stalin implemented was to stop feeding the livestock with the wheat being grown. In document 5, there is a graph showing the declination of the livestock in the first and second five year plan. In a total of 10 years, the amount of livestock was virtually cut in half! In comparison, the wheat production increased significantly in the ten years in which the livestock was cut in half. The wheat being…

    • 840 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Joseph Stalin Dbq Analysis

    • 1113 Words
    • 5 Pages

    Joseph Stalin established a modern totalitarian government in Soviet Russia. He is known as the “Man of Steel”. A totalitarianism is a type of government that takes total, centralized, state control over every aspect of public and private life of their people. His rule had changed the people of his empire in numerous ways. Stalin had total control over economic needs. According to document 6 “By 1940 Russia produced more pig iron than Germany, and far more than Britain or France. Numbers of cattle grew in the 1920s, but fell increasingly during the collectivization of agriculture after 1929, and by 1940 hardly exceeded the figure for 1920. Since 1940 the industrial development of the Soviet Union has been impressive, but agricultural production has continued to be plumiding”. The document illustrates how pig iron had significantly increased as a result of the “Five Year Plan”, however heavy industry led to expense of food supplies. This would cause limited production of consumer goods. It caused a step back because of the severe shortages of housing, food, clothing as well as other necessary goods. The Five Year Plan didn’t help much to excel their economic as Stalin hoped, it impacted by creating famine. Stalin rising to power promised an economic boom for Russia however, in that process many people suffered and died of starvation. According to document 5, “The purge began its last,…

    • 1113 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    In the period before 1941, Stalin was able to institute his economical policies of Collectivization and the 5-year plans. ‘Backwards was to be defeated and enslaved’. Russia had to make up for 100 years of lost time for fear of being consumed by the western world. Stalin, sole leader of the Bolsheviks by the late 1920’s, believed that Russia could modernize their Agricultural and Industrial sectors through his policies.…

    • 1040 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Josephe Stalin DBQ

    • 517 Words
    • 3 Pages

    Stalin presented himself as if he were greater and more powerful than everyone else (DOC 10.) Unfortunately for him the people of Russia didn’t see this characteristic; Stalin’s methods damaged the Russians. His act of collectivization was found to be extremely unfair and hurtful. Numerous actions were taken place…

    • 517 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Stalin Dbq

    • 887 Words
    • 4 Pages

    In 1917, Russia was crumbling into pieces. The World War I was draining all of Russia’s resources. There was shortage of food throughout the country, which left people starving. At the battlefront, millions of Russian soldiers were dying, they did not possess many of the powerful weapons that their opponents had. The government under Czar Nicholas II was disintegrating, and a provisional government had been set up. In November of 1917, Lenin and his communist followers known as the Bolsheviks overthrew the provisional government and set a communist government in Russia. However, in 1924, Lenin died and Josef Stalin assumed leadership of the Soviet Union, which was the name for the communist Russia. Stalin was a ruthless leader who brought many changes to the Soviet Union. Stalin’s goal was to transform the Soviet Union into a modern superpower and spread communism throughout the world, and he was determined to sabotage anyone who stood in his way. He used many methods such as collectivization, totalitarianism and five year plan’s to achieve his goals. Stalin’s rule brought both harmful and beneficial consequences to the Soviet Union; however, the negative factors were so terrible, that they overwhelm the positive factors.…

    • 887 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev was a politician who led the Soviet Union during part of the Cold War. Around 1954-55 in the power struggle triggered by Stalin’s death in 1953, Khrushchev emerged as number one. In 1956, Khrushchev gives a “secret speech” where he discussed Stalin’s crimes for the first time, starting a process called “de-Stalinization.” Khrushchev believes that the Soviet system has become too bureaucratic. He wanted decentralization. He abolished the tractor station, which were the centralizing mechanisms that gave the party/state control over the collected farms because the collected farms did not own their own machinery. It was a control mechanism. Ultimately, most of Khrushchev’s reforms had very bad, unintended consequences.…

    • 318 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    To a certain extent Stalin did meet, in places, the overly optimistic aims for the Five Year Plans yet this was to be at the cost of millions of lives and the livelihoods of many Russian peasants who were to be ruthlessly killed, extradited or simply stripped of their land and possessions. The success of the Five Year Plans can be judged upon the entry of Russia into the Second World War for this was to be the first big test of the newly industrialised state on the world stage. Stalin had aimed to bring about the complete modernisation of Russia as a country and in doing so had hoped that this would mean that Russia could overtake the Capitalist Nations of the West. Stalin himself was the individual who had proposed such plans for he was the one it may be argued, who wished to achieve an historical role for himself as the successor of Lenin. Evidence of this proposal, putting Russian development at the forefront of his ideas, is illustrated by his speeches in which he calls for the need to "create socialism in one country". His objectives were clear for he gave priority to the recovery of the peasant sector and to the financing of industry, which, he argued, were to become possible due to the prospect of the increased prosperity of the Russian peasantry. However one should also argue that they would probably have occurred anyway and another leader may have attained the same end result yet without the terrible effects upon the Russian population and way of life.…

    • 3200 Words
    • 13 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    • To modernize agriculture, Stalin encourage Soviet farmers to combine their small family farms into huge collective farms owned and run by the state. • The state takeover of farming was completed within a few years, but with terrible consequences.…

    • 1079 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Better Essays

    1.Collectivization began in the early 1930’s when Joseph Stalin became the dictator of Russia. Stalin had a five year plan come into action where the members of the communist party carried out his requests to the villagers to join the collective farm in the thought of industrializing Russia. The collective farm affected the farmers who owned agricultural land. The farmers were persuaded to join the collective farm with the thought of having an easier way to care for their land, but in reality it was a force collectivization. The members of the communist party also created propaganda for Stalin’s five year plan to influence farmers to join the collectivization.…

    • 1870 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    “A severe shortfall in grain prompted Stalin to push for the collectivization of agriculture and the seizure of grain stored by the kulak farmers (farmers who owned their own land)”(Mass). To carry Stalin’s plan out, the Soviet Union set policies of mass agriculture and forced the collectivization through the First Five Year Plan of 1928, which was supposed to last up until 1933. “Through his collectivization policy, Stalin’s goal was to increase productivity from the farmers through eliminating small, privately-held farms and turning to mass agricultural policies” (“The Holodomor”). Because many people were resisting and revolting against his rule, Stalin began to starve them by taking their food, animals, and crops away. This lead towards the deaths of millions of people by either starvation, cannibalism, or…

    • 1393 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Stalin wanted to transform the Soviet Union, “his development plan was centered on government control of the economy and included the forced collectivization of Soviet agriculture, in which the government took control of farms. Millions of farmers refused to cooperate with Stalin’s orders and were shot or exiled as punishment. The forced collectivization also led to widespread famine across the Soviet Union that killed millions. ”[1] Joseph Stalin was a politician to his core and ruled with a totalitarian spirit, he increased secret police forces and encouraged people to spy on one another. Anyone suspected of being a threat was either sent to a forced labor camp or killed.…

    • 552 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Joseph Stalin was in favor of the collective farm. The governments would take your agriculture, and give you what you “deserve.” His collectivization soon turned into a civil war which resulted in death and deportation of five to eight million people. It also caused huge famine in the Ukraine, an estimated five to ten million people died of starvation. Walter Duranty said that people were dying because of malnutrition, not starvation. Stalin sentenced people to labor camps, and if you didn’t go it could result in a ten year…

    • 573 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    The Life of Joseph Stalin

    • 1407 Words
    • 6 Pages

    Unfortunately for the world Joseph Stalin was the one child out of the four in his family that survived past his childhood. Joseph Stalin was born on December 21, 1879, in Gori, Russia. Joseph Stalin’s father died when he was just eleven years of age, so his mother took complete responsibility of taking care of the boy. Joseph Stalin’s mother was a very religious woman and she also made sure that her son was educated. Joseph Stalin attended an elementary school in which was under the administration of the Orthodox church. In 1894 Joseph Stalin received a scholarship to the Orthodox Theological Seminary in Tbilisi. Nothing out of the ordinary occurred in Joseph Stalin’s childhood that you would expect to see in a man that would later become one of the world’s most brutal leaders. As a result of his use of fear, intimidation, and his successful plan to oust his main rival, Leon Trotsky, Joseph Stalin was able to seize power in Russia.…

    • 1407 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    After 250 years of living under Russian Tsarist rule, the Ukrainians became part of the Soviet Union in 1922. Farmers thrived, economic freedom was permitted, and private enterprise was allowed. Among these, writers, artists, and scholars grew. Stalin, in 1924, took over Russia after the previous leader, Vladimir Lenin, died. Later, in 1928, Stalin launched a plan to force farmers into giving up their private land, livestock, and farms. Joseph Stalin felt he could not trust the Ukraine peasantry; he believed that the upper class farmers, or kulaks, were holding crops. Stalin took all the grain from the peasants. He had his men search for any hidden grain and Stalin analyzed fecal matter to see if the Ukrainians had stolen ‘government property’ and eaten the grain themselves. It was because of Stalin that many starved and resorted to eating anything. They drank water to fill their empty bellies. Small children perished first, then the elderly, followed by the men, and soon after, the women. Up to twenty-five percent of the population died because Stalin took all of the food.…

    • 742 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Joseph Stalin was the authoritarian leader of the Soviet Union for 31 years between 1922 and his death in 1953. During this time, he revolutionised the Russian economy with a combination of rapid industrialisation and centralised economic collectivism, reforms that in some instances caused massive devastation in rural parts of the country (including the famine of 1932-1933, in which up to 6m people starved to death). A hugely controversial figure on the global political stage, Stalin carried out ruthless purges of the Soviet military, political and judicial classes (Applebaum, 2004), sending political opponents to work in work camps (or gulags) in Siberia from which few ever returned.…

    • 997 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays