Why Did Joseph Stalin Use Of Industrialization Essay

The rapid industrialization of the USSR was a major altering time in the history of the Soviet Union. During this time, Joseph Stalin used several means to rapidly industrialize the country. Some of these means did not take any one else’s perspective into consideration and Stalin did not care if he hurt one’s feelings or not. Having the USSR undertake a massive push toward industrialization would only mean that they would become a communist state. One of the ways that Stalin used to industrialize the Soviet Union very rapidly was by enforcing the Five Year Plan. Stalin’s Five Year Plan came about after the collapse of the New Economic Policy (NEP) in 1928. The NEP wanted peasants off of their land on into tents and housed factories in which
they would live and work there. During the time of the NEP everyone was class conscious except for the Russian peasants. With the Five Year Plan in place, Stalin wanted the USSR to be in equal if not more than the rest of the world.
Unlike the NEP, the Five Year Plan had no more supply and demand. During Stalin’s Five Year Plan, peasants had more motivation to make their farms grow more. In return their goods would be sent east in return for machinery and technology. These machines only lasted for a short while due to the fact that no one in the Soviet Union knew how to make any sort of repairs on them once they broke down. In return the peasants own people were starving to death because of all of their goods from their farms were being sent away. The Great Famine peaked at this point in time claiming thousands of lives. Peasants began to store and hide their items whether it was goods or foods. Peasants knew that their farms were not going to be handed down to their children, peasants were burning their own crops, slaughtering their own cattle and attacked any communist that had approached them. This was known as collectivization, unlike the NEP which was for stopping collective agriculture. The collectivization wanted to abolish the Kulak group of people whereas during the NEP Kulaks were able to hire their labor. The members of the Kulaks were in objection to this collectivization because they thought they were doing alright for themselves. Kulaks were forced out of
their own homes and into Siberia labor camps. There the Kulaks were without subsistence and were hounded by the local population. With this collectivization and the Kulak’s out of the way this gave way to the poor peasants to improve on their agriculture but in the end it just made the peasants lose their autonomy. During Stalin’s First Five Year Plan, he wished to move into socialism and prevent the potential disintegration of the Bolshevik revolution. Stalin was able to do this by rapidly industrializing the USSR. Stalin’s first Five Year Plan was ended by 1934. When Stalin started his Five Year Plan the Soviet Union was so far behind any other country that they had a long way to catch up to others. Factories were being built fairly quickly and within a few years those factories were having to be either torn down or shut down because they could not withstand the demand for the product they were producing. During Stalin’s years in power his rapid industrialization of the Soviet Union was his biggest achievement. Number in the production facilities soared and the output of factories were extraordinary. All this did not come free though. The people of the Soviet Union suffered in the end. Some were sent away to labor camps in Siberia, where they were treated very unfairly while others were forced to make harsh decisions about their own property. Citizens in the Soviet Union were arrested and interrogated just because they might have been walking down the street the wrong way. Officers would interrogate them to make it seem like they were associated with someone or a political party that Stalin was not too fond of or vice versa.