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I. Introduction
A. Thesis
B. Statement of problem
II. Beginnings
A. Childhood
B. The Making of a Revolutionary
III. The Five Year Plans in Industry
A. Progress and Benefits to Russia
B. Downfalls for the People
IV. Agricultural Changes
A. Collectivization
B. The Liquidation of the Kulaks
C. Famine
V. Social Changes
A. Social Benefits
B. Personal Advancements
C. Woman in Society
VI. Purges
A. The Party
B. The Army
C. The Burial Pits
VII. Conclusion
A. Summary
B. Final Statement
Stalin: Did his Rule Benefit Russian Society and the Russian People?
In this paper I plan to prove that even though Stalin made improvements
in the Russian industrial system, his rule did not benefit Russian society and the Russian
people. In order to accomplish this, several questions must be asked. How did Stalin
affect Russia's industrial power? How did Stalin try to change Russia's agricultural
system? What changes did Stalin make in society? What were Stalin's purges, and who did
they effect?
Joseph Vissarionovich Djugashvili was born on December 21, 1879, on the
southern slopes of the Caucasus mountains, in the town of Gori. His mother, Ekaterina was
the daughter of a peasant who married at fifteen and who lost her first three children at
birth. Vissarion, his father, was a self-employed shoemaker who had a violent temper
(Marrin 6-7).
Young Djugashvili was small and wiry and had a deeply pitted face from
a small pox attack that nearly killed him. He also had blood poisoning in his left arm
that was probably caused by Vissarion's beating fists. The arm would stiffen at the elbow
joint and wither, making it lame and useless for the rest of his life (Lewis 8; Marrin 8).
He was dedicated to only one person, his mother, and her only ambition
was for her son to become a priest and to bless her with his own hands. But, this dream
was crushed when Joseph was expelled from Tiflis Theological Seminary for reading
"forbidden books" such as Marx and Lenin (Lewis 8; Marrin 20).
After his expulsion from Tiflis school, Joseph became a revolutionary.
He organized strikes and demonstrations at factories and also found ways to gather money
for Lenin and the Bolshevik party. He was banished to Siberia six times between the years
1903 and 1917. Each time, he escaped easily, except the last, when he was released because
of the February revolution (Lewis 19; Marrin 24). After the death of his first wife,
Ekaterina Svanidze, Joseph became more cold and tough. He gave the child that his wife
bore him to her parents and even chose a new name for himself, Stalin, the Man of Steel
(Marrin 26).
Then came the October Revolution and the rise of Lenin and the
Bolsheviks. Stalin became general secretary of the Bolshevik party's Central Committee. He
was also the commissar of the Workers' and Peasants' Inspectorate and the commissar of
nationalities (McKay 927; Treadgold 205). After Lenin's, death Stalin gained power by
allying himself with the moderates to fight off his rival, Leon Trotsky, who was a radical
and another member of the Central Committee. Stalin expelled Trotsky and suppressed his
radical followers. Then he turned against his own allies, the moderates. Stalin at last
had gained complete control (McKay 927-928).
One of the great achievements that Stalin made for the Soviet Union
were the Five Year Plans in industry. Russia had not yet had their industrial revolution
and were far behind the other powers of the world. Even Stalin said," We are fifty or
a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten
years. Either we do it, or we shall be crushed." So, that is what Stalin set out to
do (Dmytryshyn 158).
The First Five Year Plan was adopted in April 1929 by the Sixteenth
Party Conference. It's purpose was to increase Russia's industrial production. On December
31, 1932, the First Five Year Plan was declared officially completed ahead of schedule.
Total industrial output increased two hundred and fifty percent, steel production
increased three hundred percent, production of large-scale industry showed an increase of
one hundred and eighteen percent, production of machinery and electrical equipment
increased one hundred and fifty-seven percent, heavy metal increased sixty-seven percent,
coal output increased eighty-nine percent, and consumer goods increased about
seventy-three percent (Dmytryshyn 158; McKay 928; Treadgold 266).
After the success of the First Five Year Plan, the Seventeenth Party
Congress formally adopted the Second Five Year Plan, covering the years 1933-1937 in
January, 1934. To overcome the lacking of iron and steel, the Second Plan ordered
construction of forty-five new blast furnaces, one hundred and sixty-four open-hearth
furnaces, and one hundred and seven rolling mills. Other goals of the second plan were an
expansion of machine tool production, the development and production of non-ferrous
metals, and the improvement and double-tracking of the main railroad lines (Dmytryshyn
159).
The results of the Second Five Year Plan were that some items reached
their estimated targets while others lagged behind. Overall, by the end of the Second Five
Year Plan, the Soviet Union was emerging as a strong industrial country. It possessed
increased capability to produce iron, steel, coal, and electric power. It also had a whole
new range of new industries, including aviation, tractor, locomotive, chemical, aluminum,
nickel, and tin. The Soviet Union now had a well-established industrial base capable of
further expansion and growth (Dmytryshyn 160-161).
Although rapid industrialization helped improve Russia, it hurt the
workers. "Industrialization moved so fast and was often so poorly planned that
disasters frequently resulted . . ." (Marrin 102). The amount of work that had to be
put in was also hard on the workers. The workers had to work longer under Stalin than when
they were ruled by the tsars. "Depending on the industry, they worked between
forty-eight and sixty hours a week, Sundays included . . ." (Marrin 103).
Once the industrial Five Year Plans started to roll, Stalin decided to
make some agricultural changes to support the industrialization. In April, 1928, Stalin
presented the draft of a new land law. Although the draft failed to become a law, it
showed a couple of Stalin's objectives. One was the rapid and forcible collectivization of
the peasants in order to industrialize the country quickly. The other was the liquidation
of the kulaks as a class. Kulaks were classified as, "Those peasants who were either
industrious, or more prosperous than their neighbors, or simply those who were not
enthusiastic about the policies of the communist party . . ." (Dmytryshyn 167).
Collectivization was the forcible consolidation of individual peasant
farms into large, state-controlled enterprises. It was suppose to help Russian agriculture
and support the quickly industrializing country (McKay 928; Dmytryshyn 167). Soviet
writer, Lyudmila Saraskina believed that, "Collectivization was a bloody, terrible,
and monstrous means of the seizure of absolute power, because the free peasant and master
of the land, the farmer, constituted one of the main obstacles on the path to the absolute
feudal power that Stalin really wanted . . ." (Lewis 65).
The kulaks were the well off peasants that opposed collectivization any
way they could. The way Stalin dealt with them was to first turn the bedniaks or poor
peasants against them offering the bedniaks the kulaks castles and machinery. Then, Stalin
had the rest of the kulaks either killed or exiled to the northern or eastern regions of
the country. The death toll recorded in the anti-kulak campaign is between three and ten
million killed (Treadgold 268; Dmytryshyn 168; Lewis 63).
Many peasants killed their cattle, pigs, and horses; destroyed the farm
implements; and either burned their crops or let them rot in the fields before being
forced into collectivization. Because of this, poor harvests, grain seizures, and the
elimination of the better farmers, the kulaks, there was a man made famine (Lewis 65) .
The famine was so bad that some people resorted to cannibalism. Mykola Pishy reported this
about her neighbor, "Ivan was a good specialist - a joiner, a tailor, a shoe-maker -
a good fellow who could turn his hand at anything. But the famine was awful and he got to
the end of his tether. He was so hungry that he killed his child, and ate the meat . .
." (Lewis 66-67). In Targan, the city where Alisa Maslo lived, 362 people died from
the famine.
They went from house to house and they took away everything to the last grain . . . and
this included ours. And they really left the family to certain famine death. And so my
grandma died and then one of my brothers. . . . My mother was lying in bed swollen with
hunger . . . my older brother had died. And I told my mother that 'we're the only two
left', that my brother was also dead. Up came the cart and the man took my brother and
dragged him to the cart, and then my own live mother. I started crying and the man said,
'Go to the orphanage where at least you'll get some soup. She'll die anyway, why should I
come here a second time?' And so I became an orphan (Lewis 65-66).
Between five and ten million people died from starvation because of the famine (Dmytryshyn
169).
Along with the improvements in industry and the attempted improvements
in agriculture, Stalin started to make improvements in society. Soviet workers received
some important social benefits, such as old-age pensions, free medical services, free
education, and free day-care centers for children. There was also the possibility of
personal advancement.
To improve your position, you needed specialized skills or technical
education. Massive numbers of trained experts were needed for the rapid industrialization
going on. High salaries and many special privileges were offered to the technical and
managerial elite. Millions struggled in universities, institutes, and night schools for
the all important specialized education. "In Soviet Russia there is no capital except
education. If a person does not want to become a collective farmer or just a cleaning
woman, the only means you have to get something is through education . . ." (McKay
931-932).
Another change under Stalin was that there was an equality of rights
for women. They were urged to work outside the home and to liberate themselves sexually.
Divorces and abortions were also made very easy. "Young women were constantly told
that they should be fully equal to men, that they could and should do anything men could
do . . ." (McKay 932). Most women had to work outside the home because it took both
the husband and wife working to support their family. But, the woman had a heavy burden of
household chores in her off hours. Soviet men still considered the home and the children
the wife's responsibilities (McKay 933).
Along with some of these beneficial changes that Stalin made to society
came some non-beneficial ones, specifically the purges. One of the first to be eliminated
was Stalin's wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, who after being ridiculed by her husband at a
party for the fifteenth anniversary of the revolution on November 8, 1932, apparently shot
herself (Lewis 83-84; McKay 930). Then, at four o'clock in the afternoon of December 1,
1934, a young disillusioned Communist named Leonid V. Nikolaev shot Stalin's number-two
man, Sergei Kirov, who had just been offered Stalin's job of General Secretary from the
senior members of the Party (Marrin 116; Lewis 86; McKay 930; Treadgold 278).
Stalin used Kirov's death to launch a reign of terror. Stalin blamed
Kirov's death on foreign powers, the exiled Trotsky, and the moderates. Stalin ordered the
"purification" of the party. On August 19, 1936, sixteen old Bolsheviks were
publicly tried for conspiring with Trotsky and for the murder of Kirov (Dmytryshyn
179-181; Treadgold 279). Anyone connected anyway to Nikolayev was also arrested. Robert
Conquest explains:
Everyone who was remotely connected with the case was seized. One woman had worked as a
librarian at the 'Young Communist Club' in Leningrad which had been disbanded in the
mid-twenties but, with which Nikolayev had in some way been associated. Not only was she
arrested, but also her sister with whom she lived, her sister's husband, the secretary of
her Party cell, and all those who had recommended her for jobs (Lewis 90).
Then in January 1937 there was another trial for seventeen more party members. They were
accused of conspiring with Nazi Germany and Japan to dismember the USSR (Dmytryshyn 181).
The trials and arrests continued. There were mass arrests, confessions
extracted by force, and the executions and deportations of thousands of peasants. Soviet
officers were also arrested and convicted. The Red Army lost three of it's five field
marshals, fourteen of it's sixteen army commanders, sixty of it's sixty-seven corps
commanders, 136 of it's 199 division commanders, 220 brigade commanders, all eleven deputy
commissars of war, seventy-five members of the Supreme Military Council, all military
district commanders, all air force officers, all except one navy fleet commander, and all
eight Red Navy admirals. In addition, the army lost half of it's officer corps, 35,000 men
ranging from colonels to company commanders (Dmytryshyn 180-182; Marrin 127).
Many that suffered from the purges were sent to labor camps or were
just executed by the secret police. Local units of secret police were even ordered to
arrest a certain percentage of the people in their districts (McKay 931). Graves were
discovered in 1934 holding over 9,000 bodies of people killed around 1938 in the Ukraine.
Since then mass burial sights have been discovered outside major cities such as Minsk,
Kiev, and Novosibirsk, and one with possibly 40,000 bodies in the Kirov region of Donetsk.
A burial sight at Chelyabinsk, was found to contain more than 80,000 people. Zenon
Pozniak, an archaeologist who has excavated many of these burial plots also found 510
burial pits in Kuropaty and calculated that each one contained about 150 bodies. That
could mean there are around 75,000 bodies in there. Apparently there were as many as 1,000
pits originally (Lewis 106-107). Pozniak has also researched the circumstances of these
people's deaths:
They were shot by NKVD (secret police) soldiers in NKVD uniform. They shot them from
behind, in the back and pushed them into the pit. When that group was finished, they
covered the corpses with sand like a layer cake. They got the contents of the next lorry
and shot them, and in that way they filled the pit right up to the top . . . people who
lived in the villages nearby told us that . . . the earth would breathe. Some people
weren't actually dead when they were buried, and the earth breathed and heaved and the
blood came through (Lewis 107).
Stalin used the Five Year Plans to make great strides in
industrializing Russia. When he tried to equal that success with agricultural growth he
met some resistance and ended up liquidating a class and causing famine.
Socially, he gave some important social benefits to workers and gave women equal rights.
But, he also tried to purge the country and eliminated a lot of the Party, most of the
army, and a good part of the workers and peasants. Stalin made several industrial
improvements for his country but, that does not even begin to equal the death and
destruction that he caused.
Works Cited
Dmytryshyn, Basil. USSR: A Concise History. 2nd ed. New York: Scribner's, 1971.
Lewis, Jonathan, and Phillip Whitehead. Stalin. New York: Pantheon Books, 1990.
Marrin, Albert. Stalin: Russia's Man of Steel. New York: Viking Kestrel, 1988.
McKay, John P, Bennett D. Hill, and John Buckler. History of Western Society. 4th ed.
Boston: Houghton, 1991.
Treadgold, Donald W. Twentieth Century Russia. 2nd ed. Chicago: Rand, 1964.
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