Assess the economic, social and political consequences of the collectivisation of Russian agriculture in the 1930s.

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Assess the economic, social and political consequences of the collectivisation of agriculture in the 1930s.

    This essay shall examine the main consequences that collectivisation had in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. The essay will first provide an explanation of what collectivisation was and give a brief background of why Stalin pursued this course. Secondly, the essay will analyse Stalin's desired economic consequences and the actual consequences of collectivisation, looking at issues such as the idle workforce in the industrial sector of the economy that collectivisation created. Then the essay will look at the social consequences, showing how collectivisation caused a famine in the Soviet Union that took the lives of million. Fourthly, the essay will move onto the political consequences of the policy, and will also display links between the political consequences and the economic and social factors. Furthermore, it will analyse how a new 'class' was created as a scapegoat for the Soviet Union's problems. It will also examine the ways in which Stalin used this in order to further his political gains and cement his position as the undisputed leader of the Soviet Union.

    The First Five Year Plan was a list of economic goals that Stalin designed in an attempt to strengthen the country’s economy between the years 1928 and 1932. One of the main objectives of this plan was the creation of the 'kolkhoz', which is a collective farm. Collectivisation is, from Marxist theory, a representation of "a type of ownership specific to the socialist mode of production", and thus it is the process of creating collective communities where the land and the resources of an area are owned by the community or the nation as a whole, thus they do not belong to any individuals (Bottomore, Harris, Kiernan & Miliband 1991 p91). The main reasons for the introduction of collectivisation by Stalin was that he wanted to produce more food so that he could feed the workers in industry, whilst also creating a surplus of food to sell overseas thus stimulating the economy. Furthermore, he wanted people to leave the land and work in industrial jobs to further industrialisation in the Soviet Union. Another key reason for collectivisation was so that Stalin could create a new class enemy, the kulaks. This group were 'richer peasants' who Stalin accused of not believing in communism, and therefore scapegoated them as causing all the problems of the Soviet Union (Marples 1984 p567).

    Stalin had hoped the consequence of forming collective farms would increase the economic power of the country, and had planned for the larger farm units to make the use of machinery more viable and cost-effective. Stalin had hoped the more efficient use of machinery would result in an increase of food production and decrease the labour requirements of agricultural production, whilst hoping that it would also result in releasing a much-needed workforce for the growing industrial sector of the economy. Another intention was that it would serve as the solution to the ongoing crisis that the Soviet Union faced of agricultural distribution, mainly in grain supplies, a problem that had been gradually developing since 1927, and became more acute when Stalin went ahead with his ambitious collectivisation and industrialisation policies (Davies 1980 p1). However, these aims were extremely difficult to achieve, largely due to the suddenness and vast scale that collectivisation was carried out. An example of this would be when Stalin declared in 1930 that 50% of the Soviet Union had been collectivised (Stalin 1930 p1). Instead, the Soviet people were hit hard by collectivisation, with "human and economic cost which was entirely unanticipated" (Millar 1982 p66), and even outside the collective farms, life was hard for the Soviet people throughout the 1930s as Stalin favoured 'labour discipline' (Deutscher 1957 p6) and 'party spirit' (Barber 1976 p25). In addition, the policy pursued by Stalin of dekulakisation eliminated many skilled workers from the farms, and thus decreased productivity immensely (Millar 1982p64). Before dekulakisation the kulaks had been responsible for"38% of the country's grain output" (Lewin 1966 p190). This clearly displays the major impact the loss of the kulaks had on the Soviet economy.

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    Collectivisation had one particular goal of forcing peasants to move from working on the land to new industrial areas, however, as these peasants were only trained to work on the land, this 'new workforce' in industrial sectors suffered from a severe lack of training and thus were mostly unskilled for the job, despite being highly trained in agriculture (Millar 1982 p65). Additionally, they were also not used to the factory life and urban living. These factors obviously hindered the chances of stimulating the economy, as collectivisation produced an unskilled and demoralised workforce, which is something that can also ...

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