One of Stalin's great struggles during his years as Soviet premier was the state's economy. He organized a series of Five Year Plans to help create a productive communist state. During his first such plan, Stalin hoped to increase the Soviets' base of industrialization. This first Five Year Plan did manage to double the level of Russian manufacturing. A second plan focused on increasing the Soviet Union's level of technology. Stalin's involvement in World War II interrupted his third plan. Such plans, however, were pursued with such vigor and forcefulness that Stalin's Soviet Union managed, by 1940, to rise to a position of third largest industrial producer in the world, behind the United States and Germany. By 1939, all industrial manufacturing in the Soviet Union was owned and controlled by the state.
Sta1in also attempted to revolutionize Soviet agricultural output. By the mid-1930s, the Soviet Union had turned nearly all Soviet farms into socialist cooperatives. To achieve this, Stalin's agents scoured the countryside, forcing peasants to cooperate in killing those who refused to turn their privately owned land over to the state-controlled collectives. (A collective was a business or farm owned by a group for the equal good of all involved.) Perhaps millions of peasant farmers were killed during this period. Also, peasant protest of collectivism caused them to destroy fields and kill their own livestock.
By 1933, the Soviet Union had lost half of its livestock at the hands of uncooperative peasants. Yet collective farming survived. The Soviet Union, under Stalin's control, became a harsh regime which controlled the lives of its citizens on every level. Many of the average peasants were convinced of the necessity of the on-going revolution through continuous propaganda campaigns.
From Grolier Online:
Stalin rose to power because he embodied, perhaps more than any of his old colleagues, a new spirit. His colleagues, most notably the brilliant, individualistic Trotsky, who had thrived during the days of storm and stress, were unfitted for the office politics, the patient calculation, and the compromise required to operate a growing bureaucratic regime. Stalin, though unimpressive physically and a man of restless, emotional, vain, cynical, and often vindictive temperament, had internalized so profoundly the role of administrator that he projected everywhere in public (in imitation of Lenin) a humble air, simple dress, personal asceticism, calmness, efficiency, and fatherliness--qualities that appealed to his colleagues, to the public, and, perhaps most important of all, to the new generation of party functionaries of humble origin flooding the party in the 1920's.
Stalin was also careful to back the most popular solutions to the many problems hotly debated in the 1920's, including Lenin's principles of one-party government and internal party unity, the restoration of normal diplomatic relations, and moderate policies for the development of Soviet industry and agriculture. His theory of "socialism in one country", which asserted the possibility of building a complete Communist system in one country, contradicted traditional Marxist internationalism. But it was reassuring to many people who longed for some stability after the years of upheaval. He always appeared as one who implemented the will of the majority. His colleagues did not fear the power of the party machine over which Stalin presided, but rather the attempt on anyone's part to assert the kind of personal authority Lenin had exercised. Stalin exploited this miscalculation superbly, playing carefully on the mutual rivalries and suspicions of his colleagues and helping them to oust one another, while quietly staffing local and central party organs with his own followers. Power was substantially his by 1928.
After a year of drift, and not unmindful of the party's desire for change, Stalin and his men at the end of 1928 struck out precipitately on a set of policies designed to turn backward Russia into a modern state. With his predilection for vigorous and ruthless action and on the basis of what is today recognized as an inaccurate appraisal of the Soviet economy, Stalin launched forced industrialization and collectivization. The momentous series of economic and social measures included the establishment of crude and unrealistic five-year national economic plans, the deportation and execution of hundreds of thousands of the better-off peasants (kulaks) and the forced entrance of the rest into state-controlled collective farms, nationalization of all industry and commerce, the regulation and manipulation of all financial instruments for capital accumulation by the government regardless of the people's impoverishment, and the centralization of all social activity. Top leaders such as Nikolai Bukharin, Aleksei Rykov, and Mikhail Tomsky, who urged restraint and more realistic procedures, were swept out of office. Despite the death of millions from famine and goods shortages that these measures caused, Stalin pursued the program relentlessly, meeting resistance and criticism with mass deportations, executions, and show trials of alleged saboteurs.
The enormous tensions engendered by this extraordinary drive, coupled with a growing desire for normalization, produced considerable dissatisfaction that may have led to a secret movement within the party to replace Stalin with Sergei Kirov, a secretary of the central committee and party leader in Leningrad. The murder of Kirov, in December 1934, began a period of purging and terror that lasted until 1939 and was marked by the execution of virtually the entire political and military elite and the incarceration in forced labor camps of millions of Soviet citizens. In this way Stalin, with the help of the secret police, established his personal dictatorship over the party and the country.
The establishment of totalitarian political control was coupled with retrenchment in the social and economic realm, in which Stalin instituted better methods of industrial management, a system of incentives and differential wages and prices, the reestablishment of traditional procedures in the armed forces, more moderate general guidelines in the arts and sciences, and a revival of the family as the basic social unit. In the face of the growing threats from Nazi Germany and Japan, Stalin reverted increasingly to traditional forms of foreign policy, seeking diplomatic alliances with the European powers. Finally, in August 1939, he concluded a bilateral nonaggression treaty with Hitler
Although Hitler and Stalin hated each other, the two leaders were similar in many ways. Hitler and Stalin each rose to the highest position attainable in their respective countries, and there were three main reasons that they were able to do this. Both men were skilled users of propaganda, each was amoral, and they both had the ambition to make their countries powerful in the world. Since each was a skilled user of propaganda, they could use their words to twist and manipulate the minds of people into believing that what they were saying was the absolute truth. Using this power, they would get people to do anything for them, which proves their amorality. Since their countries were still trying to recover from World War I, they desired to restore the power back in to their countries. These three reasons will prove that Hitler and Stalin were similar in many ways.
