RUSSIA
History coursework
- A part of the five-year plan was collectivisation. This meant that farm workers had to leave their land and go into towns and cities to work in factories. The problem with getting country farm workers to work in factories is that the peasants weren’t trained to work with the new machines. The peasants worked according to the weather or seasons. One season when the crops would be ready for picking on the farm land the workers would work very efficiently but when the cold weather came the peasants slackened their work and the factories became inefficient, what they didn’t understand is that work could go on in any weather; snow or rain. When the peasants were paid the wages covered the expenses they had and started to become more relaxed and stopped turning up for work. They preferred leisure to work and the wages covered all their necessities. As was said earlier, the peasants weren’t trained to work in the factories and not being able to work the machines made accidents happen and the factories became inefficient. They were impossible to train partly because they couldn’t read or write and secondly they had never worked these things before in their lives. They were brought up on farms and were never taught how to work such things. This brought up problems such as machine accidents and this again made the factories slow and inefficient. Next is factory discipline. It was different to back on the farms where they made up their own rules and worked at their own pace. As it says in source E, ‘punctuality is essential’ and the peasants were not use to that kind of strict discipline.
