How successful were Stalin's economic policies in the 1920s and 30s?

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School: Shrewsbury School

Name: Edwin Bennett

History set: 5HA1

Title of Coursework: How successful were Stalin’s economic policies in the 1920s and 30s?

Question 1: What changes did Stalin introduce to agriculture and industry? (5)

Industry

The main changes that Stalin made to industry during his reign were to disestablish Lenin’s N.E.P. (new economic policy), introduce his five-year plans (this affected agriculture as well as industry), and to take the economy under state control: this is called nationalization.

With a policy of nationalization, Stalin had replaced the prospect of privatization, a key part of Lenin’s N.E.P., with his five-year plans.

These five-year plans set ambitious targets in the production all of the mainstream resources: Coal, iron, oil and electricity. He also set about creating new cities in Siberia and the Urals etc. to harness the wealth of resources available there; some examples of these cities are Magnitogorsk, Sverdlovsk and Komsomolsk.

As well as all these other projects Stalin sent engineering, agricultural and industrial experts into areas of central Asia to increase efficiency and so production.

Stalin’s first five-year plan had a simple system of planning, which started at Gosplan, the State Planning Commission (equivalent of the Home Office in Britain). Gosplan would set overall targets nationwide for a particular industry. Each region would then be told its targets, that region would then tell each of its mines, factories etc. its goals. The manager of each mine, factory etc. will then set targets for each foreman in his factory, mine etc. The foreman can then either set targets for a shift or even for particular worker. In this way in one simple but effective process targets were set for industry right at the top but at the same time people at the bottom of the pile knew what was expected of them.

        Another large change to Russia’s industry was the production of electricity simply because before then not much had been produced as Russia was effectively in medieval times. Stalin made electricity when he made dams in the river Dnieper to create HEP (as well as other places).

In Stalin’s first five-year plan the idea was to increase production and set a base for the next five years. In the first four years (the plan only took four years to complete) electricity production was nearly tripled, coal nearly doubled, as did oil and Pig Iron whilst steel production increased by fifty percent. However none of these mainstream resources actually hit the targets which were set (with the exception of oil which exceeded its target by 2.4 million tons). This should give some indication how ambitious Stalin was in his plans. This is not to say that Stalin’s policy was not successful however, as can be seen by the results above and by the fact that after four years the USSR’s national income had been increased from 27 billion roubles to 45 billion roubles.

        Stalin’s second five-year plan had an extra aim to the ones set in the first which was to create or import machine parts and other investment goods (such as tractors, lorries and cargo ships). Another distinguishing feature of this five-year plan was the distribution of medals to hardworking men as an incentive to others. These medals were called Strakhanov medals after a miner called Alexei Strakhanov who produced 14 times more coal than was normal in one shift (he mined 102 tons of coal). After this a ‘Strakhanovite movement’ was set up and Alexei proceeded to tour the country lecturing on his ideals and methods.

In the third, and what was to be the last five-year plan, the idea was to produce consumer goods (e.g. toilet paper, cooking pots, shoes and shoelaces, lightbulbs, soap etc.). Unfortunately the Second World War interrupted this plan so production was turned almost completely over to the production of armaments.

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Agriculture

The changes that were made had two main motives behind them, firstly Stalin’s want to bring all of Russia’s economy under state control and secondly to increase food production dramatically to feed the massive numbers of workers that Stalin will need to accommodate as a result of his plans for industry.

        The first stage of the Stalin’s plan to achieve those two goals was to achieve collectivisation. This was a key word since it meant that all the private farms spread across Russia would become either a collective farm Kolkhoz) or a State farm (Sovkhoz).

        A Collective farm ...

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