Jānis Lasmanis 12. sb
Essay in history
The soviet state was established at the
expense of the soviet people
Russia has always been one of the most cruel an inhuman countries in the Europe, and its governments have never truly cared about people’s lives (even estimated in several millions) to achieve their political goals and maintain power. And so did Stalin, as the previous rulers, not really cared about the sacrifice of lives needed to achieve his policies as industrialization, agricultural policies (collectivization), and purges (labor camps).
In 1927 for the first time the 5-year plan was introduced By Gosplan. Stalin wanted the Soviet Russia to achieve the industrial level as in most Western countries, so the five-year plans were made to achieve this goal. Also as the New Economic Policies (NEP) were derided as thought only as a temporary measure, a new policy to arrange the economic problems in Russia was to be made. The plan came to action in October 1928 and from that moment the Russian economy became a “command economy”.
The first five-year plan was made mainly to develop the industrialization in the country and to achieve the collective agriculture, thus increasing the production of food so that the fast growing cities would have enough of it. To achieve the collectivization meant that the peasants had to refuse from their private farms and join with other peasants in collective farms. However, Stalin knew that the richest peasants (kulaks) who had more land would most likely to protest to this policy, so first he had to deal with them. In 1929 he said that he wants to “liquidate the kulaks as a social class”. About 1.5 million people were deported to Siberia, where most of them died of cold and famine. When Stalin dealt with the kulaks another problem appeared, the peasants that were forced to join the kolkhozes, tried to oppose the decision by killing their domestic animals and destroying their crops. So this caused the problem of famine in whole Russia. Also many peasants moved to cities searching for a work in factories instead, and this increased the demand for food in the cities. As there was little food, but there was an urgent need for it in the cities Stalin ordered to take most of the food produced from peasants and move it to urban areas. Thus although the food production in Russia increased, as the five-year plan demanded it, still the peasants in the country were dieing of famine, because the food was confiscated and moved to the industrial cities. In overall about 5 to 6 million peasants died of famine because of this policy, while in the meantime government was building large warehouses to store the grain in case of ware (they were actually useless as Russians burnt most them down when Germans were attacking Russia during the WW2). To conclude, as the government’s priority was the industrial workers, Stalin did not care at all for the dieing peasants leaving them in complete isolation and only demanded the food from them.
