Stalin commenced using the power of the communist State on the people, to transform the Soviet Union into his ideal. The government took over all major private businesses. He set up his Five Year Plans which made targets for workforce in the industries, numbers and deadlines had to be met and punishments would be given if these weren’t achieved. It was a tough system but soon it recovered the production of iron, steel, coal and oil dramatically. He built railways and canals to link the industries, and built cities around coalmines and iron sources, these places like magnetogorst would have huge factories and foundries with a large number of workers. The small farms were all collectivised into massive groups of state-owned farms and had to grow exactly what the government ordered.
In 1929 Stalin made the statement:
“We are leaving behind the age-long Russian backwardness. We are becoming a country of metal, a country of cars, a country of tractors. And when we have put the Russian people in cars and the peasants on tractors, let the capitalists who boast so loudly try to overtake us. We shall see then which countries can be classified as backward and which as advanced”
Not all Russians agreed with Stalin’s ways, especially the more wealthy people who had to give up their land. But Stalin didn’t accept resistance. He forced huge numbers of peasants and town labourers who opposed his plans to work as slaves building the canals and railways. Millions of people died working through the harsh Russian winters. Stalin thought that all the suffering was merely a price worth paying to reach his dream.
Stalin’s modernization of the Soviet Union definitely produced results, but Stalin’s lust for power meant and cruel methods of reaching goals meant that many people’s lives were taken to get not very far. With little ‘seed capital’, little international trade, and really no modern infrastucture, Stalin's government financed industrialization by both restricting consumption on the part of ordinary Soviet citizens, to ensure that capital went for re-investment into industry, and by ruthless extraction of wealth from the peasantry. In 1933, worker's real earnings sank to about one-tenth of the 1926 level. This caused severe problems like the terrible famine of 1932 where many of the Russian people died of hunger. With huge sacrifices, the production in the heavy industry was certainly improved. This shows the industrial output growth from 1927 before he took power, to 1939:
The Soviet Union, ranked as the poorest nation in Europe in 1922, now industrialized at an amazing rate, far exceeding Germany's pace of industrialization in the 19th century and Japan's earlier in the 20th.
The Soviet Union began to catch up with the wealth of Capitalist nations such as the U.S.A and Britain, but because it’s wealth was concentrated solely on the field of heavy industry, there was a severe shortage of consumer goods for the people, like clothing, appliances, electrical goods, lighting, and toys and games. Nobody was allowed to complain that the Soviet people received little benefits from it’s wealth; they were supposed to take pride in the growth of industry.
Great progress was made under Stalin in some areas of science and technology. It made way for the famous achievements of Soviet science in the 1950s, such as the development of the BESM-1 computer in 1953 and the launching of the Sputnik sattelite programme in 1957. Many politicians in the United States began to fear that their country had been shadowed by the Soviet Union in science. Stalin also concentrated enormous research onto the creation of the nuclear bomb which would give the Soviet Union a power of fear (and ultimatley be the reason for the cold war later in the century). Many conventional scientific areas were banned, such as genetics, as they interfered with Stalin’s progress.
Stalin's government placed heavy emphasis on providing of free medical services, to prove to the west that the Soviet Union was not a backward place anymore. Stalin campaigned against typhus, cholera, and malaria; the number of doctors was increased rapidly as facilities and training improved; and death and infant mortality rates steadily declined. Education in primary schools continued to be free and was expanded, with many more Soviet citizens learning to read and write, and higher education, such as the public secondary school system he made also improved. With the industrialization and huge number of deaths induced, the generation that did survive under Stalin also saw a major expansion in job opportunities, especially for women, as Stalin killed off a lot of the men.
The Second World War became one of Stalin’s great achievements as well as his greatest losses. His methods of battle were far from praiseable. He constructed a movement against desertion to scare troops into continuously advancing. He even set up machine gun posts at the rear of the lines conducted by his secret police to shoot anyone retreating in the operation. Throughout the bloody duration of the war at least 9 million Red Army personnel and 20 million civilians died under Stalin’s tactics. But after years of suffering defeats, the Red Army won a string of crucial battles, and especially the victory at the battle of Stalingrad, which through great human loss eventually led to the destruction of the Nazi superpower and the capture of Berlin.
The war gave the Soviet Union a huge amount more territory, a stronger economy and ultimately a new status of power for Communism. The Red Army occupied much of the territory that had been formerly held by the Axis countries: there were Soviet occupation zones in Germany, Austria, Hungary and Poland. From 1946-1948 communist governments were imposed in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria and new communist dictatorships rose to power in Yugoslavia and Albania. These nations became known as the "Communist Bloc". The Soviet Union was truly now a superpower.
Stalin could also concentrate on further improving the country now that he didn’t need to put his efforts into war. The resulting ‘improvements’ following the war included the purifying of the population through great deportations of ethnic groups: Ukrainians, Poles, Koreans, Volga Germans, Crimean Tatars, Kalmyks, Chechens, Ingush, Balkars, Karachays, Meskhetian Turks, Finns, Bulgarians, Greeks, Armenians, Latvians, Lithuanians, and Estonians were all removed partially or completely, in an attempt to make a strong, loyal population.
To Conclude
Overall, under Stalin's rule the Soviet Union was transformed from an agricultural nation to a global superpower. The USSR's industrialisation was largely successful, and the country was able to defend against and eventually defeat the Nazi invasion in World War II, but through at an enormous cost of human lives. Personally, the industrialisation, although undoubtedly improved, would have seen the same improvements without Stalin’s evil regime. The majority of his other improvents could similiarly be disputed as there were so many problems during his rule, and the good didn’t outweigh the bad until the inevitable defeat of Germany which certainly wasn’t down to his poor tactics and plans, and would also have occurred without Stalin (and maybe faster). While Stalin's social and economic policies laid the foundations for the USSR's emergence as a superpower, the harshness in which he did this was after rejected by his successors in the Communist Party leadership, particularly the condemnation of Stalinism by Nikita Khrushchev.
