The Five Year Plans can be described as this because the Soviet Union would then be less dependent on the West for goods like coal, iron, steel and could move towards autarky or more commonly known self-sufficiency.
The first of the Five Year Plans focused on the major industries and although most targets were not met, the achievements were still astounding. The USSR was rich in natural resources but many of the resources were in distant places like Siberia. Subsequently, entire cities were built from nothing and workers were taken out into the new industrial centres. New dams and hydroelectric power supplied industry’s energy needs.
The second of the Five Year Plans constructed on the achievements of the first Five Year Plan. Heavy industry still was the main point of Stalin’s ambitions however there were other areas that were also in need of improvement. Transport and communications were advanced, and modern railways and canals were built. This included the phenomenon ‘Moscow underground railway’ that had sophisticated stations and high domed ceilings.
In the third Five Year Plan many factories were switched to the production of consumer goods but the plan only ran for three and a half years because of the USSR’s participation of the Second World War. This meant that factories had to work to a very demanding supply of weaponry and for that reason consumer industries lagged behind even though they were showing signs of recovery.
Altogether, the Five Year Plans were always declared complete a year in advance because this meant that the Soviet would get much recognition and exposure over the Western capitalist economies, which were going through the Great Depression. The Great Depression meant that the USA was losing out on a lot of manufacturing productivity and the USSR was gaining from it. Also, it would help the USSR workforce to go onto produce much more accomplishments.
The colossal new industrial centres were constructed from nothing and Magnitogorsk and Kuznetz are examples of this. Stalin was very ingenious in planning that the cities were situated on the West of the country so that the West was less likely to get attacked by countries like China.
In addition, extravagant projects were visualized to display the might of the new Soviet industrial machine. This was the ‘Dnieprostroi Dam’ in the eastern USSR, which was for two years the world’s largest construction site, and it increased the Soviet electric power output, dramatically. Other projects included the ‘Moscow-Volga canal’ and the prominent ‘Moscow underground railway’.
I think that the Five Year Plans were used extremely successfully for propaganda purposes where Stalin wanted to make the USSR an encouragement of socialism and industrialisation to other countries.
He appeared alongside the builders of the ‘Dnieprostroi Dam’ in a painting where he looks as if he is socialising with the builders. This would help him to appear to be a sociable person and he would appear to be listening to the ideas of the USSR people even if they were ideas like the ‘Dnieprostroi Dam’ where Stalin didn’t approve of the project at first. Stalin did not approve of the dam at first because he thought it was too expensive and thought it would be a waste of production time. However, when he was featured in the painting it looks as if he backed the verdict that the ‘Dnieprostroi Dam’ was going to be built since the beginning.
A Soviet poster which additionally shows a woman in front of different types of jobs and reads, ‘The development of a network of crèches, kindergartens, canteens and laundries will ensure that women take part in socialist construction.’ This poster alone shows how Stalin used propaganda purposes to gain support of the women in his Five Year Plans because the ambitions of the Five Year Plans were so eminent that even women had to get employed into jobs in the USSR. This is very similarly to what Adolf Hitler did to his own country, Germany, where he employed women to carry out the jobs that men did because they were short on employment due to everyone joining the armed forces. As we can tell, Stalin’s propaganda method in this case worked because by 1937 women were 40% of industrial workers, compared to the 1927 figure of 28%. Also, four out of five new workers recruited between 1932 and 1937 were women.
Stalin made sure that the workers of the USSR were bombarded with propaganda, posters, slogans and radio broadcasts. This ultimately lead to a vast propaganda campaign was prepared to encourage workers to raise their production, which was staggeringly low during the first Five Year Plan. Shock-brigade campaigns and ‘socialist competition’ were tried to raise work standards but they benefited from limited success. Almost certainly, the majority of the propaganda scheme was the Stakhanovite movement. While this caused some inconvenience in the economy production rates did improve gradually.
In conclusion, I think that there were many achievements, accomplished by the Five Year Plans and there is no doubt that these achievements brought Stalin glory. However, I also think that the achievements made the USSR people aware that Stalin did this to make the USSR a much secure place as well as a dominant country and also to make them aware that they were a part of the future that Stalin was heading for.
3) During Stalin’s reign and time in power he had produced the Five Year Plans, which improved the industrialisation of the USSR and made it a force in the world to be reckoned with. However, while the country was reaching for the objectives pointed out in the Five Year Plans the country was not only improving but it was also causing misery to many of the Russian people.
In 1928 there was famine in the cities in which workers were not receiving enough food. Consequently, Stalin ordered that police squads were to make raids on the farms and made sure that the food in the cities was severely shared. However, over a short period Stalin found out that this measure was not sufficient. In 1929 Stalin declared that there was to be a more fundamental resolution to sort out the dilemma, this was called, collectivisation.
Collectivisation meant that the end was near for the minor, conventional farms owned by the peasants. In each area they were to pool their fields, their horses and their tools, and work together on a kolkhoz, where a communal farm was appropriate for everyone to work on. Instead of making profits by selling their grain at market, peasants would sell their grain to the government at a fixed low price and would only receive their wages for the work.
Stalin intended all 100 million peasants to join collective farms. However, he realised that many of them would oppose his plans, so he began by dealing with the richest peasants first. These were the kulaks.
In 1929 there were about 5 million people in kulak families. The typical kulak family opened two or three horses and several cows, and had a larger than average farm but they also had other peasants that were hired by them to work for them in the harvest season. Stalin thought that the most likely people to oppose the collectivisation scheme was the kulaks because they had very much to lose.
About 300,000 kulak families were transported from their homes and no appropriate engagements were made for them in the areas to which they were sent to. They frequently had to struggle for survival and by the end of it about 25% of them died due to starvation, disease, ill treatment and the cold.
Soon into the year 1930 the government found that half the peasants in the USSR joined the collectivisation scheme. Nevertheless, the grain deficiency was not resolved and many of the peasants did not like the collectivisation scheme at all so killed many of the resources. Over the next couple of years many millions of people died due to starvation because of the famine situation.
Stalin also changed their working days by revealing that instead of working for five days and then closing at weekends, factories now worked all seven days of the week, with a fifth of the workers having their day off on any one day.
To prevent workers from taking time off work, absenteeism was punished with the sack and with eviction from factory housing. Absenteeism was defined as more than one day’s absence without good reason.
People who were willing to work hard could do well. Workers who stayed in one job and obeyed factory discipline received higher pay, better conditions and better housing. Members of the shock brigades received special privileges such as tickets to the opera, paid holidays and access to special shops. The best workers, known as the Stakhanovites, were given medals and decorations in addition to better pay and housing and privileges.
The NKVD was Stalin’s secret police and was used by Stalin to crush any opponents of his policies. In the Donbass mining region many engineers were accused of disruption and a number of them were put on trial charges that were obviously made up. However, the real horror never took place until 1934 when Purges began to take place when Kirov, the leader of the Leningrad Communist Party was assassinated. Stalin cleverly used his intelligence to clear out all his opponents because of the murder. Many leading figures like Kamenev, Bukharin and Zinoviev were put on trial because they were traitors of the nation and additionally other non leading figures were put on trial like 500,00 party members on charges of anti Soviet activities and were either executed or sent to labour camps. Trotsky soon followed the list by getting executed by Stalin’s agents in Mexico. However, Stalin did not stop there he continued this Great Purge by removing 25,000 officers and many university lecturers and teachers, miners and engineers, factory managers and ordinary workers also disappeared. By 1937 an approximate 18 million people were sent to labour camps while 10 million died and by doing this Stalin injured the USSR immeasurably. This allowed Hitler, the leader of Germany, to invade the USSR while it was very weak and powerless.
In many prisons there were workers that had to carry out tasks that normal workers would have done because the enormity of the Five Year Plans were so ambitious and huge that there were not enough people to carry out the work.
In 1930 a special department of the secret police was set up, in order to run the labour camps and these were called Gulag. The first important work set up by the Gulag was a 500km canal from the White Sea to the Baltic Sea. Almost 300,000 prisoners were set to work on the Belomor Canal with promises that they would be set free when it was completed.
By the end of the 1930’s there were labour camps in every part of the USSR. Every single one of them was surrounded by watchtowers and barbed wire, there were camps in the most remote areas of the country, as well as in towns and cities, in full view of the public. The number of zeks in the camps grew from about 30,000 at the start of the first Five Year Plan to around 2 million in 1932. By 1937 the numbers had grown to 6 million, and by 1938 to 8 million.
Some of the worst labour camps were in the Kolyma region in the Northeast. During the consistent –60 C and continuous polar nights kept the Kolyma in darkness in the winter.
However, Stalin did not make everything during the 1930’s abysmal, he successfully invested into huge new tractor works that were built in Stalingrad, Kharkov and other places to meet the needs of mechanised agriculture. Also, gigantic modern industrial complexes were built for many of the USSR’s workers. Some industrial enterprises set up their own shops, bringing in food from farms, and the peasants supplied towns with milk, eggs, vegetables and meat from their private plots.
In conclusion, Stalin created a new constitution for the USSR, which gave freedom of speech and free elections to the Russian people. However, only the Communist party candidates were allowed to stand in elections, and only approved newspapers and magazines could be published. In addition, the drop in food production meant that the famine, which Stalin had feared, happened anyway. Stalin also let the USSR be invaded by Hitler as it was very weak at the time because Stalin used his powers to a bad affect by killing almost 18 million people and sending about10 million people to labour camps. Nonetheless, many criminals were now being made to work so hard that it would stop other people from committing a crime.
4) I think that the Five Year Plans were an excellent plan that was introduced by Stalin to the USSR; it made the USSR a more dominant country to be reckoned with and also made it a more secure place because hardly anybody was unemployed.
Stalin introduced the Five Year Plans, which created many brilliant achievements including the colossal new industrial centres, which were constructed from nothing in Magnitogorsk and Kuznetz. Stalin was very ingenious in planning that the cities were situated on the West of the country so that the West was less likely to get attacked by countries like China. In addition, extravagant projects were carried out to display the might of the new Soviet industrial machine. This was the ‘Dnieprostroi Dam’ in the eastern USSR, which was for two years the world’s largest construction site, and it increased the Soviet electric power output, dramatically. Other projects included the ‘Moscow-Volga canal’ and the prominent ‘Moscow underground railway’.
I think that the Five Year Plans were used extremely successfully for propaganda purposes where Stalin wanted to make the USSR an encouragement of socialism and industrialisation to other countries like Cuba and China who saw the USSR transform dramatically.
The USSR’s industry was a competitor of that of the USA. A factor that did help this, though, was that while these plans were being carried out the USA was experiencing the Wall Street Crash. This made the USA’s industry suffer a lot and had their share of world manufacturing output decrease dramatically from 43% to 29% in the period of nine years and saw the USSR’s industry radically increase from 5% in 1929, when the Wall Street Crash took place, to 17% in 1938. Before the Great Depression the USA’s industry had been a great deal higher than anybody else’s in the world and was nowhere near the same manufacturing output of the USSR. However, even though they were suffering seriously in the Great Depression there manufacturing output was still above that of the USSR’s.
There was considerable growth in heavy industry during this period, that there were impressive achievements, and that the Soviet Union was transformed on the industrial front. The command economy clearly had major weaknesses like the unlikely targets that were set which led to the use of bribery, corruption and crooked deals to achieve targets. At best, the economy was ill organised and badly coordinated, at worst it was chaotic. There were inequities in the economy, with heavy industry taking priority over chemicals and transport and consumer goods being neglected throughout. The Russian people still spent an mammoth amount of their time queuing and went short of essential commodities. Living conditions remained dreadful.
However, this has to be set against the state of Soviet Russia in 1928 and the massive steps forward that industry took in the 1930’s. In a sense, the plans were trying to do the impossible in conditions of appalling backwardness. The targets were always unrealisable but they were designed to drive people forward to priority and in a rough and unsophisticated way progress was made. Given the results, we can conclude that the type of command economy that circumstances of the USSR in the 1930’s. It got the Soviet industrial juggernaut rolling and that was no mean achievement.
In conclusion, I think that the Five Year Plans were actually very good as they made the USSR very dominant. Also, even though Stalin took many million’s of lives, the death toll for that period would have been higher if the Five Year Plans were not placed into action. I additionally think that when the USA had overcome the Great Depression its industry and economy would once again grow way beyond that of the USSR.
