Stalin knew that the richer peasants would oppose his plans, so he began by dealing with the richest peasants first. These were the Kulaks. Stalin announced his plans for the Kulaks in December 1929: The liquidation of Kulaks. The Kulaks were divided into three different classes;
- ‘Actively hostile’.
- The wealthiest Kulak households.
- Least harmful of the Kulaks.
The property of the first two categories were confiscated and given to the local Kolkhoz. In total about 300, 000 Kulak families were deported from their homes; roughly 1.5 million people. No proper arrangements were made and probably a quarter of them died of starvation, disease, ill treatment and the cold.
These changes were fiercely resisted by the peasants. Stalin modernised Industry through a series of Five-year plans. The state targets and priorities for industry were unrealistic and even with superhuman efforts they were unable to meet these targets, however they was still a huge increase and the Soviet Union became a major industrial power.
Stalin saw his plan to industrialise the Soviet Union as a matter of life or death because anti-communists would crush the Soviet Union and him. The USSR was still a rural country, backward country. Within ten years he wanted to transform the Soviet Union into one of the worlds greatest industrial powers. To achieve this, he introduced the five-year plans. This would hopefully bring Russia into the 20th century. It was first launched in 1928, it focused on building heavy industries like coal and steel. To encourage Soviet workers a propaganda campaign was set up to complete the plan in just four years. Enormous increases in production were achieved. However , the successes also brought social and economic problems. The transport system of the USSR could not cope with all the goods produced. Towns and Cities had to expand to house the expanding industrial workforce. The demand by the people for housing, food, clothing and transport was so great that the system came close to collapse. Rationing had to be introduced to feed the ever expanding workforce of the USSR. A second and third plan was introduced but the third plan got interrupted by war.
To make sure the Soviet Workers reached their targets, Stalin set up all kinds of new work practices. In 1929 Stalin introduced what he and the government called an ‘uninterrupted’ week. Instead of working for five days and losing for the weekend, factories now worked all seven days of the week, with a fifth of the workers having their day of on any one day. This made church attendance for Christians difficult. To prevent workers from truanting or taking time off, absenteeism was punished with the sack and with eviction from factory housing. As a result of this strict discipline, worker worked for a short time till finding more agreeable work. To discourage workers from doing this, the OGPU – the state political administration introduced internal passports 1932 to stop people living the town without police permission, they had to be registered with the police. Millions of workers also belonged to ‘Shock Brigades’ these people liked the new work practices and set a good example by competing against each other to increase their output. People who were willing to work hard and worked very hard received higher pay and privileges such as tickets to the opera, paid holidays and access to special shops. And the best workers of all were given medals decorations in addition to better pay and housing and privileges. These were the Stakhanovites.
In 1935 a coal miner in the USSR worked out a new way of extracting coal from the coal face. His name was Alex Stakhanov, by doing it himself he found that he could cut fourteen times more coal; instead of the normal 7 tonnes of coal, he extracted 102 tonnes a shift. The government gave publicity to Stakhanov’s methods and other workers copied his idea and achieved great results. Stakhanovites, as such were know as the cream of the work force also the ‘Heroes of Socialist Labour’. They had new houses built for them and appeared regularly on front of newspapers. However, they were treated badly by other fellow work mates and some were even killed. The Stakhanov movement was there for quickly dropped in the late 1930s.
As a result of these plans Stalin was bale to increase the coal production from 35.4 million tonnes to 128.0, steel from 4.0 to17.7 and oil from 11.7 to 28.5. Millions of the workers were agricultural peasants who came into towns looking for jobs with little experience, most of them lacked basic training. As peasants flooded into towns and cities they got overcrowded and trams and buses were packed at suffocation point. Everything was shared even housing, a lot of workers had to live in tents, huts and all sorts of makeshift structures.
Despite the problems of harsh discipline and the bad conditions, soviet workers were better of than the countries in the west. Overall Stalin had made a huge impact on agriculture and industry and every worker had a job, this was a good impact.
