The camps were supervised by a special department of the secret police called Gulag. WE know about them mainly through the works of the Soviet dissident, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who spent many years in them. HE talks about people freezing to death in temperature so low that the mercury in the thermometers froze. Living conditions were appalling and food supplies were inadequate. In 1928 it was around 7,000,000 prisoners were sent to labour camps and during that time about 2,000,000 of them died. No one knows the exact figures of deaths in the labour camps, but during Stalin’s rule it may well have been as high as 12,000,000.
In 1929 Stalin decided that the Five Year Plan should reach its targets in just four years. So in 1932 a second Five Year plan was drawn up to run until 1938. This plan concentrated on producing tractors for the new collectivized farms and on machinery and tools for the factories. These were also to be improvement in all types of transport. In reality, much of the production was centred on war goods as Stalin became increasingly concerted that his country might go to war with Nazi Germany.
The third Five Year Plan was launched in 1938. This plan concentrated on the production of household goods and luxuries such as radios and bicycles, in an attempt to provide Soviet citizens with some of the consumer goods common in industrialized countries. The quality of goods needed to improve, too; almost 40% of production in the first two plans had to be scrapped as faulty. This plan was interrupted in 1941 when Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union. A fourth Five Year Plan was introduced in 1946 to rebuild the country after the wear and proved to be a great success.
The Five Year Plans had a dramatic effect on the Soviet Union. In just ten years it became the second largest industrial power in the world. Huge new steel plants, hydro-electric power stations, railways and canals were all built. Vast numbers of factories in hundreds of new towns poured out manufactured goods. A major symbol of this growth was the new town of Magnitogorsk. Between 1928 and 1932 it was transformed from a tiny village in the Ural mountains to a thriving industrial city with more than a quarter of a million citizens. Stalin had brought about the industrialization of the Soviet Union at an enormous cost, but his aim was to make his country strong enough to withstand an attack from Nazi Germany had been achieved, as even from 1941-5 where to shown.
Stalin’s determination that Soviet industry should develop rapidly relied on the workers in the city being well fed. But the NEP introduced by Lenin was failing to produce enough food. One reason was that Soviet farming techniques were inefficient.
By 1927 Stalin had decided that the Soviet Union’s farming problems needed solving quickly. The vast majority of Soviet citizens were still peasants who owned tiny pieces of land which they cultivated using the old strip farming system. Many of them were too poor to afford modern equipment. Even in the late 1920s most peasants used a horse-drawn wooden plough not a tractor. But Stalin knew that the NEP had also created another problem. It has produced a class of richer peasants, the Kulaks, who were reluctant to sell their produce to the government at the low price that was on offer. They preferred to store it, hoping the price would rise. If changes were to be brought about in farming, something would have to be done about the Kulaks.
When the revolution came in 1917 the Communist had hoped to introduce common land ownerships, where all the peasants worked for the common good of the soviet people. The Kulaks were an embarrassment to the government because they were a class of ‘agricultural capitalists’. Communism did not allow for individual profit making. Stalin decided that the Kulaks would have to go. By 1928 Stalin was ready to act. He could see the very real possibility of starvation in the cities. He sent the army into the countryside to enforce the policy of ‘grain procurement’ (in reality this meant buying up grain at very low prices). He introduced rationing in the cities. Even so, his measure did not solve the problem.
Then, in 1929, Stalin announced that Soviet farming was to be collectivized. Peasants were to pool their fields and equipment to set up collective farms (Kolkhozs), which would be big enough to afford mechanized equipment and would be much more efficient than the tiny farms. Mother Tractor Stations would be set up to supply the collective farms with tractors.
As compensation, peasants could keep small plots of land around their cottages. Peasants would be a paid a wage for working and their produce would be paid a wage for working and their produce would be sold to the government at a low price. The practice of selling crops on the open market for a profit would cease. Stalin was aware that collectivization would be extremely unpopular with the Kulaks. He decided that if they would not volunteer to join collective farms, he would wipe them out as a class. In effect, this is what he did.
Officials were sent into the countryside to persuade the peasant farmers to accept collectivization. Not surprisingly many of them refused to give up their land and livestock to the collective farms. The government had to use force. The Red Army and the state police arrested and deported millions of peasants. Most of the estimated 5,000,000 Kulaks were exiled to remote parts of the country or sent to labour camps, where many of them died.
But the peasants did not give up without a fight. Many of them slaughtered their animals and destroyed their crops rather than hand them over to the collectives. The result was that agricultural production declined dramatically and in 1932-3 the Soviet Union suffered a terrible famine. There was widespread starvation.
Food shortages were so bad that cannibalism was reported. It is hard to quantify the number of peasants who died; some historians have put the figure as high as 10,000,000. Although his people were starving Stalin thought it more important to export grain to other countries to raise the money to buy raw materials and machinery for Soviet industry.
Yet, despite the terrible problems of the early 1930s, collectivization was ultimately a success, although it became a success at enormous cost to the Soviet people. Stalin used the might of the government to break the Kulaks and force the peasants into the Kolkhozs. By 1937, over ninety per cent of peasant farms had been collectivized and the Kulaks had been destroyed.
From 1933 Soviet agricultural production improved; by 1937 output was significantly higher. More and more peasants had tractors. They were also benefiting from government schemes to improve literacy on the farms. Stalin had brought about a revolution in agriculture in much the same way that he had revolutionized industry.
Although by 1928 Stalin was in total command of the Soviet Union, his polices of collectivization and industrialization had made him many opponents. During the 1930s, Stalin became increasingly concerned that his enemies were plotting to overthrow him. He took steps to deal with people who had opposed him in the past or who he suspected might do so in the future. These were ‘the purges’ in which Stalin eliminated those he called ‘enemies of the state’. Over 40,000,000 people were arrested in the year 1936-53. Some 24, 0000,000 of them were executed or died in labour camps.
Many of those who were ‘purged’ were loyal Communists with years of service to the Party. Often they simply could not believe what was happened to them and were convinced that some terrible mistake had been made. The majority of Stalin’s victims were ordinary people such as teachers and factory workers who had for some, usually unknown, reason fallen out with the authorities. Few of the victims actually wanted to overthrow communism or replace Stalin with the exiled Trotsky.
Various explanations have been put forward for Stalin’s purges. Some historians believe that he suffered from a persecution complex or that once the campaign started it was difficult to stop it snowballing. Others have concluded that mass arrests and deportation to labour camps were the only way that Stalin could find a labour force to work in the more inhospitable parts of the Soviet Union.
The purges began after the assassination of Sergei Kirov in December 1914. Kirov was a popular leading Communist and member of the Politburo. The circumstances surrounding his death are very suspicious. Stalin’s state police seem to have been aware that the assassin, Nikolayev intended to murder Kirov. Some Soviet historians believe that Stalin let Kirov die. The assassination removed a potential rival and provided Stalin with an excuse to take measures to deal with supposed opposition. This view helped explain why Nikolayev was tried in secret and promptly executed.
Stalin now accused two prominent Communist, Kamenev and Zinoviev and fourteen others were charged with conspiring with Trotsky to overthrow the government. They all confessed to their crimes and were executed. Their trial was the first of the show trials in which leading Communists confessed to crimes involving trying to overthrow the government.
Most of these crimes involved supporting Trotsky in his attempt to overthrow Stalin. Few, if any, of these people were guilty of the crimes to which they confessed. Their confession often followed periods of torture, or a false promise that they would not be executed if they confessed. Others were told that their families would be punished if they did not make a public confession. In addition to those who were tired in public, thousands of other party member were executed or sent to labour camps.
Stalin’s attack on leading party members was just the tip of the icebergs, The purges spread to all walks of Soviet society. In 1937, Marshal Tuchachevsky, the commander in-chief of the Red Army, and seven other generals were arrested. They were shot as spies without ever being brought to trial. By 1938 some 25,000 army officers had been purged. Millions of ordinary citizens were also arrested by the secret police, often after being reported by neighbours with a grudge against them.
By 1938, when Stalin relaxed his purges, there can have been few people with enough courage to speak out against him, let alone organize resistance to him. Stalin had stamped out potential opposition, but at the same time he had undermined much of his earlier work of building up industry and the army. Able scientist, politicians, administrators, engineers and (perhaps most significantly) about two-thirds of the Red Army’s officers had been executed or sent to labour camps. The supposed architect of opposition to Stalin, Trotsky was murdered by one of Stalin’s agents in Mexico in 1940.
In conclusion if Stalin had not staunchly supported the extreme-left view of rapid industrialization set out in his First Five-Year Plan, the Soviet Union never would have seen the acceleration of its economy and industry in time to build military power for the Second World War. It was this First Five-Year Plan that set the pace for industrialization and production for even the modern Soviet Union. Had these extreme plans never taken place, it is quite possible that Russia would still be the “backwards country” it was before the time of the Bolshevik Revolution. While Lenin’s NEP would have greatly improved its standing, had Stalin not been the extremist he was, Russia could never have realized her dreams.
While the economics utilized by Stalinism were greatly flawed and presented problems for future leaders of the nation, the same could be said for the less effective economic / social plans set in place in the United States during its Great Depression. These plans were meant to be short – lived, only surviving long enough to alleviate the problem. However, due to the inflexibility of democracy (the rallying of interest groups around a cause, no matter how detrimental to society); some of the plans remain in place even today. However, under totalitarian rule, they can be removed, just as the credit reform system had been in industrial economic policy in 1930. It was this kind of “flexibility” in the policy making system that allowed the growth spurt to continue, and to grow at the rate that it did. The great human cost of the industrial revolution brought on by Stalin can not be ignored. Stalin directly ordered (unlike his counterpart, Hitler) the brutal slaughter of millions, even hand-signing some of the execution warrants. Low estimates set the death toll during this time at over 22 million. The Russian military had never been as slaughtered in war as it had been in peace. The purges were more non-sensual to Stalin’s people than Hitler’s genocide was. Seemingly random, ranging from the highest government officials to the lowliest factory worker, the purges struck terror into the nation. However, because of the turn around of the economy and the great amount of propaganda pouring into the population by the day, most remained disillusioned, and completely adored Stalin. Not only was he a fanatical nationalist himself, but he also instilled this into the general population through his impassioned speeches on the greatness of Russia and what she could become.
All events must be viewed in the context of the history of Eastern Europe, which has always been violent and bloody due to the many cultures that are found there. One only has to look at the news to see conflicts such as these arise constantly. Modern day examples are Bosnia and Kosovo (though these show something that Stalin did not do – ethnic cleansing. Stalin’s killings were much more directed at a particular ideology, making them harder to predict). While Stalin was a tyrant, and a butcher of his own people, he did so for “good intentions” (they pave the way to…). It was his nationalism, his complete and total belief that his country, under his rule, could surpass any dreams and expectations it had for itself. Not many countries has never seen a ruler that could compare to his passion, nor to his extremism. Stalin took the completely desiccated government of the Soviet Union and turned it into a power which long outlived him. While he slaughtered millions, he paved the way for millions more to lead better lives, which is the dream of all parents in all nations.
