Stalin & the Five Year Plans
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Joseph Stalin, the autocratic ruler of the Soviet Union for nearly three decades, remains infamous for crushing millions of his own people beneath the massive, grinding wheel of the Communist Party that he so completely controlled. Stalin's succession of Five Year Plans were designed to rapidly pull the new Soviet Union into the industrial age, and in the process mold the Russian people into a strong, independent and modern nation able to countervail the might of the highly industrialized Western world. In this, Stalin's economic ambitions for the USSR echoed those of the Russian Czar Peter the Great two centuries earlier. And like Peter the Great, Stalin would relentlessly pursue his course in spite of a great human cost; over the course of two decades, it has been calculated that Stalin's cruel machinations would result in over 20 million citizen deaths (The Economist). The Five Year Plans envisaged by Stalin centered on an objective that was plain enough: modernize, modernize, modernize. The first of these plans was launched in 1928, and it marked the Soviet Union's notorious "Great Break" with its Russian past (Reed-Purvis 8). By Stalin's reckoning, if the Soviet Union did not catch up with the West industrially, it "would go under" (Reed-Purvis 9). The basic composition of the Soviet landscape, however, would prove a formidable hurdle. Though boasting a wealth of natural resources, the USSR's richest mining and timber areas are centered in the remote regions of
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leader (Staerck 2).
By the time the second Five Year Plan (1933-1937) was underway, agriculture had improved a bit as peasants were once again permitted to have small private holdings; however, high taxes and compulsory expropriation continued to keep these peasant masses on the edge of starvation and despair (Staerck 9). Anyone that implied that citizens of the Soviet Union went hungry risked imprisonment, and all journalistic and creative enterprises were heavily censored to this effect (Lord 4). The workers' paradise envisioned by the Bolsheviks and touted by Stalin's Communist Party thus concealed a horrific host of statistics, among them an estimate that up to 25,000 peasants were dying every day of starvation, freezing or exhaustion (Lord 4).
The third Five Year Plan (1938-1941) encapsulated the Second World War and hence showed an increase in defense expenditure; the Soviet emphasis on central planning also allowed a speedier transfer of heavy industries deeper inside the heart of the USSR, a fact that would aid Stalin in his defeat over Hitler in 1945 (Staerck 10). When the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union, though German forces quickly overran the outskirts of Moscow and Leningrad, the largest industrial center
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Approximate Word count = 1909
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)
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