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 Siberia and the Ural Mountains (Rose 13). In order for the first of Stalin's Five Year Plans to be effective, millions of citizens would be needed to live and work in these hostile regions.
By early 1929, Stalin was the autocratic ruler of the Soviet Union, having gained control of the Communist Party and the Politburo (Staerck 1). He abandoned the New Economic Policy instituted by Lenin eight years prior, and began his drive towards industrialization by s...