eizing land from 10 million peasants; those that resisted were gunned down by the Red Army, and the remainder were sent to collective farms and forced labor camps (Rose 14). This process of collectivization would become a trend under Stalinist rule, and characterized the Five Year Plans.
Also characteristic of the Five Year Plan was a massive push in heavy industry development. Entire industriesùsteel, chemical, electrical, and manufacturingùwere created from the ground up. In spite of these developments, the Soviet economy showed many deficiencies. Textile production was poor, food production fell by 20 percent, real wages were half of what they had once been, and cutbacks in home construction meant that millions of citizens were forced to live in tents or shanties (Rose 14).
All the while, Stalin's new class war raged. Turning his ire on the so-called "rich" peasants or "kulaks" (those who managed to retain land and livestock in spite of the collectivization purges), Stalin initiated a "liquidation of the kulaks as a class" and expelled them to the Arctic for forced labor (Lord 4). Many wound up in the Gulag, Stalin's expansive network of concentration camps. By the time the first Five Year Plan ended in 1933, the kulak label had been widened; any peasant who "hoarded grain, resisted collectivization, or looked troublesome" was a candidate for the Gulag (Lord 4). Millions perished.
Meanwhile, Stalin was extolling the virtues of the Five Year Plan to the rest of the world. Claiming that Soviet industry was now expanding at 20 percent annually, to Western observers (dealing with the Great Depression in America or contending with generally ailing
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