The USSR under Stalin’s dictatorship

Stalin ruled the Soviet Union from 1929 until 1953, when he died. He was a dictator, which is he personally had complete control of the government. Lenin announced the New Economic Policy, (NEP) which re-established limited economic freedom. His plan was to rebuild both agriculture and industry.


In 1927, the party which had ratified Stalin’s consolidation of power adopted the first Five Year Plan. The Plan called for industrial production to be increased within five years by 250 per cent, with heavy industry to grow even faster. Agricultural production was to increase by 150 percent, and one fifth of Soviet peasants were to give up their private plots and join "collective" farms


Industries and Agriculture

Compared with other main European countries, Soviet industries were very backwards. Also the years of war and civil war had causes much damage and disorganization. Stalin decided that a huge effort must be made to develop the main heavy industries like steel. He was afraid that the USSR may be attacked again by countries who wanted to destroy Communism


Many more mines, factories, oil-refineries and generating stations had to be developed during the ten years 1928-38. Millions more workers were needed. In fact, during those ten years the proportion of the whole population living in towns increased from one-fifth to one-third.


Stalin organized a great publicity campaign to persuade peasants to move to the towns and encourage the workers to work extra hard.

A propaganda poster of 1934.   It is titled: 'Peasants can live like a Human Being'.  

                                              Study the poster - can you see how it is promising people the following:

                 •enough to eat,

                 •   adequate clothing,

                 •   the latest consumer goods,

                 •   electricity,

                 •   education,

                 •   happiness.

The problem

Soviet farming was very backward. Most of the peasants were extremely poor and used the most primitive methods to cultivate the land. Flails for threshing and even wooden ploughs were still widely used.


Yet Stalin urgently needed to increase the production of food. The first five-year plan needed a huge increase in the number of industrial workers. Food had to be available in the towns for them.


Stalin’s solution

Stalin produced a scheme to solve all this problems. The small peasant plots would be joined together to form big collective farms. This would have the following advantages:


1. They will be big enough to use modern methods of farming, including tractors.


2. A very large farm would need fewer peasants than the smaller plots separately. The surplus people could go to the towns to work in the factories.


3. Communist Party officials could control the collectives through their organizing committees.


The changes were introduced very quickly and the result was anger and chaos. The peasants were forced to give up their land, their animals, even their tools to the collective. Many peasants burned their crops or slaughtered their animals in protest, such that by 1933, the number of horses, cattle, sheep and goats fell by at least half. Man also slaughtered their animal rather than give them up to the collective.

And the state took the grain- a picture referring to collectivization.

Collectivization, often called the "second serfdom," was an unmitigated disaster. While the communist economists had expected collective farms to generate enough income to pay for factories, heavy investment was needed in tractors to replace draft horses that had been slaughtered. There was no efficient infrastructure or means of getting crops delivered to processors; tons of wheat rotted in the fields while people starved for lack of bread.

Valeria Otarola