USSR: The great retreat

Propaganda flourished in the public as posters, newspapers, and other print media all praised Stalin, communism, the military, and his ideals. Soviet schools were controlled by Stalin from nursery to college. [“Censorship under Stalin.”] Industrialization allowed women to gain more rights in the workforce (factories). Other groups were not as lucky. From 1941-1949, Stalin ordered mass deportations and sent 3.3 million Ukrainians, Poles, Koreans, Greeks, Bulgarians and Jews to Siberia and Central Asian Republics. [Languages Of The World, 10 Mar. 2015,] Collectivism and industrialization were his two biggest economic policies under his Five Year Plan implemented in 1928. The idea of collectivization was meant to allow peasants to grow crops on the farms using machinery tractors from the state. Peasants would be compensated and they would keep a small plot of land near their homes for personal use. Stalin wanted to see increases in the USSR’s crop growth quickly. By the end of 1931, the goal set for grain was met but there was a drop in the grain production. Many factors that caused this. Stalin’s activists did not have a wide range of farm knowledge or the skills. Also, the amount of animals were not enough to pull the plows because the hungry peasants ate them. A drought occurred throughout large parts of the USSR and Ukraine during 1931-32. Because all of this, collectivism ultimately failed.

One can easily admit that the Party had failed to properly economically plan the needs of each state. The Soviet Union economy was complex and massive, it became an impossible task for the state planners to manage, as they did not want to grant and create more managerial levels that would proceed to the local level resulting in failed timely attempts to the constant changes the economy was going through. Since the Soviet economy was based on state planning, it failed in encouraging innovation and motivating productivity. Managers would also alter numbers in order to produce the quotas that they were required to meet. The growth of the Soviet economy had been in a constant decline since the 1950’s and this progressed to the 1980’s. This was a clear sign that the Soviet economy was in need of a complete economic overhaul. Gorbachev succeeded power in March, 1985 and became General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist party of the Soviet Union. His main goal was to revive the Soviet economy, and he strongly believed that success was tied to loosening the governments control and creating a system that included less government intervention and more freedom to allow private initiatives. This new market economy would allow for private enterprise, which what Gorbachev believed would create more innovation. For the first time since 1920’s, individuals were able to own and create businesses.

"Stalin performed his great turn-about in late 1927 and took over the left analysis" (Pereira, 5). This is interesting because Stalin had been on the

Stalin’s policy priorities were not building a ‘worker’s paradise’ or a classless society, but protecting Russia from war and invasion. In 1928, Stalin launched the first of two ambitious five-year plans to modernize and industrialize the Soviet economy. These programs brought rapid progress – but also significant death and suffering. Stalin’s decision to nationalize agricultural production dispossessed millions of peasants, forcing them from their land to labor on gigantic state-run collective farms. Grain was sold abroad to finance Soviet industrial projects, leading to food shortages and disastrous famines in the mid-1930s. Soviet Russia was dragged into the 20th century, transforming from a backward agrarian empire into a modern industrial superpower – but this came at extraordinary human cost.

Both the Bolsheviks and the Nazis shared a fundamental commitment to create a creating a higher human type. However, the ideals and approaches of both regimes towards this mission differed substantially. While the Nazis sought to create a master race above all in European hierarchy, the Bolsheviks sought a system of liberation of their entire race and complete equality. Within both ideologies, the role of women was a hotbed of debate and instigated a period of change. In Germany, women confined to roles that were ‘natural’ or intended by nature, while in Russia, although women ‘received’ previously inaccessible rights and freedoms, it became more of a burden rather than a boon, The creation of “new men and women,” became more about the removal of undesirable classes or nationalities and the integration of the rest of the population with particular characteristics. Women were expected to accept state-propagated guidelines for conduct and appearance, and conform to certain gender roles that were defined by the state. In Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union ideology, the rebirth of the nation, its prosperity and survival depended directly on women’s conformity to the propagated feminine ideal and thus, their participation was severely influenced by the regime’s economic, social and political policies. In this essay, I

Joseph Stalin once said during his rule over Russia, “Education is a weapon, whose effect depends on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed” (“Joseph Stalin Quotes”). In George Orwell’s book, 1984, Orwell mirrors the events of Stalin’s Russia using the government called the Party to show the similarities between the two. In 1984, the Party is in control of everything; just as Stalin’s government was when he was in power. George Orwell demonstrates what was going in Russia in his book through the Party’s glorification of their leader and through the control of education.

The people were in a state of famine, the political government was weak, and the economy was in shambles with inflation as high as can be. As Stalin rose in power, this would all change in both positive and negative aspects. One of Josef Stalin’s first methods of rebuilding broken Russia was through what he named to be the Five-Year economic Plans. Through these plans, Stalin would induct a Command, or a Socialist, Economy. This Command Economy would involve a society in which the government would make all economical decisions, controlling nearly all aspects of societal life. As seen in Document One, Stalin believed that implementing a “Socialist economy” would prevent from Russia “[lagging] behind the advanced countries by fifty to a hundred years.” It would bring them up to pace with the surrounding capitalist economies, keeping Russia as a world power. The Five-Year Plans also included the increase of quota in both industrial and agricultural positions. If quota were increased, industrial increase would soon follow. Seen in Document Eight, “the fulfillment of the first and second Five-Year Plans strengthened the U.S.S.R.’s economic position.” The Five-Year Plan would cause for Russia to rise to become a modern industrial society, as well as

In the book Sofia Petrovna, the author Lydia Chukovskaya writes about Sofia Petrovna and her dreadful experiences as a widowed mother during the Russian Stalinist Terror of the 1930s. There were four basic results of the Russian Stalinist Terror: first, it was a way of keeping people in order; second, it kept Stalin in power and stopped revolutions from forming, made people work harder to increase the output of the economy, and separated families as well as caused deaths of many innocent people due to false charges.

To begin with, this book educated the reader about the past. Everyone in the Soviet Union looked up to the leader, Stalin, even though he wasn’t a good leader at all. He caused many problems for the citizens including uncomfortable living conditions. This book educates the reader by showing that back then even when people were treated badly, they still had to look up to their leader even though he was the cause of all

The USSR showed great educational progress as it is shown in the statistics , the literacy was twenty-five percent in 1915 and it grew to ninety-nine in 1980. Another example of Russia’s social condition is the massive instability and genocides during 1937 and 1938. In Document C it states “According to declassified Soviet archives, during 1937 and 1938, the NKVD detained 1,548,366 victims , of whom 681,692 were shot -an average of 1,000 executions a day ( in comparison, the Tsarists executed 3,932 persons for political crimes 1825 to 1910-an average of less than 1 execution per week).” (Document C) it shows how the NKVD, the police force that carried out Stalin’s orders to keep his people from rebelling and having freedom of speech

The concept of Stalinism, being the ideologies and policies adopted by Stalin, including centralization, totalitarianism and communism, impacted, to an extent, on the soviet state until 1941. After competing with prominent Bolshevik party members Stalin emerged as the sole leader of the party in 1929. From this moment, Stalinism pervaded every level of society. Despite the hindrance caused by the bureaucracy, the impact of Stalinism was achieved through the implementation of collectivization and the 5-year plans, Stalin’s Political domination and Cultural influence, including the ‘Cult of the Personality’. This therefore depicts the influence of Stalinism over the Soviet State in the period up to 1941.

The Soviet Union did a few things that are notable of mentioning as positive aspects of the Cold War and of the USSR’s mindset. One example of something positive yielded from

While this may be the case for the more information-limited Soviet historians, the more modern, revisionist historians such as Edward Acton, Robert Service, Harold Shukman and Steven Smith have had great exposure to much of the confidential literature, kept secret by the many Soviet Purges and the prolific ‘Iron Curtain’. In the view of Acton “Russia’s workers were

an attempt to address the issues that serfdom created, Russian thinkers desired to avoid doing what their Western counterparts did and radically modernize (Sakwa 1999). Instead, the aim became to utilize the traditions and way of life that have already been established in Russia for decades and centuries and implement them to make the move from feudalism to the institution of socialism (Sakwa 1999). Socialism would blur and erase the socioeconomic divide between classes and help to implement equality in Russia by creating a society that was classless and mostly homogenic in nature (MacKenzie and Curran 2002). This blurring would, in theory, help to ease the economic troubles that kept surfacing while the provisional government attempted to

Joseph Stalin’s three decade long dictatorship rule that ended in 1953, left a lasting, yet damaging imprint on the Soviet Union in political, economic and social terms. “Under his inspiration Russia has modernised her society and educated her masses…Stalin found Russia working with a wooden plough and left her equipped with nuclear power” (Jamieson, 1971). Although his policies of collectivisation and industrialisation placed the nation as a leading superpower on the global stage and significantly ahead of its economic position during the Romanov rule, this was not without huge sacrifices. Devastating living and working standards for the proletariat, widespread famine, the Purges, and labour camps had crippling impacts on Russia’s social