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Were Stalin’s methods the only ones appropriate to the task of transforming the Soviet Union into an industrial nation?
had not only saved millions of lives from war and but also saved Russia as a county, its people and the heritage. It is fair to say that it came at a cost of several million lives, but I believe no one could have got the same result with fewer casualties.
Although Stalin’s objectives were very clear, they were very reactionary to the mood of the times. Stalin was very careful to back the most popular solutions to the many problems hotly debated in the 1920’s. Many people preferred this, as they longed for some stability after the years of upheaval. He always appeared as one who implemented the will of the majority. This was another method of Stalin to maintain power and achieve his goal of industrialisation and developing a totalitarian communist state, and again I doubt weather any other leader would have been clever and strong enough to use these methods. He was playing his colleagues, the ordinary people and changing his policies in order to achieve what was necessary. After a year of adrift since taking over and unmindful of the party’s desire for change, Stalin and his men at the end of 1928 struck out on a set of policies designed to turn backward Russia into a modern state. With his ruthless and vigorous action he launched forced industrialisation and collectivisation. The momentous series of economic and social measures included the establishment of a series of five-year national economic plans, the deportation and execution of hundreds of thousands of better off peasants (kulaks) and the forced entrance of the rest into state-controlled collective farms, nationalising of all industry and commerce, the regulation and manipulation of all financial instruments for capital accumulation by the government regardless of the people’s impoverishment, and the centralization of all social activity. During the first two Five Year Plans (FYP’s) of 1929-39 huge hydroelectric dams were built as well as canals, mines and factories. They were built in record time, using free and prison labour. Managers, who were party members, drove the workers relentlessly because they risked prison and deportation, or even death for “sabotage” if production targets were not met. Russia and its people had never experience these methods’s before as no one had introduced them, but to Stalin’s credit the results they produced were phenomenal. During the first FYP 1500 big enterprises had been constructed. These included the Dnepregres, the Magnitogorsk and Kuznetsk metallurgical complexes, the Ural machine factory, the Rostov agricultural-machinery plant, which is still operating today, tractor factories at Chelyabinsk, Stalingrad, the Kharkov, car factories in Moscow and Sormovo, the Ural chemical works and so on. In 1932, 338 million roubles worth of machine tools were imported, which represented 78% of all machine tools installed that year. However none of this would have been achieved had the idea of “patriotism” had not been introduced. People were continuously brainwashed by the government. By 1937, all the basic tools of industrialization and of arms production were made in the Soviet Union. The [next page]