Soviet Union | Industrialization and collectivization

Industrialization and collectivization

The years from 1929 to 1939 comprised a tumultuous decade in Russian history - a period of massive industrialization and internal struggles. At this time Joseph Stalin established near total control over Russian society, wielding unrestrained power unknown to even the most ambitious tsars. Following Lenin's death Stalin wrestled for control of the Soviet Union with rival factions in the Politburo, especially Leon Trotsky's. By 1928, with the Trotskyites either exiled or rendered powerless, Stalin was ready to put a radical program of industrialization into action.

In 1928 Stalin proposed the first Five-Year Plan and abolished the NEP. The first Five-Year Plan was the first of a number of plans aimed at swift accumulation of capital resources though the buildup of heavy industry, the collectivization of agriculture, and the restricted manufacture of consumer goods. With the implementation of the plan, for the first time in history a government controlled all economic activity. While in the capitalist countries factories and mines were idle or running on reduced schedules during the Great Depression and millions were unemployed, the Soviet people worked many hours a day, six days a week, in a thoroughgoing attempt to revolutionize Russia's economic structure.

As a part of the plan, the government took control of agriculture through the state and collective farms. By a decree of February 1930, about one million kulaks were forced off their land. Many peasants strongly opposed regimentation by the state, often slaughtering their herds when faced with the loss of their land. In some sections they revolted, and countless peasants deemed kulaks by the authorities were executed. A serious famine broke out and several million peasants died of starvation. The deteriorating conditions in the countryside drove millions of desperate peasants to the rapidly growing cities, vastly increasing Russia's urban population in the space of just a few years.

The plans received remarkable results in areas aside from agriculture. Russia, in many measures the poorest nation in Europe at the time of the Bolshevik Revolution, now industrialized at a phenomenal rate, far surpassing Germany's pace of industrialization in the nineteenth century and Japan's earlier in the twentieth century. Soviet authorities claimed in 1932 an increase of industrial output of 334 percent over 1914, and in 1937 a further increase of 180 percent over 1932. Moreover, the survival of Russia in the face of the impending Nazi onslaught was made possible in part through the capacity for production that was the outcome of industrialization.

While the Five-Year Plans were forging ahead, Stalin was establishing his personal power. The secret police gathered thousands of Soviet citizens to face execution. Of the six original members of the 1920 Politburo who survived Lenin, all were purged by Stalin. Old Bolsheviks who had been loyal comrades of Lenin, high officers in the Red Army, and directors of industry were liquidated in the Great Purges.

Stalin's repressions led to the creation of a vast system of internal exile of considerably greater dimensions than those set up in the past by the tsars. Draconian penalties were introduced and many citizens were prosecuted for fictitious crimes of sabotage and espionage. The labor provided by convicts working in the labor camps of the Gulag system became an important component of the industrialization effort, especially in Siberia. Perhaps around five percent of the population passed through the Gulag system.