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As V. I. Lenin, the powerful leader of the Russian people, lay isolated and incapacitated after his first stroke, he warned of the dangers of his underling: Comrade Stalin, having become general secretary, has concentrated limitless power in his hands, and I am not sure that he will always manage to use this power with sufficient caution. (Bullock 120) The man who would eventually lead the nation of Russia in a downward spiral, from which it has still not escaped, Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, better known as Joseph Stalin, was born on December 21, 1879 in Gori, Georgia. His parents were both Georgian peasants. Although neither of them spoke Russian, Stalin was forced to learn it because it was the language of instruction at the Gori church school that he attended in 1888 - 94.
He was the best pupil in the school and earned a full scholarship to the Tbilisi Theological Seminary. While he studied the priesthood, Stalin read forbidden literature, including Marx s Das Kapital, and soon converted to a new orthodoxy: Russian Marxism. Before graduation he quit the seminary to become a full-time revolutionary. Stalin began his career in the Social-Democratic party in 1899 as a propagandist among Tbilisi railroad workers. Between 1902 and 1913 Stalin was arrested eight times; he was exiled seven times and escaped six times. The government contained him only once; his last exile in 1913 lasted until 1917.
He adopted the pseudonym Stalin, meaning a man of steel during this time. Stalin rose quickly in the party by appealing to Lenin with hard work and discipline. He was commissar for state control in 1919 - 23, and-more important-in 1922 he became secretary-general of the party. After Lenin s death Stalin joined in a troika with Gregory Zinovyev and Kamenev to lead the country. With these temporary allies, Stalin acted against his archrival Trotsky, the foremost candidate for Lenin s mantle. Once the threat of Trotsky was eliminated, however, Stalin reversed course, aligning himself with Nikolay Bukharin and Aleksey Rykov against his former partners.
Trotsky, Zinovyev, and Kamenev in turn challenged Stalin as the left opposition. By skillful manipulation and clever sloganeering, but especially by interpreting Lenin s precepts to a new generation coming of age in the 1920 s, Stalin bested all his rivals. By his 50 th birthday (1929), Stalin had cemented his position as Lenin s recognized successor and entrenched his power as sole leader of the Soviet Union. However, the talented manipulator would go down in history as the driving force behind a tyrannical, totalitarian state that suppressed its people and drove them to horrible depths unknown to them.
Stalin s historical legacy is overwhelmingly negative. Although admired by some Russians, most would agree with the assessment of the West that Stalin was one of the cruelest dictators in history. While he served to rapidly industrialize the agrarian Russia, Joseph Stalin and his Five-Year Plan left Russia with an overwhelmingly negative legacy from which she still suffers. In 1928, with his position as leader of Russia cemented at least in practice, Stalin faced enormous adversity with the terrible conditions in Russia resulting from the revolution ten years earlier. Russia found itself socially distraught.
The revolution of the proletariat promised the people by Lenin had been slow to come. Economic conditions within the cities were terrible, and many peasants left the cities to find agricultural work in the country. Peasants who had envisioned their rise to power found themselves worse-off than they had been under the tsarist regime. As tensions mounted, civil war erupted between supporters of the Communists, often referred to as Red, and supporters of the former monarchy, called Whites (See Appendix Photo). The seeds for social unrest were sown, and with the social unrest came economic unrest, as the Communist party began to realize that its idealistic interpretation of Marxist teachings was quite inaccurate in practice. While the ideas of a proletarian revolution contained in Marx s writings sounds perfectly logical on paper, in Soviet practice it turned out much different.
The Soviet Union under Stalin s early rule was almost entirely agrarian, and far too backward to carry out the revolution of the people that Marx predicted. Marx insisted that a country must have its economic base in industry rather than in agriculture (Kapital 1). Russia in 1928 was entirely unprepared for revolution. In order to introduce the Communist society Lenin envisioned, a plan for rapid industrialization would be needed.
The Soviet peoples were far behind the economic and social progress of the rest of the world. Germany, Britain, and the United States held footholds in the world s economy. Stalin saw the need for a plan, and introduced his Five-Year Plan, whose infamous aftermath still plagues Russia today and has been the subject of endless hours of debate among people at all levels of society. In 1929, Stalin introduced his Five-Year Plan for industrialization. The policy, according to Bullock, amounted to nothing less than the attempt to find a permanent solution to the social as well as economic problems posed by the Soviet rural sector in a single operation (256). The plan had three major objectives: 1) The elimination of the kulaks, an upper-class of peasants who emerged due to hard work but were resented by the majority, 2) The conversion of all individually owned farms into state-run collective farms, and 3) A reversion to War Communism, the requisitioning of grain quotas at state determined prices (Bullock 258).
However, the plan also rested on several premises that Stalin knew would be necessary occurrences if his plan were to succeed. First, there had to be no serious harvest failure. Secondly, an increase in crop production and yield needed to occur. Thirdly, there also needed to be an increase in foreign trade. Lastly, the national defense spending needed to be dropped in order to provide more state money to reinvest in collective farms. Stalin himself stood proudly as his Five-Year Plan ran full-throttle, uprooting Soviet society.
In one of his speeches Stalin proudly declares: We are advancing full steam ahead along the path of industrialization to socialism, leaving behind the age-long Russian backwardness. We are becoming a country of metal, a country of automobiles, a country of tractors When we have put the USSR on an automobile, and the muzhik on a tractor, let the esteemed capitalists, who boast so loudly of their civilization, try to overtake us! We shall see which countries may then be classified as backwards and which as advanced. (54) Stalin s propaganda fed the Russian people the image of Soviet domination of society. Stalin portrayed the Five-Year Plan as a thrilling victory for the Soviet Union and Communism. The realities of the Five-Year Plan, however, were far more horrifying. Pressed forward crudely and recklessly, with abundant use of force and with an appalling wastage of human and physical resources, they suffered for the accomplishment of a considerable portion of the objectives for which they were undertaken (Britannica 1).
Stalin s disregard for the people resulted in a tragic uprooting of the Soviet population. He ripped the peasants off farms they had worked hard to build up, placing them instead onto state-run collective farms. Those who resisted moving had to deal with rigorous grain quotas enforced by the government, which Stalin continued to increase while almost none of the population could meet them. Most left the collective farms seeking industrial work, as the Communist government invested most of its money here. Of the 12. 5 million new hands that entered industrial work during the years of the Five-Year Plan, about 8. 5 million of them were from the countryside. As the Five-Year Plan reached conclusion, Stalin pumped his people full of even more ambitious propaganda.
At the end of 1932 it was announced that the First Five-Year Plan had been successfully completed. In fact, none of the targets had been reached, or even approached (Bullock 301). While the Five-Year Plan was a social disaster, the economic ramifications, while nowhere near what Stalin had envisioned, were a great leap ahead of the case beforehand. Agricultural production was down; in 1928 there had been 70. 5 million head of cattle, down to 38. 4 million; pigs, 26 million to 12. 1 million; sheep and goats, 146. 7 million to 50. 2 million (Bullock 286). The obvious neglect of agriculture came mostly as a result of resistance to Stalin s collectivization. One thing that Stalin had counted on in his vision of Communist Utopia was the honesty of his workers.
However, the workers soon realized that producing excess livestock and crops that would only be taken by the government was a waste of time, and thusly the agricultural economy plummeted. The industrial steps made during this period were great, though. Russia had become a world leader in industry. While industry was up, the immense social upheaval created left the peasants dissatisfied with Stalin. The standard of living had fallen greatly for most people. As tensions among the people increased, Stalin felt threatened all around him.
By 1930, Stalin had cemented his place as the sole leader of Russia. However, his paranoia never ceased. He saw all those around him, particularly those in his party, as potential threats. Following the assassination of Leningrad party chief Sergey Kirov, which many believe to actually have been initiated by Stalin, Stalin made perhaps his greatest political and social error: The Great Purge. Starting within the Communist party, Stalin arrested, tried, and executed thousands of enemies of the state. By 1936 the Soviet police were arresting party leaders by the thousands.
Highly publicized trials were held in Moscow and other large cities. Such prominent leaders as Grigori Zinovyev, Lev Kamenev, and Nikolai Bukharin were set on stage to admit to ridiculous crimes, and were publicly executed as an example to any other potential dissidents. Stalin eventually turned his knife towards the general public, paranoid that underground movements were uprising against him. Estimations of those executed in the Great Purge from 1936 to 1938 range between 1. 5 million and 7 million (Encarta). However, the numbers do not even begin to do justice to the immense effect his purges had on Russia: The purges, arrests, and deportation to labor camps touched virtually every family (Lewin 307). Stalin s purges had much further-reaching effects than those it imposed on Soviet society.
Bullock, as well as many other historians, affirms that the purges of Stalin greatly weakened the country s powers of military resistance. With Germany on the brink of war under the militarism of Hitler, defense was a key to stability. Stalin had blatantly stated in his Five-Year Plan, though, that success would come through four points, one of which was a significant cut in military spending. With his country weakened within and oppressive enemies without, Stalin further weakened his image by signing a nonaggression pact with Adolf Hitler in 1939 (Richardson 20). The na ve Stalin would pay dearly when Hitler then broke the treaty and invaded Russia in 1941. The image of Russia as an industrial and political giant that Stalin had hoped for was failing.
The final blow to Stalin came as a result of his own diplomatic tendencies. Russia had been an Allied force ever since World War I, and Allied leaders found Stalin to be rude and uncouth in diplomatic matters. Churchill writes in his memoirs that at a time of heavy communication with Russia: [H]e was snubbed more than once and only rarely favoured with a kind word. Many of his telegrams were not answered at all or a reply was held up for days On October 13, 1943, in a series of messages, Stalin accused the British Government of intentionally avoiding earlier commitments on deliveries, posing a threat through the attempt to increase the number of British servicemen in the north of the USSR and to recruit Soviet citizens. (Kudryashov 14) Stalin s attempt to intimidate might seem as an odd way of diplomacy.
However, his methods gave the Allies a fearful picture of Russia. Stalin expressed militant distrust of the West and of capitalism in his actions and words; he continued to deepen the schism between East and West. Kudryashov goes on to say: By periodically creating tension during personal meetings and by means of correspondence via ambassadors, Stalin skillfully cultivated a feeling of uncertainty in western officials about the Soviet position and created the impression that if they would go some way to meeting his demands, the uncertainty and misunderstanding would disappear by themselves. (20) While Stalin s objective was to put his Allies at his mercy diplomatically, he eventually created so much distrust among them that their image of the Soviet Union became one based on fear. The distrust of the West by Stalin, and the resultant distrust of Stalin by the West, led to the deep divisions still in effect today between Russia and the United States and Britain in particular. The West began to react to Stalin s threats with policies of more action and less words than might otherwise have been necessary. The ultimate result of Stalin s diplomacy was the Cold War, which would define the freeze on US/Russian relations for in excess of 30 years.
W. Averell Harriman, then ambassador to the Soviet Union, writes of Stalin to President Roosevelt in 1945, We must clearly recognise the Soviet programme is the establishment of totalitarianism, the end of individual freedom and democracy in our understanding of these words (Kudryashov 20). The revolution of the proletariat envisioned first by Marx, later by Lenin, and finally (in theory) by Stalin, had failed miserably. Was it due to an imperfect idea, an idealistic fantasy? Or was it something so seemingly insignificant as one man who brought down a nation? The facts seem to suggest the latter.
Joseph Stalin was undoubtedly one of the cruelest dictators the world has ever seen. His manipulation of power led him to a dictatorial position in a government that he could not handle. His Five-Year Plan, while increasing Soviet industrial output, decimated its society, and left its people with their identity stolen. The Great Purge he initiated struck a permanent scar in the collective memory of his people, a remembrance of the harsh totalitarian regime he imposed. His diplomatic relations with the West created a deep division between Russia and the United States, which led to a hatred and persecution in the Western world of all things even faintly Communist or Russian. In 1953, as the news of his death spread through the streets of Russia, Joseph Stalin s people wept.
These were not tears of sadness, nor tears of joy. The Russian people wept for fear, fear of what was to come. After almost thirty years under the tyrant, the Russian people had lost their identity. Stalin s legacy lived on, however. Until the fall of Communism in 1989, Russia still carried the harsh identity projected by Joseph Stalin.
Distrust of the Russians, while fading, still remains. Joseph Stalin will never be forgotten, both by the world he changed and the countless millions of families whose lives were personally changed by Stalin. During the years of Stalin, from 1914 to 1953, Europe alone lost 75, 000, 000 to mindless acts of violence.
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Research essay sample on Five Year Plan Joseph Stalin
