The Plan to Modernize the Soviet Union

Once Stalin felt secure in his position as leader of the Party, he began to outline his plans for the USSR. The USSR held tremendous potential in terms of human and natural resources, but both were very undeveloped. Stalin believed that under a five-year economic plan, the USSR would industrialize, and become stronger than any nation in the West.

Unfortunately, the USSR was made up mostly of poor peasants who farmed small plots of land. In most cases, these peasants still harvested crops by hand and used wooden plows. Therefore, to make the plan successful, he would need to make changes to the peasant way of life. Two things were required of the peasants by Stalin: the peasants would have to be taxed heavily to pay for his new factories and secondly, the peasants would have to produce more food for all of the new factory workers in the cities.

Collectivization and the Kulaks

In 1929 Stalin announced the "collectivization" (joining together) of all farms in the country. This meant that hundreds of small farms were forced to join into larger ones, and the peasants had to work together in order to make the bigger farms successful. The large farms would be about 450 hectares in size, with anywhere from 50 to 100 families working on them. The new farms were supposed to receive new tractors and other modern equipment to help modernized and increase the production of food.

Stalin wanted all of the roughly 100 million peasants to join his planned collectivization program although he realized that the peasants would not necessarily like the new system. The people most likely to resist the change would be the ones with the most to lose. In the USSR, the Kulaks (translated to "fists") were the richest farmers. They owned two or more horses, several cows and had larger farms than most peasants.

The solution for Stalin was simple. The five million Kulaks who existed within the USSR were to be liquidated as a social class. By using his powerful secret police, Kulaks were murdered, exiled to Siberia, and robbed of all possessions. Approximately 1.5 million Kulaks died as a direct result of Stalin's policies.

Many peasants showed their displeasure to collectivization by not planting crops or by killing all of their animals. Stalin had hoped to eliminate the problem of food production, but the opposite happened. A lack of food became a major problem in the cities because of the peasants resistance to collectivization. Stalin was forced to send the police into the countryside to raid farms for food and ultimately, the army was used to force the peasants to work and send food to the cities. Furthermore, as a punishment for not collectivizing, the farmers were given little or no food. Mass starvation occurred during this period, with close to 30 million peasants starving to death.

Eyewitness Account:

A little market town in the …North Caucasus suggested a military occupation; worse active war. There were soldiers everywhere… all differing notably from the civil population in one respect. They were well fed, and the civilian population was obviously starving. I mean starving in its absolute sense; …having had for weeks next to nothing to eat. Later I found out that there had been no bread at all in the place for three months, and such food as there was I saw for myself in the market… there was black cooked meat which I worked out, I calculated, at a ruble [Soviet money] for three bites. "How are things with you?" I asked one man. He looked round anxiously to see that no soldiers were about. "We have nothing, absolutely nothing. They have taken everything away," he said, and hurried on.

Author Unknown
Collectivization of Russia