1. collectivistation

• Stalin's great turn->economic reasons

  • grain shortage of 1927

  • fall of worker productivity
  • move towards self-sufficiency
  • avoid another scissor crisis
  • control state and economy
• Great Turn


  Stalin's shift in economic policy in the USSR
• Driving forces behind Stalin's Great Turn

  • Political
  • Economic
  • Ideological
• Political factors

  • War scare and need to catch up with the West
  • Defeat political opposition of Bukharin and Rykov
  • Establish Stalin's undisputed leadership
• Economic factors

  • Avoid another Scissor Crisis
  • Grain shortage in 1927
  • Problems of industrial workers - fall in production levels
  • Kulaks having too much power over grain which could be hoarded
• Ideological factors

  • NEP not communist enough
  • Nepmen - conspicuous capitalists
  • Need for strong state control of the economy
  • Achieve self-sufficiency
• Command Economy


  A central governmental authority known as a state planning committee (GOSPLAN) dictates the levels of production and prices, with most industries publicly owned
• Collectivisation


  1. Farms (usually 50-100) came together to form one big farm (Kolkhoz)

  2. Run by a committee

  3. Everything shared - animals, tools, land, food produced

  4. Food produced sold to the state at low prices
• Collectivistation: Stalin's "Offensive against the Kulaks"
• Collectivisation process, 1929-1940


  1. 1928: 1st 5YP envisaged 15% collectivisation, changed to whole peasantry

  2. 1929: Rapid increase in collective farms (Kolkhozy)

  3. 1930s: Increase in terror, "liquidate the Kulaks as a class"

  4. 1935: Each household could keep a plot of land

  5. 1940: 235,000 farms collectivised, but only half fully under socialist principles
• By 1940, coal production had risen by 140M tons, but output was poor compared to the USA
• By 1938, the number of lorries in the USSR was 196,000, compared to over 1 million in the USA
• The peasants were staggered by the policy of collectivization and would not or could not cooperate with the destruction of their way of life.
• The peasants resisted by slaughtering their animals and eating their seed crops, which induced famine across large areas.
• The Ukraine and Kazakhstan were particularly hard hit by the famine, known as the Holodomor.
• Millions of peasants were pushed into the cities, and millions of others were used as slave laborers.
• Dekulakisation

  1.5 million peasants deported, refusers were shot
• Stalin blamed 'Over Zealous' party officials for collectivization methods


  Politburo questioned the legitimacy of collectivization and wanted it reigned in
• Stalin took sole responsibility for the "Greatest Crisis"


  This made Stalin paranoid
• Despite the initial slowdown, by the end of the decade virtually all of Russia had been collectivized.
• Kolkhoz


  • Collective farms
• Sovkhoz


  • State farms
• Terror reigned in the smallest hamlets, with more than 300 centres of peasant insurrection going on simultaneously.
• Trainloads of deported peasants left the cities for the icy North, the forests, the steppes, and the deserts, with the old folk starving to death and newborns buried on the roadside.
• Other populations rushed towards the frontiers of Poland, Romania, and China, crossing them despite the machine guns.
• the relationship between industrialisation and collectivisation? ​

  Collectivisation needed to make agriculture more efficient to allow more workers to be in towns/cities to carry out Stalin’s FYPs.​
• 1941- 100% of households collectivised
• Results of collectivisation

  • Grain exports helped pay for Industrialisation​
  • By 1939 19 million had left the countryside increasing the urban workforce​
  • By 1940 95 millions tons of grain​
  • By 1941 98% farms collectivised​
  • Increased centralisation as rural Russia now under Soviet control > the Stalinist State​
• Stalin's Five Year Plans (FYP)


  Designed to industrialise the USSR rapidly by using state planning and investment to increase production levels
• The first plan was launched

  1928
• The first plan ran until


  1932
• First FYP

  • Aimed to double agricultural output and build heavy industry
• By this year, the USSR had become self-sufficient in steel and coal production

  1937
• The plans led to mass famine due to poor harvests caused by collectivisation and forced migration from the countryside into the cities
• This resulted in widespread suffering and loss of life
• The plans created an economic crisis known as the Great Break which lasted from 1928 to 1932
• Despite these challenges, the FYPs played a significant role in transforming the economy of the USSR during this period
• Results of collectivisation

  • Took until 1940 to exceed 1930 agicultural productivity levels
  • low working and living standards – too few tractors​
  • 70% of meat and 52% of veg produced on peasants' small private plots in the USSR​
  • Famine 1932-1934 –>7 million dead (5 m in Ukraine alone)​
  • A ‘man-made’ famine? 1.73 m tons of grain exported in 1932 yet still high death toll​
  • Only 70% of farms collectivised by 1934​
  • 10 million peasants dispossessed 1929-32 ​
  • Livestock numbers not to return to pre-1928 levels until 1953!!!​
• Five Year Plan (1928-32)


  A special type of 'revolution from above' - the accelerated transformation of the Soviet Union into a socialist industrial society by means of the state's coercive power to mobilize the masses for its goals
• The targets of the Plan were utopian