Stalin's Five Year Plan Dbq Analysis

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In 1917, Russia was crumbling into pieces. World War I was draining all of Russia’s resources. Through out the country there were massive food shortages, which left people starving. At the battlefront, millions of Russian soldiers were dying, because they did not possess many of the powerful weapons that their opponents had, like machine guns or the modern tanks, and Czar Nicholas the second’s government was disintegrating. In 1917, Lenin and his communist followers known as the Bolsheviks, overthrew Czar Nicholas II and set a communist government in Russia. However, in 1924, Lenin died and Josef Stalin assumed leadership of the Soviet Union, which was the name for the communist Russia. Stalin achieved leadership instead of Trotskey because…show more content…
Five year plans where policies that would rapidly develop the economy over a five-year period by setting up high production goals for heavy industry, and agriculture. Before launching his first five year plan Stalin said in his speech “we lag behind the advanced countries by fifty to a hundred years. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or we shall be crushed.”(Doc.1) Stalin said these words to motivate the people of Russia to participate in his plans. Stalin’s five year plans set goals for farms and factories. These objectives would help agriculture and industries catch up to their neighbors. They overall were a success because industry picked up five point eight times more than when started (Five year plans had a down side to them because they set unrealistic goals for farmers, this killed many people ( Doc.8). If you didn’t meet quota the farm leader would get shot and the quota would increase again, this created a mass killing cycle and killed thousands. However collectivized farms were an overall success because of higher grain numbers and…show more content…
Collectivization was also set up to help destroy the wealthy farmers, known as Kulaks (Doc4.). Kulaks needed to be eliminated because they only cared about themselves and not for the state. Stalin had a solution for this, simply take away all of their food and starve them to death. This was known as the great purge. While the drive for collectivized agriculture was a wide going trend, kulaks needed to be destroyed. Stalins way of doing this was complete taking away all food and grain that they grew. (Doc.6) However the Kulaks didn’t make it easy; they would kill and poison their animals, kill government officials, and collective farm activists. (Doc.5) They would burn their barns and destroyed machinery. By them doing this the Soviets now had a right to kill them, and that was done until there were no Kulaks left. (Doc.7) The elimination of the kulaks might not have been necessary but if Stalin did not do what he did, Russia would not be were it is
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