Unit 11 Module 8

No, he would not live to witness the results of the NEP.

3 of his chief associates - Trotsky, Bukharin, and Stalin - jockeyed to succeed him.

Most assumed that the brilliant but arrogant Trotsky, who had led the Red Army during the civil war, would win.

He argued that the Soviet Union must promote revolutions elsewhere in the West to survive and that the Soviet economy should be tightly controlled and massively industrialized from above.

Lenin had appointed Bukharin to lead the NEP.

He argued for socialism by slow, careful steps.

He believed that Russia must survive alone - "socialism in one country."

His opponents vastly underestimated him.

It means "man of steel".

He used daring and organizational talents to rise in the party.

He played a prominent role in Russia's civil war and became executive secretary of the Communist Party. In this key position, he made himself master of the all-important party machinery and pursued his drive for power.

No, he did not want Stalin to succeed him, saying that "Stalin is too rude" to lead.

He managed to take Lenin's place by cleverly playing on the Soviet people's love of Lenin by posing as his heir and leading a movement to deify him. He also brought into the party new people, who thereby owed him a debt.

He used his control over the Central Committee of the Communist Party to edge the overconfident Trotsky and his supporters on the Left out of powerful positions and expel them from the party in 1927.

Next, he turned against Bukharin and the Right. Party members who had doubts about Stalin accepted the need for party loyalty.

He had maneuvered himself into a position of dominance over the Communist Party and of dictatorship over the Soviet Union.

He replaced the NEP with the 1st 5-Year Plan.

It called for the rapid, massive industrialization of the nation.

Specific goals included significantly increasing industrial production, generation of electric power, and the number of factories within 5 years.

The State Planning Commission, or Gosplan, strictly regulated all aspects of production, including targeting crucial industries such as steel, regimenting the industrial labor force, and hiring foreign engineers to help build the new factories.

The state helped by taking agriculture out of the control of individual peasants, consolidating their lands into huge collective farms that used modern machines. This became known as collectivization.

By determining prices and the distribution of crops through collectivization, the state expected to use agricultural surpluses to pay for industrialization.

It would push peasants to become industrial workers in the cities.

The process of collectivization proved ruinous.

Peasants, especially wealthier landowners derisively called kulaks, powerfully resisted the new policies. In protest, they destroyed their own crops and livestock.

Officials terrorized the kulaks into submission.

He said that an integral part of collectivism was eliminating the kulaks as a class.

To eliminate them, Stalin killed many peasants he considered kulaks and exiled far more to Siberia, never to return.

It tore apart rural families, communities, and established ways of life.

Yes, he was able to get his way; more than half the land was collectivized within the first year, and over 90% after ten years.

They concentrated on producer goods such as engines and tractors rather than consumer goods such as shoes and clothes.

They faced pressure to produce targeted results.

They fostered a sense of emergency to inspire people, especially the young, to work hard.

The "shock brigades" were groups of enthusiastic, efficient workers that the Soviet government moved from factory to factory to stimulate production.

They were workers who exceeded production targets, celebrated by the press.

They encouraged women to work on both the collective farms and in factories; thus, by 1940, women made up almost half the labor force.

They became saturated with official doctrines of soviet communism, efficiency, and class pride.

Families were considered the "school for socialism".

The tightened controls over cultural productions ended the experimentation of the 1920s in the Soviet state.

Socialist realism became the required orthodoxy in art. In this style, approved murals, art, and literature portrayed realistic images of people carrying out the dreams of a communist society.

He announced that all goals of the 1st 5-Year Plan had been accomplished several months ahead of time.

For the hard-pressed workers, consumer goods beyond the necessities remained scarce. Clearly, some Soviet citizens - namely party members - benefited more than others.

They emphasized consumer goods and armaments.

He used the assassination of Sergei Kirov, a high Soviet official, as an excuse to eliminate potential rivals. (This elimination of potential rivals was known as the Great Purges).

It introduced a long period of Great Purges, marked by terror, house arrests, bizarre show-trials, torture, imprisonments, and executions - all approved by Stalin.

They blamed difficulties during the 5-year plans on many engineers, technocrats, army officers, older party members, regional nationalists, foreign conspirators and saboteurs, and purged the accused.

They contributed to the waves of purges by trying to rise at the expense of higher-level officials.

Terror was spread, for everyone knew of someone accused and arrested during the Great Purges.

New, younger figures beholden to Stalin now staffed the government, the Communist Party, and the military; most of the original Bolshevik leaders and the Red Army's top officer corps were gone.

By 1939, they had a fully planned economy, with the state determining production, prices, and distribution.