1. STALIN’S DOMESTIC POLICIES
THE FIVE YEAR PLANS
War Communism was replaced by NEP which was replaced by the Five Year Plans.
The Five Year Plan was an economic model adopted in almost every communist country.
Gosplan and Vesenkha were organizations created to control the nationalized industries.
Stalin strongly believed that only through strict centralized control the Soviet Union would achieve the level of production it needed to industrialize and modernize.
In order to industrialize, new technology needed to be imported and to purchase this agricultural exports had to be increased.

2. Tractors in
Siberia
1929

3. The peasants constituted more than 80% of the population, so they were a force to be crushed and bent to the will of the state.
Bukharin maintained financed incentives for the peasants to increase production, but Stalin wanted the land and the production were under the control of the state.
In 1929, kolkhozi or collective farms replaced the individual farms owned by the peasants.
Those who disagreed with of refused to go along with the orders were branded as kulaks and were punished.

4. Collectivization was not a popular policy.
ADVANTAGES OF THE COLLECTIVIZATION
The USSR had an agrarian economy and most of the people lived in the countryside.
Cheap food could feed the cities and also be exported to finance the purchase of machinery.
Party officials were based in the tractor stations to check the party policies were being carried out.
Collectivization would ensure state control over the production of the food.
The surplus labor would be encouraged to leave and look for work in the cities.
Collectivization was not a popular policy.
In a disastrous famine killed 5 to 8 million people, especially in Ukraine.

7. Internal passports were needed to move internally.
Many historians argued the famine in Ukraine was genocidal, some others alleged Stalin needed labor from elsewhere.
Grain requisitioning was a brutal policy carried out regardless of the human cost.
Internal passports were needed to move internally.
Children were abandoned by those parents exiled to gulags.
Those without a job had to do a living from begging, petty theft, rummaging through rubbish for food and prostitution.
More than homeless children were brought to orphanages or labor camps.
Stalin passed a law stating that children over 12 could be treated as criminals, punished and executed.
Between more than children were convicted of criminal offences.

8. THE 1ST, 2ND AND 3RD FIVE YEAR PLANS
This system which was determined to forge a new utopia was vey brutal, Stalin said “if a man is a problem, no man, no problem.”
No one was safe, often having a wrong name, being in the wrong place or having a powerful enemy was a very high price to be paid.
THE 1ST, 2ND AND 3RD FIVE YEAR PLANS
These plans were the answers to the problems created by the NEP.
This policy meant economic growth, economic self-sufficiency, increase in state control, creation of a disciplined proletariat
THE 1ST FIVE YEAR PLAN (1928/9-1932)
This was a very ambitious plan considering that Russia did not have a workforce with the necessary skills.
Large numbers of peasants were moved the cities, in some cases to areas where cities would be built.
Iron and steel manufacturing plants, electric power stations, railways were built.
see page 114

9. THE 2ND (1932-37) 3RD FIVE YEAR PLAN (1937- )
The iron and steel plants were producing metals, electric power stations were providing electricity.
The country needed trains, tractors and trucks.
Hitler reached power in 1933 and focused on the re-armament of Germany; besides there were right-wing authoritarian governments in Europe that opposed the Soviet Union.
For this reason Stalin wanted to make sure the USSR would have the resources to re-arm.

10. LABOR DISCIPLINE
Harsh laws were introduced to punish workers who were late or absent to work.
It was also a crime to break machinery or to take something from the workplace.
Quitting a job and looking for a better one was forbidden.
Losing a job meant losing your right for accommodation and food rations.
Workers or managers who didn’t fulfill achieving the targets were charged of sabotage and hence punished or executed.
SLAVE LABOR
During the 1930s so many gulags were built, where kulaks were sent; also hundreds of political prisoners were sent during the purges.
Conditions were so harsh that many would die the first year of captivity.
The gulags were located in the most inhospitable areas of the USSR, where nobody would escape from.

11. When measuring the growth of the USSR during the first five year plan, the contribution made by the prisoners must be included as part of the terrible human cost.

13. ENTHUSIASM
A minority believed in the importance of what they were achieving and were ready to tolerate extreme difficult conditions as they built, for example the city of Magnitogorsk.
Enthusiast maintained they were working for the country’s future, a better country for themselves and future generations.
REWARDS
Posters extolled the virtues of Stakhanovites. (see page 116)
They were stimulated with extra rations of food and even motorbikes if the doubled or tripled their quotas.
Wages differentiated between skilled and unskilled workers.
Party memberships could lead to promotion for workers with little education.

14. PROPAGANDA
Stalin’s successes and speeches were printed in Pravda.
Workers could see by themselves that the USSR was industrializing and catching up with capitalist powers.
Workers were told that the conditions in the capitalist countries were horrible (Great Depression).
Newspapers with photographs of food lines in NY and hunger marches in London.

15. Of course, Stalin didn’t tell the soviet citizens the prison camps were overflowing with innocent people and political prisoners, who like anybody else, also had to achieve targets.