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Joseph Stalin

Decent Essays

Upon his rise to power in the mid 1920s, Josef Stalin aimed to erase all traces of capitalism presented under Lenin’s New Economic Policy and change the U.S.S.R into a totalitarian and completely socialist state. To achieve this, he set off a Five Year Plan that called for a rapid industrialization of heavy industries with the use of a command economy. Stalin also established a policy of collectivization where private farms were forced to combine into large, state-owned units. Both plans were considered successful though at the cost of countless lives. Unrealistic industrial goals and a catastrophic famine that resulted from harsh working conditions and starvation took the lives of millions of people. Thousands were also sent to prison camps called gulags and were tortured and abused lawlessly. This is to say that in the ideal state that Stalin as an autocrat wanted, human lives were nothing but merely tools used to work for the state’s prosperity. …show more content…

Alongside the establishment of a command economy, the government was able to completely control the economy and ask for high quotas of both agricultural and industrial products. In matters of collectivization, all private farmlands were forced to combine into large, state-owned properties where everyone was expected to work at. Though the plan boosted Russia’s economy and many heavy industries to match of those other European countries, it also limited the production of consumers’ goods and resulted in shortages of houses, food, and other necessary

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