Maraline Ellis Salem-Keizer School District 2013-2014

Evaluating Stalin and Agricultural Collectivization

  “Dearest  Stalin  –  People’s  Happiness!”  

Document 2 In putting into effect the Five-Year Plan for agriculture, the party pursued a policy of collectivization at an accelerated tempo. Was the party right in pursuing the policy of an accelerated tempo of collectivization? Yes, it was absolutely right, even though certain excesses were committed in the process. In pursuing the policy of eliminating the kulaks and in destroying the kulak as a class, and in destroying the kulak nests, the party could not stop half way. It was necessary to carry this work to completion….

Joseph Stalin, speech, 1933

Document 1 Such is the law of the exploiters – to beat the backward and the weak. It is the jungle law of capitalism. You are backward, you are weak – therefore you are wrong; hence you can be beaten and enslaved. You are mighty - therefore you are right; hence we must be wary of you. That is why we must no longer lag behind. In the past we had no fatherland, nor could we have had one. But now that we have overthrown capitalism and power is in our hands, in the hands of the people, we have a fatherland, and we will uphold its independence. Do you want our socialist fatherland to be beaten and to lose its independence? If you do not want this, you must put an end to its backwardness in the shortest possible time and develop a genuine Bolshevik tempo in building up its socialist economy. There is no other way. That is why Lenin said on the eve of the October Revolution; “Either perish, or overtake and outstrip the advanced capitalist countries.” We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or we shall go under.

Joseph Stalin, speech, 1931

Maraline Ellis Salem-Keizer School District 2013-2014

Document 4 Today, reliable academic estimates place the number of Ukrainian victims of starvation at 4.5 million to 7 million. The famine as in part the by-product of Stalin’s relentless drive to collective agriculture. The famine as a clear result of the fact that between 1931 and 1933, while harvests were precipitously declining, Stalin’s commissars continued to . . . confiscate grain. Peasants were shot and deported as rich, landowning “kulaks” . . . . While the drive to collectivize agriculture was a wide ranging phenomenon common to the entire U.S.S.R., only in the Ukraine did it assume a genocidal character. Indeed there can be no question that Stalin used the forced famine as part of a political strategy whose aim was go crush all vestiges of Ukrainian national sentiments.

Excerpt from “Forced Famine in the Ukraine: A Holocaust the West Forgot,” Adrian Karatnycky, The Wall Street Journal, July 7, 1983

Document 3 FOOD  PRODUCTION  IN  THE  USSR,  

1928-­‐1932

1928 1929 1930 1931 1932

Grain  (million  tons) 73.3 71.7 83.5 69.5 69.6

Cattle  (millions) 70.5 67.1 52.5 47.9 40.7

Pigs  (millions) 26.0 20.4 13.6 14.4 11.6

Sheep  &  Goats  (millions) 146.7 147 108.8 77.7 52.1

Document 5 The radical step forward by the majority of the peasantry towards a collective way of life was taking place against the backdrop of a bitter struggle between Soviet power and the kulaks. The (kulaks) stooped to all possible means to wreck the collectivization campaign. They murdered collective farm activists and Party and government officials sent to the villages to help the peasants; they set fire to collective farm buildings; they poisoned the cattle and destroyed farm machinery . . . . The Soviets had the right to banish them from their villages . . . . The exploiter class—the real bourgeoisie—was finally abolished.

Excerpt from The Land of Soviets, published by the U.S.S.R

Maraline Ellis Salem-Keizer School District 2013-2014

Document 6 From 1929 the collectivization drive proceeded - quite literally - in deadly earnest. The Russian countryside was once again turned into a battlefield as millions of peasant households, traditional communes, landholdings, livestock and equipment were commandeered at gun-point and dragooned into the huge new party-controlled collective enterprises. Kulaks were exempted. Instead, their property was confiscated and they were rounded up, herded into cattle-wagons, and forcibly transported in their millions to the ice-bound wastelands of Siberia and the far north where they were either left to rot or else turned into convict laborers in the work camps and industrialization projects of the five-year plan. Many resisted collectivization by burning their crops, refusing to sow, or slaughtering their herds and flocks rather than surrendering them to the collective farm (kolkhoz). The results, not unnaturally, were disastrous; so much so that in the spring of 1930 Stalin called a temporary halt to the campaign. In an article entitled 'Dizzy with Success', which is breathtaking in its hypocrisy, he thundered against the misplaced zealotry of local officials who in an excess of enthusiasm had rushed the process of collectivization at a breakneck speed, recklessly distorting objectives, ignoring local conditions, skipping stages and - in a grotesque understatement - 'irritating the peasant collective farmer.’

Excerpt from Stalin and Stalinism, Alan Wood, 2004, pg. 33.

Document 9 The Communist Party celebrated the 130th birthday of Joseph Stalin on Monday with an appeal for people not to bring up the more unseemly aspects of his record. Stalin is a polarizing figure in Russia, still popular fro winning World War II and industrializing the Soviet Union while reviled for the purges that killed or displaced millions of people. On Monday, the Communists sought to focus on the achievements, lining up in Red Square to lay flowers on his grave. “We would like very much on this day for the discussion about any mistakes of the Stalin era to stop, so that people can reflect on the personality of Stalin as a creator, thinker, and patriot,” said Ivan Melnikov, a senior party official.

New York Times, December 21, 2009

Document 8

1953, http://www.pbs.org/behindcloseddoors/in-depth/uneasy-allies.html

Document 7

Maraline Ellis Salem-Keizer School District 2013-2014

Evaluating Stalin and Agricultural Collectivization

“Dearest  Stalin  –  People’s  Happiness!”  

Use your own ideas and the information in the documents to complete this graphic organizer.

Stalin’s Successes Stalin’s Failures Stalin’s Methods

Based on your reading and research, how should Stalin be remembered, as a hero who revolutionized his country or as a tyrant who brutalized his people?