Natalie Martinez
11/12/14
CONTENT INQUIRY
To what extent did Joseph Stalin’s reign affect Russia? After the Death of Vladimir Lenin, Stalin joined forces with the Soviet communist politicians Grigory Zinovyev and Leon Kamenev. Once the three threw out Trotsky from the political arena Stalin completely flipped the table of his posse. Now aligned with Nikolay Buhharin and Aleksey Rykov, Stalin manipulated his former partners and turned all against each other while he succeeded. In 1929 he seen himself as “Lenin’s recognized successor and the sole leader of the soviet union” 1 . The country of Russia was in a state of complete order under the reign of Stalin. Freedom was something the entire nation lost.
Readers, writers, artists of all sorts had no place to express their muse, unless it was in “The Man of Steal’s”2 favor. He had created the Cult of Personality consisting of mostly himself and bit of Lenin. He was the focal point in all literature, poetry, music and film. Mostly warped out to be God like and suggesting that he alone had single handedly won the second world war. There were towns and villages named after him. The Stalin prize and Stalin Nobel
Peace Prize named in his honor. Speech by Nikita Khrushchev publicly declared
Stalin's evil actions: "It is impermissible and foreign to the spirit of
Marxism­Leninism to elevate one person, to transform him into a superman possessing supernatural characteristics akin to those of a god."3 Here it is seen that joseph Stalin had every single aspect of Russia wrapped around his fingers.
Stalin had created a “5 year plan”, a series of nationalized plans for the economic growth, aimed to turn the USSR into the race of industrialization the rest of the power countries were apart of. In 1928 the first plan focused on speedness of industrialization and collectivization of agriculture. Stalin demanded a 200% more production in iron, 330% increase in electrical power. Among these
1

http://russiapedia.rt.com/prominent­russians/leaders/joseph­stalin/ Documentary in class
3
http://russiapedia.rt.com/prominent­russians/leaders/joseph­stalin/
2

demands workers were held to very strict regulations. The owners of factories would be sure to hold them to these standards, perhaps didn’t even have to with the fear of being sent to labor camps or even shot of they were found guilty of
“lateness, absenteeism, and bad workmanship. (Simkin)4 . When sent to these camps prisoners were to build canals, roads, railways and damns. All things that improved the expansion of stalin’s industrialized Russia. By mid 1932 75% of all farms in Russia had been completely collectivized. To meet Stalin’s high demands of quotas farmers shipped every parcel of food they produced to the