Stalin's Dictatorship - Five Year Plans and Industrialisation
- Created by: Abbie
- Created on: 13-06-12 17:57
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Stalin's Dictatorship - Five Year Plans and Industrialisation
Stalin's main aim was to rapidly increase industrial production, he realised that modernisation was essential for agriculture, defending from attacks and showing USSR as competitive. He used 3 five year plans to do this:
First five year plan (1928-32):
- Aimed to expand heavy industry
- E.g. coal, iron, steel and oil
- It had considerable success
- Number of industrial workers more than doubled and new cities were built around them
Second five year plan (1933-37):
- Concentrated on making machines
- Especially tractors
Third five year plan (starting 1938):
- Aimed to produce more consumer goods for loyal soviet citizens
- This transformed into building weapons
- Which was necessary for when Germany invaded USSR in 1941
Gosplan was the state planning agency that drew up targets for production for each factory - BUT industries rarely met their over ambitious targets.
Positives:
- Some keen young communists, called Pioneers, went into barren areas and set up new towns and industries from nothing
- If you worked hard and were successful, you became a hero
- E.g. Alexi Stakhanov who mined 102 tonnes of coal in one shift (14x average), he was praised and went around giving talks about increasing productivity, champion workers were named after him, Stakhanovites
- Education schemes were introduced to train skilled, literate workers
- Soviet Union gave opportunities to women - creches were built so they could go to work, they were doctors…
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