“Saviour of Russia” or “Tyrannical Dictator” which term is the better description of Stalin’s perfor - page 1
Keywords: Saviour of Russia or Tyrannical Dictator which term is the better description of Stalin’s performance as soviet leader between 1927 and 41?
By Henry on 26/09/2008
Level: GCSE Key Stage 4 (Years 10-11)
Page Number: 1 of 3 pages: 1 2 3
“Saviour of Russia” or “Tyrannical Dictator” which term is the better description of Stalin’s performance as soviet leader between 1927 and 41?
After the long and hard race to become in charge of the soviet, Stalin finally won and set about improving Russia. His time in power can either be seen as him being a Savoir of Russia or a Tyrannical dictator; both of these terms have good cases because he did save Russia in a sense but he also killed many people.
When Stalin came to power in 1927 his main aim was to improve the industry of Russia from, a backward agricultural society to an advanced industrial one. He tried to become self-sufficient and modernise the army, as the fear of invasion was great, with war looking more and more likely by the day as Hitler became power hungry. Stalin also wanted a strong economy by 1930’s so Russia could become huge not just in size but in importance, he also concentrated on the growth of the proletariat and to create more workers for the industry.
To improve Russia in general Stalin came up with an idea, he made up this 5 year plans, in which he would set a target for something and they would try and reach it. There were 3 five-year plans and the first running from 1928 to 1932 concentrated on the heavy industry side like Coal, Oil, Steel and Pig iron and after this five year plan Stalin managed to increase the production rate of them by 100% most of the time. The 1933 to 1937 five-year plan was more focused on the consumer products like wool cloth and other things that also saw an increase of nearly 100%. The final five-year plan was in the late 1930’s and with most other counties because of the war it concentrated on armaments, but for these five-year plans to work Stalin also needed to modernise the agriculture, which was vital because the population of the industrial centres were growing rapidly and yet as early as 1928 the country was already 2 million tons short of the grain it needed to feed the workers. Stalin also wanted to make money out of the surplus food by selling it to other countries to fund the industrialisation, the problem was that farming was not organised to do this. But the main factor is that Stalin has improved, maybe not
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