USSR 1930s

Synopsis

The effects of the Russian Civil War and later miscalculations within the newly founded Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) government of Vladimir Lenin left Joseph Stalin, the new leader of the USSR, with an impending agricultural crisis and a crumbling Russian industrial economy. Instead of giving the peasants economic incentives to raise production, Stalin chose a policy in 1928 that forced them into state-owned collective farms. Stalin resorted to slave and forced labor in order to provide food and materials to the rapidly industrializing Soviet cities.

On 7 November 1929 Stalin formally unleashed a new revolution, the so-called Great Industrialization Drive, for the total collectivization of the Russian peasants. The country's grain-producing areas were to be collectivized at once. From then on, peasants and small landowners were not allowed to own the land or to profit from crop sales. The government dealt ruthlessly...