Stalin Five Year Plan Analysis

Register to read the introduction… The Five Year Plans had already caused a lot of distress to workers as Stalin was strict about targets not being met. Society had become unstable as a result of the Five Year Plans, mass urbanisation and violence in overcrowded, unsanitary cities. Mass urbanisation had brought a large workforce to the cities but this was followed by violence and social tension. Because of this there was a lot of hostility towards the communist party which was beginning to worry the government. M.Lewin describes this as a “quicksand society”[ix] which describes just how unstable the attitudes were towards the leadership. Stalin, it can be argued, resorted to the purges to prevent criticism of the leadership. The totalitarian viewpoint would be that Stalin used the purges to control the general population which I agree with, however the revisionist viewpoint would be that the centre used the purges to try and gain control of the chaos but it spiralled out of control and created a momentum of its own. I believe that the social instability within the main cities from mass urbanisation and the dissent that the Five Year Plans created contributed to the continuation of the purges as the leadership and Stalin needed to find a way to control the chaos. However I do not believe that this was the work of Stalin’s paranoia but Stalin doing what he believed as necessary to keep …show more content…
Lewis and P. Whitehead argue that “It has been irrefutably proved that the murder of Kirov was organised through Stalin through Yagoda and the NKVD”,[xi] however Russian Scholar and politician A. Lakoviev states that “L.V Nikolayev planned and perpetrated the murder alone”[xii]. By looking at it in this respect it shows that Stalin may not have been directly responsible for the purges. But without the murder of Kirov the purges might not have happened as Stalin would have found it difficult to justify his actions. I believe that some parts of the NKVD acted on their own, continuing the purges for their own gain. As historians Corin and Fiehn say “Some units, especially in areas outside of Moscow, operated on their own fiefdoms”[xiii], I believe the NKVD did act more like a mafia outside of Moscow using the purges to their own …show more content…
Lewis and P. Whitehead, Stalin: A time for Judgement, p63

[xii] R.W Thurston, Life and Terror in Stalin’s Russia 1934-41, p22

[xiii] Communist Russia under Lenin and Stalin, Corin and Fiehn, p227

[xiv] Robert Conquest, The Great Terror, p21

[xv] Communist Russia under Lenin and Stalin, Corin and Fiehn, p201

[xvi] A.Nove (ed.), The Stalin Phenomenon, 1993,