USM Open Source History Text: The World at War: World History 1914-1945Main MenuIntroduction: A Mural as WindowOn Diego Rivera's Detroit IndustryThe World Around 1914, Part I: the Journey of Young GandhiThe World Around 1914, Part II: The Era of Nationalism and Imperialism (1848-1914)The First World WarThe Long Russian Revolution (1917 – 1929)The Decline of the West? Europe from 1919 – 1929A New Middle East: The Rise of the Middle East State SystemChina Between Qing Collapse and WWIILatin America Between Boom and Bust (1911-1929)Africa Under Colonial Rule: Politics and Race from 1914‐1939The United States from The First World War to the Great DepressionThe Great DepressionThree Varieties of Radicalism in the 1930s: Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, and Imperial JapanThree Responses to Modernity: Ho Chi Minh, Ibn Saud, and Getulio VargasThe Second World WarSeth Rogoff5f001fc099cd635507b143be056702764af6929c
Stalin’s First Five-Year Plan
12017-07-17T21:57:26-07:00Seth Rogoff5f001fc099cd635507b143be056702764af6929c192372plain2017-09-19T07:56:02-07:00Seth Rogoff5f001fc099cd635507b143be056702764af6929cWith the system of brutality in place, Stalin sent out to industrialize. In the 1930s, when the rest of the world (apart from Japan and Nazi Germany) was mired in horrible economic depression, Stalin’s Russia surged forward, at least in its industrial capacity. The Soviet Union’s capacity for building heavy machinery, trucks, tractors, and so on, shot up to second in the world after the United States. It swiftly created an electricity grid and redoubled efforts in resource extraction: coal, iron. Areas in the Ural Mountains that had been population and economic deserts forever were suddenly booming into industrial cities with hundreds of thousands of employees working in massive state-owned industries. Agriculture, too, recovered and began to thrive, seeming to prove to the world that there was, after all, an alternative to the Western capitalistic system—and that this new system, communism, had both history and morality on its side. The great destruction that accompanied this industrial push, called the First Five Year Plan (with its collectivization of agriculture) were of course concealed or downplayed to the best of the regime’s ability, so much so that even famous philosophers and intellectuals in the West could feel secure in their misguided faith in Stalin.
