Stalin's Rule

Essay by infestHigh School, 12th grade July 2004

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Stalin was born Joseph Vissarionovich Djugashvili was born in Gori, Georgia in 1879. He joined the Bolshevik party in 1904. Lenin had said just before he died that Stalin was not the correct person to become the leader of Russia when he died. When Lenin did die on January 21, 1924 although he had written that he believed that Stalin should be removed, no action was taken. "I therefore propose to our comrades to consider a means of removing Stalin from this post and appointing someone else who differs from Stalin in one weighty respect: being more tolerant, more loyal, more polite, more considerate of his comrades." For the next four years Stalin fought with Trotsky for control of Russia. In 1928, Stalin effectively became dictator and remained so for the next 25 years until his death in 1953.

One of Stalin's first major changes concerned the economy. Stalin said that the then USSR was "...two

million tones short of the minimum amount of grain needed for feeding the workers in the cities." The major change that Stalin made in order to remedy this problem was to introduce collectivisation. There were two types of collectivisation, the kolkhoz (collective farm), and the sovkhoz (state farm). The kolkhoz entailed bringing about the end of small, privately owned farms and organising them into one massive farm in which the all the land, livestock and tools were pooled along with the work and the wages. The sovkhoz was the same as the kolkhoz apart from the fact that the labourers worked directly for the state and received a wage from the state.

Collectivisation was not popular with many of the peasants of Russia. Lenin had given them land in 1918 and Stalin was now taking it back in 1928. Some of these peasants had...