Josef Stalin and His Economical Impact on the Soviet Union

After the fall of the czars in the Soviet Union, the entire country was left in chaos. This was in effect until Vladimir Lenin founded the Bolshevik party in 1917. The country needed a government not affiliated with the originally failed Provisional Government, and the Bolsheviks were ready to take over. As this party held its reign, Josef Stalin joined as a low ranking officer and worked his way up through the ranks of the Bolshevik party over the years (Strayer, 2007, 61). After Lenin's death, Stalin rose to the front of authority and became the Soviet leader. Once he took over, he completely changed the way the Soviet Union was run and Stalin's economic reform was born. Although the way he went about reforming the Soviet Union's economic state, there is no doubt that it was a complete success while he was leading the country.

Joseph Stalin drastically changed how the Soviet Union functioned economically. He wanted to mold the country into one of the leading economic superpowers in the world, and in time he did this (Red Files, 5). Rapid industrialization was a major goal of Stalin's in order to quickly raise the Soviet Union to become an economic strength. One of the most important ways he did this was through the Five Year Plan. This was made in order to change the economy of the Soviet Union from having mostly privatized industries to having complete governmental control of all investment and production in the country, and began a large-scale plan to construct heavy machinery (Red Files, 5). Stalin did a gracefully successful job in converting the country to this. He turned the entire country, in just years, from being a small-scale country without very much economic potential to being one of the best economically sound countries at the national level.

Collective agriculture was one of the most influential points toward turning the Soviet Union into a completely socialized society. One of Stalin's chief and foremost goals was to make the Soviet Union a socialist nation, and to successfully accomplish this he had to completely embrace the agricultural business (Strayer, 2007, 62). Since the country was, for the most part, still an agricultural and farming country, the government had to put an end to the process of private agriculture and push toward starting a more nationalized agricultural environment (Strayer, 2007, 62). Because a numerous amount of the Soviet Union's citizens involved in the business of agriculture were not very well educated, it was very easy to get them to accept the deal of making agriculture, as a whole, collective (Strayer, 2007, 63). This completely helped the Soviet Union's worth as a nation, but it also destroyed the common individual.

Although the collectivization of the agriculture industry was one of the main reasons for success as a nation, it ruined the common citizen. The former owners of farms originally could work on their own terms; while making a decent amount of money doing it. After Stalin took over, they had to work on the government's schedule and this led to overworking which led to a famine (Strayer, 2007, 64). Because the demand raised so much for certain grain supplies, the suppliers could not supply enough for everyone, and this shortage ended up being the cause of over five million deaths (Strayer, 2007, 64). Since what Stalin was trying to do was being done in the matter of years, instead of the usual decades, it was obvious that drastic measures were taken in order to successfully turn the country into a socialist nation, and obviously Stalin felt that putting the country's people into a state of depression was worth the economic success on a global scale.

Even though the collectivization seems like a good idea economically at the national level, there was a mass resistance from partaking in this agricultural reform. People in the nation considered this as a regressive act going backward to serfdom (Strayer, 2007, 64). This made people very upset and they ended up revolting. There was a lot of chaos in the countryside because originally there were no allowances for the workers. This soon changed because of all this revolting. The government allowed a small amount of the citizens' property to be privatized, such as farm animals, small plots of land for personal use, and the allowance to sell small bits of one's goods to local markets (Strayer, 2007, 64). Although this did not bode well with the farmers, they were more satisfied with this than anything else that was offered.

Though Josef Stalin did destroy the common man in his quest to create an economic superpower out of the Soviet Union, he did exactly what he set out to do when he became the leader of the Soviet Union. This impacted the rest of the world dramatically. Without Stalin's reign over the Soviet Union, the Cold War would have never happened because the Soviet Union would never have been considered a threat, nor would they have had the financial wellbeing that they had throughout the Soviet Union's existence. There are not many implications in today's society, mostly because the Soviet Union broke up and dismantled back in the early 1990's. This sent the nation into a downward spiral as their regime finally died. This gave rise to many new countries that were formerly under the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe. Although Josef Stalin did create an economic superpower, it ultimately failed decades later and set up for how the world is set up today.