Preview

How Did Joseph Stalin's Forced Famine

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
588 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
How Did Joseph Stalin's Forced Famine
Stalin’s Forced Famine Throughout Europe’s history, no attack on its own people was as grueling or as cruel to its citizens as Stalin’s forced famine. These victimized people lived on farms in the “breadbasket of Europe”, which was a nickname Ukraine got for its fertile land. Stalin used his authority to deprive these people of food they had grown. During this famine, present-day Russia identified itself as the Soviet Union and Ukraine was the Ukrainian SSR.
Before Stalin’s rule, Ukraine had already fought for its independence from the 200- year rule of the Czar. The Czar fell in 1917, but by the end of the year, Vladimir Lenin had the motive to reclaim all previously Czar-ruled land. He began the decline into four years
…show more content…
Lenin was less interested in the dehumanization of these people, and more so focused on the actual task of ruling them. “To lessen the deepening resentment, Lenin relaxed his grip… stopped taking out so much grain… encouraged a free-market exchange of goods. This breath of fresh air renewed the people's interest in independence and resulted in… celebrating their unique folk customs, language, poetry, music, arts, and Ukrainian orthodox religion.” (The History Place, 1) In comparison to Lenin’s tactics, Stalin kept a stronghold on the country, which included its imports, exports, as well as their manner of cultivation. He began something called collectivization. This meant that he forced peasant households together to make big farms. The main goal of this plan was to eliminate a social class called the Kulaks as a whole. He claimed that their output in cultivation could be replaced as well as increased by the concept of collectivization. “In reality, the destruction of kulaks had little to do with economic considerations. By Stalin's own admission, kulaks supplied only a fifth of the Soviet Union's marketable grain surplus…” (Krawchenko, 1). In all actuality- despite Stalin’s accusations- the peasantry and poor people made up about three quarters of the output. Due to his need to exterminate and rid Ukraine of kulaks, the entire lower class

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    Joseph Stalin Dbq Analysis

    • 1113 Words
    • 5 Pages

    Joseph Stalin established a modern totalitarian government in Soviet Russia. He is known as the “Man of Steel”. A totalitarianism is a type of government that takes total, centralized, state control over every aspect of public and private life of their people. His rule had changed the people of his empire in numerous ways. Stalin had total control over economic needs. According to document 6 “By 1940 Russia produced more pig iron than Germany, and far more than Britain or France. Numbers of cattle grew in the 1920s, but fell increasingly during the collectivization of agriculture after 1929, and by 1940 hardly exceeded the figure for 1920. Since 1940 the industrial development of the Soviet Union has been impressive, but agricultural production has continued to be plumiding”. The document illustrates how pig iron had significantly increased as a result of the “Five Year Plan”, however heavy industry led to expense of food supplies. This would cause limited production of consumer goods. It caused a step back because of the severe shortages of housing, food, clothing as well as other necessary goods. The Five Year Plan didn’t help much to excel their economic as Stalin hoped, it impacted by creating famine. Stalin rising to power promised an economic boom for Russia however, in that process many people suffered and died of starvation. According to document 5, “The purge began its last,…

    • 1113 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Stalin Dbq Research Paper

    • 567 Words
    • 3 Pages

    There were several reasons. Stalin sought to reorganize the Soviet Union via his Five Year Plans, which called for a radical industrialization as well as collectivisation to increase agricultural production and efficiency. This increased agricultural output was necessary to support the rapid industrialization he espoused; how else could the workers be fed? Many peasants who had been awarded or taken their land...to liquidating the kulaks as a class" (Document 5.3 Collectivisation 181). Millions were sent to labor camps, deported and died. The impossible demands made on the peasant farmers of increased production, only to turn everything over to the state, resulted in peasants that remained on the land at first hiding, then burning their crops/killing their animals rather than give them up "Stock was slaughtered every night..." (History in Quotations #5). An infuriated Stalin sent industrial workers into the country to show the peasants 'Bolshevik firmness' "without any rotten liberalism...[or] bourgeois humanitarianism...[and with]extreme measures" to get the grain. (Document 5.4 Horror in the Village…

    • 567 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Soviet Union DBQ

    • 840 Words
    • 3 Pages

    Stalin was a part of the Bolsheviks which was the communist party of the Soviet Union. The Kulaks were the wealthy landowners and they were capitalists and did not approve of Stalin’s beliefs and methods. One of the changes Stalin implemented in order to achieve his one of his many goals, was to collective farms. Collectivization is the act of seizing land from the wealthy (which in this case were the Kulaks) and using it for communal use. This means that the Kulaks’ farms would get broken up to little parts and given to the peasants. In document 4, an excerpt from a speech that Stalin delivered in 1929 he says, “The socialist way, which is to set up collective farms and state farms into large collective farms, technically and scientifically equipped, and to the squeezing out of the capitalist elements from agriculture.” Stalin was determined to remove any and all capitalist that were not in his favor. Another change Stalin implemented was to stop feeding the livestock with the wheat being grown. In document 5, there is a graph showing the declination of the livestock in the first and second five year plan. In a total of 10 years, the amount of livestock was virtually cut in half! In comparison, the wheat production increased significantly in the ten years in which the livestock was cut in half. The wheat being…

    • 840 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Stalin imposed collectivism, which took all the farm land from the Kulaks, leaving them homeless and unemployed It was forbidden to give aid to the Kulaks, and eventually they were forced in to slavery to survive, and any Kulak who refused slavery was deported Forced Famine under the rule of Joseph Stalin By 1932, 75% of all farmland had been acquired by Stalin’s regime and he was exporting so much food from this region, there was no food left to feed the Ukranian people (Trueman, 2013) The Ukranian Communist party reached out for support from the Soviet Communist party and were soon stamped out by Stalin’s loyal soldiers, sent to subdue the Ukranians Starvation was so prevalent that people fled the country side to larger cities, only to find starvation there as well, with bodies of the dead lining the streets Forced Famine under the rule of Joseph Stalin…

    • 1348 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Between 1800 and 1939 Russia progressed towards an economic system of government owned business and redistribution, known as communism. Prior to Russia developing into communism they were a capitalist state. The last time we see a non communist state in Russia before 1939 would be under Czar Nicholas II. Previous social conditioning in Russia led to popular beliefs among the peasantry that the land belongs to the farmers, or at least it should. However, a small number of the peasantry had owned any land at all. And they also had other reasons to hold feelings of discontent. The Russian working conditions were simply atrocious. Workers saw work jour of 12, 14, and 16 hours long. And the factories which they worked on were overcrowded and were obvious dangers to their long-term and immediate health. And for all of the hardship faced workers would see dismal pay, barely enough to supply for their family. However, what led Russia past the threshold…

    • 837 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    Stalin was determined to exterminate Ukraine’s farmers for two reasons. First, the Ukraine had the potential to rise up and resist against the Communist regime. Second, he needed more money to industrialize the country, and the…

    • 1486 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    Collectivization was designed to modernize Russia’s agriculture by merging farms and placing them under state control. In the short term, this policy resulted in famines and Stalin’s ‘war’ against the Kulaks; wealthy peasants who opposed communism. By 1935, 5 million people had died from starvation and all 7 million Kulaks had been liquidized, through shooting or the labour camps or ‘Gulags’. However, by 1939, Collectivization was working efficiently with 99% of land merged and 90% of peasants living ¼ of a million Kolkhoz. Although at a heavy price, the exports needed to obtain the capitol for industrialization had been acquired.…

    • 1040 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    The Holodomor is a definitive example of collectivism values as formerly wealthy farmers known to the Communists as Kulaks, were to be “liquidated” as a class according to Stalin’s policies. This is where the out-of-group homogeneity effect comes in as Stalin and his regime saw these members as all alike and considered “enemies of the people” (Waller, 2007). Stalin’s law forbade helping the Kulaks as they were left with nothing and were brought to settlements located in the wilderness. Soviet mines and large industrialized organizations took these members including unmarried girls and grown men to become their personal slave-workers (The History Place, 2000). The farmers who rejected being a part of this new collective structure ended up being…

    • 128 Words
    • 1 Page
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    British professor and historian Robert Conquest also brings his view on the topic in his book The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-famine published in 1986. Conquest has written many books on the Soviet Union and was in fact an open communist in England up until the Second World War started. His thesis is that the famine was purposeful and thus constitutes genocide. He says that Stalin wanted to subdue Ukrainian nationalism, and the way Stalin believed to do that was to kill the Ukrainian peasants, especially the Kulaks, and that the famine was meant to kill them.…

    • 645 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    The peasants were probably the worst off in Russia in the early twentieth century. Although the peasants had been emancipated by Alexander II back in 1861, they still had little freedom while Nicholas was leading. Peasants had to pay redemption payments for land the government had given or lent them but they found it difficult to keep up and often got into debt. The village communities owned and paid for the land together, not as a single person. Peasants had to pay much higher taxes than the landlords and the officials would flog the peasants who didn’t pay their taxes. There were so many pressures in day to day life that many peasants could not support themselves and had to move to cities for work. Peasants had to be granted permission by their fellow commune members to leave the farm. Even once they had left, they were still expected to assist with the redemption payments (Proctor, 1995). The living standards the peasants and their families had to endure were terrible. Russian peasants were still forced into using traditional farming techniques which involved manual labour instead of machine labour. Entire families occupied one room huts and sometimes the living quarters were shared with their livestock. This meant epidemic diseases were prevalent. Peasant’s diets were insufficient and unvaried, mostly…

    • 1124 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    This was just the initial stages of Stalin’s war against the Ukrainians or “kulaks” as Stalin called them. But the quota he set for them to produce was six almost seven million tons of grain. This was an impossible quota to meet, especially since collective farms were always less productive than private…

    • 877 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    This portion of the essay will be discussing the cruelty that affected a nation because of Stalin’s communism. Stalin seized assets, including farms and factories, and recognized the economy (Shepley, 2013). However, these efforts led to a less efficient product, resulting in a mass famine that swept the country side (Shepley, 2013). This portion will also discuss how Stalin maintained export levels, shipping food out of the country even as rural residents died (Read, 1983).…

    • 852 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    The money that was received from the wheat that was being sold to other countries went towards Stalin’s Five Year Plan to modernize the Soviet Union and to help finance his military. It was estimated that Stalin sold enough wheat to feed all of Ukraine for two years (“Stalin’s Forced Famine”). They had so much excess grain that they would even dump some into the sea or let it rot right in front of the Ukrainian people’s eyes (Perloff). The Soviet Union then closed off all borders so that nobody in Ukraine could get anything in or out of the country. Anyone that got caught with food could be shot on the spot or get put in prison. Starvation started to spread throughout the country and the effects of malnutrition started taking its toll on the Ukrainian people. The Soviet Army dug deep holes where they would throw all the dead bodies that were lying around on the street. People started to cook any animals they could find, whether it was a cat, dog, or bird. They even had to resort to cannibalism (“Stalin’s Forced Famine”). Some people wanted to get the agony over with so they would commit suicide if they had the strength to do it. Others would lay out on the street, too weak to even talk, and just wait until there body was reduced to just skin and bones (Perloff). At the height of the famine, they projected that about 25,000 people died every day and around 7,000,000 died…

    • 1092 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Eight Steps of Genocide

    • 2212 Words
    • 9 Pages

    * Such was also the case with the strong resistance of the Ukrainian farmer to Stalin’s program of collectivization in 1931-32 coupled with the threat of Ukrainian nationalism to communist control. Thus, when what would have been a mild famine hit the region in 1932, Stalin magnified the famine many fold by seizing food and its sources (livestock, pets, seed grain, shooting birds in the trees, etc.) and boycotting the import of food taken away from them before they entered the Soviet Republic. About 5 million Ukrainians were starved to death.…

    • 2212 Words
    • 9 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    The Ukrainian Genocide

    • 662 Words
    • 3 Pages

    Joseph Stalin specifically started the famine and targeted Ukrainian farmers to remove them from society in order to quell feelings of nationalism and uprising in the country. The Kulak farmers made up the majority of the population and so Stalin targeted the Kulak class of farmers because he “believed any future uprising would be led by the Kulaks, who were pro-Tsarist and anti-Soviet, thus he implemented policies intended to eliminate the Kulaks as a class of Ukrainian farmers” (Krawczewski). The Kulaks did not support Stalin’s government and so he viewed that class of farmers as a threat. All of Stalin’s actions against Ukraine (the arrests, deportations, and collectivization policies) specifically targeted the private farmers in order to prevent uprisings against him. Therefore, the genocide was thought out and brutally planned with one goal in mind, submission of the country. Later, the famine affected many more rural farmers as it was created solely to punish the Ukrainian people. Stalin did not just merrily order the country to export tons of grain, he ensured that the people would starve to death in the processes. In order to create the famine, the “Soviet Union increased production quotas that were impossible to meet, cut rations to those still in Ukraine, and coordinated food seizures in Ukrainian villages. This resulted in widespread malnutrition and starvation” (Krawczewski). The Soviet Union purposely increased the productions quotas for the country and slowly wiped out all other existing food supplies. The resulting starvation from this purposeful famine was meticulously and cruelly thought out. Ukraine ended up exporting huge amounts of grain even as the people farming it were starving. Even though there was a surplus amount, all the grain was taken away from the Ukrainian people. Certainly, the specific targeting of the farming…

    • 662 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays