Essay On Joseph Stalin's Labor Shortage

After Vladimir Lenin died in 1924, Joseph Stalin was able to outcompete his rivals and become dictator of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In 1929, Stalin began his rule through the creation of a series of five-year plans, during which he attempted to jump start industrialization in the Soviet Union and take control of the peasant-run agriculture through forced government collectivization. Though Stalin was faced with backlash from millions of farmers, he did not budge; anyone who opposed him was either imprisoned or killed. Through the millions of arrests of these “kulak” individuals, who were in the way of Stalin’s Marxist ideology, a massive labor shortage was created. In order to combat this labor shortage and stay afloat on the world stage, Stalin utilized and mainstreamed Lenin’s Gulag, Main Administration of Corrective Labor Camps and Labor Settlements, to create a forced labor supply and venue.
In between when the camps became mainstream in 1929 and Stalin’s death in 1953, over 25 million people, or 15 percent of the population, were imprisoned. Though Stalin’s Gulag does not get as much coverage in the western world as other mass killings such as the Holocaust, millions more died at the hands of Stalin than Hitler. Although Stalin intended to use the Gulag system to promote state-run industrialization, the mass arrest of kulaks left the Soviet Union in a widespread agricultural labor shortage and subsequent famines; while Stalin’s utilization of Gulag prisoners as forced labor was meant to solve the state’s labor shortage, it strained the economic system of the Soviet Union and perpetuated a moral