what were the impacts of stalin's economic policies??

Answer 1

A mountain of tragedies and a mountain of achievements.

Millions died performing slave labor in the gulags. Millions of others died of starvation.
On the other hand, the industrialization of the soviet union was achieved faster than in any other country, before or since.

Answer 2

Under the policy of NEP, private ownership was restored to small parts of the economy, especially farming (but not to the land itself). It replaced the policy of "War Communism" which was introduced by Vladimir Lenin in 1918 as an emergency plan to help the Bolsheviks win the Civil War in Russia fought against the White Army. To explain the NEP, Lenin had said "We are not civilized enough for socialism", referring to the fact that Russia was still a primarily agrarian nation, with a very small urban population and a weak industrial base, and thus it did not meet the economic criteria necessary for full socialism. Lenin further justified the introduction of the NEP by declaring that the "commanding heights" of industry, that is, the large factories producing coal, iron, electricity etc., would still be under state control. The NEP also loosened trade restrictions, and tried to regain alliances with foreign countries. The NEP did improve the efficiency of food distribution and especially benefited the peasants. However, many urban workers resented the profits made by private traders. Joseph Stalin announced the abolition of the NEP in January, 1929 and replaced it with the first of his Five-Year Plans.

Trotsky first proposed the NEP in 1920, but the idea was dismissed.[citation needed] In the following year, Lenin proposed the NEP, and the policy was adopted. This allowed peasants to lease and hire labor, which is more capitalistic than socialistic and they were allowed to keep a surplus after paying a certain proportion of their tax to the government.[1] This has also led to the Fundamental Law of the Exploitation of Land by the Workers, which ensured that the peasants have a choice of land tenure.

According to the well credited historian Conor Love, the NEP was 'an alledgedly short lived recession in Communism reverting one step back into capitalism to create a stable economy which would be ready for a quick run and a leap forward into Communism'. There was however great opposition to this from right wing factions in the Bolshevik party, with one member, Nickolai Marlervich, famously saying to Lenin 'What planet are you on!'


[edit] Results of NEP
Agricultural production increased greatly. Instead of the government taking all agricultural surpluses with no compensation, the farmers now had the option to sell their surplus yields, and therefore had an incentive to produce more grain. This incentive coupled with the break up of the quasi-feudal landed estates not only brought agricultural production to pre-Revolution levels, but further improved them. While the agricultural sector became increasingly reliant on small family farms, the heavy industries, banks and financial institutions remained owned and run by the state. Since the Soviet government did not yet pursue any policy of industrialization, this created an imbalance in the economy where the agricultural sector was growing much faster than the heavy industry. To keep their income high, the factories began to sell their products at higher prices. Due to the rising cost of manufactured goods, peasants had to produce much more wheat to purchase these consumer goods. This fall in prices of agricultural goods and sharp rise in prices of industrial products was known as the Scissor crisis (from the shape of the graph of relative prices to a reference date). Peasants began withholding their surpluses to wait for higher prices, or sold them to "NEPmen" (traders and middle-men) who then sold them on at high prices, which was opposed by many members of the Communist Party who considered it an exploitation of urban consumers. To combat the price of consumer goods the state took measures to decrease inflation and enact reforms on the internal practices of the factories. The government also fixed prices to halt the scissor effect.

The NEP succeeded in creating an economic recovery after the devastating effects of the First World War, the Russian Revolution and the Russian civil war. By 1928, agricultural and industrial production had been restored to the 1913 (pre-WWI) level.[1]


[edit] End of NEP
By 1925, the year after Lenin's death, Nikolai Bukharin had become the foremost supporter of the NEP. It was abandoned in 1928 by Joseph Stalin in favor of the First Five-Year Plan due to the Grain Crisis, and the need to rapidly accumulate capital for industrialization to the level of capitalist countries in the West (as Stalin famously proclaimed: "Either we do it, or we will be crushed."). Stalin proposed that the grain crisis was caused by the NEPmen, to which grain was often sold by the peasants, selling their agricultural products to the urban populations at a high price. Explanations for the grain crisis which are more popular among western historians revolve around the terms of trade being in favour of non-rural industries and a significant goods shortage which meant peasants had nothing to spend their resources on and thus held onto them.

The NEP was generally believed to be intended as an interim measure, and proved highly unpopular with the ardent Marxists in the Bolshevik party because of its compromise with some capitalistic elements. [1] They saw the NEP as a betrayal of communist principles, and they believed it would have a negative long-term economic effect, so they wanted a fully planned economy instead. In particular, the NEP benefitted the Communists' so-called "class enemies", the traders (NEPmen), while being detrimental to the workers, whom the Party claimed to represent. On the other hand, Lenin is quoted to have said "The NEP is in earnest and long-term" (НЭП - это всерьез и надолго), which has been used to surmise that if Lenin were to stay alive longer, NEP would have continued beyond 1929, and the controversial collectivization would have never happened, or it would have been carried out differently. In contrast, Lenin had also been known to say about NEP: "We are taking one step backward to later take two steps forward", suggesting that Stalin's five year plan was a fulfillment of Lenin's testament.

Lenin's successor, Stalin, eventually introduced full central planning (although a variant of public planning had been the idea of the Left Opposition, which Stalin purged from the Party), re-nationalised the whole economy, and from the late 1920s onwards introduced a policy of rapid industrialization. Stalin's collectivization of agriculture has been his most notable, and most destructive departure from the NEP approach. It is often argued that industrialization could have been achieved without any collectivization just by taxing the peasants more, much like it has happened in Meiji Japan, Bismarck's Germany, and in post-war South Korea and Taiwan. It is also argued, however, that such an industrialization would have taken much longer than Stalin's ultra-rapid version, leaving the Soviet Union far behind Western countries like Germany in terms of industrial and military output, thus possibly resulting in a victory for Nazi Germany in World War II. However, the backwardness of Russian agriculture caused by Stalin's revolution from above is often cited by historians as a handicap going into World War II.

The Russian Civil War and wartime communism had a devastating effect on the country's economy. Industrial output in 1922 was 13% of that in 1914. A recovery followed under the New Economic Policy, which allowed a degree of market flexibility within the context of socialism.

Under Stalin's direction, this was replaced by a system of centrally ordained "Five-Year Plans" in the late 1920s. These called for a highly ambitious program of state-guided crash industrialization and the collectivization of agriculture.

With no seed capital, little international trade, and virtually no modern infrastructure, Stalin's government financed industrialization by both restraining consumption on the part of ordinary Soviet citizens, to ensure that capital went for re-investment into industry, and by ruthless extraction of wealth from the kulaks.

In 1933, worker's real earnings sank to about one-tenth of the 1926 level. There was also use of the unpaid labor of both common and political prisoners in labor camps and the frequent "mobilization" of communists and Komsomol members for various construction projects. The Soviet Union also made use of foreign experts, e.g. British engineer Stephen Adams, to instruct their workers and improve their manufacturing processes.

In spite of early breakdowns and failures, the first two Five-Year Plans achieved rapid industrialization from a very low economic base. While there is general agreement among historians that the Soviet Union achieved significant levels of economic growth under Stalin, the precise rate of this growth is disputed.

Official Soviet estimates placed it at 13.9%, Russian and Western estimates gave lower figures of 5.8% and even 2.9%. Indeed, one estimate is that Soviet growth temporarily was much higher after Stalin's death.[8] [9]

According to Robert Lewis, the Five-Year Plan substantially helped to modernize the previously backward Soviet economy. New products were developed, and the scale and efficiency with which existing products were made also greatly increased. Some innovations were based on indigenous technical developments, and others were based on imported foreign technology. [14]


[edit] Collectivization
Main article: Collectivization in the USSR

Joseph Stalin.Stalin's regime moved to force collectivization of agriculture. This was intended to increase agricultural output from large-scale mechanized farms, to bring the peasantry under more direct political control, and to make tax collection more efficient. Collectivization meant drastic social changes, on a scale not seen since the abolition of serfdom in 1861, and alienation from control of the land and its produce. Collectivization also meant a drastic drop in living standards for many peasants, and it faced violent reaction among the peasantry.

In the first years of collectivization, it was estimated that industrial and agricultural production would rise by 200% and 50%,[15] respectively; however, agricultural production actually dropped[citation needed]. Stalin blamed this unanticipated failure on kulaks (rich peasants), who resisted collectivization. (However, kulaks only made up 4% of the peasant population; the "kulaks" that Stalin targeted included the moderate middle peasants who took the brunt of violence from the OGPU and the Komsomol. The middle peasants were about 60% of the population). Therefore those defined as "kulaks," "kulak helpers," and later "ex-kulaks" were to be shot, placed into Gulag labor camps, or deported to remote areas of the country, depending on the charge.

The two-stage progress of collectivization — interrupted for a year by Stalin's famous editorial, "Dizzy with success" (Pravda, March 2, 1930), and "Reply to Collective Farm Comrades" (Pravda, April 3, 1930) — is a prime example of his capacity for tactical political withdrawal followed by intensification of initial strategies.

Many historians assert that the disruption caused by collectivization was largely responsible for major famines. The 1932-1933 famine in the Ukraine and the Kuban regions has been termed the Holodomor (Ukrainian: Голодомор). According to Alan Bullock, "the total Soviet grain crop was no worse than that of 1931... it was not a crop failure but the excessive demands of the state, ruthlessly enforced, that cost the lives of as many as five million Ukrainian peasants." Stalin refused to release large grain reserves that could have alleviated the famine (and at the same time exporting grain abroad); he was convinced that the Ukrainian peasants had hidden grain away, and strictly enforced draconian new collective-farm theft laws in response.[16][10]

Other historians hold it was largely the insufficient harvests of 1931 and 1932 caused by a variety of natural disasters that resulted in famine, with the successful harvest of 1933 ending the famine. [11]

However, famine also affected various other parts of the USSR. The death toll from famine in the Soviet Union at this time is estimated at between five and ten million people. (The worst crop failure of late tsarist Russia, in 1892, caused 375,000 to 400,000 deaths.)[12]

Soviet authorities and other historians have argued that tough measures and the rapid collectivization of agriculture were necessary in order to achieve an equally rapid industrialization of the Soviet Union and ultimately win World War II. This is disputed by other historians such as Alec Nove, who claim that the Soviet Union industrialized in spite of, rather than thanks to, its collectivized agriculture.