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Lenin's economy policy
The social effect of stalin economic policies
The social effect of stalin economic policies
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The New Economic Policy instituted by Vladimir Lenin in 1922 was seen as a necessary evil in order to maintain power in the Soviet Union. While most historians agree with Lenin’s assessment and believe that without the change the entire Soviet economy would have collapsed there is a wide range of thoughts on the true effectiveness of the NEP. This paper will look at the progression of the NEP and the differing views Bolshevik leaders had on it as well as the perceived effectiveness of the limited free market policies adopted by these socialist leaders. It will also try to determine if NEP could have remained a viable option for the economy long term.
The New Economic Policy was in many ways a reactionary policy put forth because of widespread public disdain for War Communism (Richman 1981,92-93). War Communism was the set of policies enacted by the Bolsheviks from the time they took power in 1917 until the establishment of the NEP in 1921. Under War Communism private industry was essentially eliminated, farms were collectivized, industry and business were taken over by the government. The peasantry had not been very accepting of having the land they were so recently granted ownership of being taken away once again by the government. Because of this there was little motivation on farms to grow more than what was necessary for the family because they were seeing no benefit from a surplus of crops. Workers in cities were driven back out to the farms to avoid starvation and as a result production collapsed in the Soviet Union to below pre- WWI. War Communism saw a steady decline in popularity as the Civil war wound down but the final straw came with the Kronshtadt Rebellion in March of 1921. Then a force of sailors sympathetic to pr...
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...my. This ended up leading to the fall of the Soviet Union to capitalism and democracy just as the Bolsheviks of the 1920s feared would happen with NEP.
Works Cited
Richman, Sheldon L.. "War Communism to NEP: The Road from Serfdom." The Journal of Libertarian Studies V, no. 1 (1981): 89-97.
Davies, R.W. "New Economic Policy." New Perspective 3, no. 3 (1998).
Davies,R.W.. Soviet Economic Development from Lenin to Khrushchev. Cambridge: Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge, 1998.
Boettke,Peter J.. The political economy of Soviet socialism: the formative years, 1918-1928. 1 ed. Norwell, MA: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1990.
Cohen,Stephen. Rethinking the Soviet Experience. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.
Gorbachev and glasnost: viewpoints from the Soviet press. Isaac J. Tarasulo. Scholarly Resources Inc.: Wilmington, DE, 1989.
...ap between farmer’s income and industrial prices, as now farmers could not afford industrial equipment, so they therefore had fewer incentives to reproduce grain. The government’s response to this was to subsidise, so the peasant could now afford the machinery, but this then left an economic crisis has this meant they had less money to improve the economy. This indicated to Trotsky that the NEP solved some issue like famine, protests but the New Economic Policy was not capable of industrialising the economy.
The first five-year plan, approved in 1929, proposed that state and collective farms provide 15 percent of agriculture output. The predominance of private farming seemed assured, as many farmers resisted collectivization. By late 1929, Stalin moved abruptly to break peasant resistance and secure the resources required for industrialization. He saw that voluntary collectivism had failed, and many “Soviet economists doubted that the first plan could even be implimented.”1 Stalin may have viewed collectivization as a means to win support from younger party leaders, rather than from the peasants and Lenin’s men. “Privately he advocated, industrializing the country with the help of internal accumulation” 2 Once the peasantry had been split, Stalin believed that the rural proletarians would embrace collectivization . Before this idea had a chance to work, a grain shortage induced the Politburo to support Stalin’s sudden decision for immediate, massive collectivization.
Mau, Vladimir. " The road to 'perestrokia': economics in the USSR and the problem of
Communism states that the only way to resolve these difficulties would be for the working class to replace the ruling class in order to create a diplomatic, free society without a government (Structure of Communism). Communism prevents anything from overcoming another establishment. It allows everything to be intact, and it allows everything to be equal. Communism in its most influential days was after the end of World War II and the start of the Cold War.... ... middle of paper ...
Lenin 's leadership was a crucial factor in consolidating Bolshevik power up until his death in 1924. His pragmatic leadership helped gain some initial support as well as giving him unquestioned authority within the party. Furthermore, his push for the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk to help save the revolution from foreign invasion was crucial and his practicality was further exemplified through War Communism and the introduction of the New Economic Policy (NEP). The use of terror under Lenin 's rule was also highly effective in removing political dissidents and exerting Bolshevik authority through coercive measures like the Cheka and the Red Terror. The accumulation of these factors centred on Lenin 's leadership helped stamp Bolshevik power across the Soviet Union.
The Extent to Which Lenin's NEP Solved the Problems Caused by War Communism Subsequent to the Bolshevik revolution in October 1917 commenced a two year domesticated war in Russia between the newly empowered Communist establishment and the conservative military officers. The primary victims were peasants, affected mostly from the exorbitant demands of food supplies and other essential necessities. The communist and despotic techniques practiced by the Bolsheviks during the war were hence dubbed “war communism” and had considerably alienated the mass of the Russian populace against its communist policies. Thus the regime was forced to restrain its callous inclinations and accordingly abandon “war communism”. Moreover V.I Lenin introduced the “New Economic Policy” in which capitalism and entrepreneurship was maintained, consequently restoring economic, social and agricultural production to pre-revolution levels.
The overall collapse of the Communist regime came rather quickly, but there were underlying causes of the collapse that were apparent during the preceding decades. On the surface, the 1970s looked good for the Soviet Union. A lot of certain aspects were still going the Soviet Unions way. However, in 1975, the Soviet Union’s power peaked. In 1975, the Soviet Union’s power began to dwindle and there were six underlying causes of the collapse that can be dated back to that year. In this essay I will discuss these six causes and how they helped bring about the actual collapse of the Soviet regime.
The cold war was failed by the Soviet Union for many reasons, including the sudden collapse of communism (Baylis & Smith, 2001.) This sudden collapse of communism was brought on ultimately by internal factors. The soviet unions president Gorbachev’s reforms: glasnost (openness) and perestroika (political reconstructering) ultimately caused the collapse of the Soviet Empire. Gorbachev’s basics for glasnost were the promotion of principles of freedom to criticize; the loosening of controls on media and publishing; and the freedom of worship. His essentials of perestroika were, a new legislature; creation of an executive presidency; ending of the ‘leading role’ of the communist party; allowing state enterprises to sell part of their product on the open market; lastly, allowing foreign companies to own Soviet enterprises (Baylis & Smith, 2001.) Gorbachev believed his reforms would benefit his country, but the Soviet Union was ultimately held together by the soviet tradition he was trying to change. The Soviet Union was none the less held together by “…powerful central institutions, pressure for ideological conformity, and the threat of force.
Temkin, G. (1998). Karl Marx and the economics of communism: Anniversary recollections. Communist and Post-Communist Studies, 31(4), 303–328. doi:10.1016/S0967-067X(98)00014-2
As a direct consequence of World War I, which ended in 1918, Communism emerged. Communism is an ideology that combines social and economic systems to what is depicted as an equal society, where an emphasis is placed on production for use . During the Great Depression, in the 1930’s, the lives of many people were changed drastically; the number of unemployed was great, and the amount of employment available was minimum. As a result those who wanted work, took what was available, even if it meant receiving a minimal amount of money just to survive, if that.
In the late 1920’s, living in Lenin’s shadow, Stalin decided that the New Economic Policy would introduce the Five-Year Plan.
The word “communism” is generally linked with “Marxism”. Since Marx along with Friedrich Engels published the cutting-edge thesis, The Communist Manifesto in the middle of the 19th century, it conceived the new dimension for both politics and economics. Before turning to the principles of the Manifesto, it is useful to present the brief historical background of the era, and understand why it affected the ideology. Predominantly the Industrial Revolution (IR) and the Great Revolution in France (FR) transformed the society as follows; creation of conditions for capitalism by destroying feudalism. Period between 1820 -1840 marks the beginning of the IR, which altered the whole meantime s...
Communism is a system of government, a political ideology that rejects private ownership and promotes a classless, stateless society based on common ownership of all property and the means of production, where all work is shared and all proceeds are commonly owned. Communism is practised in China, North Korea, Vietnam, Laos and Cuba. However, most of the world’s communist governments have been disbanded since the end of World War II. Soon after the Japanese surrendered at the end of World War II, Communist forces began a war against the Kuomintang in China. The Communists gradually gained control of the country and on the 1st October, 1949, Mao Zedong announced the victory of the Communist party and the establishment of the People's Republic of China.
The Soviet economy was highly centralized with a “command economy” (p.1). fsmitha.com), which had been broken down due to its complexity and centrally controlled with corruption involved in it. A strong government needs a strong economy to maintain its power and influence, but in this case the economic planning of the Soviet Union was just not working, which had an influence in other communist nations in Eastern Europe as they declined to collapse. The economic stagnation led to the frustration of the workers because of low payments, bad working conditions, inefficiency, corruption and any lack of incentive to do good work. There were lots of frustrations among the workers in the working field who began to express their feelings and emotions towards the Soviet government.
Lenin's Economic Policies in 1924 When the Bolsheviks seized power in October 1917 they inherited many of the problems faced by the old Tsarist regime as well as those of the Provisional Government after the Tsars abdication. Lenin, as leader of the Bolsheviks took many measures to try and solve these problems, each with varying degrees of success. This essay will, therefore, go on to look at and discuss the various measures that Lenin and the Bolshevik party took, and, whether these measures created more problems for Russia in the end or in fact made significant progress towards the communist society that Lenin had prophesised for Russia. In the early days of Bolshevik rule, there were many problems facing Lenin.