Historical Studies 333
The Age of Totalitarianism
Instructor: Mikkel Dack
ASSIGNMENT #1: DOCUMENT ANALYSIS
Joseph Stalin: Industrialization of the country, 1928
Prepared by: Yulia Kirillova
ID: 10095380

The Soviet Union was founded in 1922, when the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia. After the death of its first leader, Vladimir Lenin, there was a power struggle from which Joseph Stalin emerged as winner for the control of the Communist party. By the day of Lenin’s death there were five candidates with the potential to emerge as the new leader of the U.S.S.R: Stalin, Trotsky, Bukharin, Zinoviev, and Kamenev; Bukharin belonged to the “Rightists” and wished to continue Lenin’s economic policy, which gave more economic freedom for the peasants and promoted agriculture, Zinoviev and Kamenev wanted state control of economic life, Trotsky believed in the importance of a worldwide communist revolution, and Stalin filled the room for interpretation in Marxist though with the concept that he called “socialism in one country”. That was a significant shift from the previously held Marxist position that socialism must be established globally, and was in sharp opposition to Leon Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution. In contrast to what Trotsky thought and envisioned for Russia, Stalin believed that the success of Marxism in Russia was dependent on the construction of a successful soviet union, rather than a multitude of communist revolutions throughout the world. One step towards building a successful Soviet Union, as Stalin saw it, was the introduction of the five-year plans, which began the rapid process of transforming a largely agrarian nation consisting of peasants into an industrial superpower. In effect, the initial goals were laying the foundations for future exponential economic growth.
However, as we can see from Stalin's speech,