Stalinist industralization

Essay by volkovCollege, UndergraduateA-, March 2014

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Trace the direction of Soviet industrial development through state-controlled planning under Stalinist regime.

In the late 1920s following the Great Debate, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union came under the leadership of Joseph Stalin . At the time of the debate Stalin was in a political alliance with the rightist faction headed by Nikolai Bukharin in order to compete with Leon Trotsky who supported the leftist stance of developing the economy with a financial focus on the industrial sector. Whereas Stalin had been the member of the three most important bodies of the party: Politburo, Orgburo and the Secretariat, Trotsky was the 'heir presumptive' for the position of Party Premier after the departure of Lenin. This made Stalin weary of alienating peasants and he justified his position by drawing the attention towards the peasant uprising of Georgia (1922-23). In the troika Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamanev and Stalin were trying their level best to ensure that Trotsky did not succeed Lenin.

Ultimately the model proposed by Bukharin was adopted that emphasised upon balanced growth of all the sectors of economy and reinstated NEP which was to be functional till 1928. After exiling the Trotskyites from USSR in 1927, Stalin turned to the Bukharinites who had a massive following and were denounced by the Central Committee in November 1928. Alec Nove points out that despite his initial affiliation to the rightist model of growth, Stalin stole many of the clothes of the left opposition, but Bukharin's entire vision of development was radically different from the policy Stalin ultimately adopted. Bukharin wanted to preserve NEP, but Stalin destroyed it. Nove deems Stalin's policies to be horrifying and his industrialisation and political methods to be deplorable.

Ten years after the revolution the economy continued to be predominantly agrarian. Under the New Economic Policy...