Joseph Stalin Dbq Essay

Following the death of Vladimir Lenin in 1914, Joseph Stalin took up his position as leader of the Soviet Union. After rising to power, Stalin made drastic changes to Russia that was still torn from war at the time. With his power, Stalin aimed to bring Russia to the top of the world. In the end, while he pushed the Soviet Union’s economy to new heights, his methods were cruel and had negative impacts.
After the war, Stalin was determined to turn Russia into a great industrial power. He began with his Five-Year Plan in 1929, which set high quotas or targets for both industries and production in agriculture. In Document 1, the high and harsh quotas are shown in a chart. For almost all of these different industries, their previous records were to be doubled in the year 1933.

This is because Stalin’s rule was oppressive and led to millions of deaths for soviet citizens, and much of it through his own cruel methods. One of the first things he did was to put his communist ideas into place. He developed the collectivization policy which took small peasant farms to form large collective farms. (Document 3) In doing this, Stalin brought all of the farms under the operation of the state, upsetting the kulaks who were the wealth farmers. Stalin did not tolerate anyone who opposed him, and this is where his cruel methods come into play. He utilized a harsh forced famine in Ukraine, with 4.5 to 7 million victimes. “Stalin used the forced famine as part of a political strategy..” to oppress his people. Another cruel method of his were public trials of his “great purges”, purging anyone opposing him. In these trials, “[defendants] confessed...to a number of crimes. Did these ‘confessions’ carry any share of truth? It is possible that the accused were hostile to Stalin’s regime..” All of Stalin’s cruel and harsh methods may have overshadowed his great