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Y219: Russia 1894–1941

The rule of Stalin: the purges, collectivisation and the Five Year Plans

  • 3 things to know
  • Unit group 2

Overview

Recall questions on Kirov’s murder, the show trials, the military purge and the gulag, collectivisation and dekulakisation, the famine of 1932 to 1933, the first two Five Year Plans and their social effects.

What you need to know

Answer each one before you reveal it.

Your recallNot started
Evaluation

Why did Stalin turn to collectivisation at the end of the 1920s?

Key term

What caused the famine of 1932 to 1933?

Who and when

What did the First Five Year Plan concentrate on, and how successful was it?

Questions from this subtopic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

  1. 1

    How did the murder of Kirov in 1934 serve Stalin's purposes?

    Model answer

    It was used as proof of a vast conspiracy, justifying emergency procedures for political cases and opening the way to the arrest of the old Bolsheviks.

  2. 2

    What were the show trials of 1936 to 1938?

    Model answer

    Leading old Bolsheviks including Zinoviev, Kamenev and Bukharin were tried in public, confessed after pressure and torture to fantastic charges of treason, sabotage and plotting with foreign powers, and were shot.

  3. 3

    What was the effect of the purge of the armed forces?

    Model answer

    Marshal Tukhachevsky and a very large proportion of the senior officer corps were executed or imprisoned, leaving the Red Army short of experienced commanders and cautious in initiative when Germany attacked.

  4. 4

    What was the scale and purpose of the gulag system?

    Model answer

    Millions of prisoners were held in labour camps across the far north and Siberia, where they mined, felled timber and dug canals, so the terror also supplied forced labour for remote projects.

  5. 5

    Why did Stalin turn to collectivisation at the end of the 1920s?

    Model answer

    Peasants were withholding grain from a state paying low prices, and he needed a guaranteed surplus to feed the growing towns and to export in payment for industrial machinery, while also extending party control over the villages.

  6. 6

    How did collectivised agriculture work?

    Model answer

    Peasants surrendered their land, tools and livestock to a collective farm that delivered a compulsory quota to the state at fixed prices; tractors and other machinery were held by state machine and tractor stations that served several farms and watched them politically.

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