By 1941 Collectivisation had greatly strengthened the USSR by 1928 - Agree or Disagree?
By the late 1920’sStalin had begun his great turn away from the ‘repugnant’ NEP and moved towards a true socialist Russia as a means to strengthen the USSR’s agriculture in order to provide for his plans for rapid industrialisation. However, the means and methods used were far too brutal and the end result arguably not worth it. To say it greatly strengthened Russia would be a massive overstatement.
One of the biggest flaws in collectivisation was that in enforcing it the authorities used harsh and brutal measures in order to move the peasantry, often killing or deporting resistors to areas like Siberia. This triggered a violent response: peasants slaughtered their livestock resulting in the number of pigs and cattle to decrease to well below that of 1928 levels, the number of riots increased by a third and many farmers burnt their crops. The mass disruption in a shortage of grain as the little grain that remained was taken by the state in order to feed the urban areas and export to fund his goals for industrialisation, leaving the peasants with nothing resulting in 1932 famine. This massively weakened Russian agriculture as the famine killed as many as 15 million, causing a massive shortage of skilled successful farmers, as those that survived were not only inept but also weak and starving, unable to work
