Stalin's 5 Year Plan for Economic Mass Murder | BETWEEN 2 WARS I 1932 Part 1 of 4 - YouTube (2)

not enough to just keep people alive to keep them productive.

They Bolsheviks now have to train largely uneducated peasants into skilled machine operators.

It turns out to be a massive challenge, but they do manage to increase the skilled workforce

to some degree with systematic training and new incentive structures. Skilled workers

are given better housing and higher food rations. In October 1931, their wages increase on average

by 30%. For some in the coal and metal industries, wages even increase by 100%.

But what good are wage increases if one can't spend money? Prior to the first Five Year

Plan, mass consumer goods were largely absent in the Soviet Union. The population instead

relied on handcrafted products. But the kurstany (‘handicraft workers') are essentially

wiped out as a category in 1928 with the forceful elimination of private industry. In 1931/32

when it becomes clear that paying people when there is nothing to buy doesn't make much

sense, the kurstany are permitted to resume their old trade. In parallel, state owned

and run stores open that provide the slowly increasing output of consumer goods, and the

scarce food products.

In the countryside food is not only scarce, but hardly available at all, especially between

summer 1932 and spring 1933. You see, by then to feed the growing proletariat, the Bolsheviks

are simply going into the countryside and taking the already meager food away from the

peasants, even literally stealing it off their kitchen tables. In this year 1932 into mid

1933 farmers and their families will die in droves especially in Ukraine, they will starve

to the point that many of them will simply drop dead as they walk. Men, women, children,

families, whole villages will succumb to what can only be described as a genocide by hunger.

All in all, at least 4.5 million people, perhaps many more will pay with their lives for Stalin's

progress program.

They die for a program of industrialization that will play an essential role in events

causing even more deaths of Soviet citizens in only eight years.

But it will also have another essential effect on WW2, in fact a decisive role. The Kremlin's

effort at spreading out industry throughout the country, not just in the western and European

portion of the country, results in massive industrialization past the Ural Mountains

and in Central Asia. Great sprawling factories in the heartland of Russia where an invading

army will have great difficulty to reach them. Factories that might now be producing tractors,

but can easily be transformed into making guns, ammunitions, planes, and tanks. Overall,

it's a transformation on a scale that is hardly imaginable. One day it will amaze Hitler

who, in the only surviving recording of a private conversation by the Führer, will

express his utter shock to Finnish Field Marshal Mannerheim that in a single Soviet tank factory

there are sixty thousand workers… and that is only one factory. Across the Soviet Union

there will be millions and millions of workers producing an endless output of the tools of

death with tools carved from the dead.

To understand how Stalin came into power in the first place, you can view our Between

Two Wars episode about that by clicking right here. Our patron of the week is Nicholas Arblaster.

Thanks to Nicholas and the TimeGhost Army, we can make more videos just like this. Remember

to subscribe and click the bell! See you next time!