In 1931 Stalin made a speech to his people based around the following excerpt "We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years." Without any doubt it can be said that during Stalin's rule, Russia made a significant advance where industry was concerned and by the end of the 1930s the USSR was second only to the USA in its industrial production. However it is evident that at the same time Russia was advancing as an industrial power, a massive imbalance occurred on a humanitarian scale. Historian Michael Lynch could be commenting upon almost the entire Russian population when he talks about the workers in towns "Beyond the comfort to be gained from a feeling that they were engaged in a great national enterprise, a theme constantly emphasised in the Soviet press, there was little in material terms to help the workers endure the severity of their conditions." While Stalin focused almost purely on building Russia as an important world power, he was sacrificing both the liberties and lives of millions of Russian people. Stalin knew that to achieve industrialisation in Russia "overnight" would require a great deal of change enforced with a great deal of power. The major changes that Stalin implemented to bring Russia to industrial power involved firstly the adaptation of rural agriculture to industrial growth involving collectivisation and secondly a series of "five year plans" which set the ambitious goals for Russia's rapid industrial advancement. This essay will discuss these ways in which Stalin sought to increase Russian economic advance initially by outlining why they were implemented and how they worked and then ultimately how successful they were in contributing to Russia's advance. .
The New Economic Policy had created a spread of privately owned farms across Russia that were difficult to monitor. In order to industrialise, Russia would obviously need a greater workforce involved in industry, consequently agriculture and food distribution would need to be respectively modernised and improved.
