IB History Domestic Impact of Stalin's USSR Key Definitions

An agricultural policy in which private farms are combined into large state-controlled or cooperative farms. In Vietnam, collectivization was imposed on the south after 1975, eliminating private land ownership and requiring farmers to work collectively under government direction.

The Soviet state's campaign to eliminate the kulak class (wealthier peasants) as part of the collectivization drive from 1929. Officially described as "liquidation of the kulaks as a class," dekulakization involved the arrest, deportation, and execution of peasants designated as kulaks or "kulak sympathizers" (podkulachniki). In practice, the kulak category was applied broadly and inconsistently; many ordinary peasants who resisted collectivization were labeled kulaks. Between 1930 and 1933, around 1.8 million peasants were deported to special settlements in Siberia, the Urals, and Kazakhstan, where conditions were brutal and death rates extremely high. Several hundred thousand were executed outright. Dekulakization was intended both to remove the most active resisters to collectivization and to terrorize the remainder of the peasantry into compliance.

A steel city built from nothing in the southern Urals between 1929 and 1932, one of the flagship projects of the First Five-Year Plan. Tens of thousands of workers, including forced laborers, lived in primitive conditions while constructing a massive steel complex modeled on Gary, Indiana. By 1932, Magnitogorsk was producing 9% of Soviet steel. The city became a symbol of Soviet industrialization and was extensively photographed and publicized internationally as evidence of socialist achievement. American engineer John Scott's memoir "Behind the Urals" (1942) described conditions that combined genuine industrial achievement with appalling living standards and arbitrary violence.