Significant Improvements For The Peasant's Lifestyle example essay topic

Under both tsarist and communist rule there was a small level of success, however, ultimately, they showed consistent failure either by the peasants resisting or the lack of improvement in agricultural production. The reason behind the failure and resistance was mainly due to poor organisation, centralisation and overall there was no significant improvements for the peasant's lifestyle. An area that showed both failures of the policy and resistance from the peasants was when they governments didn't show any thought of them in their plans. Under autocracy they had a hierarchical system and similarly under the communists the peasants; although played an n important role in the feeding of the nation were overlooked.

Alexander II and the emancipation of the serfs not only was a good legislation but made a fundamental change to society. However, the terms never went far enough, 'Nor was the freedom granted to them by all means complete' (Source 1), the commune still had the same amount of authority as the previous landlords. The peasants did not support this change: and due to the fact there was no substantial improvements in their lifestyle they resisted. In terms of pleasing the peasants Stolypin was the most successful of all as it seemed he made the life of a peasant more desirable 'the sturdy and the strong' (Source 2 a).

He mainly put his energy into improving peasantry, which meant a moderate level of success for agriculture ' that a bright new future lies ahead of the peasants. Although like all the governments he never fully planned for the future or had a plan if the peasants resisted, 'the peasants are very hostile'. Autocracy saw no development in agricultural production because of lack of support for the peasants and poor planning. It was also clear that under Stalinist ruling they either never trusted the peasants or had no regard for them what so ever. Stalin wanted to replace the peasants with machines, because the communist governments believed that the only for Russia to improve was by modernising 'We must mechanise our agriculture' (Source 3). This seemed like a productive way of improving the agriculture, but yet again they failed to take into account the reaction from the peasants.

Stalin never planned what to do if they resisted again, they 'would rather do without the tractors', not only that but he also underestimated a: the time it would take to teach the peasants how to work the machines and b: what to do if the machinery began to break down. Stalin's policy led to moderate success, but only on the farms that had workshops to fix the machinery. Ultimately without machines and / or peasants there was no improvements in agricultural production. Khrushchev also felt he needed to mechanise and his policy relied upon machines. But again the lack of future planning and bad organisation didn't allow him to see what would happen if machines broke down.

After while they did begin to break which later resulted in them being destroyed 'Billions of roubles and vast amounts of equipment were squandered'. Due to this poor interpretation of planning and organisation, the crops began to fail which produced another miserable attempt at resolving the agricultural policy. Under both tsarist and communist rule, whether it be the early period or the later period, they all followed the idea of centralisation, whereby all the decisions came from the top. This proved to be one of the biggest problems in improving the agriculture and the reason behind why they never truly succeed.

It was mainly due to the fact that the decisions that was made only affected them or their image not the peasantry. A prime example of this is in source 1. Alexander II was labelled as 'a cunning hypocrite- a despot masquerading as a humane reformer', in other words because he 'freed' 20-30 million serfs he is seen as an honourable character, but because the terms of emancipation never went far enough he wasn't 'a humane reformer'. It could also be said that the evidence in source 3 supports this claim as well, not so much to please themselves but not pleasing those below them, the peasants.

They do 'not want collective farms and would rather do without the tractors'. To support this point further source 6 says that the heart of the problem was lack of spontaneity's o viet agriculture needs samotyok' if the individual was valued and allowed to make decisions then maybe the process of improving agriculture would have succeeded. Following the inadequacies of centralisation, it was never certain that the leaders truly knew what was going on in the country. Stalin claims that the policy was a success, but to what extent is this true ' not only have we vastly increased the food supply, but we have improved the quality of grain beyond all measure'. This information would have been given to him from a reporter around the country who would not dare say anything Stalin didn't want to hear.

Furthermore the country of Russia covers a vast area and would be very difficult to measure the scale of improvement. For example the evidence given in source 5 would suggest that agriculture saw improvements during them years. However, it is hard to relay upon the source of the information that is recorded and even harder to measure the scale of improvement. Source 6 continues to back this point up ' regardless of local circumstances, so as to report what Moscow wanted to hear'. Therefore, due to the fact that all the governments used poor planning and organisation skills their systems consistently failed.

Clearly seen in source 4, Khrushchev could have been successful, he had many enthusiastic workers but the bad organisation and unthought out planning overthrew the beginning success 'Poorly organised... and the ill-conceived strategies that cancelled out many successes'. Even the earliest period under Alexander II showed no long term planning, because if it had the peasants would have resisted. Moreover, Stalin and Khrushchev firstly underestimated the resistance to collectivisation and secondly never took into account any problems they faced. For example they couldn't control the weather ' the grain harvests were badly affected by adverse weather'. The most cause effect problem that led to the failure under all governments was that they never trusted the peasants, 'since it treated the peasants and farm managerial initiative with instinctive suspicion'.