Social Inequalities and Industrialization in the US and Soviet Union

¶ … Soviet Union and United States Comparative Analysis of Industrialization in the Former USSR and United States The political, economic, and cultural impacts of industrialization in North American and European countries are still widely evident today and have heavily affected international relations and global politics. The Industrial Revolution is usually considered to have originated in Great Britain in the mid 1700s, which at this point in time was the dominant empire in term of trade, commerce, land ownership, and influence.

Other countries with sophisticated economic systems, including Germany, France and the United Kingdom soon developed technology, which allowed for mass production of commodities, more efficient travel over longer distances, and greater participation in formal economic activity for non-elite persons. One of the hallmarks of technological innovation during the Industrial Revolution was undoubtedly the harnessing of steam power, fueled by coal and petroleum.

Cities saw rapid growth throughout the 18th and 19th centuries as people moved closer to urban centers where manufacturing, processing, shipping, and construction jobs were in plentiful supply and allowed people without any land or titles to earn a steady, if paltry, cash income. With the mass production of goods and influx of money into populations who had no had regular access to it before, came a greater demand for commodities and a shift in political and philosophical beliefs pertaining to individual rights and property.

The American and French Revolutions occurred within the general timeframe of the Industrial Revolution and are indicative of this greater emphasis upon a democratic rule of law, the abolishment of monarchy, and the legal enshrinement of the right to individual property. When one thinks of industrial and technological development in relation to the former Soviet Union and the United States, one of the first images that come to mind might be that of the Cold War and arms race between the two countries through the middle of the last century.

Both of these countries were able to develop the industrial capacity and technological prowess to become major world powers, although neither of their economies has grown at the same vigorous rates as was once the case. The United States is only now beginning to feel the effects of becoming the first true post-industrial nation as the economy has become more service and information-based rather than industrial.

China has become the industrial superpower and more and more postindustrial countries have outsourced manufacturing to countries where workers can be paid less and there is less governmental regulation (Kynge 2006). Russia has both benefitted and suffered from a turbulent history in the modern era; the political upheaval generated enough control by the time Stalin was in power to rapidly industrialize the economy, but these efforts were brutal on the people and brought many negative consequences along with the economic benefits. The collapse of the U.S.S.R.

jeopardized the industrial growth that had been accomplished through the preceding decades and the productive capacity that had been methodically developed since the 1920s lay fallow for a time as the economy collapsed (Sterns 1998). A great deal can be learned through an examination of the factors leading to the industrialization of each country. By assessing the context in which industrialization occurred and why countries with ostensibly similar economic goals ended up engaged in a brutal detente for decades.

Finally, the historical context of each of these industrialization efforts provides clues as to why the influence and success of each former superpower is waning in the 21st century as countries like India and China are rapidly expanding economically and politically (de Vries 1994).

Historical Context of Industrialization in United States Following the Revolutionary War in the United States, the technological developments which indicated proto-industrialization came quickly due to many favorable factors, including rich natural resources, many waterways suitable for commercial travel, arable land, and a spirit of innovation and hopefulness following the American victory over King George. The natural resources across the vast expanse of land in the Americas were key to energy production and construction.

In the space of under 200 years, between the late 18th and early 20th centuries, the young United States went from a primarily subsistence farming economy to the preeminent industrialized country in what was now being referred to as the "developed world." The industrial output of the Americans between 1790 and 1913 increased by over 450% (de Vries 1994). On a macroeconomic scale, one of the incentives for centralizing and formalizing the nascent American economy around the time of the American Revolution was the cost of that war, sixty-six million pieces of gold and silver.

The first federal issue of paper money occurred in 1775 and was meant to be used for redemption on state taxes, but this money, as well as a second attempted issue to readjust the new economy were depreciated rapidly. The paper money was valuated at 1% of the face value and functioned as a covert tax on the populace in order to assist in the finance of the war.

Through the next several decades, there was a great deal of ambivalence about the need for a national bank, until the War of 1812 proved the necessity for such an institution in order to equip a sufficient national defense. The development of industrialization in the United States was due to the plentiful land and opportunity in the young nation. With Eli Whitney's invention of the cotton gin in 1793, cotton soon became a highly lucrative crop and more and more people moved into the Midwest to take advantage of cheap land.

Slavery was legal in the United States until 1865, when the Thirteenth Amendment banned it and the Civil War victory secured the rule of law of the federal government in Washington D.C. over all of the states, including those that had ceded over the issue of slavery. The free labor done by the estimated 12 million African people who were brought into the United States was a highly influential factor in the economic success that brought the exponential growth of the Industrial Era.

Mills were built in the north, in towns such as Lowell and Lawrence, Massachusetts to turn all of the cotton produced on slave-owning Southern plantations into fabric for many industrial and consumer goods. Historical Context of Industrialization in Russia The process of industrialization in the former Soviet Union occurred under drastically different circumstances and in a later time period than the industrialization of Western Europe and the United States. The first stirrings of the Industrial Revolution in Russia began around 1917 and industrialization was a catalytic factor in the Russian Revolution.

Industrialization proceeded in a condensed time span in Russia between the first and second World Wars, starting in the last years of the 1920s. In about 15 years, the net change to the economy of the U.S.S.R. was remarkably similar to the changes that had occurred in the United States over the course of well over 150 years; the agrarian subsistence culture was transformed into a prominent industrial economy.

The reasons for the slow entry of the former Soviet Union to enter the industrialization race were directly tied to the political structure of Imperial Russia up until the beginning of the 20th century. Russia was still functioning as a serfdom until 1861. Following the Crimean War, Nicolas II came to power and declared the abolishment of serfdom throughout Russia, one of the most significant events in Russian history as nearly one-third of the population were serfs at this point in time.

Industrialization was not the immediate product of the abolishment of serfdom, however. Russia went through a period of Nihilism, where faith in public institutions was lost and anarchy gained philosophical traction. Tsar Alexander II was assassinated in 1881. His son, Alexander III was named the new tsar and had a reactionary leadership style, indicating that many of the problems that Russia had been going through, especially edging toward Revolution, were due to the destructive influence of the West (Gregory 2001).

The political parties in Russia through the early 20th century concerned themselves primarily with advocating for modern economic reform in Russia, though they disagreed with each other over the means and the ends. The Socialist-Revolution Party wanted democratic distribution of land amongst former serfs and the Constitutional Democratic Party wanted peaceful reform, greater ability for capitalist opportunity, and the preservation of a constitutional monarchy. The Russian Social Democratic Labor Party wanted nothing less than a total Marxist revolution in Russia.

By World War I, the economic effects of industrialization in America and Western Europe were extraordinarily clear. These world superpowers had the ability to mass-produce weaponry and planes and ships with a speed and precision that non-industrialized countries, such as Russia, had no hope of matching. The relationship between economic growth, industrial capacity, battle capability and political power and influence was obvious by the outcome of World War I, which left Russia very weakened.

Industrialization was indeed a catalyst in the revolution: it was during a strike on March 03, 1917 at a factory in St. Petersburg that the spark of discontent was fanned into a flame. By March 8th, International Women's Day, thousands of female textile workers walked out of the factories to protest poor working conditions. By most accounts, most of the cities industrial workers joined them within a few days.

Tsar Nicholas ordered the workers back to work but by this point in time, the soldiers, most of whom had family in the factories, supported the strikers. In an event that would be referred to at the February Revolution, Nicholas abdicated the Russian throne, a provisional government was quickly established, and a hasty election was held to create power blocs representing factory workers' and soldiers' interests and rights. By November, the October Revolution saw these soviet groups seizing control of the government.

The Treaty of Brest, a treaty signed with Germany by Lenin to divest Russia of several territories including those captured from the Ottoman Empire during WWI, was cancelled by the new Soviet government in November of 1918. The Russian Civil War changed the map of Eastern Europe as many territories were annexed, seized, and ceded. Russia, by 1922, was renamed the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics -- the Soviet Union.

One of the primary goals of this new union was to succeed in the economic modernization that had been desired for over a decade but unable to proceed due to many internal and external conflicts and revolutions. While perhaps an even more ardent desire of the post-Civil War Communist Party was to expand communism to other nations, especially Germany, Poland, and Hungary, the goal of unilateral industrialization was more easily actualized and dominated the political rhetoric of the era.

The Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin called for the organization of industrialization in the U.S.S.R. To proceed in 5-year increments, with the first 5-year plan taking effect in 1928. This plan was enacted in order to accomplish in the U.S.S.R. what had taken over a century in the countries that had been victorious in WWI. The industrialization of the Soviet Union was not one fueled by consumer demands and was not focused upon the production of commodities.

Stalin insisted upon the vital need for the Soviet Bloc to be self-sufficient and not take assistance from the West but to surpass the West in every possible domain as quickly as possible (Lenski 1978). The area of focus in these first five years was land use and farming, as these were seen as the necessary building blocks of heavy industrialization. Heavy industry meant the production of the tools of war that had been used against Russia during the World War I.

The Communist description of heavy industry in this period was "production of the means of production"; underscoring the fact that Stalin wanted to dramatically increase the productive capacity of the country. Stalin wanted to make sure that Russia had equal armament to the West so that in the event of another war, Russia would not be humiliated once again. The first phase of industrialization was completed in 1932 and succeeded in the conversion of subsistence agricultural efforts into farming collectives, through the use of forced migration in many cases (Nove 1965).

The food cultivated in these farms was produced at a rate to prepare the country for an influx of urban industrial workers who would be unable to produce food. Where informal market economies had once flourished in Russian villages, collective and state farms produced less and destroyed informal markets. The latter of these outcomes was an overt objective of the Communist Party to prevent any form of capitalism from establishing itself with the people.

The plan was more successful than anyone could have thought it would be; by 1940, over 97% of peasant households had been made to be collectivized. Through this process, over 5 million kulaks, who were the wealthier people of the former serf class, were forcibly deported to make room for the state and collective farms. Collective farming also resulted in a famine in Ukraine in 1932 that claimed millions of lives from starvation (McKenzie et al.).

Despite the loss of lives and inhumane treatment of many groups under this dictatorial industrialization scheme, the plan moved forward. The second five-year industrial plan was completed in 1937 and the third was not completed until after 1945 due to World War II. The five-year industrial development plan model was one that was used until the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Contrasting Industrial Practices, Goals, and Motives The types of industrial activities that the United States and Soviet Union engaged in were quite different and reflective of the goals, ideals, and objectives that industrial development plans were meant to fulfill in each respective nation. As was discussed previously, Stalin's primary industrial focus was on producing means of production in order to create the tools of war necessary to protect the motherland and force the world to acknowledge the U.S.S.R. As a legitimate power and threat.

Electricity was seen as the holy grail of industrialization worldwide in the pre- and postwar era, and Russia's late entry into the industrialization race meant that more effort could be expended upon building hydroelectric and coal-fueled power plants rather than developing the technology gradually over the course of decades as had happened in the United States. The rhetoric of Communism positioned progress for the good of the collective as a secularized religious ideal and the Dnieper power plant was the icon of Soviet achievement to this end (Gregory 2011).

Another vitally important heavy industry was metallurgy. Iron ore and coal deposits were rich in the Ural Mountains in Ukraine and the metal was take from there and refined to supply iron ore for construction. Aluminum was another important metal to production, as it was lightweight and versatile, and it was also in high demand through this era. Metallurgy and civil engineering were critical to the modernization of transportation throughout the U.S.S.R. Transportation was a vital element of socialist rule in the U.S.S.R.

As it allowed for a standardization of access and thus quality of life. In a country that had been so besieged by revolution and unrest in the preceding decade, a standardized improvement in the quality of life in the working class was fundamental to ensuring the continuation of peace and progress (Nove 1965). It is important to emphasize the impact of the timing of industrial progress in both the United States and the U.S.S.R. In the prewar period.

While the United States and Europe, bastions of democratic rule and capitalism, had thousands of individual engineers, inventors, experimenters and scientists pushing the frontiers of technology, socialism in the U.S.S.R. had a collectivist structure which did not result in the same sort of gold rush of innovators that was being seen in the United States in particular, where technological invention was virtually.