What was the impact of Stalin's economic policies?

Cambridge IGCSE History 0470 · Paper 1 Section B, Depth Study C Syllabus: 2027 and 2028 Depth Study C: Russia, 1905 to 1941 Key Question 4 of four

This file covers one Key Question: what Stalin's Five-Year Plans and his collectivisation of agriculture did to the Soviet Union between 1928 and 1941. It covers why he introduced each policy, what each one produced, and what each one cost the people who lived through it.

The question word is impact, not description. That single word decides what this page has to do. A file that explained what a Five-Year Plan was, what a collective farm was and how GOSPLAN set targets would be a competent Level 2 answer and nothing more, because none of it argues. So this page is built to support two opposed cases at once: that these policies turned a backward agricultural country into the world's second largest industrial power in twelve years, and that they killed millions of people to do it. Both cases are built from Cambridge's own mark schemes. Neither is decoration for the other.

Key Question 3, "How did Stalin gain and hold on to power?", is the neighbouring page, and the boundary between it and this one has to be drawn deliberately, because the same events sit on both sides of it. That page owns the Purges, the show trials, the NKVD, the gulag as an instrument of terror, the cult of personality, propaganda and official culture. It owns them as political control. This page owns the Five-Year Plans and collectivisation, and it owns the same institutions only where they are doing economic work: the gulag as a labour force building canals, dekulakisation as the mechanism that made collectivisation happen, the destruction of a class of farmers as a fact with a consequence for grain output.

The overlap is real and Cambridge does not hide it. Several Paper 4 questions read "How significant were the Five-Year Plans in maintaining Stalin's dictatorship?" and "How significant were the Five-Year Plans in helping Stalin increase his control of the Soviet Union?" Those are Key Question 3 questions using Key Question 4 material, and section 9 gives the shape for answering one. The working rule is simple. If the question asks what the policy did to the economy or to people's lives, it is this page. If it asks what the policy did for Stalin's grip on power, lead with the other page and borrow from this one.

Everything about how this paper is marked, including the mark split, the level ladders, the two rule changes that landed in the 2024 series and the sentence shapes that reach the top band, is on the separate page How Cambridge marks History 0470 Paper 1. That page covers Section B explicitly, which is where this Key Question is set. Read it first. None of it is repeated here.

1. What the syllabus actually asks

This is the wording printed in the Cambridge IGCSE History 0470 syllabus for 2027 and 2028, on page 23. The syllabus writes its date ranges with dashes; those are written out in full below, and nowhere else is a word changed.

Key Question 4

What was the impact of Stalin's economic policies?

Focus points

• Why did Stalin introduce the Five-Year Plans?
• Why did Stalin introduce collectivisation?
• How successful were Stalin's economic changes?
• How were the Soviet people affected by these changes?

Read those four as a sequence and the shape of the whole Key Question falls out. Two of them ask why, one asks how well, and one asks who paid. The first two are part (b) questions in the exam. The last two are part (c) questions, and both of them are two-sided by construction. "How successful" invites a failure case. "How were people affected" invites both the woman who trained as a doctor and the peasant who starved.

The specified content is printed once, and it is not divided

The syllabus defines specified content as material that "provides guidance on what needs to be studied for each key question". For Depth Study C it does not deliver on that definition. The list is printed once, on page 24, after all four Key Questions, as a single undivided block for the whole Depth Study. Cambridge does not say which line belongs to which Key Question, and nothing in the syllabus does the splitting for you.

Here is the whole list, verbatim, with the dashes written out:

- The main features of Tsarist rule and Russian society before the First World War: the 1905 Revolution and its aftermath; attempts at reform
- The First World War and its impact on the Russian people
- The March Revolution of 1917
- The Provisional Government and the Soviets, the growing power of revolutionary groups
- Reasons for the failure of the Provisional Government
- The Bolshevik seizure of power, the role of Lenin
- The main features of Bolshevik rule, the Civil War and War Communism, and reasons for the Bolshevik victory
- The Kronstadt Rising and the establishment of the New Economic Policy
- Lenin's death and the struggle for power
- Reasons for Stalin's emergence as leader by 1928
- Stalin's dictatorship: use of terror; the Purges; propaganda and official culture
- Stalin's economic policies and their impact: the modernisation of Soviet industry; the Five-Year Plans; collectivisation in agriculture
- Life in the Soviet Union: the differing experiences of social groups; ethnic minorities and women

Two of those thirteen lines are this Key Question's. The eleventh line, "Stalin's economic policies and their impact", with its three sub-items, is the core of it and its wording is almost the Key Question repeated. The thirteenth line, "Life in the Soviet Union", is shared: the differing experiences of social groups is squarely focus point 4, and ethnic minorities and women sit on the boundary with Key Question 3, because Cambridge has set questions treating them as evidence of economic change and other questions treating them as evidence of political control.

The tenth line, "Stalin's dictatorship", belongs to Key Question 3. The first nine belong to Key Questions 1 and 2.

Do not try to tidy this. The list is undivided in the document, a student who asserts a division is asserting something Cambridge did not print, and no mark anywhere depends on getting the division right. What matters is that the two lines above are covered, and they are, in sections 3 to 7.

2. Where this Key Question is set

Cambridge publishes no table of which Key Question appears at which question number. What follows was built by reading the printed question stem of every Question 13 and Question 14 in all 48 Paper 1 mark schemes from 2018 to 2024, and the Depth Study C questions in the Paper 4 mark schemes across the same years.

Depth Study C is Questions 13 and 14, confirmed in all 48 papers

Section B is headed "SECTION B: DEPTH STUDIES", begins at Question 9, and gives each Depth Study two consecutive questions in syllabus order. Depth Study C is the third, so it takes Question 13 and Question 14. That held in every one of the 48 Paper 1 papers read, including the 2018 to 2023 papers that ran on to Question 22 with seven Depth Studies and the 2024 papers that stop at Question 18 with five. The withdrawal of three Depth Studies changed where Section B ends. It did not move Depth Study C, because the three that went were all numbered after it.

Inside Depth Study C, the split is chronological, and this Key Question never appears at Question 13

The marking page warns that Cambridge does not tie a Key Question to a slot within a Depth Study. For Depth Study C that warning needs sharpening, because the 48 papers show something the general rule does not.

Question 13 examined Key Question 1 or Key Question 2 in all 48 papers. It never once examined Key Question 3 or Key Question 4. Not a single Question 13 in seven years mentioned the Five-Year Plans, collectivisation, the kulaks, GOSPLAN, Stakhanov, the kolkhoz or industrialisation. Every Question 13 was on Tsarist Russia, 1905, the First World War, March 1917, the Provisional Government, the Civil War, War Communism, the New Economic Policy or Stolypin.

Question 14 carried the Stalin material. It examined Key Question 3 or Key Question 4 in 45 of the 48 papers, and Key Question 2 in the other three.

So the division is by date, not by Key Question number. Question 13 is Russia before Stalin. Question 14 is Stalin. That is a useful thing to know and a dangerous thing to over-trust, for one reason: it tells you nothing about whether your Question 14 will be Key Question 3 or Key Question 4. Those two share the slot, and which one turns up is not predictable. Revising the Purges and gambling that the Plans will not appear is a bet on a coin.

How often this Key Question is actually set

Counting the 10-mark part (c), which is where two thirds of a question's value sits:

Question 14(c) was on Stalin's economic policies in 21 of the 48 papers. That is close to half, and it makes this the most frequently set part (c) in the whole Depth Study. Two further papers set part (c) on whether the Russian people or Soviet women "benefited from Stalin's rule", which is broad enough to be answered from either Key Question, so the honest figure is 21 firm and 23 at the widest reading.

Counting any of the three parts, at least one part of Question 14 drew on this Key Question in 26 of the 48 papers. Several papers set a part (a) or part (b) here while giving part (c) to the Purges: November 2024 asked "What were the aims for industry of the Five-Year Plans?" and "Why was central planning important to Stalin's economic policy?" before a part (c) on Russification.

The 21 part (c) questions divide almost evenly between the two policies. Nine were on collectivisation and agriculture, seven on industrialisation and the Plans, and five on the two together or on the effect of both on people's lives. Neither policy is safe to drop.

The one wording that repeats

Six of the 21 are the same argument in different clothes: "Collectivisation was a disaster", "Collectivisation did more harm than good", "Stalin's industrial policies did more harm than good", "The impact of industrialisation on the Russian people was disastrous", "Collectivisation increased the well-being of the Russian people", "For the Soviet people, the gains made by collectivisation were worth the cost". Every one of those is the cost-against-achievement question, and the last of them states it most explicitly. If you can argue that one, you can argue all six.

Depth Study C is Questions 5 and 6 on Paper 4

If your school enters you for Paper 4, the Alternative to Coursework, rather than the coursework component, Depth Study C is examined there as Questions 5 and 6 on every paper read, 2018 to 2024. The chronological split repeats: Question 5 is Russia before 1924, Question 6 is Stalin.

This Key Question is set even harder on Paper 4 than on Paper 1. Sixteen of the Paper 4 papers read set Question 6 on Stalin's economic policies, including "How significant were economic factors in the introduction of the Five-Year Plans?", "How significant was industrialisation to the development of the Soviet Union after 1928?", "How significant was collectivisation in changing life in the Soviet Union under Stalin?", "How significant was defence as a reason for Stalin's economic policies, 1928 to 1941?" and "How significant was the need to increase food production as a reason for Stalin's modernisation of Russia?" Section 10 covers the format change.

Paper 2 never examines a Depth Study. Its prescribed topic is always taken from Core Content, so nothing on this page can be examined there.

The examiner reports go quiet at exactly this question

One warning about what section 9 can and cannot give you. Question 13 upward routinely draws too few candidates for the Principal Examiner to comment. The phrase "There were too few responses to this question for meaningful comments to be made" appears against Question 14 in eight of the 18 examiner reports read, and Depth Study C as a whole is described as attracting few candidates in several more.

The consequence is that the fault list in section 9 is thinner than it would be for Germany or the USA, and it is built mostly from what the mark schemes reward and refuse rather than from reports of what candidates did wrong. Where a report does comment on this content, it is named.

3. Focus point 1 as an argument: Why did Stalin introduce the Five-Year Plans?

This is a 6-mark part (b) in its own right and it has been set repeatedly: "Why did Stalin's first Five-Year Plan have ambitious targets?", "Why did the First Five-Year Plan focus on developing heavy industries like coal and steel?", "Why did Stalin think it was necessary to reform Soviet industry?", "Why was developing heavy industry important for Stalin's plans?", "Why was central planning important to Stalin's economic policy?", "Why was industry brought under government control?"

It has also been set as a 10-mark part (c), in the sharpest possible form: "Stalin introduced the Five-Year Plans for political rather than economic reasons." That version is answered in the second half of this section.

The four reasons the mark schemes reward

Backwardness and the fear of invasion. This is the reason Cambridge prints most often and prints most fully. The November 2018 mark scheme gives it as an exemplar explanation:

Stalin stated that Russia was 50 to 100 years behind the advanced countries in industrialisation. He said that Russia either makes good the difference in ten years or the advanced nations will crush Russia.

The same "50 to 100 years behind" formulation appears in the March 2018 and November 2022 mark schemes. It is the single most reliable piece of specific contextual knowledge on this focus point, and the marking page explains that a fact of that kind inside an explanation is worth exactly one mark, the fifth of six. Cambridge does not date the statement in any mark scheme read, so do not date it.

1. Russia is 50 to 100 years behind
2. it must close the gap in ten years or be crushed
3. only heavy industry closes a gap of that kind
4. targets must be set beyond what looks possible

Military strength. Repeatedly given as a separate reason, not a restatement of the first: "Stalin wanted to rapidly increase the USSR's military strength", "Stalin wanted the Russian military to be stronger and this required steel and machinery to be produced", and on Paper 4, defence as a reason in its own right. Coal, iron and steel are not ends. They are what tanks are made of.

Rivalry with the capitalist economies. "He wanted to rival the economies of the USA and other capitalist countries." This matters because it is the aim the mark schemes later use to judge whether the Plans succeeded, in section 5.

Building a proletariat. The most ideological of the four, and the one that carries the argument into political territory: "He needed more workers in industry to produce a true communist society", and from the November 2024 mark scheme, "The Communist Party was committed to industrialisation and wanted to create a worker's state as envisage by Marx." A country of peasants was, on Marxist terms, the wrong material for a workers' state. Industrialisation manufactured the class the revolution was supposed to have been made by.

The political case against the economic case

For the "political rather than economic" version, Cambridge's own mark scheme sets out both sides and then refuses to separate them. That refusal is the answer.

Political side, from the November 2024 mark scheme:

Stalin had political motives for introducing the Five-Year Plans. He wanted to destroy the kulaks, a richer class of farmers who were likely to oppose his regime with an industrial proletariat which would be loyal.

Add to it: the Plans made Stalin the author of the transformation, and section 9 of the marking page warns against writing a list, so this needs a mechanism attached. Targets create heroes and traitors. A worker who exceeds a target is a Stakhanovite and a hero of the state; a manager who misses one is a wrecker. The Plans handed Stalin a permanent supply of both.

Economic side, from the same mark scheme:

He was conscious that Russia was backwards compared to European states. Although Russia had started to industrialise in the years before the First World War, war, revolution and civil war meant the economy had not developed at a steady pace.

And Cambridge's own Level 5 exemplar declines to choose:

Economic and political motives were interwoven. The Soviet economy was behind and needed to be modernised. However, in making plans for rapid industrialisation, Stalin wanted to secure his own position, improve the position of the USSR, and create a Communist state which was based on an industrial proletariat. Economic motives existed but they were all subject to political motives as well.

Note carefully what that does. It is not a fence-sitting answer, and it is not the forbidden sentence "there are arguments on both sides". It states a position, that the economic motives were real but subordinate, and gives a reason for it. That is what the tenth mark is for.

4. Focus point 2 as an argument: Why did Stalin introduce collectivisation?

Set as part (b) in the forms "Why did Stalin need to reorganise farming in the USSR?", "Why was it important to Stalin to modernise Soviet agriculture?", "Why did Stalin move against the kulaks?", "Why was the campaign against the kulaks important to Stalin?"; and as part (c) in the form "Stalin changed Soviet agriculture for political rather than economic reasons."

What collectivisation actually was

Four marks in a part (a) go here, and the marking page's 2024 rule means four separate points, not two developed ones. Cambridge's own lists give more than four:

• Small peasant holdings were merged into large farms. Land, animals and tools were pooled.
• The kolkhoz was the collective farm: land owned by the state, machinery and animals shared, small private plots for individuals. Ninety per cent of produce went to the state; ten per cent was retained by the kolkhoz. Each household kept one acre of private land, and workers received a share of the profit rather than a wage.
• The sovkhoz was the state farm, where peasants were paid a wage. The toz was an agricultural co-operative where peasants owned the land but shared machinery and some of the work.
• Tractors and machinery were supplied by the government through machine and tractor stations.
• A propaganda campaign explained the advantages; officials were sent to force peasants to agree; many peasants were driven from the land and sent to Siberia.
• The kulaks were eliminated as a class.

Cambridge's Paper 4 mark schemes date the start to 1928, introduced as part of the first Five-Year Plan, and describe dekulakisation as complete by 1934.

The economic reasons

Feeding the cities. This is the mechanism that ties the two policies together and it is the single most important causal link on the whole page. The Five-Year Plans were pulling millions of people off the land and into factories. Those people had to eat, and they were no longer growing anything.

1. The Plans move peasants into cities
2. the cities need food the cities do not grow
3. grain must be taken from the countryside in larger and more reliable quantities
4. farms must be large enough and controlled enough to deliver it on demand

The June 2023 mark scheme gives this as its exemplar explanation and ties it back to the Plans explicitly.

Earning foreign currency. Grain exported abroad paid for the machinery and foreign expertise the Plans needed. Cambridge prints this in almost every collectivisation mark scheme: "More grain was needed for export", "Exports of grain would earn foreign currency", "grain was sold abroad to enable the USSR to buy industrial equipment". Hold on to this one. It becomes the most damning fact on the page in section 7.

Efficiency and mechanisation. Large units could use tractors; small strips could not. Whether this worked is section 5's problem. That it was the stated reason is not in doubt.

The New Economic Policy was not delivering. "There were still food shortages." Cambridge also frames the abandonment of the NEP as ideological, and Paper 4 has asked directly how significant Communist ideology was as a reason for abandoning it.

The political reasons

Destroying the kulaks. The March 2022 mark scheme puts the political case plainly:

Collectivisation was the socialist way of farming. The ideas were that the peasants had to live and work together and learn to share. They would be working for the Soviet Union and all the people rather than just for themselves. It also involved an attack on the 'kulaks', the rich peasants, who went against socialist beliefs and were seen as the enemies of the people.

Control of the countryside. Collectivisation put a Communist official in every village, political commissars on every collective farm, and the state's hand directly on the harvest. It also ended the government's dependence on what peasants chose to sell. Under the NEP a peasant who disliked the price could hoard the grain. On a collective farm he could not.

One further question has been set on precisely this, and it is worth naming because it inverts the usual framing: "Destroying the kulaks was the main purpose of Stalin's agricultural policy." The answer to that is not simply yes. Dekulakisation was the method as much as the aim, because removing the people most likely to resist was how the rest of the policy became possible.

Who the kulaks were

Cambridge's November 2024 mark scheme defines them: peasants who were successful farmers, thought to be wealthy, who owned land and were sometimes rich enough to employ workers, often opposed to communism, and who "made up around 20% of all those who worked on farms."

That last figure matters more than it looks. A fifth of the agricultural workforce, and by Cambridge's own description the most skilled fifth, was removed from farming. The November 2022 mark scheme draws the consequence itself: "These peasants had the skill, but they were replaced by many who had little idea about modern farming."

5. Focus point 3 as an argument: How successful were Stalin's economic changes?

This is the commonest part (c) on this Key Question and it comes in many wordings: "Stalin's first Five-Year Plan was successful", "How far were Stalin's industrialisation policies a success?", "Stalin achieved his economic aims", "By 1941 Stalin had modernised the Soviet Union", "How successful was Stalin's policy of collectivisation?", "In modernising the Soviet economy, Stalin's plans for industry were more successful than his plans for agriculture."

The marking page gives the mark arithmetic: from the 2024 series, one explanation on each side is 7, further explanations take you to 8 and 9, and a supported judgement is the tenth mark. A one-sided answer, however good, is capped at 6. What follows is organised so that you have one explained point on each side for industry and one on each side for agriculture, which is more than enough.

Industry: the case that it worked

Every figure below is printed in a Cambridge mark scheme. None is inferred.

Alongside the numbers, the physical achievements Cambridge names: whole cities built around steel mills at Magnitogorsk and Sverdlovsk, the Moscow Underground, great dams and hydroelectric power, new industrial complexes built from scratch in previously undeveloped areas, and greatly improved transport.

And the argument the mark schemes make from all of it, which is the strongest single point on this side:

One of Stalin's aims was to make the USSR stronger in military terms. In this, his policies worked really well. When the USSR entered the war in 1941 it was a powerful, well-armed nation. Without Stalin's policies, the USSR would probably have been defeated by Germany. It was also part of Stalin's policies that much of the industry had been built deep inside the USSR so that it did not fall into German hands.

That is the case at its most serious, and it is not a small one. Measured against the aim Stalin actually stated, closing a gap of 50 to 100 years in ten years so the country would not be crushed, the Plans did the thing they were for.

Industry: the case that it did not

The targets were not met and the figures cannot be trusted. Cambridge prints this as an exemplar explanation:

This is because the Five-Year Plans did not meet their targets. The production figures claimed by the Soviets cannot be trusted. In production of electricity, coal, iron and steel, although production was increased, Stalin's targets were not met.

Note what that licenses. You may write that Soviet output figures were unreliable, because Cambridge writes it. What you may not do is substitute your own numbers for the official ones.

Central planning was inefficient. "This was partly because of central planning which led to inefficiency, duplication and waste. In some factories there was overproduction, while in others there was a lack of essential parts and the factories were idle for weeks." Cambridge adds that many workers were unskilled and "worked slowly or wrecked the machines by mistake", and that "the emphasis on quantity and speed meant that the quality of the goods produced was often poor."

Growth was lopsided and slowing. Almost nothing was made that anyone could buy. "Few consumer goods were produced so people's standard of living did not improve much." The November 2019 mark scheme adds that "Economic growth started slowing down in the mid-1930s and the economy became dependent on slave labour in the gulags."

That last clause deserves its full weight. Cambridge is stating that a substantial part of Soviet industrial output by the later 1930s rested on forced labour.

Agriculture: the case that it worked

The economic case exists and Cambridge prints it, though it is thinner than the industrial one and arrives later.

• Grain production increased from 73 million tonnes in 1928 to 95 million tonnes by 1940 (Paper 4, June 2024).
• By 1941 most land had been collectivised and production had increased by nearly 20 per cent (Paper 4, November 2024).
• By 1940 the production of grain was the highest it had ever been and the number of cows and pigs on farms also went up (Paper 1, March 2024).
• Mechanisation arrived: tractors, machine and tractor stations, new farming techniques, fertilisers.
• Grain exports earned the currency that paid for industrialisation. "1930 and 1931 were excellent years for exports."
• Collectivisation released labour: it "freed up workers from individual farms who could move into industry", which is what made the Plans possible at all.
• Education programmes were set up on the collectives.

Cambridge's own Level 5 exemplar for "How successful was Stalin's policy of collectivisation?" argues this side, and argues it while conceding the worst:

Despite the policy leading to a lot of opposition and millions dying in a famine, I think that in the long run it was a success. If the Soviet Union was to grow into a modern industrial country, it needed vast amounts of food to feed the workers in the cities. By the end of the 1930s collectivisation was working and had achieved this. I do not think there was any other way forward for the country.

That exemplar is worth studying as a piece of technique. It reaches the top band by naming the cost first, in one clause, and then arguing past it. It does not pretend the famine did not happen.

Agriculture: the case that it did not

Production fell first, and it fell because of how the policy was imposed. Cambridge's mechanism, printed repeatedly:

The peasants did not want to hand over their farms to collectives and be told what to do by a farm manager. The more prosperous peasants killed their animals and burnt their crops. The enormous disruption to the countryside led to less food being produced.

The skilled farmers were removed. "The elimination of the kulaks removed the best farmers."

The incentive was destroyed. "Peasants produced less because they did not benefit if they worked hard." "They put all their efforts into their own personal allotments." Cambridge notes that Stalin was eventually "forced to allow farmers on the kolkhoz their own plots of land", which is an admission built into the policy itself.

Recovery took a decade. The November 2019 mark scheme states that "the number of farm animals did not reach pre-collectivisation levels until 1940". Twelve years to get back to where the policy started.

And it caused a famine. That is section 7.

The judgement this focus point is really asking for

The question Cambridge sets more often than any other on this Key Question is not "did it work" but "was it worth it". The strongest judgements available are these, and each states a position with a reason attached rather than summarising the essay:

• The Plans succeeded on the terms Stalin set and failed on every term anyone else would have set, because survival in 1941 was the aim and consumer welfare never was.
• Industry succeeded and agriculture did not, because industry was building something new while agriculture was destroying something that already worked before it could replace it.
• Collectivisation worked eventually and at a cost that no calculation of grain tonnage can settle, because the cost was counted in people and the gain was counted in tonnes.

6. Focus point 4 as an argument: How were the Soviet people affected by these changes?

This focus point is the one most likely to appear as a part (c), because it is two-sided in its own wording. Set forms include "The impact of industrialisation on the Russian people was disastrous", "How far had the lives of Russians improved by the mid-1930s?", "How far do you agree that industrial workers benefited from Stalin's rule?", "Collectivisation increased the well-being of the Russian people", "The kulaks suffered the most from Stalin's economic policies", "The Russian people supported Stalin's policies for modernising the Soviet economy".

Industrial workers: what improved

• There was no unemployment. "Nearly everyone had a job", and unemployment was "nearly eradicated". In the 1930s that is not a small claim, and a strong answer will say why: it was said at the moment when a quarter of the American workforce was out of work.
• Skilled and well paid jobs multiplied. "By the late 1930s, many Soviet workers had improved their conditions by acquiring well paid skilled jobs under the Plans and earning bonuses for meeting targets."
• Education, medicine and training were free. "Education, medicine and training schemes were free." "There were advances in medicine and education." "Literacy levels went up." More doctors, free hospitals.
• Housing was provided for workers, and workers were entitled to an annual holiday. Sports clubs and film shows increased.
• Managers and Party officials did noticeably better than everyone else.

Industrial workers: what did not

• Wages fell. Cambridge prints this twice in the same words: "Wages actually went down between 1928 and 1937", and "between 1928 and 1937 wages fell". Nine years of the fastest industrial growth in the world, and the people doing it were paid less at the end than at the start.
• Discipline was punitive. "Lateness or absences could be punished by sacking and this often meant losing your house or flat. To escape the hard discipline, some workers tried to move jobs, but the free movement of workers in the USSR was banned." Cambridge's Paper 4 mark scheme names the instrument: internal passports.
• The Stakhanovite system raised the bar on everyone. Cambridge describes Aleksei Stakhanov, the coal miner whose record shift became a national campaign, and then prints the consequence in the same mark scheme: "The achievements of Stakhanovites encouraged officials to raise the 'norm' for a quota. As a result, Stakhanovites were not always popular with fellow workers." A propaganda hero was also a mechanism for making everyone else's target harder.
• People died building things. "On some of the big construction projects, the death rate of workers was very high with thousands being killed." Cambridge names the Belomor Canal, also called the Baltic to White Sea canal, twice: "Many forced workers died because of the terrible conditions, as on the building of the Belomor Canal", and it records that gulag prisoners built it. Of the Moscow Metro the Paper 4 mark scheme states that "thousands died as slave labour for building projects".
• Housing and cities could not keep up. "So many people moved to cities that there was bad overcrowding and poor living conditions." "The standard of housing remained poor."
• Almost nothing was made for people to buy. "Consumer goods like clothes and radios that may have improved living standards were not being produced."

Cambridge's own Level 5 exemplar for "How far had the lives of Russians improved by the mid-1930s?" is the sharpest statement of the whole Key Question, and it is worth learning:

Overall, the lives of Russians did not improve. Russia's industrial output went up and more women could work but it is important to remember that Stalin was not interested in making people's lives better; he wanted to make Russia a modern and powerful industrial state that could defend itself. While Russia made tremendous progress in that, the everyday lives of ordinary Russians did not really improve. In fact, they had to make enormous sacrifices and between 1928 and 1937 wages fell.

That judgement works because it separates the question of whether the policy achieved its aim from the question of whether the aim was the people's welfare. That distinction is available on almost every part (c) on this page.

Women

Cambridge treats women as the clearest case of genuine gain, and sets questions on them often.

• Women entered industry in very large numbers. Cambridge gives the proportion four different ways, and section 7 explains why you should not try to reconcile them.
• They were trained as engineers and doctors. "By 1939, 79% of doctors were women." "By 1937, 72% of health service workers were women." "By the 1930s women made up most of the doctors and about a third of engineers."
• Thousands of crèches and day care centres were established so that mothers could work. Free health care and paid holidays were provided to encourage them into work.
• "In the eyes of the law women were equal with men."
• Many women were Stakhanovites, "especially in the country".

The complication, and it is a real one: the direction of travel reversed in the mid-1930s. Cambridge's November 2024 mark scheme describes a new family policy introduced in 1936 in which divorce became harder to obtain, abortion was made illegal, and tax incentives were offered to families who had more children. The reason it gives is that the earlier liberalisation had gone badly: "Divorce was so easy that men divorced women as soon as they became pregnant, and the women were left to support themselves and their children with no jobs", with "millions of homeless children ... wandering the streets" and a rise in youth crime.

So the honest position is that Soviet women gained access to work, training and professions on a scale unmatched anywhere at the time, and lost legal control over their own lives in the same decade. Both halves are Cambridge's.

Peasants and kulaks

• The kulaks, roughly a fifth of the agricultural workforce, were destroyed as a class. Cambridge's Paper 1 mark scheme states that "Nearly 10 million kulaks were executed or removed from their land." Its March 2018 mark scheme states that in 1933, "10 million were deported or imprisoned for opposing the plans". Its Paper 4 mark schemes date the "liquidation of kulaks" to 1934 and record "10 million deported in this period" as gulag labour.
• Peasants who resisted "slaughtered their animals and burnt their crops rather than hand them over to the state".
• Those who remained lost their land, their animals and their tools, worked to government targets, and were, in Cambridge's phrase, "basically prisoners on the collectives" with their movement controlled.
• Ethnic minorities were deported. Cambridge records "Some 1.5 million ethnic minorities were deported to Asia", and names the Crimean Tatars, the Chechens and the Ingush as groups sent to Siberia, where "they became second-class citizens. Millions died." Whether that belongs here or on the Key Question 3 page depends on how the question is framed, as section 2 explains.
• And there was a famine.

7. The famine

Collectivisation caused a mass famine. Cambridge's mark schemes state this without qualification across seven years, on both papers, and every strong answer to a collectivisation question has to deal with it. This section sets out what Cambridge prints, what it does not print, and where it contradicts itself.

What Cambridge says caused it

The November 2022 mark scheme is the only one built entirely around the question "Why was there a famine in the Soviet Union in 1932 to 1933?", and it prints four causes:

• Peasants destroyed the food. "Rather than give their animals and crops to the state, they destroyed them and so there was no food in the villages."
• There was nothing left to plant. "There was no seed to plant the following year."
• The state took what there was. "Crops were requisitioned and taken away from the villages."
• And it kept exporting. "Stalin continued to export grain even though there were shortages in Russia."

That fourth cause is the one that changes the character of the whole event, and Cambridge prints it in more than one place. The November 2018 mark scheme describes "starving peasants watched Communist officials sending food for export". The June 2020 mark scheme writes: "This led to a famine in 1932 and 1933. Yet the government still exported grain. Millions of peasants starved to death." The March 2018 mark scheme records that the state farms "produced 1.7 million tons of grain for export in 1933", which is the year in which it also records five million deaths.

Grain left the country while the people who grew it starved. That is Cambridge's account, not an inference from it.

Cambridge also prints an explanation that goes further, in the June 2021 mark schemes, twice, in identical words:

The Holodomor famine was a terror-famine campaign organised by the Soviet authorities against the Ukrainian population.

That sentence appears in Cambridge's own list of creditable points. It states that the famine in Ukraine was organised, deliberate and directed at a population. The June 2021 mark scheme elsewhere uses the phrase "forced famine in 1932-33", and the November 2020 Paper 4 mark scheme uses it too. A candidate who writes this is writing something Cambridge itself credits.

Where it happened

Cambridge names Ukraine and Kazakhstan. "Millions died in Kazakhstan and the Ukraine." "The result was famine that killed millions of people, especially in Ukraine." Thousands of kulaks "were deported to Kazakhstan as a punishment for resisting government policy".

What Cambridge prints for the death toll, and why the numbers do not agree

Here the instruction has to be exact, because this is where an invented figure would do the most damage. Cambridge does print death tolls. It prints two different ones, and it prints them in different places.

The pattern is not random. The Paper 1 mark schemes that give a figure give five million. The Paper 4 mark schemes that give a figure give thirteen million. Most Paper 1 mark schemes give no figure at all and write only "millions died".

Cambridge also dates the famine four ways: 1932 to 1933 in most Paper 1 mark schemes and in the November 2022 question stem itself; 1933 alone in March 2018; 1932 to 1934 in June 2019; and 1930 to 1932 in the June 2024 and November 2024 Paper 4 mark schemes.

Do not try to reconcile any of this, and do not average it. There is no reconciliation available and no mark for attempting one. What to do instead:

• If you want to give a figure, give one Cambridge gives and attribute it as an estimate: "an estimated five million died", or "estimates of the dead run to thirteen million". Both are Cambridge's own.
• "Millions died" is always safe, because it is what Cambridge itself writes most often, and it is what the June 2019 examiner report calls "a catastrophic famine".
• A figure you have not seen in a Cambridge document is worth nothing and risks a great deal. The real death toll of this famine is genuinely contested among historians, and inventing a precise number to sound authoritative would be wrong in a way that no mark scheme rewards and no examiner would credit.
• Never import a figure from a neighbouring Depth Study. Cambridge's mark schemes for Depth Study E on China print "20 to 40 million" for the Great Leap Forward famine. That number belongs to China. It is not a Soviet figure and it must never be used as one.

How to write it in an answer

Factually, in one or two sentences, with the mechanism attached. Cambridge's own Level 3 exemplar shows the register:

Collectivisation left the countryside in chaos. Peasants were unfamiliar with the new ideas and methods; there was much bitterness as starving peasants watched Communist officials sending food for export. Food production fell and there was a famine in 1932 and 1933 with millions dying.

That is the model. No adjectives doing the work that facts should do, and no softening either. The famine is not an unfortunate side effect to be mentioned in a subordinate clause, and it is not a reason to abandon the argument, because the question Cambridge sets is almost always whether the gains were worth this cost. You cannot weigh a cost you have refused to state.

8. Where Cambridge's own documents disagree

Four conflicts, beyond the famine figures in section 7. In each case both versions are in Cambridge's own mark schemes, so both are creditable and neither is an error you should correct.

Grain production in the 1930s. The November 2022 mark scheme prints "Grain production did not increase through much of the 1930s." The March 2024 mark scheme prints "By 1940 the production of grain was the highest it had ever been". The June 2024 Paper 4 mark scheme prints a rise from 73 million tonnes in 1928 to 95 million tonnes by 1940. These can be partly squared by noting that a policy can depress output for years and end above where it started, and a strong answer can say exactly that. But do not present the reconciliation as Cambridge's, because Cambridge does not print it.

The proportion of industrial workers who were women. Cambridge gives four different answers: "by 1935 42% of all industrial workers were women"; "By 1937, 40% of industrial workers were women"; by 1939, "over 40% were involved in the industrial workforce"; and "by the late 1930s nearly half of industrial workers were women", with Paper 4 giving "made up 40% of workforce by 1940". The safe move is to write that women made up roughly 40 per cent of the industrial workforce by the late 1930s, which is true of every version, and to skip the specific year.

Stakhanov's shift. The June 2023 mark scheme says he "cut over 100 tons of coal in one shift". The November 2018 mark scheme says "He mined 102 tons of coal during his six-hour shift" and adds "This represented 14 times his quota." The second is more precise and does not contradict the first. Use whichever you remember; the fourteen-times figure is the one that does argumentative work, because it explains why the norms went up.

Which policy the human cost belongs to. Cambridge sometimes attributes the deportation of ten million people to the campaign against the kulaks under collectivisation, and sometimes to the gulag system under the Purges. The same ten million appears in both places in different mark schemes. This is the Key Question 3 boundary showing through the paperwork, and it is a reason to read the question rather than the topic.

9. The faults these mark schemes and reports name

Section 7 of the marking page carries the faults that apply to every question on the paper, including writing too much on part (a), listing instead of explaining on part (b), and one-sided part (c) answers capped at 6. Those are not repeated. What follows applies only to this content.

Treating collectivisation as a Five-Year Plan for agriculture. The June 2018 examiner report names this explicitly and at length:

Weaker responses tended to confuse the Five-Year Plans and the collectivisation of agriculture, often seeing them as the same thing. Although they were linked, it would be inaccurate to see collectivisation as a Five-Year Plan for industry.

They were two policies with two mechanisms, launched together and dependent on each other. The Plans set targets for factories through GOSPLAN. Collectivisation reorganised land ownership and requisitioned food. Confusing them costs you the link between them, which is the most valuable thing you know.

Describing the policies instead of explaining them. The report for the same series: "There were many general descriptions of collectivisation and industry, with no reference to economic or other reasons for their introduction." The following year: candidates "described the Five-Year Plans, collectivisation and the system of repression. This led to descriptive answers or narratives, which lacked the vital assessment to push the answers into higher levels." This is the single commonest failure on this Key Question and the Key Question's own wording invites it, because the policies are interesting enough to describe.

Answering "was Stalin a success" instead of the question asked. The June 2019 report, on a collectivisation part (c): "A number of responses lacked focus on collectivisation and wrote about whether Stalin was a success or not generally." A question about collectivisation is marked on collectivisation. Industrial output does not answer it except as a consequence of it.

Arguing only the side the question states. Also from June 2019: "Most responses were more effective in explanation of agreement than disagreement." On this Key Question the failure is directional and predictable. The famine is vivid and the achievements are abstract, so candidates write the disaster case well and the success case thinly, then cap at 6. If your instinct is that collectivisation was a catastrophe, the mark is in the paragraph you do not want to write.

Explaining that Stalin disliked the kulaks without saying why. From the same report: "A number of responses were generalised, stating only that Stalin did not like the kulaks, without any attempt to explain why." Dislike is not a reason. The reasons Cambridge credits are that they were a class with property and therefore ideologically intolerable, that they were the most likely source of organised resistance, and that their destruction was how the rest of the policy became enforceable.

Writing about the secret police when asked about collectivisation. The June 2019 report records that "A small number of candidates were unaware of the distinct details of collectivisation, and wrote about the work of the secret police instead." This is the Key Question 3 boundary being crossed in the wrong direction.

Ignoring the date in the question. The June 2022 report notes candidates "focussing on Stalin's rise to power before 1928, which was outside of the parameters of the question". The economic policies begin in 1928. Everything before that is Key Question 2 or Key Question 3.

Using invented or borrowed production figures. Not named in a report, because too few candidates sit these questions for the reports to say so, but visible in what the mark schemes will and will not credit. Cambridge's Level 1 descriptor for one of these questions is "The Five Year Plans caused industrial production to increase", which earns one mark. The route out of Level 1 is a real figure inside a real explanation, and section 5 lists every figure Cambridge prints. That list is long enough that you never need to guess.

10. Paper 4, if you sit it

Paper 4 is the Alternative to Coursework: one hour, 40 marks, 30 per cent of the qualification, one question on one Depth Study. Depth Study C is Questions 5 and 6, and Question 6 is the Stalin question.

The format changed for the 2024 series. Up to 2023 it was a single 40-mark essay, always worded "How important was..." or "How significant was...". From 2024 it is two parts: (a) 15 marks, "Write an account of", and (b) 25 marks, "Discuss the importance of" or "Discuss the impact of".

The two 2024 papers that set this Key Question show what the new format wants:

• June 2024: 6(a) "Write an account of the campaign against the kulaks." 6(b) "Discuss the impact of collectivisation."
• November 2024: 6(a) "Write an account of the process of collectivisation." 6(b) "Discuss the impact of the Five-Year Plans."

The part (b) mark schemes are organised under headings, and those headings are the plan Cambridge wants: economic impact, social impact, political impact, technological impact, human impact, military impact. If you are sitting Paper 4, write to those headings. It is the closest thing to a printed essay structure Cambridge gives you anywhere in this syllabus.

Note also that Paper 4 is where the higher famine figure lives, and where the phrasing is bluntest. If you have only revised from Paper 1 mark schemes you will not have seen "13 million dead" or "gulag slave labour". Section 7 covers what to do about the discrepancy.

Finally, several Paper 4 Question 6 titles use this Key Question's material to answer Key Question 3's question: "How significant were the Five-Year Plans in maintaining Stalin's dictatorship?" and "How significant were the Five-Year Plans in helping Stalin increase his control of the Soviet Union?" For those, the argument is that economic transformation was itself a means of control: it moved millions of people into places where the state could see them, it made every worker's livelihood depend on meeting a target the state set, and it destroyed the one class in the countryside with the independence to refuse.

11. Quick revision

• The question word is impact. Description of the Plans and the collectives cannot pass Level 2. Every section of this page should end in an argument.
• Depth Study C is Questions 13 and 14 on Paper 1 and Questions 5 and 6 on Paper 4. This Key Question never appeared at Question 13 in 48 papers. It shares Question 14 with Key Question 3.
• It was the 10-mark part (c) in 21 of 48 papers, more than any other part (c) in this Depth Study, and it was somewhere in Question 14 in 26.
• Why the Plans: Russia was "50 to 100 years behind the advanced countries" and had ten years to close the gap; military strength; rivalry with the capitalist economies; building a proletariat.
• Why collectivisation: feed the cities the Plans were filling; export grain to pay for machinery; mechanise; destroy the kulaks and control the countryside.
• Industry succeeded on Stalin's own terms. Coal from 35 million tons in 1928 to 150 million tons in 1940; 20 per cent of world manufacturing by 1940; second largest industrial power by 1939; Magnitogorsk, the Moscow Underground, the dams; and a country that survived 1941.
• Industry failed on everyone else's terms. Targets missed, figures unreliable, planning wasteful, quality poor, almost no consumer goods, and wages fell between 1928 and 1937.
• Agriculture destroyed before it built. Output fell, the best farmers were removed, animal numbers did not recover until 1940, and grain still went abroad while people starved.
• The famine is not optional. Cambridge dates it 1932 to 1933 most often. It prints five million on Paper 1 and thirteen million on Paper 4. Use one of those, attribute it as an estimate, or write "millions died". Never invent a number, and never borrow China's.
• Cambridge prints "The Holodomor famine was a terror-famine campaign organised by the Soviet authorities against the Ukrainian population." That sentence is creditable because Cambridge wrote it.
• Women are the clearest gain and the clearest complication. Roughly 40 per cent of industrial workers by the late 1930s, most doctors, about a third of engineers, crèches and paid holidays; and then the 1936 family policy that made divorce harder and abortion illegal.
• Balance is the mark. One explanation on each side is 7. The famine paragraph is easy and the achievement paragraph is the one people skip.
• Key Question 3 owns the Purges, the terror and the cult of personality. This page owns the economics. Read the question, not the topic.

Where these facts come from

Everything above is taken from Cambridge's own documents, and every claim can be checked against a named one.

The Cambridge IGCSE History 0470 syllabus for 2027 and 2028. The Key Question and all four focus points, from page 23. The whole Depth Study C specified content list, from page 24, and the fact that it is printed once and undivided. The definitions of key question, focus point and specified content. The Paper 1 and Paper 4 formats, timings and weightings, and the statement that Paper 2 candidates answer on a prescribed topic taken from Core content only. The statement in the changes section that "There are no significant changes which affect teaching", which is why past papers from 2018 to 2024 remain usable for this Depth Study.

Paper 1 mark schemes, March, June and November 2018 to 2024, forty eight papers. The finding that Depth Study C is always Questions 13 and 14. The finding that Question 13 examined Key Questions 1 or 2 in all forty eight papers and never this Key Question, and that Question 14 carried the Stalin material in forty five. The counts of 21 and 26 in section 2, built by reading the printed stem of every Question 13 and Question 14 in all forty eight papers. All the industrial and agricultural figures in section 5 that are attributed to Paper 1, the Stalin "50 to 100 years" formulation, the GOSPLAN and Stakhanov material, the kolkhoz, sovkhoz and toz definitions with the ninety and ten per cent split, the kulak definition and the twenty per cent figure, the four causes of the famine, the five million and "almost 5 million" figures, the Holodomor sentence, the Kazakhstan and Ukraine attribution, the wages figures, the women's employment and profession figures, the 1936 family policy, and every exemplar argument quoted in sections 3 to 7.

Paper 4 mark schemes, 2018 to 2024. The finding that Depth Study C is Questions 5 and 6 and that Question 6 is the Stalin question, and the sixteen Question 6 titles counted in section 2. The 2024 format change and the two 2024 question pairs quoted in section 10, with their heading structure. The grain figures of 73 million and 95 million tonnes, the "nearly 20 per cent" production rise by 1941, the electrification tripling by 1933, the internal passports, the Moscow Metro deaths, the ten million deported, the "liquidation of kulaks by 1934", and the thirteen million famine figure in all three of its printed forms.

Principal Examiner reports, 2018 to 2024, eighteen reports. All of section 9 except the final item. The phrase "There were too few responses to this question for meaningful comments to be made", counted against Question 14 in eight reports.

Where Cambridge contradicts itself. Sections 7 and 8 name five cases: the famine death toll, the famine dates, grain production in the 1930s, the proportion of industrial workers who were women, and Stakhanov's shift. None has been silently resolved above, and none should be resolved in an exam answer.

Not verified, and therefore not asserted above. The date of Stalin's "50 to 100 years behind" statement, which no mark scheme read gives. The number of people who actually died in the famine, which is contested among historians and which Cambridge gives two incompatible answers to; no third figure has been introduced here and none should be. The precise start and end dates of any individual Five-Year Plan, which the mark schemes read give only as beginning in 1928. Any production target as distinct from any production outcome, since the mark schemes state repeatedly that targets were missed but print no target figure. Grain export tonnages other than the 1.7 million tons for 1933 printed in March 2018. Total urban population growth, total gulag population, and the number of collective farms, none of which appears in the documents read. The Russian-language names of any institution beyond kolkhoz, sovkhoz, toz and GOSPLAN, which are the only ones Cambridge prints.

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