The Figures and the Famine
The motion: “The Five-Year Plans succeeded on the terms Stalin set for them.”
Your opponent: George Orwell · Course: Pearson Edexcel International GCSE History (4HI1) · Assessment objectives: AO1, AO2, AO4
The output figures are real. So is the famine. This format is about which evidence carries more weight, and why.
What you are asked to argue
You table your evidence; Orwell tables his. You must argue why yours bears more weight — not merely that you have some.
What the specification expects you to bring
- The plans' priorities and the targets set for coal, steel, electricity and oil
- Collectivisation, dekulakisation and the famine of 1932–33
- Magnitogorsk, Dnieprostroi and the showpiece projects
- The reliability of Soviet statistics and why historians treat them cautiously
- Stakhanovism and what it was for
Positions that are defensible
Disagreeing with the figure is not an error. Any of these can score full marks if argued well:
- That the plans succeeded strategically and failed humanly, and 'the terms Stalin set' is the crux
- That the industrial figures are broadly real and the agricultural ones are not
- That success in 1941 is the only test that mattered to the regime, so the motion is true on its own terms
Common misconceptions this debate is built to expose
- Wrong: Official Soviet output figures are simply facts.
The correction: They were produced by an administration whose officials were punished for missing targets. They are evidence about claims as much as about output. - Wrong: Having more evidence wins an evidence battle.
The correction: The format assesses why one piece OUTWEIGHS another — provenance, proximity, what it was for.
What passing it proves
An argument that weighs evidence by provenance and purpose, not by quantity, and that engages the strongest counter-evidence directly.
Why them?
Read the life before you argue with it — the case you are about to meet was built by a real person, over a real career:
- The life of George Orwell — Chronicler of the Total State · Writer & Journalist · 1903–1950