STALIN’S FIRST FIVE YEAR PLAN

     When the Communist party took power in 1917, the Soviet Union was a country severely lagging behind the main industrialized countries, especially the United States, Britain and France.  If the ideal of Communism was to have any significant effect on the rest of the world, it would have to prove its worth in the Soviet Union first.  Therefore the Bolshevik Party had to implement several different economic policies.  Lenin introduced his New Economic Policy in 1921 while Stalin, their heir to Lenin’s title introduced his economic plan in the spring of 1929.  His plan was known as the Five Year Plan.

     Although in total there were three different Five Year Plans, it was the First Five Year Plan that was the main focus.  During the early years of the Communist rule, the economic picture in the Soviet Union was unclear.  Because of World War 1 and the development of a war economy, the real and “bottom line” picture of the Russian economy was shrouded.  By 1925 however, the sunshine of a post-war boom was dimming.  A marked decline in the rate of economic improvement was coupled with a large and rapidly increasing pool of umemployed.¹ Stalin’s First Five Year plan called for the country to industrialize.  He reasoned that the Soviet Union was “fifty to one hundred years behind the advanced countries.  [The USSR] must make good this lag in ten years…or [it] will be crushed”.² Stalin hoped to achieve in one decade something which took the industrialized nations several.

     In the official text, the Five Year Plan was described as a “plan for the radical reconstruction of the productive foundations of [the] country…[through] tremendous capital consumption, at the price of a harsh regime of economy and by sacrificing the satisfaction of today’s needs”.³   If Stalin’s plan worked, the entire world would see the benefits of a planned Communist economy and consequently would have no choice but to join the Socialist cause.

     The economic justification for having a totally mapped economy was simple in ideology.  Since the Soviet Union did not possess a huge abundance of resources, the country was determined to be productive of any resources it did have.  Apparently, the central Communist government was the only body who had enough vision in the utilization of these scarce resources.⁴ The development of these resources was essential to the Five Year Plan.

     The Plan worked on the basis of a target system.  In this system there were two main variants; the baseline and the optimum, where the baseline was set at a value approximately twenty per cent lower than the optimum level.⁵  In simpler terms, a factory had to achieve at least the baseline level as a minimum production goal to stay within the acceptable guidelines of Stalin’s Plan.  Anything above the baseline was “preferable” if the manager wanted to remain in proper standing within the Communist ranks.

     The goals set by the Plan were outrageously high.  From 1928-1933, the gross industrial output was to increase by 235.9%, heavy industry alone by 279.2% and labour productivity by 110%.⁶  In order to reach these goals, rapid development was needed in all industrial areas.  During the First Five Year Plan approximately fifteen hundred new enterprises were built.⁷  These included developments in car and tractor manufacturing, a chemical industry, machine tool production and different types of other motor works, such as airplane factories.⁸

     The entire geography of the Soviet Union was scoured in search of the resources which were essential to the industrialization.  The huge mines dug east of the Ural Mountains resulted in a new iron and steel industry.⁹  In the first year of the Plan, the main emphasis was on the production of energy and construction materials.  Because the industries literally had to be built from the basement up, it was very important that the government secured sources of coal, oil, electricity, timber, cement, steel and other metals.¹⁰  Agriculture also played a significant role in the Five Year Plan.

     No longer would the Russian peasant be concerned with providing only enough food for his family, he would now have to contribute to the planned Soviet economy.  The Plan called for the collectivization of 20% of the total amount of individual peasant farms in the Soviet Union by 1933.¹¹  Although the subject of collectivization is worthy enough for a paper of its own, it does fit into the scheme of the First Five Year Plan.  In order to maximize the production of the expansive tracts of land, farm machinery had to be developed quickly.  Since the horse and plow was no longer a feasible alternative, the mass industrialization of tractors and other equipment was essential to the existence of the collective farm.¹²  Unfortunately for Stalin, a major problem arose.

     Defying Stalin and the Communist plan, the peasants slaughtered and ate their own livestock instead of delivering them to a collective farm.  In an economic sense, not only did the supply of meat diminish but also the supply of horse power.  This problem would not have been so severe had there been a substantial output of tractors from the new factories, which there was not.¹³  Because of the time lapse which occurred between the initial start of production and the final product, many of the collective farms were not able to meet even the baseline requirement.

     The slow production of tractors was not the only failure the Five Year Plan encountered.  Many of the optimum goals were not reached.  For example, 9.3 billion bricks were planned, 4.9 billion were produced by 1932; 8.5  million tones of mineral fertilizer were planned, 920,000 tonnes were produced in 1932 and even by 1933 only 1,030,000 tonnes had been produced.¹⁴  Realistically, the goals had been set too high.  The Five Year Plan was also hampered in its development by the Great Depression, where even the industrialized countries were faltering.  The decline of agricultural output during the First Five Year Plan affected the fulfillment of the plan in the number of agricultural products.

     As the Soviet Union industrialized, the urban population swelled by more than two million people a year and despite the rise of collective farms, a large gap was created between the needs of the people and the volume of agricultural production.¹⁵  Lost in the entire Five Year Plan was the individual.  The personal needs of the average consumer were always placed far below the larger “world class” economic picture.

     The Five Year Plan was one of Stalin’s many policies directed at the advancement of the Soviet Union in the scope of the world.  The Soviet Union was always struggling; struggling to be better, to prove its worth and to show pride in the Communist system.  Most of this struggle went on behind the “iron curtain” and out of the watchful capitalist eye.  Today, the Communist curtain has been thrown back to reveal the legacy of the Communist regime.  Sadly, the world behind the curtain was naked; naked of food and shelter, naked of individualism and tragically naked of freedom.