We explain what the five -year plan was in the Soviet Union. In addition, its history and consequences.
What was the five -year plan?
The five -year plan was An economic planning method with five -year goals first implemented in the Soviet Union (USSR) By communist leader Iosif Stalin in the period 1928-1932.
After Lenin's death in 1924, Stalin became the absolute leader of the Soviet Union and promoted the idea of ”socialism in a single country.” To consolidate the communist model in the Soviet Union and avoid dependence on Western capitalist powers, Stalin considered it necessary for the Soviet economy to cross rapid industrialization.
Stalin left the NEP (new economic policy), a private-state mixed economy that Lenin had established, and implemented a model of Heavy industry development based on state planning and forced collectivization of agriculture (whose resources were necessary to sustain industrial production).
This economic administration model It was launched with the first five-year plan (1928-1932), a combination of economic policy and state propaganda, and was followed by others such as the second five-year plan (1933-1937), the third five-year plan (1938-1941) and the fourth five-year plan (1946-1950), which also concentrated in the production of armament.
The historical context
During the last years of the Russian Empire, Tsarism considered that industrializing Russia was a goal to achieve. For this reason, industrialization efforts were made that obtained some achievements.
However, in the vision of communist leaders, influenced by Marxist thought, Industrialization was much greater: it depended on the survival of the regime that had been installed in Russia from the October Revolution (November 1917), which faced international hostility but did not give up extending communism to the rest of the world.
Anyway, The difficulty was that the Soviet economy remained mostly agriculturalpeasant and rural.
With the arrival of the Bolsheviks to power in Russia, the “war communism” was implementeda system for the nationalization of the resources and grain requisitions aimed at winning the civil war against the counterrevolutionary sectors.
Once the civil war has been completed and the revolts of sectors opposed to the Bolsheviks In 1921, Lenin implemented the NEP (new economic policy)which allowed the operation of a state-private mixed economy to deal with the productive limitations of the previous system.
After Lenin's death in 1924 and Stalin's rise as a Soviet leader, efforts went to consolidate “socialism in a single country” (against Leon Trotsky's ideas of stimulating “permanent revolution” and bringing communism to the rest of Europe). For that it was necessary generate the conditions for the Soviet Union to be industrialized and could compete with the Western capitalist powers. The medium that Stalin implemented to achieve this end were Quinquenal plans, state planning programs with five -year deadlines which were held in the forced collectivization of agricultural production and the accelerated development of the heavy industry.
The first five-year plan (1928-1932)
Accelerated industrialization
In 1927 and 1928 a deep agricultural crisis in the Soviet Union took place: The peasants, who due to the NEP could market the grain of their crops, sold a very small amount of food to the State.
Stalin accused the middle layers of peasants (the calls Kulaks) to retain crops To force the State to pay a greater price, and decided to end the NEP (which, in his opinion, did not allow the progress of industrialization with the desired rapidity). Thus began a new phase of the economic history of the Soviet Union: accelerated industrialization through central planning.
The turn of the Soviet economic policy was reflected in the elaboration, by the central planning body (Gosplan), of the First five-year plan (1928-1932). The plan established the economic priorities of the Statethat companies and individuals had to comply.
The maximum priority was the rapid growth of the capital producing industry (coal, oil, hydroelectricity, iron, steel, machinery, etc.) and, to a lesser extent, the armament industry. This required feeding a lot of labor, building and maintaining productive facilities and importing machinery. This objective was based on a key piece: the forced collectivization of agricultural farms.
The collectivization of agriculture
The industrialization process initiated with the first five -year plan was based on state agricultural collectivization. Through the systematic resource of violence, the private property of the land – to which the Stalin government made responsible for the supply problems in the Soviet Union – disappeared from the agricultural sector and was replaced by large state farms.
The peasants were forced to integrate into state farms or emigrate to cities and emerging industrial centers. Forced collectivization was accompanied by murder, internment in forced labor fields and inner exile of millions of people.
Besides, The disarticulation of the NEP agricultural system contributed decisively to the famine of 1933, because of which millions of Soviet citizens died (especially in Ukraine, where this phenomenon was known as Holodomor). The Soviet agricultural sector was affected for decades for the low priority assigned by planners to agricultural and livestock production compared to the industry.
Results of the first five -year plan
The growth of the heavy industry and its spatial redistribution to eastern Russia were very fast with the implementation of the first five -year plan. The creation of huge dimensions industrial plants He frequently sacrificed general economic efficiency with the objective of complying with the ambitious production figures of the heavy industry set in the plan.
A lot Less brilliant were the results of the durable consumer goods industry (such as housing) or non -durable (such as footwear or dress). The imbalance between the heavy industry, on the one hand, and the light industry and the agricultural sector, on the other, was consistent with the final objective of the plan. This basically consisted of a gigantic transfer of resources from the consumption of the population to the investment.
The per capita consumption of the Soviet population was, especially in the case of the peasantry, less in 1940 than in 1928. This shows that Industrialization oriented to the production of capital and armament goods was favored to the detriment of the satisfaction of the basic needs of the population. The negative effects of this economic growth model on the well -being of the population were partially compensated with the increase in social spending (for example, in education and health).
Other five -year plans of the Soviet Union
The second five-year plan (1933-1937) established more realistic objectives than the first. Investments made in the preceding years They allowed spectacular economic growth, and in 1935 the ration cards that had been implemented were abolished to deal with the basic needs of the industrial population when the NEP was abandoned.
As of 1934, the worsening of the international political climate (the Japanese occupation of Manchuria in 1931 and the ascent to Adolf's power Hitler In Germany in 1933) was translated into a Great expansion of the arms industry in the Soviet Union.
The imposition of the accelerated industrialization of the second five -year plan required the purification of the Bolshevik economic apparatus. The “purges” of Stalin (the persecution, deportation or execution of officials accused of opponents or counterrevolutionaries) They affected much of the management staff of the companies. When the second five -year plan ended, some 2.7 million people were in the different fields of forced labor under gulag control. It is estimated that its economic contribution, surely undervalued, was equivalent to 1.2 % of the industrial product.
The arms industry intensified with the third five-year plan (1938-1941)interrupted when Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, and the fourth five-year plan (1946-1950)which coincided with the time of reconstruction after World War II and the beginning of the Cold War.
The economic transformation generated by the process of industrialization of the five -year plans allowed the Soviet Union to be erected as one of the two global powers of the Cold War, although it did it at the expense of millions of human lives.
Continue with:
References
- Britannica, Encyclopaedia (2022). Five-Year Plans. Britannica Encyclopedia. https://www.britannica.com/
- Britannica, Encyclopaedia (2020). Stalinism. Britannica Encyclopedia. https://www.britannica.com/
- Fitzpatrick, S. (2005). The Russian revolution. 21st century.
- Saborido, J. (2009). History of the Soviet Union. I emecé.
