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Soviet Union [USSR] TRANSFORMATION AND TERROR
Industrialization and Collectivization
At the end of the 1920s, a dramatic new phase in economic
development began when Stalin decided to carry out a program of
intensive socialist construction. To some extent, Stalin chose to
advocate accelerated economic development at this point as a
political maneuver to eliminate rivals within the party. Because
Bukharin and some other party members would not give up the
gradualistic NEP in favor of radical development, Stalin branded
them as "right-wing deviationists" and used the party organization
to remove them from influential positions in 1929 and 1930. Yet
Stalin's break with NEP also revealed that his doctrine of building
"socialism in one country" paralleled the line that Trotsky had
originally supported early in the 1920s. Marxism supplied no basis
for Stalin's model of a planned economy, although the centralized
economic controls of the war communism years seemingly furnished a
Leninist precedent. Nonetheless, between 1927 and 1929 the State
Planning Commission
(
Gosplan--see Glossary) worked out the First
Five-Year Plan for intensive economic growth; Stalin began to
implement this plan--his "revolution from above"--in 1928.
The First Five-Year Plan called for rapid industrialization of
the economy, with particular growth in heavy industry. The economy
was centralized: small-scale industry and services were
nationalized, managers strove to fulfill Gosplan's output quotas,
and the trade unions were converted into mechanisms for increasing
worker productivity. But because Stalin insisted on unrealistic
production targets, serious problems soon arose. With the greatest
share of investment put into heavy industry, widespread shortages
of consumer goods occurred, and inflation grew.
To satisfy the state's need for increased food supplies, the
First Five-Year Plan called for the organization of the peasantry
into collective units that the authorities could easily control.
This collectivization program entailed compounding the peasants'
lands and animals into
collective farms (see Glossary) and
state farms (see Glossary) and restricting the peasants' movements from
these farms, thus in effect reintroducing a kind of serfdom into
the countryside. Although the program was designed to affect all
peasants, Stalin in particular sought to liquidate the wealthiest
peasants, the kulaks. Generally speaking, the kulaks were only
marginally better off than other peasants, but the party claimed
that the kulaks ensnared the rest of the peasantry in capitalistic
relationships. Yet collectivization met widespread resistance not
only from kulaks but from poorer peasants as well, and a desperate
struggle of the peasantry against the authorities ensued. Peasants
slaughtered their cows and pigs rather than turn them over to the
collective farms, with the result that livestock resources remained
below the 1929 level for years afterward. The state in turn
forcibly collectivized reluctant peasants and deported kulaks and
active rebels to Siberia. Within the collective farms, the
authorities in many instances exacted such high levels of
procurements that starvation was widespread. In some places, famine
was allowed to run its course; millions of peasants in the
Ukrainian Republic starved to death when the state deliberately
withheld food shipments.
By 1932 Stalin realized that both the economy and society were
seriously overstrained. Although industry failed to meet its
production targets and agriculture actually lost ground in
comparison with 1928 yields, Stalin declared that the First
Five-Year Plan had successfully met its goals in four years. He
then proceeded to set more realistic goals. Under the Second
Five-Year Plan (1933-37), the state devoted attention to consumer
goods, and the factories built during the first plan helped
increase industrial output in general. The Third Five-Year Plan,
begun in 1938, produced poorer results because of a sudden shift of
emphasis to armaments production in response to the worsening
international climate. All in all, however, the Soviet economy had
become industrialized by the end of the 1930s. Agriculture, which
had been exploited to finance the industrialization drive,
continued to show poor returns throughout the decade.
Data as of May 1989
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