Stalin’s Soviet Union · CHAPTER 4 ·
Stalin’s Five-Year Plans
Chapter 4 of The Soviet Union under Stalin, 1924–1953: “The Five-Year Plans”
From 1928 Gosplan’s Five-Year Plans set output targets for every industry as political commands and poured resources into steel, coal, machinery and electricity. Stalin argued in 1931 that the USSR had ten years to catch up, and new plants such as Magnitogorsk, which lit its first blast furnace in 1932, moved industry east.
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The map above is the world of The Soviet Union, August 1935 — The Second Five-Year Plan: steel, coal and camps.
Part of IB History: The Soviet Union under Stalin →
BRIEF EXPLANATION — THE ESSENTIAL ARGUMENT
Stalin’s industrial revolution rested on one idea, that a planned economy could be driven to grow faster than any market by setting targets from above and treating them as orders. A Five-Year Plan was a list of output targets for every industry, drawn up by Gosplan, the State Planning Commission, much as a company sets a five-year budget, except that here the targets were political commands and missing them could be treated as sabotage. The First Plan (1928–32) poured resources into steel, coal, machinery and electricity, and its targets were raised again and again as leaders competed to show ambition. Stalin justified the pace in February 1931: the country was “fifty or a hundred years behind” the advanced countries and had ten years to catch up, “or they crush us”, a deadline that turned every shortfall into a threat to the country’s survival.
The results were real, and so were the costs. By official figures steel output rose from about 4 million tonnes in 1928 to 18 million in 1940 and coal from 35 to 166 million tonnes, and Western recalculations, though lower, still show some of the fastest growth of the century. The map marks the new giants: Magnitogorsk and Kuznetsk joined by the long Urals–Kuznetsk shuttle of ore and coal, the Dnieper dam, the Gorky car plant and the Turksib railway linking Siberia to Central Asia. Millions of peasants became workers, and unemployment vanished. Yet real wages, meaning pay measured by what it could buy, fell sharply in the early 1930s, housing and food were scarce, waste was immense, and prisoners and deportees built much of the new industry. The plans built the factories that would win a war, at a price paid by the people who worked in them.
The full story
Planning by command, in which the targets of Gosplan, the State Planning Commission, were orders to every factory, meant that speed mattered more than cost, and that choice shaped everything the plans produced. In 1929 the leadership adopted the most ambitious draft of the First Five-Year Plan, the list of output targets for 1928–32, set like a company’s five-year budget but enforced as law, called the “optimal variant”. It then raised the draft further, so that the target for pig iron, the crude iron from which steel is made, of 10 million tonnes for 1932 was pushed to 17 million; actual output that year was about 6 million. Managers who missed targets risked prosecution, especially after the Shakhty trial of 1928 accused mining engineers of “wrecking”, the deliberate sabotage of production, so they hoarded materials, inflated their reports and drove workers harder. The plan was declared fulfilled in four years and three months, in January 1933, because heavy industry had grown fast even when most targets had been missed. Success was defined as growth in the priority sectors, which is why the regime could celebrate while consumers went short.
The map shows how the plans moved industry east, away from the borders. Magnitogorsk, built in the southern Urals on the model of the steelworks at Gary, Indiana, lit its first blast furnace in early 1932; Kuznetsk in western Siberia followed months later. Trains carried iron ore east from Magnitogorsk and coal west from the Kuznetsk basin, the two arrows of the Urals–Kuznetsk Combine, a shuttle of about 2,000 kilometres each way. The Turksib railway, finished in 1930, linked Siberian grain to Central Asian cotton. Foreign firms, many of them American, designed plants such as the Stalingrad tractor works and the Gorky car factory, and the Dnieper hydroelectric dam opened in 1932 with American engineers. Building in the remote east was costly, yet it put industry beyond the reach of invaders, which helped decide the war a decade later.
Workers paid for the plans through falling living standards and rising pressure, and the regime answered with both rewards and coercion. Real wages, pay measured by what it could buy, dropped steeply between 1928 and 1932 as food went to export and rationing returned. Labour turnover was enormous, so managers bid for workers with bonuses and housing. The state answered with labour books in 1938, records of each worker’s employment that tied him to his job much like a work permit held by the employer, and with harsh discipline laws in 1940. In August 1935 the miner Alexei Stakhanov cut 102 tonnes of coal in a shift at Kadiyivka, about fourteen times the norm, the output each miner was expected to reach, much like a sales target. The “Stakhanovite” movement that followed rewarded record-breakers with pay and prestige while raising everyone else’s norms. Meanwhile the economy run by the political police grew, as prisoners dug canals, mined gold and built railways. The plans made the Soviet Union an industrial power, but they did so by treating labour, free and unfree, as a resource to be spent.
DEEP EXPLANATION — EVIDENCE & INTERPRETATION
How fast did the economy really grow?
The real speed of Soviet growth matters to any verdict on Stalinism, and the evidence shows growth that was fast but far slower than official figures claimed. Soviet statistics reported industrial growth of more than 15 per cent a year in the 1930s, and Western economists spent decades testing that claim. Naum Jasny and Abram Bergson recalculated output using consistent prices and found much lower growth: Bergson estimated national income growth of about 5 to 6 per cent a year between 1928 and 1940, still fast by international standards. The difference arose because new products were valued at inflated prices and quality fell as quantity rose. Robert C. Allen’s Farm to Factory (2003) argues that the industrial “big push” did raise living standards over the decade as a whole, once education, health and urban jobs are counted. R. W. Davies and Mark Harrison stress the collapse of consumption in 1930–33 and the waste of unfinished projects. The evidence supports a double verdict: rapid growth of heavy industry and military power, bought with low consumption and large hidden losses.
Stakhanovism: reward and pressure
The Stakhanovite movement shows how the regime combined incentives with compulsion, and its history is documented in Lewis Siegelbaum’s Stakhanovism and the Politics of Productivity (1988). Stakhanov’s record of 30–31 August 1935 was organised by the mine’s party organiser, who chose the miner, assigned helpers to prop the roof and remove coal, and invited a newspaper reporter. Within weeks every industry had its record-breakers, who received higher pay, apartments, holidays and medals, and in November 1935 Stalin told a Stakhanovite conference that “life has become better, comrades; life has become more joyous”. For ordinary workers, the records became the basis for higher output norms in 1936, so pay fell unless they worked harder. Some Stakhanovites were assaulted by fellow workers, and managers who could not reorganise production around records were accused of sabotage. Siegelbaum shows the movement as a genuine route to advancement for some and a source of resentment for many, which is why it faded after 1937, as the Terror turned attention from records to enemies.
The police economy
Forced labour was built into the plans, and archival research since 1991 has measured how much. Oleg Khlevniuk and other historians have shown that the political police became one of the largest construction organisations in the country. Its prisoners dug the White Sea Canal and the Moscow–Volga Canal, built the Baikal–Amur railway, mined gold in Kolyma and coal in Vorkuta, and felled timber across the north. By 1940 the NKVD’s economic directorates held a significant share of national capital investment and produced most of the country’s gold and much of its timber and nickel. Historians debate whether forced labour was efficient: Paul Gregory and others show that prisoner labour was costly once guards, transport and high mortality were counted, and Gulag officials themselves complained of low productivity. Its advantage was that prisoners could be sent where free workers would not go. The camps’ real value to the planners lay in colonising the north and east by command, whatever the cost per tonne.
Key places on the map
On this day
Why it happened
Fear of war drove the pace. Bolsheviks expected the capitalist powers to attack the first socialist state, and the war scare of 1927 made that fear urgent. Heavy industry meant tanks, aircraft and artillery, so the plans favoured steel and machinery over consumer goods, and defence plants received the scarcest materials first. Stalin’s February 1931 warning that the country had ten years to catch up proved almost exactly right, and he used the deadline to justify every sacrifice the plans demanded.
Ideology demanded a socialist economy. Marxists believed a socialist society required large-scale industry and an industrial working class, and NEP had left the economy dominated by peasants and small traders. Planning seemed the rational alternative to the market’s booms and slumps, a view many Western observers shared during the Great Depression after 1929, when Western unemployment soared while Soviet factories were hiring. The plans therefore promised a new kind of society as well as more output.
Collectivisation released grain and labour. Control of the harvest let the state feed the growing towns and export grain to pay for foreign machinery, even during the famine. Grain exports reached about 5 million tonnes in 1931, paying for imported machine tools. It also pushed millions of peasants into industry, either as migrants fleeing the farms or as deported “kulaks” sent to building sites such as Magnitogorsk. The two revolutions of 1929 were designed to work together, and each depended on the other’s violence.
Political competition inflated the targets. After the defeat of the Right, no one could safely argue that targets were unrealistic. Planners and managers raised them to show loyalty, as when the pig-iron target for 1932 was pushed from 10 to 17 million tonnes, and the slogan “there are no fortresses Bolsheviks cannot storm” made caution sound like cowardice. The result was a planning system in which ambition was rewarded and realism was punished, which built in waste and the falsification of reports.
THE TURNING POINT
Magnitogorsk, February 1932. The first blast furnace at Magnitogorsk, lit in the winter of 1932 on a site that had been empty steppe three years earlier, is the hinge of the plans because it proved that the regime could build a heavy industrial base in the east. With Kuznetsk it formed a second metallurgical centre beyond the reach of any European army. In 1941, when German forces overran the old industrial regions of Ukraine, the Urals and Siberia produced much of the steel for Soviet tanks, so the most expensive decision of the plans also became their most important.
What it changed
The industrial base for victory in 1941–45. The plants built in the Urals and Siberia, and the experience of moving and building whole factories, made the evacuation of 1941 possible and supplied the Red Army through the war. Historians who are harsh on Stalinism still count this as the plans’ decisive result, though they debate whether a less brutal path could have reached the same point. The cost of building in the east was repaid in 1941, when the west was lost.
A society of new workers and new managers. Millions of peasants became urban workers, and a generation of young people from working-class and peasant families was trained as engineers and managers, the so-called vydvizhentsy (“promoted ones”). They owed their rise to the regime and formed the core of its support. Two of them, Leonid Brezhnev and Alexei Kosygin, ran the Soviet Union in the 1960s and 1970s, so the generation the plans promoted governed the country until the 1980s.
Shortage as a way of life. Priority for heavy industry left consumer goods, housing and food permanently scarce. Queues, rationing until 1935, overcrowded communal apartments and a thriving black market became normal, and the best goods went to closed shops for officials. The shortage economy, in which people relied on connections to obtain goods, lasted until the end of the Soviet Union and shaped how ordinary people dealt with the state.
Scapegoats for every failure. Because the plans could not fail officially, failures were blamed on “wreckers”: engineers in the Shakhty trial of 1928 and the Industrial Party trial of 1930, and later managers and officials during the Terror. Accidents, shortages and missed targets became evidence of sabotage, which linked the economy directly to the arrests of 1936–38, when industrial managers were among the most heavily purged groups.
DISCUSSION QUESTION — To what extent were the Five-Year Plans a success?
The answer depends on which goal is used to measure them. If the goal was heavy industry and military power, the plans largely succeeded: steel, coal and electricity output multiplied, a second industrial base rose in the Urals and Siberia, and during the war the Soviet Union out-produced Germany in tanks and aircraft. Even sceptical recalculations by Bergson and Jasny show unusually fast growth. If the goal was a better life for workers and peasants, the record is far worse. Real wages fell sharply in the early 1930s, famine killed between about 5.5 and 8.7 million people, consumer goods stayed scarce, and much of the new industry depended on forced labour. The plans were also wasteful, with unfinished projects, falsified reports and poor quality. Historians such as Robert Allen argue that the growth came largely from moving peasants into industry, which a less violent policy might also have achieved. A balanced judgement is that the plans succeeded in Stalin’s own terms while failing the promise of socialism to raise living standards, a pattern seen in many states that industrialise by command.
An interesting fact
Some of the best evidence about Magnitogorsk comes from an American. John Scott, who left the University of Wisconsin in 1931, went to the Urals in 1932 to work as a welder and rigger, married a Russian teacher there and stayed until 1938. His memoir Behind the Urals (1942) describes temperatures of minus 40 degrees, workers sleeping in tents and barracks, and constant accidents, alongside genuine enthusiasm among young builders. The historian Stephen Kotkin later used Scott’s account, together with the city’s archives, for Magnetic Mountain (1995), where he argued that Stalinism was a whole civilisation that people learned to live inside, speaking its language as they did so.
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