How successful were Stalin’s Five-Year Plans?

The short answer

• 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.

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.