USSR's+Industrialisation+-+The+Five-Year+Plans

Lenin's successor also proceeded after 1928 with plans to equip Russia with heavy industry and better transport and to develop new sources of power and industry beyond the Urals. Lenin had not envisage detailed economic planning in 1917, but under Stalin it became and remained a permanent characteristic of the Communist order. The effect was to produce a highly integrated economy. By 1939, four-fifths of Russian industrial production came from plants built during the previous ten years and, as many of these were situated east of the Urals, they carried modern industrialisation into the heart of Asia. This rigorous drive to transform Russia into a first-class industrial power made necessary a high degree of political centralisation. The transition from M|Marxism to Leninism and from Leninism to Stalinism was brought about by a self-constituted bureaucratic elite which had become independent of the masses in whose name it was supposed to rule. The re-constitution of the familiar Russian tradition of autocratic domination and state control was made possible by the institution of a single-party monopoly. Stalin's policies involved gross inhumanity -slaughter, deportation, imprisonment and famine on a massive scale. At the same time there was rapid economic progress. It is estimated that in the decade after 1929 the Russian gross national product grew by just under 12% a year. The greatest single failure (as today) was to be found in Russian agriculture. But even there, by paying the collectives far less than the market price and absorbing the difference, the state forced agriculture to swell the accumulation of capital which powered the industrial programme. While the price of C|collectivisation was extremeley high and while historians question whether Stalin's brutality was necessary to achieve the pace of Soviet development, collectivisation and grain surpluses made it possible to pursue the aims of the five-year plans. Collectivisation caused bitter disaffection, not only among the peasantry. (1)



(1) Weigall, D. & Murphy, M. //A Level European History. Study Guide.// Letts Educational, London, 1998. Chapter 10: "Russia, 1917-41", pages 136 to 149.