Stalin in Power

Industrialization

Five Year Plans Total of five under Stalin, each with a slightly different

focus

1st – 1928 -1932

2nd – 1933-1937

3rd – 1938-1941 cut short by German invasion

4th – 1946-1950

5th – 1951-1955

• Involved total state / govt. control of industry – no more private ownership, no more worker run factories – end of NEP liberalization / privatization / small scale capitalism

• Introduction of Command or Centralized or Planned Economy

• Industrialization would be Rapid / Hugely Accelerated (Economic Policy of the Left)

Goals• 1. ECONOMIC: Main aim – modernize, industrially and

militarily. Bring USSR out of middle ages, make it a great nation. This could only be done through state control and state planning.

• 2. POLITICAL: Survival – Fear of war with opponents of Communism / West (and China): more real after Locarno Treaty (Germany and France became allies): seen by Stalin as an attempt by the West to keep Germany from developing closer ties with the USSR.

• Stalin felt USSR could not survive unless its industrial capacity was improved: to deter aggression and repel it if deterrence failed.

• In 1931, Stalin wrote “Do you want our socialist fatherland to be beaten and to lose its independence? If you do not want this you must put an end to its backwardness…that is what Lenin said during the Oct Rev: ‘either perish, or overtake and outstrip the advanced capitalist countries.’ We are 50 or 100 years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or they crush us.”

• His program of industrialization is best understood as an attempt to establish a war economy, but without the war – he declared he was promoting a great leap forward, as a war on the failings of Russia’s past, as a war against the class enemies within, and as a preparation for war against the nation’s capitalist enemies abroad, FYP’s were presented as a defense of the USSR against the Capitalist world, and international hostility.

• 3. POLITICAL: Fulfill the ideals of Communism – more factories meant more jobs for workers, a worker based / centered country was necessary for Communism to survive and prosper. Redress the balance between worker and reactionary peasants; urbanize the USSR

• Industrialization would be a means to inspire and excite the workers about their role in the Rev and in modernizing the USSR. Stalin skillfully manipulated workers in this way, building them up, emphasizing their importance for the future of the USSR and Communism

• 4. POLITICAL: Part of his strategy to defeat his opponents on the Right; he adopted the ideas of Left, hoping to capture the imagination of the workers and discredit the Right who opposed rapid industrialization and modernization.

• 5. POLITICAL: Justify to Western world that Communist ideology was superior to capitalism: in the 20s most capitalist countries were suffering from the Depression – Stalin wanted to show that Communist ideology was superior to self destructive capitalism / capable of generating real growth and increased prosperity.. The USSR would prove that in a planned economy serious depression like this did not happen

• 6. PERSONAL: By achieving the industrialization and modernization of the USSR, Stalin’s importance would also be comparable to that of Lenin, Peter the Great etc. if not a greater achievement than theirs

• Irony – he dismissed the Capitalist system of the West but yet he arranged for the assistance of Western Capitalist countries in helping with Industrialization

• Soviet engineers were sent abroad to learn about foreign technology

• hundreds of foreign engineers and thousands of foreign skilled workers were brought to Russia on contract.

• USA, Britain, France, Canada, Spain …. sold machines, equipment to the USSR (bought Soviet grain)

First FYP (1928-1932)

• Its target was to dramatically expand heavy industry:

• Infrastructure, transportation: roads, bridges, railroads• Fuel and energy supplies: coal, oil, iron, electricity• Factories producing machinery, equipment, materials

(tractors, steel, rubber) tools

• There was a huge cutback in production of consumer / domestic items / light ind. goods

• The organization of the FYP’s was overseen by the State Planning Commission, Gosplan

• Gosplan would Command the economy / set the targets or productivity goals which were to be met by each industry over the 5 years.

Problems with First Five Year Plan

• 1. Gosplan: staffed by bureaucrats, many of whom had no idea of what factories or businesses were capable of producing: as a result the targets were arbitrarily set, without any consultation with the factory managers on the ground. Many were often unrealistic: this led to desperate and confused strategies / chaos at the factory level

• Alec Nove: this was hardly a planned economy. Plan was the wrong word – more a set of objectives – real planning was missing. Provided detailed production figures but no details about how they were to be achieved.

• Norman Stone comments on how Stalin liked to be referred to as the “master-planner” – but in this case Stalin’s policies did not involve a far-sighted strategy. Stalin, the master-planner, in fact engaged in very little planning (usually just approved of Gosplan quotas)

• Stone agrees with Nove: Such planning as there was occurred not at national but at local level. It was the regional and site managers who, struggling desperately to make sense of the instructions they were given from on high, formulated the actual schemes to meet their given production quotas.

• When things went wrong, Stalin blamed his bureaucracy, as he had done in 1930 when Collectivization had to be temporarily modified.

• Stone: Stalin may not have been concerned about the details at first: it may have been the overall design not the details that mattered – essentially the plan was a huge propaganda project which aimed at convincing the Soviet people that they were engaged in a vast enterprise to re-make society, and prevent invasion and the defeat of the Revolution

• At first workers were co-operative, idealistic and enthusiastic: fell for Stalin’s propaganda, and believed that eventually industrialization and modernization would lead to a better life for them

• Other Complications / Problems besides arbitrary quotas or targets handed down by Gosplan

• 2. The scale and speed with which factories were built led to huge confusion; factories with no machines, machines no one could operate, no replacement parts if machines broke down

• 3. At first a shortage of workers for all the projects and factories – eventually solved by the forced migrations of peasants after collectivization

• 4. Workers and peasants often lacked the literacy and skills to read directions / instructions and operate complicated machinery: lacked the technical knowledge or skills: machines were often damaged or broken as a result: there were frequent industrial accidents

• 5. A further complication was the different versions of the first FYP appeared – original plan, revised plan, a base plan and an optimal plan: targets were frequently raised higher and higher, sometimes by 100%.

• As usual, the new targets were unrealistic and unreachable: this was done mostly for political effect.

• As the Plan proceeded Stalin indicated that he hoped to achieve the goals and targets in “four years not five” – (‘Five in Four” became the Party slogan)

• 6. An obsession with quantity over quality caused many products to be shoddy and unreliable

• 7. Need to use force after the early wave of workers enthusiasm abated. Workers became frustrated with the decline in salaries, living conditions, standard of living

• Lived in dorm or barrack style accommodation, govt. decided on occupation, lower salaries, unaffordable domestic products, long hours, high income and sales taxes, govt. controlled unions, food and clothes rationing, total obedience expected, internal ID cards / passports.

• life was worse than under the Czars, yet Stalin called for yet more and more sacrifices

• OGPU / NKVD / KGB (secret police) spied on workers and factory managers and reported on their performance, attitude, comments…

• Poor attitudes, criticism, absence from work, failure to meet quotas, damaging tools, miscounting items were all punishable by pay cuts, dismissal, imprisonment, exile, gulags, execution.

• Forced Labor became the basis of industrialization, as it was of collectivization.

• Resistance was branded as “sabotage.” A series of public trials of industrial workers was used to impress the Party and the masses of the futility of protesting against the industrial program

• The most famous “industrial” trial was of mining engineers accused of sabotage (a German inspired anti-Soviet plot) in the Shakhty mines in the Donbass region.

• 53 engineers were put on trial (including 3 German citizens), most confessed to acts of sabotage and to be part of a German conspiracy: 11 sentenced to death, of whom 5 were executed (the Germans were released to avoid confrontation with Germany)

• Historians suggest that Stalin invented the sabotage charges, had their confessions forced under torture: that the whole episode was an elaborate theatrical public show trial was intended to intimidate the industrial workforce.

• 8. In the atmosphere of fear and recrimination, factory managers and local party officials doctored official returns and falsified or inflated output figures

• Soviet statistics for industrial growth during the Plans is unreliable: these falsified figures made it possible for Stalin to claim that the Plan was ahead of schedule, that Five could be achieved in Four: often, to Stalin, appearances were everything

• Success• The first FYP was deemed to have achieved its goals by

1933: Even taking into account the falsification of figures, the Plan still remains an extraordinary achievement.

• The overall total output of heavy industry doubled.

• Some notable individual industrial growth: Steel production increased 5 times, coal 5 times, electricity 9 times.

• This transformed the USSR into a modern industrialized nation in a short space of time – ranks among the astonishing achievements of the 20th Century.

• Built the USSR, at breakneck speed, into what would become after WWII, the second largest economy in the world.

• It erected the heavy industry that fended off Hitler’s 1941 attack on the USSR and that eventually out-produced the Nazi war machine.

• Industrialization / modernization would not have succeeded without Stalin. Only Stalin possessed the ruthless determination to force such changes through in spite of the resistance of millions of workers. Without him there would not have been a second revolution (Thompson pg. 270)

• Stalin never stopped to consider the great human costs of such rapid and extensive industrialization and modernization

The Second and Third FYP, 1933-1941

• The second FYP set more realistic targets, at least at first.

• Foundation had already been laid by new plants, factories, mines of the first FYP.

• Again the focus was on heavy industry

• Had promised more focus on domestic goods but changed his mind after increased threat from Nazi Germany and from Japan

• Big focus on production of military equipment and weapons

• Increase in military spending: % of budget / national income spent on military and defense

– 1933 4%– 1937 17% – 1940 33%– 1944 50%

• 2nd FYP: more poor, uncoordinated central planning: Overproduction of some parts, machines: underproduction of other parts, machines

• The struggle to obtain an adequate supply of materials often led to fierce competition between regions and sectors of industry, all of them anxious to escape the charge of failing to achieve the goals laid down from above.

• In consequence, there was much unproductive hoarding of resources and a lack of the co-operation necessary for integrated industrial growth.

• No one dared complain too loudly about the lack of planning, or the poor quality of goods

• The reluctance to expose weaknesses in the Plan hindered genuine industrial growth.

• Since no one was willing to admit that an error in planning or production had taken place, faults went unchecked – if objective or constructive criticism had been welcomed, the whole situation could have improved

• The Party’s control of the media (press, radio, movies) meant that only a favorable view of the plans and their achievements was ever presented.

• It was during the 2nd and 3rd FYP’s that Stalin’s political purges reached their peak: mangers operated under constant fear, which affected production.

• Too many important workers were victims of the Purges: The deportation of thousands of engineers and technicians to the Gulags was a severe loss to industries

• Workers saw living and working conditions decline even further during these Plans – had no recourse: Unions were not independent, were controlled by the govt.

• demands for better pay, conditions were regarded as selfish and inappropriate during time of crisis

• Stalin demanded maximum effort and output in spite of lower salaries and decline in working and living standards

• Take home wages did increase during the 2nd FYP, but this was offset by inflation: high cost of food and consumer goods because of low supply; real income continued to declined by approx 20% to 40% during the period 1928-1933.

• Huge disparity in wages: skilled workers made four times more than unskilled: technicians and engineers up to eight times more, and managers and administrators from twelve to thirty times

• Party intelligencia formed a special elite; special privileges: housing, cars, vacations, stores with imported goods, health care

• Wage disparity is not consistent with Marxism, with the concept of pay according to needs, not skills

• Many workers were paid a fixed wage for the minimum amount of output and then increasingly higher wages for additional units produced per hour or day above the minimum: incentives (Capitalistic principles).

• Stakhanovite movement, started in Sept. 1935: named after a miner from the Donbass coalfield: on one shift he dug 14 times the amount of coal expected (supposedly)

• Again, Propaganda value: His output was assisted by helpers and equipment – the whole thing was stage managed - but his achievement became nationally famous and was used to encourage and motivate others

• Led to creation of Shock Brigades: travelled to mines and factories showing what could be achieved

• Very productive workers could also qualify for the privileges of the intelligencia: health care, special shopping privileges, and vacation opportunities.

• Workers were still severely punishment for being tardy, absent from work - loss of housing, imprisonment, Gulags

• System of internal passports was expanded under 2nd and 3rd plans

• Success of 2nd and 3rd FYP’s: In 1941, when Germany invaded, the USSR was in a position to engage in a successful military struggle of unprecedented intensity.

• In Soviet propaganda, this was what mattered, not minor questions of living standards or wages.

• The USSR’s triumph over Nazism was according to Stalin the ultimate proof of the wisdom of his enforced program of industrialization

• The Economy in Wartime, 1941-1945• German invasion destroyed any possibility of

measured planning.

• Much improvisation after 1941: Survival was the key

• Overall production declined during War years (1941-1944)

• Within 6 months of German invasion, Germans controlled 50% of the Soviet population, 33% of industrial plants were under German occupation

• 60% of iron and steel production, 40% of the railway system, 60% of livestock, and 40% of grain stocks had been lost.

• whole sectors of industry were transferred to the relative safety of the eastern USSR

• Some Scorched Earth: destruction of industries, mines before Germans arrived

• Production took place in the East, behind the Urals: this, and assistance from the USA (Lend Lease) helped the USSR to recover and survive

• Whatever the reality of central planning had been, the principle of centralized authority was of considerable value when it came to organizing the war effort.

• The harshness of the conditions under which the Soviet people had labored in the 1930s had prepared them for the fearful hardships of war.

• Soviet workers and peasants withstood the conditions of war, because they had lived and worked in such horrible conditions for years before this

• Huge deprivation during the war: chronic food shortage was transformed into a famine by German occupation of most fertile lands, and the breakdown of the food distribution system

• Over a quarter of the 25-30m deaths during war years were due to starvation.

• Yet Stalin claimed that “we have survived the most cruel and hardest of all wars ever experienced in the history of our Motherland…the Soviet social system has proved to be more capable of life and more stable than a non-Soviet system.”

• Post War Reconstruction: 4th and 5th FYP’s• Triumph in war did not lessen the suffering of the

Soviet people or make them freer - sad thing was that for all their suffering the Soviet people gained nothing, no gratitude, rewards.

• After the war Stalin gave no thought to rewarding Soviet citizens for their efforts.

• He was more suspicious of the outside world than before, he called on the nation to redouble its efforts: rebuilding was crucial: a Cold War was starting: always a new danger, threat

• Stalin hoped to rebuild and repair the Soviet Union through taking advantage of Soviet control of Eastern Europe and of Eastern Germany – demanded reparations of $20b dollars at Yalta.

• The Fourth FYP – 1946-50 – was aimed at restoring production to the levels of 1941.

• Soviet economy remained unbalanced – no domestic goods or light industry: focus on Heavy Industry

• Stalin favored large scale construction projects – bridges, dams, refineries, generating plants – showpieces – invited world leaders to come and see the successes.

• Stalin’s “Grand Projects of Communism,” had more to do with propaganda than economic planning.

• Again, little thought given to overall economic strategy – much waste of financial and material resources.

• Fourth and fifth plans - reached goals with regard to growth of heavy industry – the output of iron and steel, oil, electric power, was doubled from 1941 levels

• Food shortages, poor living conditions, strict labor code, low wages, harsher life for workers in 1953 when S died than any time since 1917. So much for dictatorship of the proletariat.

• Yet, workers did receive some benefits in terms of old age pensions, free medical services, free education, and daycare centers for children. And there was no Unemployment

Compare and Contrast with Castro• Transition to Command Economy

– Castro slower…involved taking possessions of foreigners

– Stalin rapid

• Flexibility, backtracking– Castro moves back to “market socialism” more than once

– Stalin only once / Collectivization in just 1930

• Use of Force / Terror / Purges– Both use terror

– Stalin uses more terror / Purges:

• Success Level– Stalin more successful – more resources, population – resists

Nazis….one of two superpowers by Cold War……