How successful were Stalin’s Five-Year Plans?

The short answer

• Fear of war drove the pace. The Bolsheviks expected capitalist powers to attack the first socialist state, and the war scare of 1927 made preparation urgent. Steel and machinery could supply tanks, aircraft and artillery, so heavy industry took priority over consumer goods and defence plants received scarce materials first. Stalin’s February 1931 warning gave the country ten years to catch up and justified the sacrifices demanded; the deadline proved almost exactly right.
• Ideology demanded a socialist economy. For Marxists, a socialist society required large-scale industry and an industrial working class. NEP had left the economy dominated by peasants and small traders. Planning promised both a different society and an alternative to the market’s booms and slumps. After 1929 many Western observers found this attractive: the Great Depression brought soaring unemployment in the West while Soviet factories were hiring.
• Collectivisation released grain and labour. Industrial towns needed food, and foreign machinery had to be paid for. Control of the harvest gave the state grain for both purposes, even during famine; exports reached about 5 million tonnes in 1931 and paid for imported machine tools. Collectivization also sent millions of peasants into industry. Some fled the farms as migrants; deported “kulaks” were sent to sites such as Magnitogorsk. The two revolutions of 1929 were designed to work together, each depending on the other’s violence.
• Political competition inflated the targets. After the Right’s defeat, a warning that a target was unrealistic could be dangerous. Raising it demonstrated loyalty: the 1932 pig-iron target went from 10 to 17 million tonnes. The slogan “there are no fortresses Bolsheviks cannot storm” made caution sound like cowardice. Planners and managers had incentives to promise more than they could deliver, building waste and falsified reports into the system.

What it changed

The industrial base for victory in 1941–45. When the western industrial regions were lost in 1941, factories in the Urals and Siberia supplied the Red Army through the war. The experience of building and moving whole plants also helped make the 1941 evacuation possible. Even historians severely critical of Stalinism regard the industrial base as the plans’ decisive result, though they debate whether a less brutal path could have reached the same end.

A society of new workers and new managers. Industrialization made millions of peasants into urban workers and opened careers to young people from peasant and working-class families. Trained as engineers and managers, these vydvizhentsy (“promoted ones”) owed their rise to the regime and formed the core of its support. Two members of the generation, Leonid Brezhnev and Alexei Kosygin, ran the Soviet Union in the 1960s and 1970s; the generation promoted by the plans governed into the 1980s.

Shortage as a way of life. Heavy industry received resources that could otherwise have supplied food, housing and consumer goods. Shortages became ordinary: people queued, lived in crowded communal apartments, used a thriving black market and faced rationing until 1935. Officials obtained the best goods from closed shops. Connections helped people find what they needed, and the shortage economy shaped their dealings with the state until the Soviet Union ended.

Scapegoats for every failure. If the plan could not officially fail, someone else had to explain missed targets, accidents and shortages. Engineers were accused of “wrecking” at the Shakhty trial of 1928 and the Industrial Party trial of 1930; managers and officials followed during the Terror. Economic failures became evidence of sabotage, linking production to the arrests of 1936–38, when industrial managers were among the most heavily purged groups.