You are viewing a free preview of this lesson.
Subscribe to unlock all 10 lessons in this course and every other course on LearningBro.
Stalin's abandonment of the NEP in 1928–29 launched the most radical programme of economic transformation in modern history. The Five-Year Plans sought to industrialise the Soviet Union at breakneck speed, while collectivisation simultaneously destroyed the traditional peasant economy and herded some twenty-five million households into collective farms. Together these policies — often called the "second revolution" or the "revolution from above" — reshaped class structure, labour, the countryside and the relationship between citizen and state. They also killed millions, above all in the famine of 1932–33. The human cost remains genuinely contested, and the historiographical quarrel over whether the suffering was deliberate design or catastrophic by-product is one of the richest in modern history.
For a breadth study running from Lenin to Yeltsin, the Stalinist economy is the pivot of the whole economy thread. The command system created after 1929 — Gosplan, the ministries, the kolkhoz — defined how the Soviet Union produced and distributed goods until 1991; the strengths it built (a heavy-industrial base capable of defeating the Wehrmacht) and the pathologies it entrenched (chronic neglect of consumer goods and agriculture, statistical falsification, the priority of quantity over quality) both recur through the Khrushchev and Brezhnev chapters and become the very problems Gorbachev's reforms fail to solve. The nature of government thread also advances sharply here: the drive concentrated economic power in the state and the party, expanded the bureaucracy, and created the upwardly mobile new elite that would run the country for decades. The organising question is whether the achievements of Stalin's economic revolution were worth the human cost — and how far the famine and the suffering of the peasantry were the deliberate aims of policy rather than its by-products.
By the end of this lesson you will be able to:
This lesson belongs to Edexcel 9HI0 Paper 1, Option 1E (Route E): "Russia, 1917–91: from Lenin to Yeltsin" — a breadth study assessed by extended analytical essays (Sections A and B) and by the evaluation of historians' interpretations (Section C). Within our teaching sequence it is the centrepiece of the economy thread and connects directly to the society thread (the remaking of the working class and the destruction of the peasantry) and the control thread (dekulakisation as the precursor of the Great Terror).
Because Paper 1 is a breadth paper, examiners look for command of change over time and for judgements about the scale and permanence of change. Keep asking how the transformation of 1928–41 shaped the Soviet economy and society for the rest of the period. (For the precise assessment weightings and question wording, consult the official Edexcel specification and sample assessment materials rather than any paraphrase.)
The First Five-Year Plan (officially 1928–1932) pursued several interlocking goals: rapid heavy industrialisation to build the military-industrial base needed to defend the USSR against "capitalist encirclement"; self-sufficiency in machinery and technology; the elimination of the NEP and the private economy; the absorption of surplus rural labour; and the creation of a modern, urban working class. Note that the goals were as much political and ideological as economic — the plan was a project to build socialism and to bind economic transformation to Stalin's personal authority, not merely to raise output.
| Sector | 1928 actual | 1932 target | 1932 actual |
|---|---|---|---|
| Coal (million tons) | 35.4 | 75.0 | 64.3 |
| Steel (million tons) | 4.0 | 10.4 | 5.9 |
| Oil (million tons) | 11.7 | 22.0 | 21.4 |
| Electricity (billion kWh) | 5.05 | 22.0 | 13.4 |
Most headline targets were missed — steel fell well short, and the wildly "optimal" variants revised upwards in 1929–30 were never realistic — but the absolute growth was still substantial, and in oil the gap was modest. The figures must be treated with great caution: statistical inflation, double-counting and the political pressure to "over-fulfil" make official output data an unreliable guide. The economic historian Alec Nove stressed that genuine planning in the Western sense barely existed; targets functioned as exhortation rather than calculation. The transformation was dramatised by showpiece projects: Magnitogorsk (a vast steel city built from nothing on the Urals steppe), the Dneprostroi Dam (then Europe's largest hydroelectric station), the Stalingrad Tractor Factory, the Turksib Railway, and the White Sea–Baltic Canal, dug largely by Gulag labour at enormous loss of life.
The human cost of industrialisation was severe. Workers endured 12–16 hour shifts under dangerous conditions; labour discipline was harsh (a 1932 decree made a single day's unauthorised absence grounds for instant dismissal and eviction); the internal passport system, reintroduced in December 1932, tied workers to their workplaces; real wages fell during the First Plan as rationing and shortages eroded purchasing power; and housing was desperately overcrowded. Yet industrialisation also created genuine opportunities for upward social mobility (vydvizhenie): ambitious young workers were promoted into management and education, forming a generation of "Stalin's men" loyal to the system that had raised them — a point of great significance for the society and government threads, since these vydvizhentsy would staff the regime for decades.
The Second Five-Year Plan (1933–1937), often called the "good years," set more realistic targets, brought the earlier showpiece projects on stream, gave greater emphasis to communications, transport and chemicals, saw some improvement in consumer goods and the formal end of bread rationing in 1935, and opened the flagship Moscow Metro. The Stakhanovite movement (from August 1935, named after the Donbas miner Alexei Stakhanov, credited with hewing 102 tons of coal in a single shift) promoted "heroic" shock-workers who exceeded their norms — and was used to justify raising quotas for all workers, generating resentment and sometimes the sabotage of celebrated Stakhanovites by their own workmates. The Third Five-Year Plan (1938–1941) focused heavily on military production — tanks, aircraft, artillery — as the threat from Nazi Germany grew, but was disrupted by the Great Terror, which removed many experienced managers, engineers and military-industrial planners, and was cut short by the German invasion of 22 June 1941. (The wartime relocation of over 1,500 enterprises beyond the Urals in 1941–42 would later demonstrate, retrospectively, the mobilisational capacity the planned economy had built — the strongest single argument advanced for the policy's "necessity.")
It is worth being clear about how the "planning" actually worked, because this bears on the whole economy thread. Genuine planning in the Western sense — the careful matching of inputs to outputs — barely existed. Gosplan, the State Planning Commission, drew up and monitored the plans, but targets were frequently set by political leaders and adjusted arbitrarily, and the "plan" functioned as much as a propaganda instrument and a tool of mobilisation as an economic calculation. The language of "fronts," "storming" and "over-fulfilment" turned production into a campaign. This gap between the rhetoric of scientific planning and the reality of exhortation and improvisation is a permanent feature of the Soviet command economy, and it helps explain both the system's early bursts of growth and its chronic later inefficiency.
The grain procurement crisis of 1927–28 convinced Stalin that the NEP could not deliver the surpluses industrialisation required. In late 1929 he proclaimed the "liquidation of the kulaks as a class" (27 December 1929) and launched the forced collectivisation of Soviet agriculture, driven into the villages by the urban "25,000ers" — industrial workers despatched to organise the collective farms.
| Motivation | Detail |
|---|---|
| Economic | Reliable grain supplies for the cities and for export; mechanised farming would (in theory) be more efficient |
| Political | Individual peasant farms were difficult to control; collective farms were easier to manage and tax |
| Ideological | Private farming was incompatible with socialism; collective ownership was the Marxist ideal |
| Funding industrialisation | Grain exports would earn the foreign currency to buy Western machinery |
The process was coercive from the start. By March 1930 some 58% of peasant households had been collectivised, often through extreme violence, and peasants slaughtered livestock and destroyed crops rather than surrender them — livestock numbers fell catastrophically. Stalin's article "Dizzy with Success" (Pravda, 2 March 1930) blamed local officials for excessive zeal and produced a tactical retreat, but collectivisation was reimposed with renewed vigour in 1931–33, and by 1936 over 90% of households were collectivised. Peasants retained only small private plots, which by the late 1930s produced a disproportionate share of the country's meat, milk and vegetables — a telling comment on the inefficiency of the kolkhoz system, in which the state extracted most of the produce through compulsory deliveries at artificially low prices.
The assault on the kulaks (dekulakisation) was one of the most brutal episodes in Soviet history. The definition of "kulak" was vague and arbitrary — in practice anyone who resisted collectivisation, including poorer peasants, could be denounced as a kulak or "sub-kulak." A graduated system consigned kulaks to three categories: the "counter-revolutionary" first category shot or sent to camps; the second deported to remote "special settlements"; the third resettled on poor land locally. Around 1.8 million people were deported to Siberia, the Urals and Central Asia in 1930–31 alone, with the total considerably higher; property was confiscated, families broken up, and very large numbers died in transit or in the unprepared settlements. The most productive farmers were removed from the land at precisely the moment grain output mattered most. Lynne Viola, in Peasant Rebels under Stalin (1996), documents the scale and brutality of dekulakisation and the surprisingly widespread peasant resistance, arguing that the campaign amounted to a "war against the peasantry" that shattered rural society and its culture. Dekulakisation also links directly to the control thread of the course: the same logic of "enemies" within, and the same instruments (the OGPU, deportation, the camps), would run into the Great Terror examined in the next lesson.
The upheaval of these years was as much a social revolution as an economic one, and in some respects more durable — a point that matters greatly for the society thread of the course. The urban population roughly doubled between 1926 and 1939, swelling Moscow, Leningrad and the new industrial cities; an entire peasant generation was uprooted and remade as factory workers. Mass education and literacy campaigns transformed a largely illiterate society, and technical training created the engineers and administrators who would run the country for decades. Yet the costs fell with brutal unevenness across social groups:
| Group | Impact |
|---|---|
| Workers | Harsh conditions but some genuine upward mobility; a new Soviet working class was created |
| Peasants | Bore the heaviest burden — dekulakised, collectivised, starved; traditional rural society was destroyed |
| Women | Entered the workforce in large numbers but were concentrated in the lowest-paid and hardest jobs, while retaining the double burden of domestic labour |
| Party officials | Benefited from the expansion of the state apparatus; formed a new privileged elite |
| "Specialists" | Engineers and managers inherited from the old regime were both needed and suspected; many were purged as "wreckers" |
The Stalinist social order that emerged by 1941 — hierarchical, bureaucratic, materially poor but ideologically mobilised, and staffed by the upwardly mobile vydvizhentsy whose loyalty helps to explain the system's resilience — would endure, in its essentials, until the 1980s. Sheila Fitzpatrick has shown how Soviet citizens learned to navigate, exploit and "speak" the new order rather than simply suffering it. Understanding this created-from-above society is essential to explaining why the regime proved so stable for so long, and why reforming it later would prove so difficult.
The famine of 1932–33 was the catastrophic culmination of these policies. State grain requisitioning continued and quotas were even raised as harvests failed; peasant resistance cut production; unrealistic procurement quotas bore no relation to the actual harvest; and drought and crop disease in 1932 compounded the policy failures. Decisively, the regime refused to reduce exports or provide meaningful relief, sealed off the worst-hit districts (the January 1933 ban on peasants leaving Ukraine and the North Caucasus), and punished the gleaning of grain with the death penalty under the law of 7 August 1932 (the "law of five ears of corn").
| Region | Estimated deaths |
|---|---|
| Ukraine | 3.5–7.5 million (the Holodomor) |
| Kazakhstan | 1–1.5 million |
| North Caucasus, Volga | Hundreds of thousands |
The death tolls are genuinely contested and should always be expressed as ranges rather than spurious precision. Total excess mortality across the USSR in 1932–33 is now generally estimated by archival historians at roughly 5 to 7 million, with Robert Conquest's earlier figures running higher. Kazakhstan suffered the heaviest proportional loss, as the forced sedentarisation of a nomadic pastoral society destroyed the herds on which it depended. Whether the famine was genocide remains one of the most significant historiographical debates, and the Ukrainian parliament and numerous countries recognise the Holodomor as such; the historians' dispute (addressed below) turns on whether the legal test of genocidal intent is met.
The balance sheet of Stalin's economic revolution is genuinely double-edged, and a strong breadth answer holds both sides in view rather than declaring simply for "success" or "catastrophe."
Subscribe to continue reading
Get full access to this lesson and all 10 lessons in this course.