First five-year plan (Soviet Union)

The first five-year plan (Russian: I пятилетний план, первая пятилетка) of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was a list of economic goals, implemented by Communist Party General Secretary Joseph Stalin, based on his policy of socialism in one country.

[4][5][6][7][8] According to historian Sheila Fitzpatrick, the scholarly consensus was that Stalin appropriated the position of the Left Opposition on such matters as industrialisation and collectivisation.

Its grand and idealistic vision, enforced through Stalin's various ministries, saw planners and builders often disregarding practical constraints as they worked to meet demanding schedules, with the possibility of facing severe consequences for failure to do so.

[12] The resistance to Stalin's collectivization policies contributed to the famine in Ukraine, Russia, Kazakhstan as well as areas of the Northern Caucasus.

[15][16][17] Such a change caused unrest within a community that had already existed prior to this external adjustment, and between 1928 and 1932, Turkmen nomads and peasants made it clear through methods like passive resistance that they did not agree with such policies, the Kirgiziya area also knew guerrilla opposition.

[19][need quotation to verify] A war scare arose in 1927[20] when multiple Western states, like Great Britain, began cutting off diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union.

[22][need quotation to verify] Also during this time the secret police (the OGPU) had begun rounding up political dissenters in the Soviet Union.

[25] Rapid growth was facilitated starting in 1928 and continued to accelerate because of the building of heavy industry, which in turn raised living standards for peasants escaping the countryside.

[27] To meet those unrealistic needs, the facilities had to be constructed quickly to facilitate material production before goods could be produced.

The Stalingrad Tractor Plant was built with the help of western allies and was meant to play a major factor in the rapid industrialization of Russia, Belarus and Ukraine.

[29] To achieve this massive economic growth, the Soviet Union had to reroute essential resources to meet the needs of heavy industry.

Vladimir Lenin tried to establish removal of grain from wealthier peasants after the initial failure of state farms, but this was also unsuccessful.

This stockpiling of grain by the peasantry left millions of people in the city hungry, leading Lenin to establish his New Economic Policy to keep the economy from crashing.

[36] Beginning in 1929 under the FYP, mass collectivization was communal farms being assigned an amount of agricultural output with government coercion.

The middle and lower class supported collectivization, because it took private land from individual kulaks, and distributed it among the serednyak and bednyak's villages.

[39] In turn, this disruption would eventually lead to famines for the many years following the first five-year plan, with 6–7 million dying from starvation in 1933.

[43][44] Farmers of Kazakhstan rejected collectivization, and protested, while Stalin raised quotas, meaning peasants would not be able to eat and would psychologically break them.

To meet the goals of the first five-year plan the Soviet Union began using the labor of its growing prisoner population.

[50] In addition, despite the difficulties that agriculture underwent throughout the plan, the Soviets recruited more than 70,000 volunteers from the cities to help collectivize and work on farms in the rural areas.

Duranty's coverage of the five-year plan's many successes led directly to Franklin Roosevelt officially recognizing the Soviet Union in 1933.

Due to the rapid industrialization of the plan, as well as the strategic construction of arms manufacturers in areas less vulnerable to future warfare,[56] the Soviet Union was partially able to build the weapons it needed to defeat the Germans in 1945.

[58] Unions were being shut down which meant workers were no longer allowed to strike and were not protected from being fired or dismissed from work for reasons such as being late or just missing a day.

[41] These famines were among the worst in history and created scars which would mark the Soviet Union for many years to come and incense a deep hatred of Russians by Ukrainians, Tatars, and many other ethnic groups.

This famine led many Russians to relocate to find food, jobs, and shelter outside of their small villages which caused many towns to become overpopulated.

[60] In his work, Revolution Betrayed, Trotsky argued that the excessive authoritarianism under Stalin had undermined the implementation of the First five-year plan.

He noted that several engineers and economists who had created the plan were themselves later put on trial as "conscious wreckers who had acted on the instructions of a foreign power".

This change was visibly seen in the role of women in the industrial workplace where rudimentary figures show they comprised 30 percent of the workforce.

[64] The First Five Year Plan resulted in the easy access of staple foods bread, potatoes and cabbage across the Soviet Union.