Five-Year Plans and Rapid Industrialization
"We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or they crush us."
-Joseph Stalin
Purpose of the Five-Year PlansThe Five-Year Plans, which aimed to improve the Soviet Union industrially after centuries of backwards tsarist leadership, enabled Joseph Stalin to increase and spread his control over Soviet citizens.
“Stalin's economic policies...were thoroughly intertwined not just with his Marxist-Leninist ideology but with his drive to dominate his political opponents.” -Norman M. Naimark, American historian |
"Under the leadership of great Stalin- forward to communism!" |
Faults of the Five-Year Plans
The targets established by the Five-Year Plans were ridiculously high, leading to factory managers lying about their production totals to save themselves from arrest, which was also a punishment for minor everyday occurrences such as changing jobs, missing days, or being tardy to work.
"The fulfillment of the Plan is our sacred duty. Those who do not fulfill the Plan are saboteurs and traitors, and we show them no mercy!" |
"Assembly lines do not stop by themselves, machines do not break down by themselves, boilers do not burst by themselves...Somebody's hand is behind every such action. Is it the hand of an enemy? This is the first question we should ask." -Excerpt from a Pravda article, 1937 "Impossibly high quotas and over-centralized planning made for canals too small for the right ships and parts too big for the right machines. Consumers ran short of everything from bread to soap, and hastily built factories were crippled by accidents. All this just increased the need for scapegoats." |
Personal Interview with Hiroaki KuromiyaHow did Joseph Stalin seek to change or improve the conditions of Russia under the leadership of Czar Nicholas II during his own leadership?
"The Russian autocracy was replaced by Stalin’s one-party dictatorship. The same question, the same problem [as during czarist leadership], remained. But certainly, the Soviet Union was not backward-looking; it looked forward to take advantage of industrial technological achievements of the day and that certainly helped Moscow to govern the Soviet Union."
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