The First Five-Year Plan

THE INTERWAR PERIOD HIST 1301 | History The First Five-Year Plan Stalin's domestic agenda took the shape of Five-Year Plans, which specified the economic gains the Soviet Union was expected to accomplish at the end of each plan. The schedule was challenging, if not unachievable. Officials risked losing their jobs or maybe their lives in an attempt to reach output requirements, but they nevertheless made an effort to accomplish the goals. The Soviet Union was intended to industrialise quickly under the first Five-Year Plan. Due to the necessity to create more farm equipment for the peasantry and the need to undermine those who had been calling for increased industrialization, Stalin renounced his former support of moderate growth. Certain sectors saw the development and funding of cities dedicated to them. The plan called for the construction of new electrical power plants as well as a sharp increase in the production of iron and steel. Numerous of these objectives were met, and there was a roughly 50% growth in total industrial capacity. When it came to agriculture, Stalin's goal of imposing state control over every element of Soviet society failed. The transition from small farms to large state-run farms was the essence of collectivization of agriculture, and Communist Party officials ignored the realities of agricultural production in their haste to meet increased production quotas following the first Five-Year Plan. The government officials' incursion into the daily lives of the peasants was fiercely opposed. They even turned to violent methods when the plan was carried out. Better lifestyles, which the revolution had promised, would not be attainable under the plan. Many peasants in the agricultural areas of the nation were classified by the authorities as kulaks. The more liberal policies of the NEP had brought prosperity to the Kulaks. According to Soviet policy in the early 1920s, a kulak was a person who employed seasonal agricultural labourers on a farm that was between twenty-five and forty acres in size. This group of farmers was quite small, yet Stalin used them as scapegoats. He portrayed them as state opponents and held them accountable for the challenges in enacting collectivization, making them vulnerable to detention and perhaps execution. Not even their family members were allowed to go to college or hold certain occupations. Stalin speeded the campaign to collectivization, and local authorities did all they could to comply with the increased standards for grain collection. Over 90% of the peasant population was compelled to live and labour on communal farms by 1939. They may be arrested if they protested, and many of them would end themselves in Siberian labour camps. Middle-class peasants continued to reject collectivization, even murdering their animals instead of giving them over to the Soviet authorities, but other impoverished peasants cooperated since they had little of their own property to lose. Collectivization caused the loss of almost half of the country's cattle in the 1930s; the numbers did not start to rise again until the 1950s. The disturbance prevented spring planting in several places. Millions of people in the Soviet Union died as a result of collectivization's failures. About two million people perished in jail or while resisting, while a famine brought on by the confusion of the situation, the decision of the peasants to butcher their cattle, and government initiatives that kept food away from them claimed the lives of an additional five to 10 million people. Particularly severely affected were the grain-producing regions of Ukraine; there, government policies led to widespread hunger. A few officers even entered houses and stole any food they could find. The famine known as the Holodomor— which means "death by famine" in Ukrainian—is thought to have claimed the lives of some 3.9 million Ukrainians. Many inside the Communist Party began to doubt Stalin's judgement as a result of the collectivization issues. Stalin suspected that a plan to assassinate him had been discovered during the inquiry into the 1934 killing of high-ranking Soviet politician Sergei Kirov. Stalin's rising anxiety was fueled by Kirov's death, collectivization-related unrest, antiSoviet rhetoric from Germany's Nazi Party (which had seized power in 1933), and his awareness that many Soviet leaders did not share his outlook on the USSR's future. Due to his fear that he was surrounded by adversaries, the Soviet secret police detained millions of people on the grounds that they were disloyal. Many were taken to Siberian detention camps, where they starved to death and died from exhaustion. Some were put to death right away after short trials. For some, there were no trials at all. Kulaks, intellectuals, Russian Orthodox priests, ethnic minorities, workers (dubbed "saboteurs") in factories where accidents had occurred due to the hectic pace of the Five-Year Plan, Red Army officers, government officials, well-known Soviet politicians, and Lenin supporters from the early days of the Bolshevik Revolution were among those imprisoned or killed. The number of Soviet deaths from the political purges of the 1930s is disputed among historians, although one million is a reasonable estimate.