Eighth Five-Year Plan (Golden Five-Year Plan)

History

The plan was drafted on the basis of the directives of the 23rd CPSU Congress (1966) and the decisions of the October 1964 and March and September 1965 plenums of the CPSU Central Committee. At the September 1965 plenum Kosygin outlined the contours of the coming eighth five-year plan and presented a reform that expanded the economic independence of enterprises, abolished the territorial organs of economic management and planning (sovnarkhozes) and put profit and profitability in first place. The congress directives were referred to Gosplan for elaboration into the official five-year plan, but ratification by the Supreme Soviet was repeatedly delayed and no final version appears ever to have been ratified. Goals were twice altered downward during the period, and the overall industrial-production target was probably achieved although the composition of output differed from the original goals.

Examples

National income rose 42%, gross industrial output 51% and agricultural output 21%, an average annual growth rate of 7.7%, the best figures in the entire history of the USSR and of modern Russia. By 1970 the USSR ranked second in the world by GDP, behind only the USA. The Bratsk, Krasnoyarsk and Saratov hydroelectric stations and the Dnieper GRES, the first stage of the Volga Automobile Plant in Tolyatti, and the West Siberian and Karaganda metallurgical combines were put into operation, and work began on developing the Tyumen oil-and-gas complex. Completion of the single power system of the European part of the USSR and creation of a joint power system of Central Siberia took place during the plan, and central dispatch control began operating in 1967. One tangible outcome of the reforms was the appearance of new mass-market chocolate brands, including 'Alyonka' (1966) and 'Sedmoye nebo' (1967), produced by the Krasny Oktyabr factory, which joined the experiment among the first 48 enterprises. By 1969 more than 32,000 enterprises, accounting for 77% of Soviet output, were operating under the new system.

Relations and distinctions

The plan implemented the economic reforms announced in 1965, which linked wages more closely to output, and, given the transition envisioned and its emphasis on economic realism, it set relatively modest production goals. It departed from the slogan 'Overtake and surpass the U.S.A.' and prioritized consumer goods, promising wider distribution of television sets, refrigerators and washing machines, higher wages, lower consumer-goods prices and a shift to a five-day work week. The reform itself expanded the economic independence of enterprises, abolished the sovnarkhozes and put indicators of economic efficiency, profit and profitability, in first place. Despite outstanding results, the rolling-back of the reform began in 1968: the innovations clashed with the principles of managing the national economy and with the convictions of the leadership, and the experiment had many opponents in the government, including Leonid Brezhnev. One reading attributes the leap in the economy to nothing but the change in the model of enterprise management and in the evaluation of labour results, though there were no fundamental changes in the financing of branches or in centralized modernization programmes. Technically the eighth five-year plan was the seventh five-year plan: the sixth five-year plan was interrupted in 1959 by the unnumbered seven-year plan.