Five-Year Plan

From "control figures" to pyatiletka

In the mid-1920s Gosplan drew up, for the first time, an annual economic programme for the 1925/26 financial year under the heading "control figures" (P99). Such annual plans were criticized as lacking width and vision, and in 1927 a first five-year scheme was framed for October 1926 to September 1931 (P99). It was the Opposition under Trotsky's leadership that demanded accelerated industrialization and the replacement of annual plans by five-year plans; its proposal, put to the April 1926 Plenum of the Central Committee, was rejected by the majority of the leadership and derided by Stalin (P30, P98). When Stalin's five-year plan was implemented in 1928, the Opposition's "super-industrialist" demands were in effect absorbed into it (P3, P30, P101).

Gosplan and party directives

The plans were drafted centrally on a nationwide scale by the State Planning Commission (Gosplan) under the leadership of the CPSU (P1). Gosplan began drawing up five-year plans and supervising their fulfilment in 1928 (P10). Each plan dealt with all aspects of development: capital and consumer goods, agriculture, transport, communications, health, education and welfare, with base and optimum targets and an emphasis that varied from plan to plan (P32). The third plan sought to move industry eastward to make it safer from attack in a coming war (P32).

Cycles that did not fill their terms

The first plan began on 1 October 1928 and ran to 31 December 1932 (P34). Until 1931 Soviet national-economic statistics were kept by economic years beginning on 1 October, and after 1929/30 a special quarter was added (P4). Several plans did not take up the full period assigned to them: some were pronounced completed earlier than expected, some took much longer, and others failed and had to be abandoned (P6, P24). The dating of the first plan differs between sources: the maximum variant made official in 1929 is described as covering 1928-33, while the plan period is also given as 1928-1932 (P3, P34, P101). In 1959 the 21st Party Congress adopted a seven-year plan for 1959-1965 (semiletka), which was merged into the seventh five-year plan in 1961 (P7, P57). The twelfth plan (1986-1990) opened under the slogan of "acceleration" but ended in a profound economic crisis across virtually all sectors (P68). The last, thirteenth plan, for 1991-1995, was not carried out because the Soviet Union was dissolved in 1991 (P8, P24).

What was built, and what it cost

The early plans aimed at rapid industrialization and therefore placed a major focus on heavy industry. Approximately 86 per cent of all industrial investments during the 1928-1940 industrialization period went directly to heavy industry (P35). Between 1928 and 1940 the number of Soviet workers in industry, construction and transport grew from 4.6 million to 12.6 million and factory output soared (P34). Officially the industrial programme of the first plan was fulfilled to 93.7 per cent in four years and three months, with the means-of-production sector reaching 103.4 per cent and consumer goods up to 84.9 per cent of its assigned quota (P35). Yet much investment made in the west was excluded from the accounts, and although many factories were built and production rose sharply, the target figures were not approached (P40). The approach to industrialization was extremely inefficient: vast resources went into construction that was never completed and equipment that was never used, and much of the consumer goods produced was of unusable quality and wasted (P41).

The plan was not only an economic matter. The first five-year plan was a revolution intended to transform all aspects of society; it was also called the "Great Turn," and individual peasant farming gave way to collective farming (P37). There was strong resistance to this at first, and by the time the process was done, collectivization resembled a very bloody military campaign against the peasants' traditional way of life (P38). A major event of the first plan was the famine of 1932-33, which peaked in the winter of 1932-33 and claimed an estimated 3.3 to 7 million lives, with millions more permanently disabled; it was the direct result of the industrialization and collectivization carried out under the first plan (P42).

Repression in the planning apparatus

The first purges of the period were aimed at many people working for Gosplan, including Vladimir Bazarov and the 1931 Menshevik Trial centred on Vladimir Groman (P34).

Beyond the USSR

Most other communist states adopted a similar method of planning (P25, P71). India's five-year plans, run by the Planning Commission from 1951 to 2017, were inspired by the Soviet model, and Pakistan (1956-1998), Bhutan and Indonesia's REPELITA (1969-1998) adopted the same method as well (P71, P72, P73).

Sources and the problem of the figures

Writing in 1930, Boris Souvarine argued that the fanciful figures supplied in abundance by Soviet government departments served propaganda purposes and that data from different institutions rarely coincided; for him the most important figures were the inconspicuous ones showing discrepancies in accomplishing the plan's key tasks (P103, P104). The 1988 Soviet political dictionary defined the five-year plan as the basic form of centralized planning of socio-economic development in the USSR and other socialist countries and judged that the first plan was successfully fulfilled, confirming the advantages of the planned socialist system, while naming negative features of five-year planning that had not yet been overcome: the direct directive setting of volume indicators, enterprises' lack of independence in using their funds, and the weak interest of work collectives in accelerating technical progress and raising productivity (P113, P116).