Great Break

The declaration

The phrase came from Stalin's article "Year of the Great Break", published in Pravda on 7 November 1929. It defined the past year as one of decisive turns in labour productivity, industrial construction, and the collectivization of agriculture, and asserted that peasants were entering the collective farms of their own accord.

The declaration was largely a retrospective justification. Emergency measures had already been invoked in the grain crisis of early 1928, the Sixteenth Party Conference of April 1929 had adopted the maximum variant of the first Five-Year Plan, and the Central Committee plenum that November had settled on full collectivization. The article gave these decisions a name.

Content

The turn proceeded in four directions at once. First, full collectivization and the liquidation of the kulaks recast the social structure of the countryside. Second, the targets of the first Five-Year Plan were revised upward repeatedly until heavy-industrial investment compressed consumption. Third, the attack on bourgeois specialists was institutionalized, with the Shakhty trial of 1928 and the Industrial Party trial of 1930 punishing technical cadres for sabotage. Fourth, scholarship and culture were reorganized as the schools of the previous generation in economics, philosophy, and agronomy were defined as political deviations and removed.

The terms of denunciation coined in this period map that reorganization. Menshevizing idealism, Chayanovshchina, and Kondratievshchina each named a school eliminated in philosophy, agricultural economics, and business-cycle theory respectively.

Outcome

The economic result was twofold. Across the 1930s large new capacity was built in metallurgy, machine building, and power generation, and the USSR passed from an agrarian to an industrial country. At the same time the famine of 1932 and 1933 occurred, real wages and urban consumption fell below their level of the late 1920s, and labour discipline decrees began treating movement and absenteeism as criminal matters.

The political result lasted longer. The Great Break was carried out in a way that closed inner-party debate, and with the removal of the Right Opposition the space for proposing policy alternatives closed with it. The Great Purge of the mid-1930s proceeded on the manner of rule formed in these years.