1st October 1928: The USSR introduces the first five-year plan under Joseph Stalin скачать в хорошем качестве

1st October 1928: The USSR introduces the first five-year plan under Joseph Stalin

The plan set a series of economic goals to be achieved between 1929 and 1934, with the intention of rapidly industrialising the USSR in case of war with the West. Based on Stalin’s policy of Socialism in One Country, the five-year plan called for a complete change in the culture of the Soviet Union that affected agriculture just as much as industry. A vital ingredient in being able to fulfil the industrial goals of the five-year plan was an increase in agricultural productivity. Improved agricultural output would release peasants and farm labourers from the land and allow them to become industrial workers. The first five-year plan is therefore probably most famous for the introduction of the policy of collectivisation, where hundreds of peasants were put together to work on enormous farms that covered thousands of acres. The dramatic increase in food output per peasant as a result of mechanisation on collectivised farms freed up former agricultural workers to move to the new factories instead. This led to the number of industrial workers almost doubling between 1928 and the end of the plan in 1932. However, significant opposition to the process of collectivisation meant that overall productivity remained low in many areas and caused widespread famine in the countryside as Party officials seized food for the cities yet left the agricultural workers with nothing. In the factories, however, production soared. Although the targets were constantly revised to the point where they could never be achieved, the first five-year plan firmly set the USSR on the road to becoming a world superpower.