Industrialization in the Soviet Union

• 1. Introduction

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  Industrialization in the Soviet Union began in May 1929 with a single declared ambition: to close a gap of fifty to one hundred years against the advanced world in just ten years. Stalin put it plainly to the 16th Congress of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) in 1930: "Either we do it, or they crush us." That sentence compressed an entire governing logic. A peasant country of hundreds of millions, where factory workers were only a small fraction of the population, was about to be remade by command into an industrial power. The questions the rest of this story will answer are not simply how fast it happened, but at what cost, through whose labor, and whether it worked the way its architects claimed.

• 2. Before the Plan

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  The Soviet industrialization drive did not begin with the first five-year plan. In December 1920, the GOELRO plan was approved by the 8th All-Russian Congress of Soviets, laying out a vision for electrifying the country across eight major economic regions. It called for thirty district power plants, twenty thermal and ten hydroelectric, with a combined capacity of 1.75 gigawatts, and paired electricity construction with new railways and the Volga-Don Canal. Designed to run ten to fifteen years, GOELRO was the scaffolding on which later ambitions rested. By 1932, electricity generation had risen nearly seven times compared to 1913, from 2 to 13.5 billion kilowatt-hours.

  While the lights were being strung across the country, a fierce argument raged inside the party about the pace and method of economic transformation. Under the New Economic Policy still in effect until 1928, agriculture, retail, and light industry were largely in private hands, while the state held heavy industry, transport, and banks. Two intellectual camps competed. The genetic school, associated with economists Vladimir Bazarov, Vladimir Groman, and Nikolai Kondratiev, argued that plans should reflect objective economic trends. The teleological school, led by Gleb Krzhizhanovsky, Valerian Kuybyshev, and Stanislav Strumilin, insisted that plans should restructure the economy from the top down. Leon Trotsky backed the teleological case and pressed for five-year plans as early as his April 1926 report to the Central Committee plenum, where he also proposed the Dnieprostroi hydroelectric dam. Those proposals were rejected at the time.

  Economist Evgeny Preobrazhensky, aligned with Trotsky, had developed the concept of forced "superindustrialization" in 1924-25, arguing for drawing funds out of the countryside in what he called "initial socialist accumulation." Nikolai Bukharin attacked this as imposing "feudal military exploitation of the peasantry." Joseph Stalin initially sided with Bukharin. After Trotsky's exclusion from the party's Central Committee in late 1927, Stalin reversed course entirely, a shift the researcher Vadim Rogovin traces to the grain harvest crisis of that same year, when peasants en masse refused to sell grain at state prices considered too low.

• 3. The Foreign Policy Pressure

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  On the 23rd of February 1927, the British Foreign Secretary sent a note demanding that the Soviet Union halt its support for the Kuomintang-Communist government in China. The British followed that on the 24th-the 27th of May by breaking off diplomatic relations entirely. A raid on the Soviet embassy in Beijing on the 6th of April, a British police search of the Soviet-British joint-stock company Arcos in London on the 12th of May, and a series of terrorist attacks in June by representatives of the Russian All-Military Union compressed a single year into a cascade of hostility. On the 7th of June, the White emigre Koverda killed the Soviet plenipotentiary in Warsaw, Voykov. That same day in Minsk, the head of the Belarusian Joint State Political Directorate, Iosif Opansky, was killed. The day before, a bomb had been thrown at the Joint State Political Directorate in Moscow.

  At the 15th Congress of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) in December 1927, Anastas Mikoyan acknowledged that the country had lived through the difficulties of "the eve of war without having a war." That phrase described the psychological environment in which the first five-year plan was being drafted. As early as 1921, Sergey Gusev and Mikhail Frunze had prepared a reorganization draft for the 10th party congress that declared both the inevitability of a new large war and the Red Army's unpreparedness for it. They called for shock production of tanks, artillery, armored cars, armored trains, and airplanes. Lev Kamenev, presenting his report "About the Soviet Republic Surrounded" at that same 1921 congress, had warned that the old imperialist slaughter would generate, as its natural continuation, "some new, even more monstrous, even more disastrous imperialist war." That fear ran like a current under the whole industrialization project.

• 4. American Blueprints, Soviet Factories

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  In February 1930, the Soviet government signed an agreement with the firm of American architect Albert Kahn, establishing it as chief consultant on industrial construction. The package of orders was valued at two billion dollars, or roughly two hundred fifty billion dollars in later prices. Kahn's firm provided designs for more than five hundred industrial facilities across the Soviet Union.

  The Magnitogorsk Metallurgical Plant was designed by the American firm Arthur G. McKee and Co., which also supervised its construction. The standard blast furnace used at Magnitogorsk and at all other steel mills built during the industrialization period came from the Chicago-based Freyn Engineering Co. The hydroelectric DneproGES, one of the flagship projects of the era, was built with Hugh Cooper, an American hydrobuilder, as chief consultant; its hydro turbines were purchased from General Electric and Newport News Shipbuilding. Ford Motors participated in the development of an automobile complex in Nizhny Novgorod, drawing on the design of Ford's River Rouge complex in Detroit. The Soviet leadership's view of industrialization had been shaped in part by watching Western European wartime economies during World War One, and the country responded by importing that expertise directly.

• 5. The Five-Year Plans in Practice

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  In 1930, around fifteen hundred facilities were launched across the Soviet Union, of which fifty absorbed almost half of all investment. The first line of the Moscow Metro opened in 1935 with a total length of 11.2 kilometers. In 1932, the Soviet Union stopped importing tractors from abroad, having built domestic tractor production. In 1934, the Kirov Plant in Leningrad began producing the "Universal" tilled tractor, which became the first domestically built tractor exported to other countries. In the ten years before the war, about seven hundred thousand tractors were produced, accounting for forty percent of world tractor output.

  To finance all of this, the state pursued unusual methods. After a "golden boycott" was declared following the nationalization of foreign concessions for gold mining, the government turned to selling paintings from the Hermitage collection to obtain foreign currency. Capital investment in heavy industry quickly exceeded original projections and kept climbing. Money supply growth during the entire first five-year period more than doubled the growth of consumer goods output, causing price increases and persistent shortages on shelves.

  In 1935, mine worker Alexey Stakhanov reportedly performed 14.5 shift quotas on the night of the 30th of August, and the Stakhanovist movement was born in his name. A number of historians note that the methods involved were a form of continuous productivity improvement previously popularized by Frederick Taylor and Henry Ford. Records were, in practice, largely staged and depended on the work of assistants. Because wages tracked productivity, Stakhanovists earned several times the industrial average. Ordinary workers resented this, accusing record-setters of driving up norms while driving down piece rates. Newspapers described "unprecedented and blatant sabotage" of the Stakhanov movement by shop managers and trade union organizations.

  From October 1930, free movement of labor was prohibited, and criminal penalties were introduced for violations of labor discipline. Since 1931, workers were held liable for damage to equipment. In 1932, forced transfer of labor between enterprises became possible, and the death penalty was introduced for the theft of state property. On the 27th of December 1932, an internal passport system was restored, which Lenin had previously condemned as "czarist backwardness and despotism." The seven-day week was replaced by a numbered five-day cycle, so that on every sixth day a shift had a day off while factories ran without interruption. Gulag prisoners' labor was incorporated into construction projects on a wide scale. Workers' discontent produced strikes at the Stalin plant, the Voroshilov plant, the Shosten plant in Ukraine, the Krasnoye Sormovo plant near Nizhny Novgorod, the Serp and Molot plant in Moscow, and the Chelyabinsk Traktorstroy, among others.

• 6. What the Numbers Show

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  At the end of 1932, the first five-year plan was declared fulfilled in four years and three months. Stalin reported at the 17th Congress of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) in January 1934 that heavy industry had fulfilled the plan by 108 percent. The production of cast iron rose from 3.3 million tons in 1928 to 6.2 million tons in 1932 and 14.5 million tons in 1937. Steel production climbed from 4.3 million tons in 1928 to 17.7 million tons in 1937. Coal output went from 35.5 million tons in 1928 to 128 million tons in 1937. Output of metal-cutting machines grew from two thousand pieces in 1928 to 48,500 in 1937. Car production rose from eight hundred units in 1928 to two hundred thousand in 1937.

  By 1941, approximately nine thousand new plants had been built. By the end of the second five-year plan, the Soviet Union had reached second place in world industrial output, behind only the United States. The industrial share of gross national output rose from 42.1 percent in 1913 to 70.4 percent in 1933. Open unemployment was eliminated. Employment at full rates increased from one-third of the population in 1928 to 45 percent in 1940. In the period 1928-1937, universities and colleges trained about two million specialists. The number of higher and secondary technical educational institutions more than quadrupled between 1930 and 1940, exceeding 150 institutions.

  Western and Russian researchers have argued that despite the announced success of the first five-year plan, statistics were falsified and none of the original goals were fully met. Sergey Syrtsov, part of the party nomenclature, described the achievement reports as "fraud." For the period 1929-1932, value added per hour of work in industry reportedly fell by 60 percent and did not recover to 1929 levels until 1952. Average labor productivity fell, according to Trotsky and foreign critics, even as specific gross national product per worker in the first ten years grew by 30 percent. The two figures are not contradictory: the labor force expanded with masses of untrained rural migrants while the overall economy also grew, producing a mixed result.

• 7. The Human Price

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  Collectivization, forced to serve industrialization, reduced the number of horses in the Soviet Union by 51 percent, or 77 million animals, between 1929 and 1933. In 1932-1936, the collective farms received about five hundred thousand tractors from the state partly to compensate for that loss. The short-term result was a drop in agricultural production. The consequence was the Soviet famine of 1932-33.

  The urban labor force increased by 12.5 million people during the first five-year plan, of whom 8.5 million were migrants from rural areas fleeing poverty, hunger, and the arbitrary exercise of state authority. By the end of 1929, rationing had been extended to almost all food products. The average level of per capita consumption in 1938 was 22 percent higher than in 1928, but the gains were concentrated among the party and labor elite and did not reach the overwhelming majority of the rural population, which constituted more than half the country's inhabitants. The Soviet Union did not reach a fifty-percent urban population share until the early 1960s.

  The White Sea-Baltic Canal drew particular criticism. Jacques Rossi argued that the canal was unnecessary. By Soviet statistics, 1.143 million tons of cargo were transported along it in 1933 and around one million tons in 1940. The construction killed up to twenty-five thousand able-bodied, working-age Soviet citizens. Those deaths reduced not only the available labor supply but the pool of military-eligible men available less than a decade later to confront Nazi Germany.

• 8. War, Debate, and Legacy

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  As of the 1st of January 1932, the Red Army held 1,446 tanks and 213 armored vehicles. By the 1st of January 1934, it had 7,574 tanks and 326 armored vehicles, more than the armies of the United Kingdom, France, and Nazi Germany combined. The military transformation was real. Whether it was enough became a painful question after June 1941.

  Historian Vitaly Lelchuk pointed out that by the beginning of winter 1941, German forces had occupied territory where, before the war, 42 percent of the Soviet population had lived, 63 percent of coal was mined, and 68 percent of pig iron was smelted. Industrial giants built during industrialization, including Novokramatorsk and Makeevka metallurgical plants and DneproGES, fell into German hands. Konstantin Nikitenko argued that the command-administrative system nullified much of industrialization's economic contribution to defense. Supporters of the Soviet interpretation pointed to the successful evacuation of 1,360 large enterprises to the Urals, Volga, Siberia, and Central Asia in the first three months of the war alone, along with the industrial expansion that had taken place east of the Ural mountains, where pre-revolutionary industry had barely existed.

  The influence of the Soviet experiment traveled beyond its borders. Japanese policymakers observed the Soviet approach to catch-up industrialization, and those observations shaped the Five Year Plan for Heavy Industry in Manchukuo, the Japanese puppet state. The Manchukuo experience in turn influenced Japanese economic mobilization after the start of the Second Sino-Japanese War.

  Soviet economist Nikolai Kolesov Dmitrievich argued that without industrialization, the country's political and economic independence would not have survived. He held that the Soviet Union eliminated its developmental backlog in thirteen years. Whether that calculation includes the famine, the Gulag labor, the suppression of labor movement, and the productivity losses that persisted into the early 1950s remains the question at the center of every serious discussion about what those years cost.