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Stalin and the Soviet Economy

Stalin and the Soviet Economy. I. The first Five-Year Plan 1928-32 (What was the purpose of the first FYP?) A. It laid down what was to be achieved but not how. B. First FYP was more of a set of targets then a plan.

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Stalin and the Soviet Economy

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  1. Stalin and the Soviet Economy

  2. I. The first Five-Year Plan 1928-32(What was the purpose of the first FYP?) A. It laid downwhat was to be achieved but not how. B. First FYP was more of a set of targets then a plan. C. Local officials and mangers falsified their production figures to give impression they had met their targets. D. Stalin is impressed by the progress and adjust his quotas upwards. (The “Optimal” plan) E. Figures were again revised even higher in 1932 II. Propaganda A. The plan was a huge propaganda project 1. Designed to convince the Soviet people they were engaged in a vast industrial enterprise.

  3. B. Among the young especially, an enthusiasm and a commitment that suggested that many Soviet citizens believed they were building a new better world. 1. “There is no fortress that we Bolsheviks cannot storm.” III. Successes and achievements A. 1st FYP was an extraordinary achievement overall. B. Coal, iron and electric power supply all increased in huge proportions. C. It gave a low priority to improving the material lives of the Soviet people. 1. No affordable consumer goods were made. Living conditions actually deteriorated. 2. This was not by accident. Plan was never intended to raise living standards. Its purpose was the collective not individual.

  4. IV. Resistance and sabotage (Why so little resistance to the FYP?) A. Stalin presented it as a defense of the USSR against international hostility. 1. “Wreckers” trials was used to impress the Party/masses of the futility of protesting and industrialization program. 2. In 1928 (prelude to 1st FYP), Stalin claims to have discovered an anti-Soviet conspiracy among mining engineers of Shakhty. a. Their public trial intended to frighten the workers into line. Also showed that the position of skilled workers, (“bourgeois experts”) was to be tolerated no longer. 3. Attack on the experts was part of a pattern in the 1st FYP, it emphasized quantity at the expense of quality. 4. This led to whole enterprises ruined because of the workers lack of basic skills.

  5. 5. Stalin places the blame for underproduction on poor managers 6. Sabotage became a blanket term used to denounce anyone considered not pulling his weight. 7. Factory managers found themselves on trial as public enemies of the Soviet state. a. Fear and recrimination flourished. b. doctoring official returns & inflating output figures became the norm. c. Everyone was involved in the inflation of the numbers. This leads Stalin to believe that he could cut it to a 4 year plan.

  6. V. Stalin: the master-planner? (How far was the 1st FYP planned from the top?) A. Very little planning from the top. B. Most historians consider it a plan of “one foot in front of the other as he went along.” C. The Stalin government exhorted, cajoled and bullied the workers into ever greater efforts towards ever greater production, but the planning was more at the local not national level.

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