Joseph Stalin's Five-Year Plans (1928 to 50) were a series of state-led initiatives which aimed to grow the economy of the USSR, rapidly industrialise what was still a largely agricultural state, and collectivise farms to both increase productivity and reduce anti-Communist elements in the countryside. Partially successful in their aims, although never achieving the ambitious targets they set, the four plans under Stalin did transform the USSR into a much more modern and powerful state. Negative consequences of the plans included the Great Famine of the early 1930s, which killed millions, the persecution of the wealthier landowning peasantry (kulaks), a persistently low quality of production, and huge amounts of wasted costs.

The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 established a new republic: Soviet Russia. The leader of the radical socialist movement was Vladimir Lenin (1870 to 1924), and his goal was a fairer society where workers and peasants were not exploited by wealthy capitalists. As they had promised, the Bolsheviks gave workers more rights and peasants their own land to work, and Russia withdrew from the First World War (1914 to 18). However, only one party was permitted – the Communist Party, as the Bolsheviks soon called themselves. Other promises proved much more difficult to keep: to curb inflation, end food shortages, and improve Russia's backward economy. Only after the hugely damaging Russian Civil War (1917 to 22), in which the Bolsheviks had to defend their revolution against moderates, sympathisers to the old Tsarist regime, and foreign states, could Lenin turn his attention to his country's economic problems.

Lenin set about revolutionising the economy. Land was redistributed from the wealthy to the peasantry. Banking became a state monopoly. Shares and dividends were forbidden. Many industries were nationalised. Lenin was determined that, in the longer term, the state would control all industries, but to achieve this, he would have to weaken worker-soviet power. The first step was, ironically for followers of Karl Marx, to encourage state capitalism and reinstate former factory managers and specialists.

From 1921, Lenin compromised on his ideology and instigated the New Economic Policy (NEP), a strategy which involved a measure of private enterprise. There was an economic recovery, but to compensate for the reinstatement of certain aspects of capitalism, the Communist Party became all-powerful, biding its time until further steps like farm collectivisation and a fully planned economy could be implemented.

In 1922, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was declared. Although the NEP created an economic recovery, it did not create a significantly expanded and technologically advanced economy. The NEP created certain economic problems, notably a fall in food prices but a rise in consumer goods prices. The keen debate over the NEP's use of capitalist ideals continued through the 1920s. Lenin acknowledged the ideological paradox of the NEP in Soviet Russia but insisted he was "building socialism with capitalist hands" (Freeze, 322). Under the NEP, only 8.5% of Russia's industrial businesses remained nationalised. 76% of retail business was in private hands. This was not what some revolutionaries had envisaged when they had swept aside Tsar Nicholas II.

The Soviet government did continue to control heavy industry, banking, and foreign trade. To achieve better control, the government formed a new state planning agency, Gosplan. One of the government's main concerns was to raise labour productivity since only this would lower the costs of production and so allow businesses to acquire a profit. Lenin died in January 1924, and leaders within the ruling party debated whether to continue with the NEP or not.

The NEP did have some successes. By 1928, agricultural and industrial output had regained pre-war levels. The standard of living was raised. However, economic growth was slow, and unemployment was still too high for comfort (14% in industry in 1927). Technological advances were slow to spread. In 1928, only 1% of agricultural land was farmed using tractors instead of draught animals.

The only partially successful NEP was finally ended in 1928 by Joseph Stalin (1878 to 1953), Lenin's successor as leader of the USSR. Stalin championed a return to radical socialist ideals, indeed, even beyond these to an entirely new form of state control. Abolishing the NEP also meant Stalin could discredit his chief leadership rival, Nikolai Bukharin (1888 to 1938), who was a supporter of it. The poor state of the economy was not only blamed on the NEP but also on richer landowning peasants and the 'money-grabbing' merchants (NEPmen). It was time for a policy change.

Stalin's new approach was to collectivise farms (that is, collect smaller private farms into much larger state-owned farms) and fully nationalise industry, massively increasing the intervention of the state in the economy. The USSR's brief flirtation with capitalism was over. Collectivising farms, in particular, was a policy that seemed to exactly replicate in the countryside the Bolshevik/socialist ideal of a community of workers in industry in the cities.

The Communist Party had always struggled to gain support in rural areas. 80% of the USSR's population lived in the countryside, yet only one in 336 was a member of the Communist Party. By radically shaking up rural life and destroying the traditional peasant order of land ownership, Stalin's collectivisation would permit the state to control vast areas where previously it had been almost totally absent in practical terms. This process was couched in militaristic terms as Stalin envisaged nothing short of a war against what he regarded as a backward and money-grabbing peasantry. Collectivisation would be the 1917 Revolution repeated in the countryside.

From 1929 to 1931, "20 million individual farms were amalgamated into 250,000 collectives" (Brown, 393). Often entire villages were absorbed into the two types of collective farms: supposedly voluntary cooperatives where the farmers maintained shared ownership (kolkhozy) and fully state-owned farms (sovkhozy) where farmers were little more than paid labourers. By 1932, 61.5% of rural households were part of a collective farm. Those outside the collective farm still had to give produce to the state and were heavily fined for not meeting the required quotas. Collectivisation was even applied to areas where the people lived as nomadic herders. Kazakhs, for example, were collectivised and so lost almost all of their sheep herds. As the farms were now bigger, they became dependent on machinery, especially tractors, but the distribution of these was closely controlled by the state.

Stalin achieved at least a partial victory in establishing more state control in rural communities. Collectivisation also permitted rural labour to be released – around 10 million people between 1928 and 1933 – for Stalin's push for a fully industrialised state, what he called 'the Great Turn'. 'Brutal lurch' might have been a better term.

Stalin had drawn up a series of industrial and economic targets, which were known as the five-year plans, since each one covered that time span (more or less). There would be four five-year plans under Stalin. The First Five-Year Plan for National Economic Construction, to give it its full title, began in October 1928 (actually, it began in April 1929 but was retroactively dated to have started the year before). The plan contained targets for industries and the collective farms.

The Five-Year Plan targets were set by Gosplan and imposed in reality by an ever-growing state-backed bureaucracy. The targets were typically set for each month, quarter, and year. These targets could be quantities of product, productivity, cost reduction, or simply increasing the variety of products. Targets for heavy industry included increasing annual pig iron production from 3.3 to 10 million tons. Coal production was to rise from 35.4 million tons per year to 75 million tons. The target for annual iron ore production was to rise from 5.7 million tons to 19 million tons. Light industry was expected to rise by 70%, the national income by 103%, labour productivity by 110%, and agricultural production by 55%. Critics considered these figures wildly optimistic.

The First Five-Year Plan did not meet any of its main targets, but it did achieve economic growth and modernisation. From 1928 to 1937, Russia's industrial production "increased by 12 to 18 per cent a year" (Brown, 393), particularly in the areas of industrial and agricultural machinery. Huge new industrial plants, hydro-electric plants, and canal systems were built from scratch, and the train network was greatly extended. The state invested significantly in education, building new schools and universities, which greatly extended literacy. Other public projects included the construction of parks, sports facilities, and cinemas.

The downside of the plan was that such intense state interference often stifled incentives to produce more. Once a target was met, there was no incentive to better it. Many enterprises kept back any surplus to ensure they could reach the next target. Many producers exaggerated their figures so as to be seen to meet the plan's targets. Planning was crude, and the quality of the manufactured goods produced was often poor. As industries grew, so too did the populations of towns and cities, straining traditional communities and infrastructures. "The urban population rose from 26 million in 1926 to 56 million in 1939" (Brown, 393). Rationing was required for foodstuffs and consumer goods (a sector seriously neglected by the state in this period), which led to trading on black markets. Scarcity of even the most basic goods like bread led to prices rising far faster than wages did. Perhaps the greatest upheaval of all was in agriculture.

The collectivisation of farms, particularly in Ukraine, considered the breadbasket of the USSR, was a disaster. In the collectivisation process, the larger farms were typically managed by individuals loyal to the Communist Party who often had little or no knowledge of agriculture. The state and its officials were really only concerned with fulfilling the targets of the five-year plans, and so grain and foodstuffs were simply seized from the region of Ukraine in 1932 and 1933. These requisitions helped farms in other parts of the USSR meet their targets but caused a devastating famine in Ukraine. The situation was so bad that many Ukrainians resorted to cannibalism in order to survive; there were even cases of families killing and eating their weakest children. Around 5 million Ukrainians died in the famine. Other areas to suffer famine through 1932 to 3 were the North Caucasus and the lower Volga region. The targets of the First Five-Year Plan did indeed prove to be hopelessly optimistic, with grain falling short by around 50%. In Ukraine, 9,000 tons of potatoes were grown instead of the target of 25,000 tons.

Another problem with collectivisation was the chronic lack of transport to take produce from one place to another. There was investment in the railways, but not enough. All too often, the problem of famine in one region could not be alleviated by the movement of a surplus in another region because the transport system was so antiquated and slow that food rotted before it could reach its destination.

Peasants of the bedniak class, who had no land of their own or any means to work it, largely welcomed the idea of collectivisation. There was, though, resistance to the collectivisation process, especially from the class which came to be known (by the state) as the kulaks, a derogatory term which literally means "tight-fisted". This wealthier peasant class (previously known as the seredniaki) had had their own land to work but lost it in the collectivisation process. The term kulak was actually used indiscriminately against any farmer who opposed the state. Those who sympathised with dispossessed farmers were known as 'subkulaks'.

The land-owning farmers were sceptical of the state's promises that collectivisation would bring lasting prosperity. The state seemed to have been directly responsible for all kinds of rural misery so far in the 20th century. The kulaks were equally sceptical of the government's sweeteners such as a promise to supply new machinery like tractors and credits for land requisitioned by the state.

One means to protest was for kulaks to slaughter their own livestock rather than hand them over to the state. In this way, at least according to a speech by Stalin in June 1930, one-third of cattle and one-fifth of horses were lost. By 1933, "the numbers of cattle, pigs, and sheep were less than half what they had been in 1928" (Freeze, 350). Other forms of protest included demonstrations and riots (frequently involving women activists), stealing property such as tools from the collective farm, and murdering state officials.

As Stalin waged a war on the kulaks, the state brutally dealt with any and all resistance (and those suspected of potentially resisting in the future). The luckier farmers regarded as enemies of the state were given inferior land to work, land not part of the collective farms. Some were obliged to relocate as they were only given inferior land in another region. The worst fate for farmers was to be exiled and forced to work as labourers in remote camps in regions like Siberia, where they performed menial tasks like chopping wood. In addition, by 1929, around 64,000 prisoners had been moved to camps of forced labour. Any politically motivated opposition to the state was brutally quashed, both outside and inside the Communist Party.

It is estimated that there were 3.5 million arrests and 6.5 million deaths as a result of 'dekulakisation' (Berlatsky, 28). By 1933, around 2 million farmers had been forcibly relocated. Up to one million farmers were sent to a growing network of labour camps, in what became known as the Gulag System. Put simply, uncountable human suffering, famine, and deaths were considered a price worth paying by Stalin in order to maintain his iron grip on power and achieve the long-dreamed goal of making Russia a major industrial power.

So brutal was the 'Great Turn' that instead of a booming agricultural sector that could provide a driving force for greater industrialisation, the low productivity of collectivised farms became a serious drain on the economy of the USSR. Nevertheless, Stalin pursued his idea of Five-Year Plans for the rest of his time in power, albeit with less ambitious targets.

The Second Five-Year Plan began in January 1933 and focused on what Stalin called 'mastering technology'. Targets were revised, such as the aim to produce 100 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity in 1937 (revised to 38 billion) and 22 million tons of pig iron (reduced to 14.5 million tons). Certain unsuccessful innovations of the First Five-Year Plan were abandoned, such as a rolling working week of four days of work and one day off. A hierarchy of personnel based on skills was reintroduced, too. Engineers were reinstated as workers essential to the success of industry. In agriculture, the aim was now to make the sector fully mechanised.

Collectively, the above measures to reduce excessive egalitarianism and collectivisation became known as Stalinism, a philosophy that championed above all patriotism, hierarchy, conservatism, and state power. These ideals were protected by Stalin's Great Purge of any and all opposition, and promoted by state-sponsored propaganda (which ranged from school textbooks to show trials), and the creation of a vast and all-powerful bureaucracy.

The Second Five-Year Plan achieved a measure of success as the worst upheavals of the collectivisation process settled down. Rationing was ended in 1934 to 5. Some progress was made in establishing a more efficient railway system. The metal industries were flourishing. Productivity was also going up as more was expected of workers, more women were employed in factories, and through propaganda programmes like Stakhanovism, where the example of a prodigious miner called Aleksei Stakhanov, who exceeded his personal quota by 1400% in August 1935, was held up to the nation as an example to follow. Perhaps more sharply motivating for workers was the destruction of trade unions and the classification of tardiness and absenteeism as criminal offences.

Towards the end of the second plan's period, around 1937, the economy began to suffer from an overemphasis on heavy industry and purges of factory managers and economic planners as Stalin once again grew paranoid about anti-Communist saboteurs wrecking factories and impeding production levels. The harsh winter of 1937 to 8 brought back rationing of foodstuffs and disrupted the transport network.

The Third Five-Year Plan, which began in January 1938, aimed to complete industrialisation and make the USSR ready for what seemed an inevitable war. When Nazi Germany attacked the USSR in June 1941 with Operation Barbarossa, the ambitious targets for this plan went out the window. In the first few months of the war, the USSR lost vast swathes of territory which included over 60% of the state's capacity to produce aluminium, coal, iron, and steel. Stalin was obliged to move over 1,500 factories to the east of Russia. Another 3,500 new factories were built as Stalin steadily mobilised the economy to focus on war materials.

Following victory in WWII, Stalin's Fourth Five-Year Plan began in March 1946 and aimed to restore the economy to pre-war levels. This objective was achieved by 1950; indeed, in that year, the USSR's gross industrial output was 40% higher than in 1940.

Were the Five-Year Plans a success? Historians continue to debate what might have been if the NEP or some other policy had been pursued. Certainly, economic growth and industrialisation came at a terrible price for millions of citizens. Consequently, "the prevailing view is that during the Stalin years far more could have been achieved at far less cost" (Brown, 394). Stalin's successors continued with the idea of Five-Year Plans, but the last one was interrupted by the collapse of the USSR in 1991.