Five-Year Plans
Five-Year Plans
- Five-Year Plans were highly ambitious targets drawn up by Gosplan (state planning committee)
- First FYP: Oct 1928 - Dec 1932
- Second FYP: Jan 1933 - Dec 1937
- Third FYP: Jan 1938 - Jun 1941
- a war plan; disrupted by WWII
- Fourth FYP: Jan 1946 - Dec 1950
- Fifth FYP: Jan 1951 - Dec 1955
- posters and political cartoons put up to promote FYPs
- often showed a giant ‘5’ crushing a Jew (hooked nose) wearing a top hat (capitalism/Uncle Sam) on top of a battleship (the FYP will crush the West)
- message: Jews perpetuate capitalism and were seen as the capitalist class because they owned many businesses, even in Nazi Germany
- often showed a giant ‘5’ crushing a Jew (hooked nose) wearing a top hat (capitalism/Uncle Sam) on top of a battleship (the FYP will crush the West)
First FYP (1928 - 1932)
- focused on major industries – coal, iron, oil, electricity
- extremely ambitious and unattainable targets → targets were often not met
- officials often fudged figures to exaggerate actual output
- workers were under so much stress that work absenteeism increased
- production increased regardless → laid foundation for next FYP
Achievements
- coal, iron, generation of electricity 📈📈 in huge proportions
Textbook
📕 Textbook Page 227, Figure 9.
- huge steel mills appeared in Magnitogorsk
- new dams and hydroelectric power fed the industry’s energy requirements
- Russian experts flooded Muslim republics of Central Asia (Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan) → created industry in previously-underdeveloped areas
Second FYP (1933 - 1937)
- built on the first FYP’s achievements
- heavy industry remained a priority + other areas developed too
- mining for tin, lead, zinc, etc. 📈
- production of tractors + other farm machinery 📈
- transport and communications boosted → new railways and canals built (e.g. Moscow underground railways)
Third FYP (1938 - 1941)
- focused on switching factories to consumer goods
- they forgot about consumer goods for the first two 💀 → Russians lived with deprivation and did not have access to consumables for the first ten years
- housewives would queue for 4-5 hours every day to get 1-2 loaves of bread to last them the entire week
- they forgot about consumer goods for the first two 💀 → Russians lived with deprivation and did not have access to consumables for the first ten years
- disrupted by the onset of WWI
Source Analysis
Source 13.13 (p.229 of handout)
Source 13.13
[The purge] swept away… managers, technicians, statisticians, planners, even foremen. Everywhere there were said to be spies, wreckers, diversionists. There was a grave shortage of qualified personnel, so the deportation of many thousands of engineers and technologists to distance concentration camps represented a severe loss. But perhaps equally serious was the psychological effect of this terror on the survivors. With any error or accident likely to be attributable to treasonable activities, the simplest thing to do was to avoid responsibility, to seek approval from one’s superiors for any act, to obey mechanically any order received, regardless of local conditions.
- “managers, technicians, statisticians, planners, even foremen” → no one spared
- scope of purges
- ruthlessness of purges
- speed and efficiency of purges
- pervasiveness of opposition, or “traitors”
- negative impact of purges
- psychological trauma & terror
- how people responded to the purges
- people became obedient
- positive: control over population
- negative: loss of population’s voice → doesn’t help to improve conditions
- negative:
- PTSD
- psychological trauma
- dogmatism ruled, rather than pragmatism
- ideology & groupthink > individual thought
- overall: negative & regressive; people became more cautious, suspicious and inward-looking
- people became obedient