Stalin's 5 Year Plan for Economic Mass Murder | BETWEEN 2 WARS I 1932 Part 1 of 4 - YouTube (1)

So what do you do when you've ostensibly created the dictatorship of the proletariat,

but you hardly have any proletarians? You build factories, lots of them, because where

there are factories there are workers. But if most of the peasants become workers, who

will provide the workers with bread? And now that we've abolished commerce, what will

the workers do with their wages? These are some of the questions facing Stalin in 1932

as his first five year plan for state controlled industrialization goes into its chaotic last year

Welcome to Between-2-Wars a chronological summary of the interwar years, covering all

facets of life, the uncertainty, hedonism, and euphoria, and ultimately humanity's

descent into the darkness of the Second World War. I'm Indy Neidell.

As the twenties progress, the USSR comes under increasing pressure from within to evolve.

The country faces constant food shortages, despite that the former lands of the Russian

Tsar are mainly agricultural. Industry is underdeveloped and infrastructure is far behind

the western world. Stalin and the rest of the soviet Central Committee also perceive

themselves to be under imminent threat from both within and abroad, so they want more

military power.

During the years of the civil war and the ensuing wars, this had been solved with what

became known as “War Communism”. Pretty much a euphemism for systematic plunder and

robbery through war-spoils, expropriation, and forced requisitioning of agricultural

produce. Coupled with the abolition of free commerce and trade, by 1921 this is having

disastrous effects on the economy, with widespread starvation and unemployment crippling Bolshevik

Russia and its dominions.

Vladimir Lenin, then leader of the Soviet sees no other way out than to implement his

New Economic Policy, the NEP. It's an attempt to solve the immediate economic problems by

reintroducing elements of free market economics, such as profit-seeking and private trade.

Yet several features, including banking and large industries, remain under state control.

It solves the immediate pains somewhat, most significantly it leads to less starvation,

but doesn't create much progress, especially not in manufacturing and infrastructure.

See, the central problem for what has now become the USSR is that going back to the

old ways won't solve that it's in large parts still stuck in a pre-industrialized

economic structure, which is perhaps paradoxical for a country that has now gone through a

revolution meant to liberate the industrial working class masses. In reality, this means

that it is everything but well suited for Karl Marx predicted worker's revolution

that he foresaw in the industrialized countries of western Europe, not the agrarian East.

Marx posited that the establishment of socialism would come organically as a result of a majority

working class in an industrialized society creating social change from the grass roots.

It's the belief that once freed of its shackles, and once class has been abolished by revolution,

the proletariat will magically rule itself in a blissful dictatorship of the proletariat.

But in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, if you feel that this Marxist vision is even possible

and a must, such industrialization will have to be carried out to create this working class,

and until then the application of state power will need to be top-down. Obviously, it's

quite a bit more complicated that that, but vastly simplified: although the Bolsheviks

claim a revolution in the name of the proletariat and the peasants, their relationship to the

peasant class is at best ambivalent, and at times downright murderous, as we shall see

here and in a later episode.

Anyway, when Lenin dies in 1924, the other Communist leaders spend a few years infighting

about who is going to be the new boss, instead of addressing this elephant in the room. It

is mainly Josef Stalin and Leon Trotsky who vie for power. To make a long story short;

in 1928 Stalin emerges victorious as he expels Trotsky from the party and forces him into

exile.

Stalin now feels an urgent need to take the Russian dominated Soviet Union forward at

any price.

He feels that the USSR is under imminent threat of either falling apart, or being dissembled

from external forces, or as he will ask rhetorically in 1931, “Do you want our socialist fatherland

to be beaten and to lose its independence? If you do not want this, you must put an end

to its backwardness in the shortest possible time.”

With fresh memories of the First World War, the Russian Civil War, the attempts at independence

of the former western lands of the Russian Empire that resulted in millions of deaths,

military needs are seen as fundamental. Beginning in 1926, the Soviet government undergoes a

war scare that intensifies in 1927. While an imminent threat does not necessarily exist,

the fear is not baseless. Just in January 1927, senior figures such as the Editor-in-Chief

of Pravda Nikolai Bukharin, Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the Soviet

Union Alexei Rykov, and People's Commissar for Defense of the Soviet Union Kliment Voroshilov

all warn of the imminence of war.

In the East they fear that Japan or even the US might renew activities on the Russian Western

Pacific Rim that ended after the Civil War. They worry that Great Britain, who had also

been involved in the civil war, might encourage encroachment eastward by Poland. This worry

is made particularly strong by Poland's policy of ‘Prometheanism', a program by

Józef Piłsudski, who is now dictator of Poland, to weaken the Soviet Union by supporting

nationalist and separatist movements.

To counter this they need more arms, but they can no longer rely on ‘War Communism'.

There simply isn't enough left to plunder. And despite a secret military exchange between

the Red Army and the German Reichswehr starting already in 1921, they have few international

allies that will support them. They can and do purchase arms from abroad, but lack the

cash or credit worthiness needed to do so at scale, not to mention that it makes them

dependent on foreign relations.

Faced with all these urgencies Stalin, with his deep-seated hatred of capitalism sees

only one way out - a strict military style plan for rapid state-controlled industrialization.

And rapid is an understatement, in the same speech as earlier in 1931 he says, “We are

fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance

in ten years. Either we do it or we go under.” So, as much as ten times faster than the west

developed. His instrument for that will be his Five Year Plans, with goals set not on

realism and opportunity, but ideology and necessity. Rather than permitting the market

to determine cost, production, and consumption, the Five Year Plan is dictated by the government.

Quotas are established for various products with the goal of increasing production significantly.

All while the Soviet economy has barely recovered to its 1914 levels by 1928. It will be a brutal

plan built knowingly on the suffering, starvation, and death of millions of Soviet citizens.

In fact, the targets are more than ambitious, they are simply unrealistic. The most dramatic

effect on the people will come out of how they plan to feed the masses executing their

plan. We will cover that in a separate episode in detail, but for now it's enough to say

that the agrarian part of the plan has two parts; forced collectivization of all farms,

and ‘the liquidation of the kulaks as a class,' with the latter turning into downright

mass murder. It is, in short, a catastrophic failure. Between 1928 and 1933, agricultural

output diminishes by 18.5% with livestock products falling by a stunning 56%.

Not only does this create food shortages, even starvation, it has serious knock on effects.

For instance; the sudden drop in cattle, which were needed for draft power to plow the fields,

results in a rise of the number of tractors needed. Instead of adjusting the plan, they

simply raise the quota of new tractors. Decline in food production leads to the implementation

of rationing in peacetime, decreasing productivity of the hungering workers. When they can't

fulfill the quotas, they're just moved to the next deadline. Other materials, such as

various metals, have to be imported. To finance that, they export food products like grain

that are already not sufficient to feed the population. Even for an isolated economy like

the USSR, starting in October 1929 the global depression further exacerbates import and

export goals, but the plan still doesn't change.

As Stalin tightens his dictatorial grip, and his goals are not met, he uses radicalization

to try to force to goals through.

More cautious engineers are denounced as undermining the Soviet Union's advancement and labelled

bourgeois saboteurs. The plan become more and more divorced from the reality on the

ground. And yet, in 1931, Stalin confidently claims “There are no fortresses Bolsheviks

cannot capture!” Economic planners with more limited visions are marginalized while

ideologues are promoted in their place in an increasingly out of control system.

But, as the economic historian Eugène Zaleski notes, the goals may have been largely immaterial.

“Stalin was a man of action, and industrialization meant for him the intensified construction

of factories, the development of new branches of industry and new regions, the improvement

of labor skills, and the reduction of economic dependence on the outside world. His vision

of industrial development was of a vast program of large works, but works carried out under

the impetus of a drive imbued with ideological fanaticism. Under these conditions, what would

it matter whether these immense works were completed in three, four, or ten years?”

But the optimism that took hold of the planners had some justification. Following the end

of the Russian Civil War, the Soviet economy, and the industrial sector in particular, saw

a high growth rate. Experience in the First World War also contributed to the belief that

resources were underutilized. For example, the Russian Empire had greater economic output

in 1916 than in 1913 despite the effects of the war, including territorial losses. And

as mentioned earlier, the ongoing war scare helped produce an existential fear in which

rapid industrialization was less of a choice but more of an urgent and unavoidable necessity.

And, believe it or not- in terms of industrial output, although it doesn't meet Stalin's

insane goals, it is undoubtedly effective. Industrial output skyrockets, taking the Soviet

Union from being the fifth nation in absolute terms of industrial capacity in 1928 to being

the second by 1932, trailing only the United States. Not only that, many of the goals are

achieved ahead of time. With the statistics on the first two years in hand, Stalin proclaims

that the plan could be achieved in four years, partially due to what he calls “the enthusiasm

of the workers”. This is embodied in posters that read “2+2=5”.

And it isn't a transformation that just focuses on putting out product. Prior to the

Five Year Plan, the Soviet Union lacks even the basic industries, which are needed for

industrial development in the first place. So they depend on tools and machinery from

abroad, or as the Soviet foreign trade theoretician D. D. Mishustin will note in 1938, the country's

development depended on “capitalist technology” and that “equipment of the very latest design

and construction” was required “in order to free the country from the need of importing

this machinery and equipment once the goal had been reached.”

But now in 1932, the Soviets are still in desperate need of western machinery so that

they continue exporting their badly needed goods, such as grain while the population

starves.

And it isn't just food that is scarce, living standards overall suffer considerably. While

urban housing increases by 12%, it doesn't keep up with massive urban population growth.

And this is a slap in the face of the workers, who now go into newly built modern factories

only to return home to pre-war era housing units without any kind of sanitation. Health

care can't keep up with urbanization and so on. But even if all that is solved, it's