AQA 7042 · 2N · R11 - Economic developments: reasons for and impact of the 'Great Turn'
This lesson examines why economic pressure and political choices pulled the Soviet Union away from the New Economic Policy during 1928–29. You will trace how the grain procurement crisis, the launch of the first Five Year Plan and the decision to collectivise connected industry and agriculture in the 'Great Turn'. The key issue is whether its greatest impact by the end of 1929 lay in achieved economic results or in a radical change in who made economic decisions.
From NEP to the 'Great Turn'
The New Economic Policy (NEP) was a mixed economic settlement introduced in 1921. The state controlled the "commanding heights"—large-scale industry, banking, transport and foreign trade—but most farming remained in individual peasant households, and market exchange linked the countryside to the towns. By the later 1920s, industrial recovery had taken place, yet the arrangement contained a persistent tension: the state wanted cheap grain and rapid industrial investment, while peasant households decided how much grain to consume, feed to animals or sell.
The 'Great Turn' describes the rapid move away from this mixed arrangement towards central direction, forced-pace industrialisation and the collectivisation of agriculture. It was not one decree issued on one day. The decisions accumulated across 1928–29:
| Date | Development | What changed |
|---|---|---|
| December 1927 | The Fifteenth Party Congress supported preparing a Five Year Plan and a gradual transition from scattered peasant holdings towards larger-scale agriculture. | Planning and collectivisation were already goals, but the timetable and methods were not yet those of the later mass drive. |
| January–February 1928 | A serious shortfall in state grain procurement led Stalin to Siberia, where searches, seizures and arrests were used to obtain grain. | Administrative coercion began to replace the price incentives on which NEP exchange depended. |
| October 1928 | The accounting period of the first Five Year Plan began. | The state started directing resources through a national plan, although the complete plan had not yet been formally adopted. |
| April–May 1929 | The Party Conference adopted the plan's higher "optimum" version in April; the Fifth Congress of Soviets formally approved it in May. | Rapid growth, especially in heavy industry and investment, became the authoritative national priority. |
| November–December 1929 | Stalin proclaimed a "great change"; the Central Committee accelerated collective-farm construction; Stalin then declared a shift towards eliminating the kulaks "as a class". | The direction moved from gradual collectivisation towards a coercive transformation of the countryside. |
This chronology separates three things that are easily blurred together: an existing debate about industrialisation, the launch and formal adoption of a national plan, and the later decision to force the pace of collectivisation. It also prevents a result from being placed before a decision. Most of the reorganisation, disruption and human cost associated with the policies occurred after 1929; by the end of 1929, the decisive impact was that the policy direction and the methods available to enforce it had changed.
The grain crisis and the choice of coercion
A grain procurement crisis did not necessarily mean that the Soviet Union had physically run out of grain. That distinction matters because Stalin publicly blamed wealthy peasants—labelled kulaks—for deliberately withholding grain, whereas economic historians identify a wider combination of incentives and uncertainty.
Grain procurement crisis
A shortfall in the grain state agencies could obtain at their offered prices, which could arise even when households still held grain.
Four pressures interacted:
- Low state procurement prices. Keeping bread cheap for urban workers encouraged the state to offer peasants low prices for grain. A household could gain more by consuming grain, using it as animal feed or selling through private channels.
- A "goods famine". Manufactured goods and agricultural tools that peasants wanted to buy were scarce. Money received for grain was less attractive when there was little useful stock available in exchange.
- The 1927 war scare and hoarding. International tension encouraged both officials and households to fear future disruption. Holding stocks could be a precaution rather than proof of organised class sabotage.
- Competing state demands. Grain was needed to feed towns and the armed forces. Exports could also earn foreign currency for imported machinery, so procurement difficulty threatened the industrial programme as well as the bread supply.
These pressures created a feedback loop. The state held procurement prices down and prioritised industrial investment; peasants had weaker reasons to sell; state grain collections disappointed; leaders feared that cities, exports and industrialisation were in danger; coercive collections then made peasant confidence in voluntary exchange even weaker.
Stalin's January–February 1928 response in Siberia revealed a choice, not an automatic economic law. Officials used criminal-law provisions, searches and seizures to force deliveries. This extraordinary-measures approach could obtain grain in the short term, but it treated a problem of prices, goods and trust as a struggle against hostile social groups. Continuation of NEP with higher procurement prices, more consumer goods or a slower industrial tempo remained conceivable. The crisis was therefore an immediate trigger, while the decision to answer it through coercion depended on ideological priorities and the leadership's willingness to impose costs on the countryside.
Launching the first Five Year Plan
The first Five Year Plan replaced a looser mixture of annual controls and market responses with an economy-wide statement of state priorities. Gosplan, the State Planning Commission, prepared competing versions. The higher "optimum" version was adopted by the Party Conference in April 1929 and formally approved the following month, even though its accounting period had begun on 1 October 1928 and was intended to run to 30 September 1933.
The plan's published ambitions help reveal the scale of the shift. It called for real national income to double and investment to treble over five years. These were targets, not results. They matter here because they show how the leadership intended to mobilise resources and because later upward revisions made the pace still more demanding.
Three priorities held the plan together:
- Heavy industry first. Coal, iron, steel, machinery and power were treated as the base from which other industries and military capacity could grow. Producer goods received priority over immediately improving the supply of consumer goods.
- State allocation rather than market signals. Central authorities set targets and directed investment, materials and labour towards chosen sectors. Factory managers became responsible for meeting planned output rather than responding chiefly to prices and demand.
- Economic independence and socialist transformation. Soviet leaders feared industrial and military weakness in a hostile international setting. They also saw rapid planning as a way to enlarge the socialist sector and displace the private trade and individual farming tolerated under NEP.
The plan and the grain problem were inseparable. Industrial construction needed food for a growing urban workforce, export earnings for imported equipment, and resources that could be channelled into investment. Yet pushing investment towards heavy industry could worsen the shortage of consumer goods offered to peasants, weakening the very market incentive to sell grain. The leadership's answer was not to reduce the plan's pace. It sought greater administrative control over agriculture.
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