AQA 7042 · 2N · R14.1⁄3 - Five Year Plans: Gosplan, aims and production
Trace how Gosplan turned Party priorities into the first three Five Year Plans and assess their production record from 1928 to June 1941. Distinguish changing aims from annual factory targets and interpret output data critically. This lesson judges production against aims; the Plans' wider success also depends on the project, labour and social evidence developed in the following lessons.
Aims across three Plans
By 1928 the New Economic Policy had restored much pre-war production, but the Soviet Union still lacked much of the industrial equipment and technical capacity available to the leading Western economies. Communist leaders also regarded dependence on capitalist suppliers as a strategic weakness. Industrialisation was therefore meant to change both the scale and the structure of the economy: the state would direct investment towards the sectors needed to make machinery, power and metals, rather than allow consumer demand and profit to determine the pattern.
Producer goods and consumer goods
Producer goods, called Group A in Soviet classifications, are goods used to produce other goods: fuel, electricity, metals and industrial machinery are examples. Consumer goods, or Group B, are made for household use. The Plans promised growth in both, but repeatedly gave Group A the stronger claim on investment and scarce inputs.
The first three Plans formed a sequence, but not three identical programmes:
| Plan | Operational period | Main direction relevant to production |
|---|---|---|
| First | 1928-32 | Force a rapid industrial “big push”; expand heavy industry and power; build domestic capacity to make machinery; increase state direction of production. |
| Second | 1933-37 | Consolidate the new industrial base; reduce bottlenecks; improve technique, output and efficiency; promise greater consumer production while retaining heavy-industry priority. |
| Third | 1938-42, interrupted in 1941 | Continue industrial expansion but shift resources increasingly towards defence-related producer goods as the danger of war grew. |
The dates need care. The First Plan began operating on 1 October 1928, but Gosplan's large “optimum” plan was not approved until April 1929. Some books therefore label its intended span 1928/29–1932/33, while the conventional completed-plan dates are 1928–32. The Third Plan likewise began in 1938 but was adopted only in March 1939; Germany's invasion on 22 June 1941 prevented any peacetime result for its intended 1942 endpoint.
These programmes combined several aims. Economic catch-up and technical modernisation mattered, as did reducing reliance on imported capital goods. Ideologically, expansion of state-directed industry was presented as the construction of socialism. Strategically, an economy able to produce energy, metals, machinery and, increasingly, armaments was meant to make the USSR less vulnerable. The promise of rising consumer output remained present, but it competed for resources with the higher-priority producer sector.
How Gosplan turned priorities into targets
Gosplan, the State Planning Commission created in 1921, was the central body that assembled information and drafted national economic plans. It should not be imagined as an all-knowing computer, nor as an authority above Stalin and the Party. Political leaders decided the hierarchy of priorities and could demand faster growth; Gosplan's task was to turn those decisions into a more connected programme of investment, inputs and output.
The planning chain worked roughly as follows:
- Party-state leaders fixed broad priorities and demanded target rates of growth.
- Gosplan estimated available resources and drafted five-year, annual and shorter plans.
- A material balance compared the expected physical supply of an input, such as coal or steel, with the proposed uses of that input across the economy.
- industrial people's commissariats translated aggregate targets into assignments for branches, trusts and enterprises.
- Factory managers received targets for output and other indicators, then reported results and demanded the labour, fuel, transport and materials needed to fulfil them.
Five-year targets supplied direction, but annual control figures often did more to govern immediate production. The system also involved negotiation in both directions. Ministries and managers had incentives to request generous inputs and attainable quotas, while leaders repeatedly raised targets to force faster expansion. A formally “balanced” plan could therefore become inconsistent when a politically important output target rose without a matching increase in fuel, transport, skilled labour or intermediate goods.
Output targets had particular force because fulfilment was judged heavily by measurable quantity. A factory ordered to maximise tonnes or numbers of units had a reason to hoard inputs and prioritise the measured indicator, even when this raised costs or reduced quality. Planning did concentrate resources on chosen sectors, but centralised did not mean stable, complete or perfectly coordinated.
The First Plan: rapid growth below maximum targets
The First Plan's production record contains two truths that must be held together. Physical output in several priority sectors increased very quickly, yet the most demanding end targets were not reached. The table below selects three inputs central to industrial expansion.
| Product | 1927/28 starting output | First Plan maximum end target for 1932/33 | Recorded output in 1932 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Electricity | 5.05 billion kWh | 22 billion kWh | 13.54 billion kWh |
| Coal | 35.4 million tonnes | 75 million tonnes | 64.36 million tonnes |
| Pig iron | 3.3 million tonnes | 10 million tonnes | 6.2 million tonnes |
Electricity output more than doubled, coal rose by roughly four-fifths and pig-iron production nearly doubled from the starting values. Those changes represent real additions to physical capacity. They also fell below the maximum targets, especially for electricity and pig iron. The Soviet declaration that the Plan had been “completed” therefore cannot be treated as proof that each major production target had been met.
There is also a comparison problem in the table: the maximum targets are labelled for 1932/33, whereas the recorded results are calendar-year observations for 1932. They are useful for judging the size of the shortfall, but calculating a supposedly exact percentage of “Plan fulfilment” from them would create false precision. Targets also changed: original goals gave way to higher optimum, maximum and annual targets, so a claim that production “met the target” is meaningless unless the target version is identified.
Expansion was uneven across sectors. Cotton-fabric output, for example, changed only from 2,678 million linear metres in 1928 to 2,694 million in 1932, while electricity and coal surged. That contrast fits the priority given to producer goods. It does not by itself tell us about living standards, but it does show that “industrial growth” was not one uniform rate shared by every branch.
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