The Year 1928 to the Present

The Balance-Sheet of the First Five Year Plan.

When the 'first Five Year Plan came to an end on December 31, 1932, very considerable progress toward the goal of industrialization had been registered, as is indicated in the following table of figures: 1927-1928 1932 Coal 35,400,000 tons 64,200,000 tons Oil 11,600,000 tons 21,400,000 tons Pigiron 3,300,00o tons 6,16o,000 tons Steel 3,900,000 tons 5,890,000 tons Copper 28,30o tons 47,200 tons Cotton Thread 2,871,000,00o metres 2,540,000,00o metres Superphosphates 151,400 tons 612,800 tons In agriculture the picture was much less favourable. The majority of the peasant homesteads had been brought into the collective farms. An important contributing factor in this con nection was the so-called "liquidation of the kulaks as a class," a measure which was formally authorized in a decree of February 193o. The kulaks were the more well-to-do peasants, owners of more cattle and machinery than their neighbours, operators of mills, brick kilns and other small village enterprises. They were regarded by the Government as implacably opposed to col lectivization; and their "liquidation" involved confiscation of their property and banishment to forced labour, usually in the northern timber camps or on new industrial enterprises, some times varied by consignment to shanties and dugouts on the out skirts of the villages. Inasmuch as there was never any clear-cut definition of what constituted a kulak, and since any peasant who opposed collective farming might easily be denounced as a kulak or a "kulak agent" by zealous local authorities, it is not surprising that there was a large influx of peasants into the col lective farms, especially as it was evident that successful in dividual farming would only lead to confiscation and exile. Working morale and efficiency at this time, however, were gen erally very low in the collective farms; and there had been a terrific decimation of the country's livestock, partly because of lack of fodder and the spread of infectious diseases, partly be cause the peasants, who, in the beginning, had been required to give up all their animals to common ownership, slaughtered their beasts. Figures which were cited by Stalin at the Communist Party Congress in 1934 reflected the havoc which had been wrought in this field.

(Millions omitted) 1916 1929 1933 Horses 34 16.6 Large horned cattle 58.9 68.1 38.6 Sheep, goats 115.2 147.2 50.6 Pigs 20.3 20.9 12.2 The sub-average harvests of 1931 and 1932, the great reduction in livestock, the heavy requisitions at fixed prices of grain, meat, milk and other food products which the Soviet authorities carried out, combined with unfavourable climatic conditions, furnished the background for a very disastrous famine in the first half of 1933. The famine mainly affected Ukraine and the North Cau casus, the normally rich farming areas of southern and south eastern Russia; but mortality from hunger and the diseases which accompany hunger also occurred in some districts of the Middle and Lower Volga and in parts of Soviet Central Asia. A trip of personal investigation which the writer undertook in the autumn of 1933 elicited local figures indicating a mortality in the neighbourhood of ten per cent in the Kropotkin region of the North Caucasus and in villages in the neighbourhood of Poltava and of Belaya Tserkov, in Ukraine.

The Second Five Year Plan : Social and Economic Changes.—I933 marked the beginning of a shift of emphasis on what the Communists of ten call "the economic front," and this was reflected in the structure of the second Five Year Plan, which is supposed to run from 1933 until 1937. With the country well

started on the road of industrialization and with collectivization the dominant form in agriculture (in 1935 about three-quarters of the peasant homesteads, organized in 240,00o collective farms, farmed nine times as much land as the dwindling remnant of peasants who clung to individual methods of farming) the Soviet Government decided to relax the extreme pressure which had been regarded as necessary during the first Plan and to pay more attention to improving the standard of living.

The second Five Year Plan endeavoured to remedy the failures and disproportions of its predecessor. It set as one of its goals the realization of two and a half or three times as much food and manufactured goods by 1937 as had been available in 1932. It also stressed the development of railway transportation, which had lagged behind. Another marked feature of the second Plan was an eastward shift in Russia's economic centre of gravity. So the eastern regions of the country (Siberia, the Ural Territory, Kazakstan and Central Asia) are supposed in 1937 to produce about one-third of the country's pigiron, as against one-fourth in 1932; about a fifth of its electrical energy, as against 6.5% in 1932; ten per cent of the output of machinery, as against five per cent in 1932.

The peasants, whose resistance to collective farming had been largely broken by the grim lessons of the famine, were given more positive incentives through several changes of Soviet ag rarian policy. The levy in kind was definitely fixed for each region, instead of being left to the arbitrary discretion of the grain collecting authorities; the peasants were definitely en couraged to develop, inside the collective farms, small individual homesteads, with a cow, pigs and chickens, and garden plots; there was an attempt to insure that the payments, in money and in kind, to collective farmers should be more definitely related to the amount and quality of work which each individual performed.

There was a significant abandonment of the policy of forcing exports in order to pay for imports. The value of Soviet exports, in gold rubles, declined from 1,036,371,000 in 1930 to 000 in 1933; imports were cut down even more sharply, from 1,058,825,000 gold rubles in 1930 to 348,200,000 in 1933. Con sequently more foodstuffs remained within the country ; and this fact, combined with improved peasant morale and produc tivity, made it possible to abolish the ration cards which had been introduced for bread in 1929 toward the end of 1934 and to abolish rationing for other food products in October, 1935.

During the years of severe food scarcity rationed products had been sold in limited amounts to workers and employees ; apart from bread and potatoes, the supply in co-operative stores was ex tremely scanty and irregular. Side by side with this rationing system open markets and a few state shops continued to func tion; food could be bought there without rationing restrictions, but at fantastically high prices. With the abolition of rationing a one-price system was restored; the prices, as fixed by the gov ernment, were higher than the co-operative prices, but lower than the free market prices.