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4. THE STALINIST SYSTEM
Stalin's industrial programme, which went parallel with the agricultural measures, was achieved in a series of Five-Year Plans, each one having a particular aim. The first Plan was for the years 1928–32. Its aim was to lay the foundations for heavy industry, namely, factories to produce steel and tractors and automobiles; coal and iron; hydroelectric plants; and railways. In all sections the Plan had to overcome enormous difficulties. Russia was still an extremely poor nation, yet the vast scheme envisaged by Stalin would need correspondingly vast capital. Though the raw materials, needed for most industries, were available in abundance, the machinery and precision tools would have to be imported (and paid for); and highly skilled foreign planners and workers would be needed to set the industries going, and such workers would be attracted only by high wages and good conditions of living and working. It is against this background that the successes and failures of the Plan must be judged. The successes were truly enormous. A dam on the river Dnieper made possible a vast hydroelectric station at Dniepropetrovsk. Magnitogorsk, on the eastern slopes of the Urals, was created as a great industrial centre specializing in steelworks. Tractor factories were set up in Stalingrad. The oil output of the Caucasus wells was greatly increased; so was the coal output at Kutnesk. The Trans-Siberia railway, hitherto a single track, was double-tracked, and new railways were laid to serve the new industrial centres. These were but typical of the developments of many various kinds which went on all over Russia. One of the advantages of much of this development was that the industrial plants of the Urals and in Siberia were too far removed from Russia's frontiers to be vulnerable in wartime to invaders from either west or east. So vast and novel an industrial programme was not likely to be carried through without a hitch. It was not easy to gauge the raw materials that would be needed in every one of the hundreds of various factories. Also, too many of their products – tractors and motor-cars, for example – were liable to break down under strain. Nevertheless, within the first five years Russian industry at least doubled its output. The achievement had its disadvantage, so far as the mass of the Russian people was concerned. The Plan dealt only with what were called 'capital' industries, that is, those that were necessary in order that other industries, dependent upon them, might expand. Thus the coal and steel were the materials for other products, the tractors were needed for agriculture, and so on. They did not meet the people's immediate needs. There was almost no more choice of foodstuffs or clothes – 'consumer goods' – in the shops than before, certainly not at prices that ordinary people could pay. Luxury goods scarcely existed. Thus the workers lacked the immediate incentives to labour, and the shortages, added to those resulting from harvest failures, were causing discontent. Partly because of pressure from the Government, and partly because of the hope of benefits to come, very large numbers of factory workers had sacrificed leisure and had accepted low wages; but by the end of four or five years they were looking for results. Hence the second and the third Five-Year Plans, for the years 1933–37 and 1938–42 (until interrupted by war in 1939), aimed at adjusting the balance between the two classes of goods – capital and consumer. To some degree the later Plans fulfilled their purpose; but the proportion of goods produced by the heavy industries still very much exceeded those of any others. Also a large part of the success had been made possible only by modifying Communist principles. In particular, the theory of equality among the workers broke down in practice: as an incentive to production, piece-work replaced fixed rates of daily wages, and scales of pay were drawn up based upon skill and quality. But the real test of the Government's achievement came with the outbreak of war: the success of the Communist U.S.S.R. against Capitalist Germany in 1941–45 contrasted with the defeats of Czarist Russia in 1914–17 and was tangible evidence of the effect of the Five-Year Plans. Between the two wars the U.S.S.R. had become largely a self-sufficient industrial nation.
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