Born into the NEP Years: The First Five-Year Plan. Life and Fate

ISSN 1019-3316, Herald of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 2022, Vol. 92, Suppl. 8, pp. S777–S786. © The Author(s), 2022. This article is an open access publication. Russian Text © The Author(s), 2022, published in Rossiiskaya Istoriya, 2022, No. 4. Born into the NEP Years: The First Five-Year Plan. Life and Fate M. A. Feldman Ural Institute of Management, Branch of the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration, Yekaterinburg, 624034 Russia e-mail: Received August 14, 2022; revised October 19, 2022; accepted October 19, 2022 DOI: 10.1134/S1019331622140040 The transition to the New Economic Policy (NEP) marked a new stage in the relationships between the authorities and the scientific intelligentsia. In the opinion of economic historian N.M. Yasnyi, ideological control over the science of economics was relatively loose1 in the 1920s and the first half of the decade in particular. Direct links with the State Planning Committee (Gosplan) provided an opportunity not only to draw upon an abundance of statistics, but also to employ commentaries of specialists from the agency departments. In resolving problems associated with the project of industrialization, they significantly outpaced the economic thought of the West on multiple fronts. It was made possible to do justice to their contribution only three or four decades later during a crisis of Keynesian and institutional economic policy. Additionally, the then devised thoughts cover contemporary relevant equilibrium mechanisms as the subject matter of economic science and equilibrium mechanisms as the subject matter of socioeconomic genetics, matter of factors and the institutional framework, their roots and causes of disintegration, and selection mechanisms.2 The first five-year-plan adopted by the Fifth Congress of Soviets in May 1929 appeared as a unique phenomenon. In its three volumes, the sector-specific components of the country’s modernization dovetailed with issues of a social nature and various aspects of regional development. The regional approach proved to be the most innovative from the perspective of global economics. In 1926–1929 Gosplan largely focused on elaboration of the district and inter-district issues of the five-year-plan within the scope of eco1 Yasnyi, N.M., Sovetski ekonomisty 1920-kh gg. Dolg pamyati [Soviet Economists of the 1920s. A Duty to Remember], Moscow, 2012, p. 717. 2 Ol’sevich Yu.A., Introduction, in Mirovaya ekonomicheskaya mysl’. Skvoz’ prizmu vekov [The World Economic Thought. Through a Prism of Centuries], Vol. 4: Vek global’nykh transformatsii [Age of global transformations], Moscow, 2004, pp. 13–15. nomic regionalization. Conferences were held to accomplish this goal on complex accounting of resources and setting specific targets within the industries and large economic regions.3 Specialization of the krais and oblasts took shape considering the best use of the wealth of their resources and an increase in the performance of “laggards.” This also involved defining the perspectives for interdistrict cooperation and forecasts of the development of large regions, such as the Urals (Ural oblast) and Siberia (Siberian krai). The country marched into the first five-year-plan with the best option for the latter. It appeared to be a relatively realistic document that flagged the main lines of economic development instruments for their realization. It suggested “involvement of different classes in addressing the industrialization objectives,” as well as equality among all systems of cooperative societies and acceptance of individual peasant households as a principal agricultural producer that “had not lost importance to date.” Thus, it embraced everything that unambiguously implied pursuing to retain a mixed economy, on the one hand, and to take a quantum leap in engineering and metallurgical industries, in particular, and to carry out a large-scale construction of the new and modernization of old enterprises, on the other hand. I.V. Stalin and his coterie can be held directly responsible for reckless profligate spending of multibillion budgets and millions of deaths, since the cost of abandoning the NEP policy proved to be enormous. The industrial project, which was the state policy instrument, twisted into a self-fulfilling prophecy. A target to “catch up with and surpass the industrial development level of the leading capitalist countries within the historically shortest time spans” was met largely due to the quantitative indicators. On the contrary, social policy transformed from a major component of the path to “socialism” into a one of secondary 3 Istoriya sotsialisticheskoi ekonomiki SSSR [History of Socialist S777 Economy of the USSR], Vol. 3, Moscow, 1977, p. 18. S778 FELDMAN importance, thus, having devaluated its stipulative meaning. Official publication of the “Results of Fulfillment of the First Five-Year-Plan for the Economic Development of the Union of SSRs” was unveiled in 1933. It was supposed to justify Stalin’s narrative around his idea that a large share of the public sector in production and industrial manufacturing, as well as the kolkhoz and sovkhoz sector in agriculture, should be treated as an indicator of the development stage of the “socialistic” structure. It highlighted a significant overfulfillment of the five-year-plan during the initial years by all targets. This basically indicates that relatively high growth rates should be attributed to a scale of building activities, including construction of a number of industrial giants not scheduled by the plan. The task of developing the factory and plant equipment proved to be far more complex: even according to official figures, the plan for gross output was fulfilled as low as 93.7%.4 Shifts in the economy based on quantitative indicators were characterized as “triumphant,” but only against the background of the global economic crisis. The idea behind the statement that the Soviet Union had caught up with the developed capitalist countries based on the share of production and industrial manufacturing in the national income, as well as on the share of production of capital goods (the means of production) was to prove the “preeminence of the socialist system over the capitalism.” The “Results” reported little if any data at all, having been founded on the international statistics. Thus, it was reported that, “against the foreign commerce scale-back, the Soviet share in global trade had increased and the Soviet Union had progressed from the 17th place in 1928 to the 11th position in 1932.”5 Importantly, characteristics of the results of the five-year-plan for decades to come were defined by Stalin’s wording from the Report by the General Secretary in the Plenary Meeting (Plenum) of the Central Committee (TsK) and Central Control Commission (TsKK) of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks (VKP(b)) (January 7–12, 1933) during the Soviet period. Thus, the spirit of offic (...truncated)