On the 1st October 1928, the Soviet Union introduced Joseph Stalin’s first five-year plan. The plan set a series of economic goals to be achieved between 1929 and 1934, with the intention of rapidly industrialising the country in case of war with the West. Based on Stalin’s policy of Socialism in One Country, the five-year plan called for a complete change in the culture of the Soviet Union that affected agriculture just as much as industry.
A vital ingredient in being able to fulfil the industrial goals of the five-year plan was increasing agricultural productivity, since this would release peasants and farm labourers from the land and allow them to become industrial workers. The first five-year plan is therefore probably most famous for the introduction of the policy of collectivisation, where hundreds of peasants were put together to work on enormous farms that covered thousands of acres.
The dramatic increase in food output per peasant as a result of mechanisation on these farms freed up former agricultural workers to move to the new factories instead, with the number of industrial workers almost doubling between 1928 and the end of the plan in 1932. However, significant opposition to the process of collectivisation meant that overall productivity remained low in many areas and caused famines as Party officials seized food for the cities and left the agricultural workers with nothing.
In the factories, however, production soared. Although the targets were constantly revised to the point where the targets would never be achieved, the first five-year plan firmly set the USSR on the road to becoming a world superpower.
