IB History Economic Policies Including Collectivization and Five-year Plans Notes

Collectivization and the Five-Year Plans Rebuilt the Soviet Economy at a Catastrophic Human Cost

Why Stalin Chose Collectivization

1. The scissors crisis forced Stalin's hand. By 1927, a wide gap between high industrial prices and low agricultural prices (a problem Lenin had identified in 1923) made peasants hoard grain rather than sell it to the state. The resulting grain procurement shortfall threatened the food supply for the growing urban workforce and the grain exports needed to pay for imported industrial machinery.
2. Collectivization solved an economic problem and an ideological one at once. Merging individual peasant farms into large state-controlled collective farms (kolkhozy) let the state fix production targets and take a guaranteed share of every harvest, funding industrialization, while also eliminating private property in agriculture as Bolshevik ideology demanded.
   1. The First Five-Year Plan made collectivization an official goal in 1928. By 1936, over 90% of Soviet agricultural land had been collectivized.

Dekulakization and Peasant Resistance

1. "Kulaks" were targeted for elimination as a class. Officially, kulaks were wealthier peasants who hired labor and owned significant property. In practice, local officials under pressure to meet quotas applied the label to any peasant who resisted collectivization.

1. Dekulakization deported and killed hundreds of thousands. Between 1930 and 1933, around 1.8 million people were deported to remote regions (Siberia, the Urals, Kazakhstan). Several hundred thousand were shot.

1. Peasants resisted by destroying their own livestock. Between 1929 and 1933, the Soviet livestock population fell by roughly half as peasants slaughtered animals rather than hand them to collective farms. Others fled to the cities or mounted armed resistance, which was met by NKVD operations.

1. Machine Tractor Stations (MTS) supplied tractors and equipment to collective farms too poor to own machinery themselves, but each station also housed a political department that monitored the surrounding villages, extending party control deep into the countryside alongside its practical function.
2. Collective farmers were permitted small household plots for private use. Despite covering only a tiny share of total farmland, these plots supplied a disproportionate share of the Soviet Union's meat, dairy, and vegetables throughout the 1930s.

The Famine of 1932-1933 and the Holodomor

1. State grain quotas continued despite mass starvation. The Soviet government kept exporting grain (1.73 million tonnes in 1932-1933 alone) to fund industrial machinery purchases even as millions starved.
2. The blacklist policy and internal passports trapped peasants inside the famine. Villages that missed their quotas had food supplies cut off entirely, and the internal passport system prevented starving peasants from fleeing to cities to find food.
3. Between 5 and 7 million people died of starvation across the Soviet Union.
4. Ukraine suffered disproportionately. The famine killed an estimated 3.5-5 million Ukrainians in 1932-1933. Ukrainian scholars and many governments call this the Holodomor and classify it as genocide. Other historians argue it resulted from criminal recklessness and ideological fanaticism affecting multiple Soviet populations rather than a deliberate plan to destroy the Ukrainian nation specifically.

The Five-Year Plans and Industrialization

1. The First Five-Year Plan (1928-1932) set deliberately unachievable targets. Steel, coal, electricity, and machine-tool production were all to multiply several times over in five years. The plan prioritized heavy industry over consumer goods. Factory managers who failed to meet targets risked arrest as "saboteurs."

1. The plan was declared complete in four years, but the real figures were mixed. Statistics were manipulated and quality was sacrificed for quantity, yet the underlying growth was genuine: Soviet steel production tripled between 1928 and 1932, coal output doubled, and electricity generation quadrupled. Economic historians Alec Nove and Robert Allen have long debated how much of this growth reflected genuine efficiency versus statistical exaggeration, but even sceptical estimates confirm large absolute increases in output.
   1. The Second Five-Year Plan (1933-1937) continued heavy industrial expansion at a more sustainable pace. The Third Five-Year Plan (1938-1941, interrupted by the German invasion) shifted toward military production.
2. The Stakhanovite movement pressured every worker to exceed impossible norms. Named after a Donbass miner whose record-breaking shift in August 1935 was staged for propaganda, the movement used bonuses for high output and accusations of sabotage against workers and managers who fell behind.

1. The Dnieper hydroelectric dam (Dneprostroi), completed in 1932 with help from the American engineer Hugh Cooper, became a flagship symbol of Soviet electrification, standing alongside Magnitogorsk's steel as proof of industrial transformation.
   1. A 1938 labour book system required every worker to carry a document recording their employment history, restricting their freedom to change jobs and extending state discipline over industrial labour much as internal passports already restricted peasant movement.

1. Magnitogorsk showed both the achievement and the human cost of industrialization. This steel city was built from nothing in the southern Urals from 1929. At its peak, 250,000 workers lived there, most in barracks or primitive housing, working twelve-hour shifts. The workforce combined free laborers drawn by wages with forced laborers, including dekulakized peasants and Gulag prisoners.

1. By 1941, the USSR was among the world's leading industrial economies. This industrial base proved essential to Soviet military survival after the German invasion in June 1941, and the wartime evacuation of factories eastward beyond the Urals eventually allowed the USSR to out-produce Germany in key war materials from 1942 onward.

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