The Five Year Plans and Soviet Society
In ten years, the Soviet Union became the world’s third-largest industrial economy. Cities, dams, blast furnaces and metro lines were built almost from scratch. The cost was paid in long shifts, accidents, gulag labour and the rationing of food during the 1932-33 famine. To answer ‘were the Five Year Plans a success?’ in the exam, you have to weigh the headline tonnage gains against the quality, the people and the price.
Aims of the Five Year Plans
Stalin set out three core aims for industrialisation. First, build heavy industry — coal, iron, steel, oil — the foundation of any modern economy. Second, achieve autarky: the USSR must produce inside its own borders everything it might need. Third, prepare for war. Stalin told a 1931 audience: ‘We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must close this gap in ten years. Either we do it, or they crush us.’
First Five Year Plan, 1928-1932
The First Five Year Plan prioritised coal, steel, oil and electricity. Targets were unrealistic; results in heavy industry were nevertheless dramatic. Coal output rose from 35 to 64 million tonnes, steel from 4 to 6 million tonnes, electricity nearly tripled. Consumer goods barely registered. Showcase projects launched in this period include Magnitogorsk — a giant steel city built in the Urals from 1929, designed by American engineers, peopled in part by deported peasants — and the Dnieper Dam, opened in 1932 as Europe’s largest hydroelectric station.
Second Five Year Plan, 1933-1937
The Second Plan continued heavy industry but added transport (the Moscow Metro opened in 1935) and consumer goods. Mining and engineering grew rapidly. Steel hit roughly 18 million tonnes by 1937. Showcase achievements: the White Sea Canal, dug almost entirely by gulag prisoners with around 25,000 deaths during construction, and the Moscow Metro, with stations made deliberately monumental as a public showcase of socialism.
Third Five Year Plan, 1938-1941
The Third Plan turned to armaments and was interrupted by Operation Barbarossa in June 1941. Tank, aircraft and weapons production became a priority — a shift that paid off when the German invasion came. By 1940, military spending had risen to almost a third of state expenditure.
Each Plan had a showcase project. First Plan: Magnitogorsk and the Dnieper Dam. Second Plan: the White Sea Canal (gulag-built) and the Moscow Metro. Third Plan: tank and aircraft production for the coming war.
Workers’ Lives
Soviet workers paid for the Plans in long hours, brutal discipline and frequent accidents. Lateness of more than 20 minutes became a criminal offence in 1940. Internal passports from December 1932 controlled urban residence; collective farmers could not leave the kolkhoz without permission. Wages were tied to output through piece-rates. Crash construction meant accidents were endemic and quality was poor — whole factories were built on bog, while others produced steel that rusted within months.
Yet propaganda celebrated the worker as the hero of socialism. In August 1935, the miner Alexei Stakhanov reportedly cut 102 tonnes of coal in a single shift — fourteen times the norm. The figure was real but engineered: he had teams clearing the coal away. The myth that grew around him — the Stakhanovite movement — pressured workers to exceed norms, with rewards (housing, holidays, bonuses) for top performers and risks for those who fell behind.
The Plans drew women into industry on a scale unseen elsewhere. Female factory employment rose from about 3 million in 1928 to 13 million by 1940; women became a majority of the medical profession. State nurseries, free education and literacy programmes lifted women’s status in real ways. The 1936 Constitution proclaimed equality. Yet women still did the cooking, queuing and childcare on top of their factory shift — the ‘double burden’. Family law tightened in 1936: abortion was banned and divorce made harder, partly to drive up the birth rate after the famine.
City Dwellers and Professionals
The 1920s urban culture of free speech and open debate was crushed. New apartment blocks went up, but the housing shortage meant most workers lived in barracks or shared single rooms in ‘communal’ flats. Professionals — engineers, doctors, planners — were given privileges (better housing, dachas, food access) but were also targeted in ‘wrecking’ trials when projects went wrong, including the Shakhty trial of 1928, which accused Donbas mining engineers of sabotage and set the pattern for later wrecking trials.
Were the Plans a Success?
This is the question students most often answer badly. The honest answer is: it depends on the metric.
In headline tonnage, yes. By 1940 the USSR was a major industrial power, the world’s third-largest after the US and Germany. The Plans gave the country the steel and weapons that survived Barbarossa. Against the metric of preparing for war — Stalin’s explicit aim — they worked. But quality was often poor: tractors broke; steel cracked; new plants ran far below capacity. Quotas were sometimes met by including gulag output and falsifying figures. Consumer goods (clothes, shoes, kitchenware) remained scarce throughout the 1930s. The Plans were a triumph of headline numbers and a failure of living standards. Top-band 12-mark answers reach a substantiated overall judgement that names which metric they are weighing — not just ‘successful in some ways and not in others’.
By 1940, Soviet industrial output had roughly tripled and the USSR was the world’s third-largest economy. But headline tonnage gains hid quality failures, gulag labour disguised in totals, and consumer poverty. The Plans succeeded against Stalin’s war-preparation aim and failed against worker living standards.