Revolution from Above:

The First Five-Year Plan, 1928-1932

Lecture 4
 Revisionist Histories of the First Five-Year Plan

• Focuses on the
Cultural Revolution
• Cultural Revolution
places focus on
history from
below
• It was a period
when Soviet
workers rose up
against bourgeois
elites

1974 1988
 The Soviet Worker
In thousands 1928 1932 1937 1940
Total 10,800 20,600 26,700 31,200
employment
(workers and
employees)
Workers only 6,800 14,500 17,200 20,000
(total)
Workers in 3,124 6,007 7,924 8,290
industry
Workers in 630 2,479 1,875 1,929
construction
Workers in 301 1,970 1,539 1,558
sovkhozy and
other state
farms
The population of the USSR was in 1927 147 million people. Numbers in thousands.
M. Lewin, “Society, State, and Ideology during the First Five-Year Plan,” in Sheila
Fitzpatrick, ed., Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928-1931 (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1984), 60.
 Joseph Stalin
General Secretary of
the Communist Party
of the Soviet Union
from 1922-1953

Consolidated power in
1928
The New Economic Policy, 1921-1928
• The ‘commanding heights’ of the economy
(large scale industry, banking, and foreign
trade) were kept in the hands of the state
during the NEP
• Some private business were allowed to operate
(particularly shops, restaurants and services)
• Peasants were allowed to market their grain
without central price controls
Improving economy during the NEP
Year State Investment in
Industry
1925/1926 1,003,000,000 rubles
1926/1927 1,333,000,000 rubles
1927/1928 1,679,000,000 rubles
First Five-Year Plan
launched October
1928
Hiroaki Kuromiya, Stalin’s Industrial Revolution: Politics and
Workers, 1928-1932 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1988), 12.
 The
First Five-Year Plan
October 1928 - September 1933.
Ended early at the end of 1932.

Called for 236% growth in

gross industrial output and
110% growth in labor productivity.
 The Soviet Approach to
Industrialisation
1. Economic self-sufficiency (that meant
opening up new branches of the industrial
economy)
2. Focus on heavy industry rather than
production of consumer goods
3. Use of the latest technology and the
construction of new, modern factories
4. State planning and state ownership
Magnitogorsk Steel Combine
 Dnepr Power Station

Margaret Bourke-White, 1931

Childhood in the Early Soviet Period

In 1922 there were 6,603 children’s homes holding

540,000 children. That year, there were an estimated
7.5 million starving and dying children in Russia.
The Cultural Revolution: From Class Conciliation to Class War

Young Communist League (‘Komsomol’) members in 1930s in Asha.

Working in timber industry.
A shock worker in 1930.
Policies of Cultural revolution, 1928-1931

1) Repression of the old intelligentsia (‘bourgeois

specialists’)
2) Massive recruitment of workers and Communists
to higher education (these promoted workers
were called the ‘vydvizhentsy’)
3) Universal, compulsory primary education
introduced in 1930
4) Establishment of proletarian hegemony in the
cultural professions by groups of militant
Communist intellectuals
5) Enrolment of more workers into the Communist
party
 1) The Shakhty Trial

Defendants, prominent engineers, attacked as ‘bourgeois specialists’

during the Shakhty Trial, 1928
2) Affirmative Action program, 1928-1932

• During the First Five-Year Plan period over 110,000

Communists, equivalent to almost one in ten of all party
members in 1928, entered higher educational institutions,
and 40,000 former workers who were not communists did as
well. Almost two thirds went to engineering schools.
• About 150,000 so-called vydvizhentsy, or upwardly
promoted workers, finished higher education degrees.
• In 1931, 2/3 of all students were 23 years of age or older,
and 16% were over 29.

Sheila Fitzpatrick, Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union,

1921-1934 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 187.
A worker faculty (rabfak) in the 1920s.
 Total enrolments of students in higher education
Year Number of students in Working class %
Soviet Higher
Education Institutes
1927-1928 159,800 25.4%
1928-1929 166,800 30.3%
1929-1930 191,100 35.1%
1930-1931 272,100 46.4%
1931-1932 394,000 51.4%
1932-1933 469,800 50.3%
Sheila Fitzpatrick, Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union, 1921-1934 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1979), 188.
 Numbers of Students Enrolled in Secondary Schools
1926-1927 1931-1932 1933-1934 1938-1939
Secondary 1, 059,078 2,813643 4,083,588 8,780,049
school grades
5-7

Secondary 136,280 927 138,677 1,403,846

schools grades
8-10
Total in 1,834,260 5,187,789 5,940,569 12,088,772
secondary and
tertiary
education
Sheila Fitzpatrick, Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union, 1921-1934 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1979), 238
3) 1930: Universal, compulsory primary
education introduced
• Between 1931 and 1933, 50,000 Komsomols were mobilized
to teach in the schools, and by 1936, about a half of all
primary teachers were Komsomol members.
• Of 187,281 teachers in Russian primary schools in 1935,
more than a third had only primary or incomplete secondary
education..
• Total numbers in grades 1-7 increased from 11 million in
1927 to 21 million in 1932.
• By 1931, 95% of 8-11 age group were in primary school.
• Due to a lack of buildings, many schools had to transfer to a
2 or 3 shift system
Problems of Labor Productivity
Shock Workers

A shock worker in 1930.

 Joining the Party
Year Party members
1928 1,305,854
1929 (Year of party purge – victory of Stalinist group) 1,535,362
1930 (party purge continues) 1,677,910
1931 2,212,225
1932 3,117,250

‘The most important criterion of acceptance to the party is the

worker’s active participation in the shock movement and
socialist competition and his truly vanguard role in production’.

Hiroaki Kuromiya, Stalin’s Industrial Revolution: Politics and Workers, 1928-1932

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 195; Rigby, Communist Party
Membership in the USSR, 52.
 The End of Unemployment
Year Number of Unemployed

1929 1,741,000

1930 1,316,000

1931 236,000

April 1931 18,000

Hiroaki Kuromiya, Stalin’s Industrial Revolution: Politics and Workers, 1928-1932

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 201.
 1931: The Year of Stabilisation
• End to wage levelling and introduction of
piece rates
• End of the continuous working week
• The making of a working class, technical
intelligentsia
• Rehabilitation of bourgeois specialists
• Cessation of massive promotion and
mobilisation of workers into administration
and university
 Production Achieved
Product 1927/8 1937
Pig iron 3.3 million tons 14.5 million tons
Coal 35.4 metric tons 128 metric tons
Electric power 5.1 billion kilowatt 36.2 billion
house kilowatt hours

Machine tools 2,098 units 36,120

Hiroaki Kuromiya, Stalin’s Industrial Revolution: Politics and

Workers, 1928-1932 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1988), 287.
Stalingrad tractor factory,
1930.
The Heroic Tractor Driver
25,000 tractor
drivers were
trained in 1930.
Stalin and famous
collective farmers
Angelina and
Demchenko at the
X Congress of the
Young Communist
League, 1936.
 The Soviet Worker
In thousands 1928 1932 1937 1940
Total 10,800 20,600 26,700 31,200
employment
(workers and
employees)
Workers only 6,800 14,500 17,200 20,000
(total)
Workers in 3,124 6,007 7,924 8,290
industry
Workers in 630 2,479 1,875 1,929
construction
Workers in 301 1,970 1,539 1,558
sovkhozy and
other state
farms
The population of the USSR was in 1927 147 million people.
M. Lewin, “Society, State, and Ideology during the First Five-Year Plan,” in Sheila
Fitzpatrick, ed., Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928-1931 (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1984), 60.