To many scholars, the words socialism and stagnation go hand-in-hand almost as well capitalism and prosperity. Do these associations find their basis in real-world experience, or does history tell a different story? Lets observe several accounts of the first Soviet five-year-plans, and see if the facts bear out the stereotypes. For starters: The industrialization of a great community is by itself obviously not unique…. What is unique in the USSR is that a single decade saw developments which required half a century are more elsewhere. Industrialization was achieved, moreover, without private capital, without foreign investments (save in the form of engineering skills and technical advice), without private property as a spur to individual initiative, without private ownership of any of the means of production, and with no unearned increment or private fortunes accruing to entrepreneurs or lucky investors. Resources were developed, labour was recruited, trained and allocated, capital was saved and invested not through the price mechanism of a competitive market but through a consciously devised and deliberately executed national economic plan, drawn up by quinquennia, by years and by quarters for every segment of the economy, for every region, city, town, and village, for every factory, farm, mine and mill, for every store, bank and school, and even for every hospital, theater and sports club. The adventure led from the illiteracy to literacy, from the NEP to socialism, from archaic agriculture to collective cultivation, from a rural society to a predominately urban community, from general ignorance of the machine to social mastery of modern technology. Between the poverty stricken year of 1924, when Lenin died, and the relatively abundant year of 1940, the cultivated area of USSR expanded by 74 percent; grain crops increased 11 percent; coal production was multiplied by 10; steel output by 18; engineering and metal industries by 150; total national income by 10; industrial output by 24; annual capital investment by 57. During the First Five-year Plan, 51 billion rubles were invested; during the Second, 114; and during the Third, 192. Factory and office workers grew from 7,300,000 to 30,800,000 and school and college students from 7,900,000 to 36,600,000. Between 1913 and 1940, oil production increased from nine to 35 million tons; coal from 29 to 164; pig iron from 4 to 15; steel from 4 to 18; machine tools from 1000 to 48,000 units, tractors from 0 to over 500,000; harvestor combines from 0 to 153,500; electrical power output from two billion kWh to 50 billion; and the value of industrial output from 11 billion rubles to more than 100 billion by 1938. If the estimated volume of total industrial production in 1913 be taken as 100, the corresponding indices for 1938 are 93.2 for France; 113.3 for England, 120 United States; 131.6 for Germany, and 908.8 for the Soviet Union. Much interest was aroused in both countries [the USSR and USA] by the 1944 summer journey of Eric Johnston, President of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, who visited the Urals, Siberia, and Kazakhstan and declared that Soviet economic progress since 1928 was an unexampled achievement in the industrial history of the whole world. - Schuman, Frederick L. Soviet Politics Whoops.
Posted on: Sat, 16 Aug 2014 18:37:56 +0000
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