In order to decide whether or not these 5 year plans were successful, it is necessary to first define what is meant by success in this context.
This can be done by considering the aims of Stalin with his first three Five-Year Plans. Stalin's industrial plans for the USSR were to establish a war economy - to prepare the USSR for war against its capitalist enemies. He regarded steel, iron and oil the sinews of war and the successful production of these would war guarantee strength and readiness for war.The first Five-Year Plan covered the period from 1928 -1932 as a means of revitalising a flagging economy not fully recovered from the ravages of the First World War and the Civil War. The plan stated what was to be achieved in these five years, but not how these aims were to be achieved; it simply assumed that all quotas would be met.
For this reason, the first Five-Year Plan was more of a set of targets than a plan. Stalin encouraged the formulation of an 'optimal' Plan that had hopelessly unrealistic quotas which stood no chance of being reached, even under the most favourable conditions.Local officials and managers often gave false production figures to give the impression that they had reached their targets when, in actuality, they had fallen short, so it is difficult to give precise statistics. Even though the figures of output production were rigged at the time, the output of coal, iron and the generation of electricity all increased in huge proportions.
Though steel and chemicals were not produced in as impressive proportions and the output of textiles declined.During the Plan, living standards among Soviet people also deteriorated as no effort was made to reward workers by providing them with affordable consumer goods and people in towns and cities often till lived in sub-standard accommodation. Workers had few rights, as by 1917 the Russian trade unions had become powerless. Strikes had been prohibited and the traditional demands for better pay and work conditions had been regarded as selfishly inappropriate, as this was a time of national crisis.However, it was never part of the Plan to raise living standards as its purpose was collective and not individual. Overall, the first Five Year Plan was an extraordinary achievement overall as industrial production had increased substantially.
A difference between the First, and the Second and Third Five-Year Plans were that targets for the Second and Third Plans were set more realistically. Nevertheless, over-production still occurred in certain areas of the economy and under-production in others, which led to whole branches of the economy being held up for lack of vital supplies.There was a large struggle in maintaining a proper supply of materials; which often led to competition between sectors of industry and regions, as a result there was hoarding of resources and lack of co-operation between sectors. Successes that occurred were in heavy industry, where the Second Five-Year Plan began to reap the benefit of the creation of large-scale plants under the First Plan. Stalin's economic reforms only succeeded in areas of heavy industry.
There were other sectors where unskilled and forced labour could be easily used, for example, the building of large projects such as canals, factories and bridges. Even though the results of these buildings proved impressive, the Soviet economy still remained unbalanced as little thought was put into the development of an overall economic strategy by Stalin. Also, modern building techniques were not adopted and old, wasteful techniques, such as using massed labour over efficient, cheaper machines.Stalin was fond of 'the Grand Projects of Communism', meaning that no real attention was paid to producing goods of quality. His focus was on his love for showing to other nations the great projects that either had been built or were under construction, which meant that not goods could be profitably sold abroad to raise the money that the USSR so badly needed. Historian Sheila Fitzpatrick argued that Stalin's obsession with large-scale projects distorted the Soviet economy at a critical time calling out for proper investment and planning.
She emphasised on how little the Five-Year Plans did to improve the Soviet standards of living, stating that 'the Stalinist regime did little to improve the life of its people in the 1930s'. Despite the negative economic impacts of the First, Second and Third Five-Year Plans, it is untrue to say that the Plans were at least somewhat successful, as figures indicate a remarkable increase in production overall. Speaking in purely statistical terms, most sectors of the economy would have been far short of reaching their targets, particularly in the first Five-Year Plan.However, in just over 12 years of the Plans being in place, there were huge successes in the growth of heavy industry, transforming the Soviet economy and establishing the Soviet Union as a leading industrial power. Coal production had grown five-fold, steel production had grown six-fold, oil output had more than doubled and electricity generation had quintupled. These were the four key products that provided the USSR with the basis for the military economy, which enabled it to survive four years of German occupation, and also, to amass sufficient resources to drive the German military out of Soviet territory.
