Home – Home – Jornals – Humanitarian sciences in Siberia 2021 number

The article is devoted to understanding the results of the First Five-Year Plan in the USSR in January 1933. The idea of the First Five-Year Plan was extensive: for the first time in world history, a proportional and balanced development of regional and sectoral potentials was planned within the framework of the state plan; as well as a wide range of social programs. The clash of rational and utopian courses during implementation of the five-year plan is the most dramatic page of Soviet history, which had a strong impact on the people fates. The materials of the January (1933) Plenum of CPSU(b) Central Committee show that the perniciousness of the “frenzied pace” course was eventually realized by the USSR leadership representatives. However, the comprehension of the First Five-Year Plan events has been complicated by the constructed mythological space, which included ideological constructions such as “creating the socialist economy foundation”. At the same time, Stalin attributed the explanation of the “frenzied pace” practice, all difficulties and hardships fell to the population share during the First Five-Year Plan, as well as reasons to under-fulfill the planned tasks to an external factor: “the refusal of neighboring countries to sign non-aggression pacts with us and complications in the Far East”. The removal of one’s own responsibility for the monstrous mistakes and crimes of the early 1930s; the imposition of responsibility on local cadres and the capitalist environment - such were distinctive signs of Stalin’s style, which had not changed since the spring of 1930, the time of balancing on the verge of a new civil war in the countryside. Another fundamentally new point was the repeated emphasis on the lack of alternative to the course of the early 1930s. The General Secretary did not make any analytical comparison with the version of the Five-Year Plan adopted in April-May 1929. Thereby, the January (1933) Joint Plenum of CPSU(b) Central Committee and the Central Control Commission has a special place in a number of party forums according to the significance of conclusions included in textbooks for decades - for example, the thesis about “building the socialist economic foundation”. By the scale of social deception - millions of people dying of hunger dying collectivization; exile and devastation of the most skilled peasants; impoverishment of tens of million people; catastrophe in husbandry; economic chaos in constructing and developing enterprises - were presented as a revolutionary victory of “socialist” relations.