Industrialization in the Soviet Union was the process of the accelerated creation of large–scale machine industry and the transformation of the predominantly agrarian economy of the Soviet Union into an industrial one, carried out from the late 1920s to June 1941 through the system of Five–Year Plans and associated with the construction of a planned economy.Davies, R. W. The Industrialisation of Soviet Russia. London: Macmillan, 1980–2018.Allen, Robert C. Farm to Factory: A Reinterpretation of the Soviet Industrial Revolution. Princeton University Press, 2003. In historiography, industrialization is generally distinguished from ordinary economic growth because it involved a deliberate restructuring of production through the transfer of labor, capital, and resources from agriculture to industry, from the countryside to urban centers, and from consumer production to the production of means of production.Nove, Alec. An Economic History of the USSR, 1917–1991. Penguin Books, 1992. Most historians regard industrialization as the decisive transformative event in Soviet history, fundamentally reshaping the social structure, economy, and institutions of the Soviet state and creating the industrial, technological, and military foundations that later enabled the Soviet Union to emerge as a global superpower.Lewin, Moshe. The Soviet Century. Verso, 2005.Suny, Ronald Grigor. The Soviet Experiment. Oxford University Press, 2011. Industrialization marked the definitive abandonment of the New Economic Policy (NEP) and the transition to a mobilizational model of development in which the state monopolized investment decisions, controlled resource allocation through Gosplan, and prioritized the expansion of heavy industry, machine building, metallurgy, and electrification over consumer welfare.Kotkin, Stephen. Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization. University of California Press, 1995.
The origins of industrialization lay in the economic and ideological contradictions that emerged after the October Revolution and the Russian Civil War. Despite the establishment of communist rule, the former Russian Empire remained overwhelmingly rural, economically backward, and technologically dependent on the industrial powers of Western Europe and North America.Carr, E. H. The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917–1923. Macmillan, 1950.Gerschenkron, Alexander. Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective. Harvard University Press, 1962. For the leadership of the All–Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), this situation represented not only an economic problem but also a theoretical challenge to Marxism, which traditionally assumed that socialism would emerge from a highly developed capitalist economy rather than from a predominantly peasant society.Lenin, V. I. Collected Works, vol. 33. Throughout the 1920s, Soviet leaders debated whether industrial development should proceed gradually within the framework of the NEP or through accelerated state-directed accumulation. These disputes became known as the Soviet industrialization debate and involved figures such as Leon Trotsky, Yevgeni Preobrazhensky, Nikolai Bukharin, Alexei Rykov, and Mikhail Tomsky, whose competing proposals reflected broader disagreements over the future of the Soviet economy and the relationship between the state, the working class, and the peasantry.Erlich, Alexander. The Soviet Industrialization Debate, 1924–1928. Harvard University Press, 1960.Cohen, Stephen F. Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution. Oxford University Press, 1980.
The political victory of the supporters of accelerated industrial development was consolidated during the Great Break of 1929, which coincided with the rise of Joseph Stalin as the dominant figure in Soviet politics and the defeat of both the Left Opposition and the Right Opposition.Tucker, Robert C. Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above, 1928–1941. W. W. Norton, 1990. Drawing ideological justification from the doctrine of socialism in one country, Stalin and his supporters argued that the Soviet Union had to overcome decades of economic backwardness within a single generation or risk military defeat and political subordination to the capitalist world.Stalin, J. V. Works, vol. 13. The industrialization program was therefore conceived not merely as an economic strategy but as a project of state-building, national security, and socialist transformation. The implementation of this program required the abandonment of market mechanisms associated with the NEP, the expansion of the authority of Gosplan, the growing role of the Supreme Soviet of the National Economy, and the prioritization of Group A industries – the production of capital goods – over Group B industries, which produced consumer goods.Davies, R. W. The Socialist Offensive. Harvard University Press, 1980.Gregory, Paul R. The Political Economy of Stalinism. Cambridge University Press, 2004.
The practical implementation of industrialization relied on centralized directive planning, mass resource mobilization, and the extraction of capital from the agricultural sector through the collectivization of agriculture.Lewin, Moshe. Russian Peasants and Soviet Power. George Allen & Unwin, 1968.Viola, Lynne. Peasant Rebels Under Stalin. Oxford University Press, 1996. During the first five-year plan and second five-year plan, the Soviet government sponsored the construction of major industrial enterprises and infrastructure projects, including the Magnitogorsk Iron and Steel Works, the Dnieper Hydroelectric Station, Uralmash, the Stalingrad Tractor Plant, the Chelyabinsk Tractor Plant, the Kuznetsk Basin industrial complex, and the Turkestan–Siberia Railway. Many of these projects were built with imported machinery and the assistance of foreign specialists from companies such as Ford Motor Company, General Electric, and Albert Kahn Associates.Sutton, Antony C. Western Technology and Soviet Economic Development. Hoover Institution Press, 1968–1973. Labor mobilization combined ideological campaigns such as the Stakhanovite movement, socialist competition, and the promotion of shock workers with coercive methods, including extensive reliance on the forced labor of prisoners within the Gulag system.Kuromiya, Hiroaki. Stalin's Industrial Revolution: Politics and Workers, 1928–1932. Cambridge University Press, 1988.Khlevniuk, Oleg. The History of the Gulag. Yale University Press, 2004.
Despite its proclaimed goal of building socialism, industrialization generated profound theoretical, political, and social tensions within the Soviet system itself. The drive for rapid accumulation contributed to dekulakization, mass population displacement, and the Soviet famine of 1930–1933, events that remain among the most controversial aspects of Soviet history.Conquest, Robert. The Harvest of Sorrow. Oxford University Press, 1986.Davies, R. W.; Wheatcroft, Stephen G. The Years of Hunger. Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. At the same time, the expansion of centralized planning strengthened the bureaucracy, increased the authority of party and state institutions, and transformed the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from a revolutionary movement into a highly centralized administrative apparatus.Lewin, Moshe. The Making of the Soviet System. Pantheon Books, 1985. In the long term, industrialization created the heavy-industrial and military–industrial complex that made possible Soviet victory in the Great Patriotic War, postwar reconstruction, and the emergence of the Soviet Union as one of the two dominant powers of the Cold War.Harrison, Mark. Accounting for War. Cambridge University Press, 1996.Overy, Richard. Russia's War. Penguin Books, 1998. Its human cost, economic efficiency, and historical legacy remain subjects of extensive historiographical debate, but scholars generally agree that industrialization permanently established the foundations of the Soviet command economy, shaped both the strengths and structural weaknesses of the Soviet system, and determined the trajectory of Soviet development until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.Nove, Alec. The Soviet Economic System. George Allen & Unwin, 1977.
GOELRO Already during the Civil War, the Soviet government began to develop a long-term plan for the electrification of the country. In December 1920, the GOELRO plan was approved by the 8th All-Russian Congress of Soviets, and a year later it was approved by the 9th All-Russian Congress of Soviets.
The plan provided for the priority development of the electric power industry, tied to the plans for the development of territories. The GOELRO plan, designed for 10–15 years, provided for the construction of 30 district power plants (20 thermal power plants and 10 hydroelectric power plants) with a total capacity of 1.75 gigawatts. The project covered eight major economic regions (Northern, Central Industrial, Southern, Volga, Ural, West Siberian, Caucasian and Turkestan). At the same time, the development of the country's transport system was carried out (reconstruction of old and construction of new railway lines, construction of the Volga–Don Canal).
The GOELRO project made possible the industrialization in the Soviet Union: electricity generation in 1932 compared with 1913 increased almost 7 times, from 2 to 13.5 billion kWh.
Features of industrialization Researchers highlight the following features of industrialization: As the main link were selected investment sectors: metallurgy, engineering, industrial construction; Pumping funds from agriculture to industry using price scissors; The special role of the state in the centralization of funds for industrialization; The creation of a single form of ownership – socialist – in two forms: state and cooperative–collective farm; Industrialization planning; Lack of private capital (cooperative entrepreneurship in that period was legal); Relying on own resources (it was impossible to attract private capital in the existing external and internal conditions); Over-centralized resources.
Discussions in the period of the New Economic Policy
Until 1928, the Soviet Union conducted the New Economic Policy. While agriculture, retail, services, food and light industries were mostly in private hands, the state retained control of heavy industry, transport, banks, wholesale and international trade (deemed the commanding heights of the economy). State-owned enterprises competed with each other, the role of the Gosplan of the Soviet Union was limited to forecasts that determined the direction and size of public investment.
One of the fundamental contradictions of Bolshevism was the fact that the party that called itself "workers" and its rule the "dictatorship of the proletariat" came to power in an agrarian country where factory workers constituted only a few percent of the population, and most of them were recent immigrants from the village who have not yet completely broken ties with her. Forced industrialization was designed to eliminate this contradiction.
From a foreign policy point of view, the country was in hostile conditions. According to the leadership of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), there was a high probability of a new war with capitalist states. It is significant that even at the 10th congress of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) in 1921, Lev Kamenev, the author of the report "About the Soviet Republic Surrounded", stated that preparations for the Second World War, which had begun in Europe: