The party congress of 1927, which ratified Stalin’s consolidation of power, marked the end of the NEP; the following year marked the beginning of the era of socialist five-year plans. The first of these plans had staggering economic objectives. In just five years, total industrial output was to increase by 250 percent, with heavy industry, the preferred sector, growing even faster. Agricultural production was slated to increase by 150 percent, and one-fifth of the peasants in the Soviet Union were to give up their private plots and join collective farms.

Stalin unleashed his “second revolution” for a variety of interrelated reasons. There were, first of all, ideological considerations. Stalin and his militant supporters feared a gradual restoration of capitalism; wished to promote the working classes; and were eager to abolish the NEP’s private traders, independent artisans, and property-owning peasants. Economic motivations were also important. A fragile economic recovery stalled in 1927 and 1928, and a new offensive seemed necessary to ensure industrial and agricultural growth and to help the U.S.S.R. to catch up with the West.

The independent peasantry remained a major problem as well. For centuries, the peasants had wanted to own the land, and finally they had it. Sooner or later, Stalinists reasoned, landowning peasants would embrace conservative capitalism and pose a threat to the regime. At the same time, the Communists — mainly urban dwellers — believed that the “class enemy” in the villages could be squeezed to provide the enormous sums needed for all-out industrialization. To resolve these issues, in 1929, Stalin ordered the collectivization of agriculture — the forced consolidation of individual peasant farms into large, state-controlled enterprises that served as agricultural factories.

The increasingly repressive measures instituted by the state first focused on the kulaks, the class of well-off peasants who had benefited the most from the NEP. The kulaks were held up as a great enemy of progress, and Stalin called for their “liquidation” and seizure of their land. Stripped of land and livestock, many starved or were deported to forced-labor camps for “re-education.”

Forced collectivization led to disaster. Large numbers of peasants opposed to the change slaughtered their animals and burned their crops rather than turn them over to state commissars. Nor were the state-controlled collective farms more productive. The output of grain barely increased over the first five-year plan, and collectivized agriculture was unable to make any substantial financial contribution to Soviet industrial development in the first five-year plan.

Collectivization in the fertile farmlands of the Ukraine was more rapid and violent than in other Soviet territories. The drive against peasants snowballed into an assault on Ukrainians in general. In 1932, as collectivization and deportations continued, party leaders set levels of grain deliveries for the Ukrainian collectives at excessively high levels and refused to relax those quotas or allow food relief when Ukrainian Communist leaders reported that starvation was occurring. The result was a terrible man-made famine in Ukraine in 1932 and 1933, which claimed 3 to 3.5 million lives.

By the end of 1938, government representatives had moved 93 percent of peasant households onto collective farms, neutralizing them as a political threat. Nonetheless, peasant resistance had forced the supposedly all-powerful state to make modest concessions. Peasants secured the right to limit a family’s labor on the state-run farms and to cultivate tiny family plots, which provided them with much of their food.

The rapid industrialization mandated by the five-year plans was more successful. Soviet industry produced about four times as much in 1937 as it had in 1928. No other major country had ever achieved such rapid industrial growth. Rapid industrialization had dramatic social consequences. An industrial labor force was created almost overnight as peasant men and women began working in the huge steel mills built across the country. The government could assign workers to any job anywhere in the country. When factory managers needed more hands, they called on their counterparts on the collective farms, who sent them millions of “unneeded” peasants over the years. Industrial growth led to urban development: more than 25 million people, mostly peasants, migrated to cities during the 1930s.