Document 21.1: Stalin on Stalinism: Joseph Stalin, “The Results of the First Five-Year Plan,” 1933

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In January 1933, Stalin appeared before a group of high-ranking party officials to give a report on the achievements of the country’s first five-year plan for overall development. The years encompassed by that plan, roughly 1928–1932, coincided with Stalin’s rise to the position of supreme leader within the governing Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

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JOSEPH STALIN

The Results of the First Five-Year Plan

1933

The fundamental task of the five-year plan was to convert the U.S.S.R. . . . into an industrial and powerful country, fully self-reliant and independent of the caprices of world capitalism, . . . to completely oust the capitalist elements, to widen the front of socialist forms of economy, and to create the economic basis for the abolition of classes in the U.S.S.R., for the building of a socialist society. . . .

Let us pass now to the results of the fulfillment of the five-year plan. . . .

We did not have an iron and steel industry, the basis for the industrialization of the country. Now we have one.

[Stalin follows with a long list of new industries developed during the first five-year plan: tractors, automobiles, machine tools, chemicals, agricultural machinery, electric power, oil and coal, metals.]

And we have not only created these new great industries, but have created them on a scale and in dimensions that eclipse . . . European industry.

And as a result of all this the capitalist elements have been completely and irrevocably ousted from industry, and socialist industry has become the sole form of industry in the U.S.S.R. . . .

Finally, as a result of all this the Soviet Union has been converted from a weak country, unprepared for defense, into a country mighty in defense . . . , a country capable of producing on a mass scale all modern means of defense and of equipping its army with them in the event of an attack from abroad.

We are told: This is all very well; many new factories have been built, and the foundations for industrialization have been laid; but it would have been far better . . . to produce more cotton fabrics, shoes, clothing, and other goods for mass consumption. . . . Then we would now have more cotton fabrics, shoes, and clothing. But we would not have a tractor industry or an automobile industry; we would not have anything like a big iron and steel industry; we would not have metal for the manufacture of machinery—and we would remain unarmed while encircled by capitalist countries armed with modern technique. . . .

It was necessary to urge forward a country which was a hundred years behindhand and which was faced with mortal danger because of its backwardness. . . .

The five-year plan in the sphere of agriculture was a five-year plan of collectivization. . . . [I]t was necessary in addition to industrialization, to pass from small, individual peasant farming to . . . large collective farms, equipped with all the modern implements of highly developed agriculture, and to cover unoccupied land with model state farms. . . .

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The Party has succeeded in routing the kulaks° as a class, although they have not yet been dealt the final blow; the laboring peasants have been emancipated from kulak bondage and exploitation, and the Soviet regime has been given a firm economic basis in the countryside, the basis of collective farming.

In our country, the workers have long forgotten unemployment. . . . Look at the capitalist countries: what horrors result there from unemployment! There are now no less than 30–40 million unemployed in those countries. . . .

The same thing must be said of the peasants. . . . It has brought them into the collective farms and placed them in a secure position. It has thus eliminated the possibility of the differentiation of the peasantry into exploiters—kulaks—and exploited—poor peasants—and abolished destitution in the countryside. . . . Now the peasant is in a position of security, a member of a collective farm which has at its disposal tractors, agricultural machinery, seed funds, reserve funds. . . .

[W]e have achieved such important successes as to evoke admiration among the working class all over the world; we have achieved a victory that is truly of world-wide historic significance.

°kulaks: relatively rich peasants.

Source: Joseph Stalin, “The Results of the First Five-Year Plan,” Pravda, January 10, 1933.