On October 1, 1928, the first Soviet five-year plan came into force. It ran, in fact, for four years and three months, to December 31, 1932, and it set out what the country was to produce: tonnage of coal and pig iron, kilowatt-hours of electricity, the number of tractors. Gosplan, the state planning committee, wrote the figures. The party had already decided at its fifteenth congress in December 1927 that the peasantry would be collectivised.
The plan was a bet on heavy industry, and it was made in a hurry. Stalin had abandoned the New Economic Policy, which let peasants sell grain on a market, after the procurement crisis of 1927, when the state could not buy what it needed at the price it was offering. His answer was to take the grain by force and to merge individual holdings into collective farms the state could requisition from directly. Collectivisation began in 1929. It was enforced by party brigades and by the OGPU.
The targets were not met. They were declared met. Pig iron and steel fell far short, coal came close, and electricity generation roughly doubled. The propaganda said the plan had been fulfilled in four years. What had actually happened was a doubling of industrial capacity built on the labour of prisoners, on the output of collective farms, and on Western machinery and engineers paid for with grain exported during a famine.
The countryside paid for it. About 15 million peasant households were pushed into collective farms between 1929 and 1932, and the livestock was slaughtered rather than handed over, so that cattle numbers fell by nearly half. Grain procurements kept rising anyway. Between five and seven million people died in the famine of 1932 and 1933, the largest share of them in Ukraine, where the famine is called the Holodomor, and in Kazakhstan.
The structure survived. Centrally planned five-year targets governed the Soviet economy until 1991, and the model was copied across the communist world after 1945. The industrial base built in the 1930s, much of it in the Urals and Siberia and out of range of German aircraft, is what produced the tanks and guns that stopped the Wehrmacht at Stalingrad and Kursk.