574Chapter 28fifty degrees Fahrenheit), dressed in light clothing and
felt boots, and were fed a diet of approximately one
thousand calories per day.
Stalin used these instruments of terror to build the
Communist state. He ended the NEP and its privately
owned shops and farms. The nationalization of this
property (a process called collectivization) led to bitter
fights, especially with the successful class of landown-
ing peasants known as the kulaks.There were approxi-
mately twenty-five million peasant farms in the Soviet
Union in 1928, with a livestock population of twenty-
eight million pigs and sixty-six million cattle. By 1932
collectivization had created 250,000 large state farms
(sovkhoz), where the government employed peasant
workers to farm state land, and collective farms
(kolkhoz), where state land was leased to a peasant com-
munity that farmed it as a collective enterprise. The
kulaks resisted collectivization by burning crops,
smashing farm implements, and slaughtering livestock.
Thus, in 1934 the Soviet livestock population had
plummeted to eleven million pigs and thirty-three mil-
lion cattle. Stalin answered with a brutal repression
aimed at nothing less than “the liquidation of the kulak
class.” Between five million and six million peasants
(chiefly in Ukraine and the Caucasus) were executed in
their villages or died in the gulags;another four million
died in the famine of 1933, a direct consequence of
collectivization.
Stalin used the grains and profits of collectivized
agriculture to feed and finance the forced industrializa-
tion of the Soviet Union. He placed the economy un-
der a central planning office (Gosplan) that drafted a
series of Five Year Plans directing the creation of an in-
dustrial economy. The first Five Year Plan (1928–32)
encompassed the collectivization of agriculture and
rapid industrialization (see table 28.5). The cost of
these plans in human suffering was horrifying, but they
accomplished the goal of industrialization (although
they did not meet their production targets in heavy in-
dustry). Russia had lagged far behind western Europe
throughout the nineteenth century; by 1940, however,
the Soviet Union had the third largest industrial econ-
omy in the world (behind the United States and Ger-
many), and at Stalin’s death in 1953 it stood second.
The same Five Year Plans that starved the kulaks in-
creased Soviet coal production from 36 million tons
(1928) to 166 million tons (1940), steel production
from 4 million tons to 18 million tons. Production often
fell short of Gosplan’s targets (leading to the purge of
“plan wreckers”), and both efficiency and quality suf-
fered, but Stalin made the Soviet Union into an indus-
trial power.
Simultaneously, Stalin relied on police terror to
maintain his dictatorship. He began a new series of
purges directed by Yezhov in 1936, which grew into
the Great Terror (1936–39). This purge struck millions
of members of the Communist Party, including virtually
all surviving leaders of the Bolshevik revolution of- Many of Stalin’s old comrades, such as Nikolai
Bukharin, the intellectual leader of the right deviation-
ists, were convicted in public “show trials” after confess-
ing to absurd charges such as being Nazi agents. In
1937 the purge decimated the officer corps of the Red
Army, including the chief of staff and seven leading
generals. By the end of the Great Terror, approximately
one million people had been killed (including both
Bukharin and Yezhov) and eight million to ten million
sent to the gulags.
1928 Target in 1932
Output total the plan total
Gross industrial production (in billions of 1927 rubles) 18.3 43.2 43.3
Consumer goods production (in billions of 1927 rubles) 12.3 25.1 20.2
Gross agricultural production (in billions of 1927 rubles) 13.1 25.8 16.6
Hard coal production (in millions of tons) 35.4 75. 064.3
Iron ore production (in millions of tons) 5.7 19. 012.1
Steel production (in millions of tons) 4. 01 0.4 5.9
Electricity generated (in billions of kilowatt hours) 5.1 22. 013.4
Source: Alec Nove, An Economic History of the USSR(London: Penguin, 1969, 1982), p. 192.TABLE 28.5Soviet Industrialization Under the Five-Year Plan, 1928–32