Five-year plans for the national economy of the Soviet Union

The five-year plans for the development of the national economy of the Soviet Union were multiple nationwide centralized economic plans in the Soviet Union, starting in the late 1920s.

In the end of 1920s, the USSR economy was sluggish, inefficient and mostly agrarian because of the New Economic Policy (NEP) was designed for the inherited agrarian economy of the former Russian Empire.

In 1929, Soviet head-of-state Joseph Stalin enacted the five year plans (known in Russian shortly as pyatiletka), along with the collectivization of the agricultural economy in order to accelerate the industrialization of the Soviet Union. This strategy consisted of stockpiling grain and selling (exporting) the excesses abroad to make money for the needed industrial equipment. This came at the cost of the Holodomor, a famine which killed several million people.

Five-year Plans For The National Economy Of The Soviet Union Media

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  Leon Trotsky was among the earliest Soviet figures that supported economic planning and decentralization but opposed the Stalinist model.

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  Statement from the Newspaper Pereslavl Week. The text reads:"Plan is law, fulfillment is duty, over-fulfillment is honor!". Here "duty" can also be interpreted as "obligation."

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  Large notice board with slogans about the 5-Year Plan in Moscow, Soviet Union (c. 1931) by traveler Branson DeCou. It reads like it's made by a state-run paper «Economics and Life» ().

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  Soviet poster inciting early achievement of the First Five-Year Plan, using the slogan "2 + 2 plus Workers' Enthusiasm= 5". 1931