Russia's Five-Year Plan
The Soviet Union Looks Ahead. The Five-year Plan for Economic Construction. (Allen and Unwin. 8s. 6d.)
Illsrorry is not without honour save in its own generation. A few decades hence each scrap of witness about present events in Russia will doubtless be treasured by social historians as .datum of great worth. Our own generation scarcely finds anything harder than to contemplate the Soviet Union with calm interest and objectivity.
Contemporary events in Russia are of unique importance because they represent the attempt to carry out the indus- trialization of an agrarian semi-Asiatic country „at an unpre- cedented speed, and for the first time in history to do so, not in the Mammy of laissez-faire, but on the basis of cen-- tralized control and planning and of approximate economic equality. This book of two hundred odd pages of text and fifty odd pages of statistical tables is a translation of the official outline of the Piatiletka, or. Five-Year Plan of industrial deyelopment, prepared by the State Economic Planning Commission and adopted by the Soviet Government. From estimates of tendencies and potentialities it . proceeds to outline the general programme which State economic policy is to follow in the -five-year period between October, 1928; and October, 1933. As the planning department of an American business may draw up a programme of reorganiza- tion for the plants under its control, so the State Economic Planning Commission in Russia has here outlined a programme for reorganizing the eeonomic system of a whole nation of
one hundred and fifty million inhabitants. ,
As such this document is as fascinating to read as it is unique in historical interest. The keynote of the plan rests in the very high proportion of the country's resources which are to be devoted to capital purposes—to construc- tional work—as distinct from immediate production ot consumable goods moreover, a particularly large proportion` is for long-period construction, such as electrification, railway-building and the development of the heavy industries, which will only yield fruit several years hence. This it is that is responsible for the prevailing " goods famine," of which the report speaks : the insufficiency of numerous products, especially imported manufactures and agricultural products, to meet a growing current -demand represents the degree of " saving," or stinting of present enjoyments, which so gigantic an effort at capital construction necessarily involves. The plan provides for a total sum of sixty-four n011iard roubles of_capital investments in the five-year. period, as against twenty-six milliard in the preceding five years, thereby increasing the total fixed capital of the country by 80 per cent. and doubling the average horse-power per worker in industry. This represents a volume of capital accumulation which embraces over a quarter of the national income, or double the proportion applied to capital purposes in this country. On this basis a doubling of industrial output is provided for over the five-year period ; and it is estimated that by -1938 some 88 per cent. of industrial-production will come from new factories and plants (as distinct from reconstructed existing plants). The railroad system is to be increased from 77,000 kilometres (already considerably above the pm-War length) to 94,000. In the sphere of electrification, forty-two large regional power stations are already under construction or are planned, and are to increase the annual power output by 1933 to twenty-two milliard kilowatt hours, as against two milliard in 1913.
As the report points out, agriculture and the problem of technical skill constitute the crucial " tight places " in Russia's economic growth. Agriculture already seems to have reached the limit of its growth on • the basis of small- scale peasant production. At present some four thousand , engineers of all kinds graduate annually from the universities and higher technical institutes ; whereas to meet the needs of the Five-Year Plan an annual supply of at least five thousand engineers will be needed. It is to deal with the former problem that the present intensive " drive " is being made towards the creation of State and co-operative farms ; and the plan provides for this "socialized " section of agri- culture to cover by 1933 15 per cent. of the grain area and to account for 20 per cent. of the grain crop and 45 per cent. of the marketed surplus of grain. This programme neces- sitates the employment on these farms of some 170,000 tractors by 1933 ; and to meet this need two giant factories are planned (at Stalingrad and in the Urals), to be erected with American technical assistance, each of them to have an output of fifty thousand tractors annually, or more than, the total output in the U.S.A.
Rural over-population has always constituted a funda- mental source of difficulty for Russia. With improved public health facilities in recent years the death-rate in Russia has declined, so that the natural rate of increase of population has risen to the very high figure of twenty-three per thousand. As a result of the influx of population from the countryside to the towns, the increase in the urban population is double as great, namely, some 5 per cent. per annum, which is the_ cause of the present serious unemployment problem in the towns. Since the expansion of industry that is taking place is mainly based upon rationalization and mechanization, the number of employed workers will not increase in anything like the same proportion as will the total volume of production. While the plan provides for more than a doubling of industrial output over the five years, the number of employed wage- earners is estimated to increase by only 39 per cent. This figure, 'however, is two or three times as great as the natural increase, and sufficiently greater than the estimated increase of urban population to reduce the unemployed margin in the towns to a relatively low figure by 1988. Meanwhile, the real wages of those in employment are planned to increase by 70 per cent. (compared with a 110 per cent. increase in average output per -worker). '
A common reaction to such figures- is to dismiss them As Utopia-weaving or, worse, as propagandist window-dressing. Such an ostrich-view, I believe, can no longer be tolerated by sensible persons. Three years ago the present reviewer, infiiieneed by, this common scepticism, published a con- ' Servative estimate of 10 per cent. as the probable rate. of industrial growth in Russia over the ensuing years. Actual events show him to have been too cautious by about a half. The Five-Year Plan as originally prepared appeared in two forms—a minimum and a maximum variant. The Govern- ment adopted the latter as the goal to be aimed at. The results of the first year (1928-9) of the plan are actually, in excess of this programme : industrial production increased 24 per cent. as against an estimated 21 per cent. According to latest reports, in the -first four months of the second year of the plan (1929-80), an increase of 27 per cent. is shown over the same period of the previous year. At the same tiine, the growth of the collective farm movement has already embraced 50 per cent. of peasant holdings. Whether people like it or not, it seems time to realize that the economic revolution which is in process in Russia is something of a stupendous order, of which history has hardly seen the like.
There are two minor blemishes to be blamed against the English edition of this book. A reference book of its impOrt- ance should not have lacked an index. And it is misleading to the English reader, when the American sense of " billion " differs from the English usage, that numbers should appear throughout (without explanation) in American billions in place of more convenient European " milliards." The maps with which the book is illustrated could also have been
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