The Five Year Plans • The Soviet Five Year Plan
comes to an end this week-, but singularly little attention is being paid to that not unimportant fact. The reason no doubt is that no one can quite ,decide whether the plan is to be regarded as a _ success or a failure. That depends partly on whether it is measured by the original estimates or by the situation as it existed in Russia in 1927 before the plan was entered on. It depends further on whether the figures published by the Soviet Government are -to be -regarded as accurate or not. That there has - been a vast expansion in the means -of production in the last five years—or rather in the last four years, for the claim made for the Five Year Plan is that it has been more or less completed in little over four years instead of the projected five—is incontest- able. But how the new productive machinery .will• stand the wear and tear of continued use is as uncertain as it is whether the peasants will permanently submit to the existing regimentation in the collective farms.; . This at least can be said of the plan, that it reveals Russia as conducting the most important experiment in the world and by no means failing. And the day the .original Five Year Plan ends a new Five Year Plan with more emphasis on the production of " consumers' goods " begins. Russia, in other words, will be creating the goods her citizens want, instead of creating the machinery to create them with.
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