The history of the industrialization of the USSR 1933-1937

The History of the Industrialisation of the Soviet Union: 

1933–1937. Documents and Materials. Moscow: Science. 1971. PDF

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FOREWORD

This collection of the publication of the all-Union series of documents on the history of industrialization of the USSR (1926-1941) contains materials telling about the process of industrialization throughout the country during the second five-year plan.

The economic tasks of the second five-year plan, set by the party, were to master the advanced technology of newly built and reconstructed enterprises during the first five-year plan, complete the technical reconstruction of the entire national economy, create the latest technical base for all its branches and continue the industrial development of the eastern regions of the country. In the second five-year plan, it was also planned to ensure a higher rate of growth in the production of consumer goods. Based on these tasks, it was necessary to significantly increase the volume of capital construction not only of machine-building plants, but also of power plants, enterprises of ferrous and non-ferrous metallurgy, coal mines, textile and shoe factories. The volume of capital construction in the industry producing means of production increased by 2.5 times according to the plan, and consumer goods - 4.6 times compared to the first five-year plan. Improving the organization of labor, raising the qualifications of workers and engineering and technical personnel, mechanizing a number of labor-intensive processes made it possible to plan for the second five years and a more significant increase in labor productivity.

The implementation of the second five-year plan took place in difficult conditions. The threat of imperialist aggression against the socialist state required accelerating the development of machine building in general and the defense industry in particular. During the years of the second five-year plan, the domestic aircraft building, tank and artillery industries achieved great success. Submarines and destroyers began to leave the stocks of Soviet factories in increasing numbers. If, according to the five-year plan, the gross output of mechanical engineering was to increase 2.1 times compared with the previous five-year plan, then in 1937 it increased 2.9 times.

A very difficult problem was the training and advanced training of hundreds of thousands of workers, engineering and technical workers and employees, without which it was impossible to master new equipment and production technology.

The advantages of the socialist economic system, the skilful leadership of the Communist Party and the Soviet government, the heroic labor of the working class, the collective farm peasantry and the Soviet intelligentsia were the key to the successful implementation of the second five-year plan. More than 4500 new enterprises were built to ensure the technical reconstruction of transport and agriculture, as well as the growth of the country's defense capability. In 1937, over 80% of the production was obtained from new enterprises that were completely reconstructed in the years of two five-year plans. These successes were achieved on the basis of a significant improvement in the organization of labor, the further development of the principles of cost accounting in production management. New methods of work organization began to be introduced into construction - high-speed construction, standard structures and parts, the park of construction machines and mechanisms was significantly enlarged. The creative activity of the working class, collective farmers and the intelligentsia has grown immeasurably, which has manifested itself in the broad scope of socialist competition and especially its new form - the Stakhanov movement.

The main features of socialist industrialization during the second five-year plan formed the basis of the structure of the published collection, the principles of selection and systematization of material. The collection consists of two sections:

1. Industry of the USSR in the second five-year plan,

2. The working class of the USSR in the struggle for socialist industrialization. 

Let us remind the reader that in the first collection of our series, in the section "The course of the Communist Party for socialist industrialization," the fundamental documents are presented in which the party, based on Lenin's doctrine of building socialism in the USSR, gave a detailed program of socialist industrialization. The documents of the Central Committee of the CPSU relating to 1933-1937, except for the resolution of the 17th Congress on the second five-year plan for the development of the national economy, published at the beginning of this publication, are posted according to the topic and chronology. Each section of the collection consists of chapters covering the following issues: financing of industry, capital construction in industry, organization of production and the results of the work of industry, the number and composition of the working class,

The first section consists of three chapters. Most of the first chapter (on the financing of industry) consists of explanatory notes to the reports of the People's Commissariat of Finance of the USSR on the execution of the state budget of the USSR for 1933-1937. (doc. No. 2-6). The notes contain information: on the structure of income and expenditures of the state budget for financing all sectors of the national economy, transport and communications; on the execution of the budgets of the union republics; about the financial results of the industry and the amount of industrial savings; on the ratio and size of budgetary funds and intraindustrial savings in the financing of industrial construction and their distribution by industry. Much space in the notes is given to the results of the principles of cost accounting in industry and construction, the influence of the process of mastering production and the organization of labor on the economic results of the work of enterprises. The notes also contain information about the participation of the population in financing socialist industrialization: mass loans, a new form of financing for socialist industrialization, based on the high political activity of the Soviet people.

Information on the amount and distribution of taxes makes it possible to trace the change in the class structure of Soviet society as a result of socialist industrialization and collectivization of agriculture up to the complete elimination of capitalist elements in the country. Special sections of the notes show how the Soviet state financed the training of skilled workers and engineers and technicians.

The projects of the state budgets of the USSR and the union republics are also of interest for working out the problem of financing. Information on the execution of the state budget was published in the reports at the sessions of the Central Executive Committee (and since 1937 - the Supreme Soviet of the USSR), in the monthly reviews of the State Planning Committee of the USSR on the implementation of state plans by the national economy. However, the Gosplan's monthly reviews contain preliminary, inaccurate data.

The notes of the USSR People's Commissariat for Finance are the most generalizing and complete documents on the financing of industry; they are much more complete and accurate than all the sources on this issue published so far.

During the years of the second five-year plan, as a result of the successes of socialist industrialization, significant changes took place in the structure of foreign trade. Along with agricultural products, the Soviet Union began to export products of heavy industry, especially machine building. The published statistical materials show the composition and volume of exports and imports by weight and value (doc. No. 7, 8). Information about the equipment, unfortunately, is given only by weight, without breakdown by type. A somewhat more detailed grouping of export and import goods is contained in the statistical collection "Foreign trade of the USSR in 1918-1940." (M., 1958). However, it equates the prices and value of goods to those of 1955, which makes it difficult to compare them with the rest of the materials published in this edition.

The second chapter of the first section of the collection (on capital construction in industry) publishes materials on the implementation of the decisions of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) and the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR and STO of February 11, 1936. These decisions outlined a wide range of measures that contributed to the industrialization of the construction business. The memorandum of the People's Commissariat for Heavy Industry in the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR (doc., No. 14) contains information on the implementation of capital construction plans in all industries, on the revision of technical standards, on the streamlining of the design and estimate business, on the setting of standard design, on the production of building materials and the situation on the most important start-up construction sites. Much attention is paid to the training and retention of personnel. The next group of documents of the chapter is made up of reviews of the construction sector of the USSR State Planning Committee on the situation in the construction industry of the People's Commissariat for Heavy Industry and the entire industry in general for the first two years of the five-year plan (doc. No. 10, 11). These documents give a detailed analysis of the situation of construction organizations and a lot of work to overcome such shortcomings as the excess of the staffing level, unsatisfactory design and estimate work, etc., which led to an increase in the cost of construction by the end of the first five-year plan. The third group of documents represents notes and information from various sectors of the State Planning Commission on the improvement of the technical equipment of construction organizations, on the growth of labor productivity of builders and on the results of capital construction in the most important industries (doc. No. 15-17). 

A number of additional information about capital construction in industry, including light and food, the reader can find in the documents of the third chapter. They contain a short list of the main industrial facilities built during the second five-year plan, analyzed the reasons for the main difficulties and shortcomings in the organization of the construction business: a large volume of unfinished construction, the lengthy construction of new enterprises, the commissioning of enterprises with imperfections eliminated during operation, and etc. At the same time, the materials noted the great success that the construction industry achieved in the second five-year plan: the quality of work improved, the construction time was reduced, as a result of mechanization and the creation of permanent construction personnel, the cost of construction was reduced to a greater extent.

When studying the final materials, it must be borne in mind that the capital construction plan for the second five-year plan did not fully correspond to the real possibilities. The actual cost of building the factories was significantly higher than originally projected. In addition, the accelerated development of mechanical engineering and the defense industry required the transfer of part of the funds intended for the development of industries that produce consumer goods. All this could not but have a negative effect on the total volume of capital construction, especially in the light and food industries.

The third chapter (on the organization of production and the results of the work of industry) includes directive documents of the Communist Party and the Soviet government, as well as orders of the People's Commissariat for Heavy Industry. Such documents include the decree of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR and the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks "On the coal industry of Donbass", the decree of the CEC and the Council of People's Commissars "On organizational measures in the field of Soviet and economic construction", etc. These documents reveal the reasons for the shortcomings in the work of industry as a whole and the ways of their elimination are outlined.

A large group of orders from the NKTP contains information about the success of the industry in the production of new types of products, about the successes in the development of modern technology, shows the organizing role of the People's Commissariat for the development of new industries and the introduction of the principles of scientific organization of labor into the work of enterprises. A number of orders show that the successes of heavy industry in mastering new technology allowed in 1935 a number of metallurgical plants and coal mines to switch to work without planned subsidies. The transition of heavy industry to work without subsidies was not possible without the introduction of new prices, since the old prices did not fully take into account the actual cost of goods. A number of documents tell about the organizational and technical achievements of Soviet industry, about the development of advanced technology. For example, the reports of the Moscow Automobile Plant im. Stalin and the Stalingrad Tractor Plant. Dzerzhinsky on the restructuring of production planning, liquidation of the functional, strengthening the instrumental and repair facilities, restructuring the system of wages and technical training (doc. No. 20, 29). Among the leading trusts of heavy industry, one cannot fail to note the All-Union Trust of Quality Steels.

During the second five-year plan, the enterprises of the trust mastered a number of new grades of high-quality steels and freed the country from the need to import them from abroad. The report of the trust shows that these successes would have been impossible without the training of qualified engineers and workers, without a systematic increase in their level of knowledge (doc. No. 28). The review of the State Planning Committee of the USSR on the results of the fulfillment of the 1934 plan gives an idea of ​​the first successes of industry in organizing production and mastering new technology (doc. No. 33). The review shows what great importance was the versatile organizational work of the party and economic bodies in 1933-1934, as a result of which the industry significantly improved the quality indicators of its work. The growth of labor productivity, the reduction in production costs were a direct consequence of the training and consolidation of new qualified personnel,

The chapter includes a document on the implementation of the decisions of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR and the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) on the coal industry in the Donbass and the Moscow region coal basin. The memorandum of the Main Directorate of the Coal and Shale Industry is based on survey materials of only four mines, but it shows the main directions in the restructuring of the coal industry (doc. No. 34).

Further improvement in the organization of production and growth in labor productivity were associated with the organization and deployment of the Stakhanov movement. The published report of the Main Directorate of the Automotive and Tractor Industry shows a lot of work on studying the experience of Stakhanov's work and revising the old production standards, carried out with the active participation of the foremost workers in production (doc. No. 44). During the years of the second five-year plan, the forms of wages in industry have changed. The desire to increase the material interest of workers entailed an increase in piecework wages and its varieties. However, as the information from the State Planning Committee of the USSR shows, this tendency led to a decrease in differentiation between workers of different qualifications, especially in connection with the Stakhanov movement (doc. No. 38).

The largest group of documents in the chapter contains information about the results of the implementation of the second five-year plan. These documents, which represent plans for the third five-year plan for individual branches of industry, testify to the great successes of the Soviet people in the development of advanced industry. Studying the published materials, it is necessary to pay special attention to the successes in the field of mastering new technology, which made it possible to significantly overlap the tasks of the second five-year plan for increasing labor productivity and achieve the planned volume of gross output with a significantly smaller volume of new capacities.

However, the very nature of the planning materials predetermines the specifics of their content - the main attention is directed not to assessing the achievements of the second five-year plan, but to those imbalances or shortcomings in the organization of the matter that need to be corrected in the next five-year plan.

The chapter ends with materials from the industrial census of 1938. These materials contain data on the number of enterprises and workers and on gross output by industry (doc. No. 56). A special table characterizes the shifts in the territorial distribution of socialist industry that took place in the second five-year plan (document No. 57).

A well-known addition to the documents published in the chapter can be a number of materials published in due time. The second five-year plan and the annual five-year plans are of considerable interest. In addition to the report on the implementation of the plan for the second five-year plan published by the State Planning Committee [1] , the Main Indicators of the Implementation of the National Economic Plan for 1933-1937, published by the Central Statistical Office, are of interest. These compilations contain preliminary statistics for each month, for six months and for the year as a whole. A number of data on the work of industry and capital construction are given in statistical reference books. Along with the well-known yearbook "Socialist Construction of the USSR" [2], it is necessary to note the statistical collection "Industry of the USSR" [3]containing the most complete information, including the materials of the equipment census of 1932-1934. [4] and small industry in 1934. Of considerable interest is the transcript of a meeting of workers in heavy industry, which took place in September 1934. [5] At this meeting, GK Ordzhonikidze made a presentation.

The second section of the published collection consists of two chapters. The first chapter contains documents on the number, composition and training of workers and engineering and technical personnel in the years of the second five-year plan. A significant part of the published documents are references from the labor sector and personnel of the USSR State Planning Committee for each year of the five-year plan throughout industry and even throughout the national economy as a whole. Since especially great successes were achieved in training personnel for heavy industry, the collection publishes the report of the management of educational institutions of the People's Commissariat for Heavy Industry for 1933 (doc. No. 60). The lack of similar materials in the NKTP fund in subsequent years led to the need to include several private materials in the chapter: reports of the Spetsstal trust and some branch departments of the State Planning Commission on the training of new personnel in mechanical engineering, fuel and energy industry and chemistry. These documents give an idea of ​​the network of educational institutions that trained workers and engineers and technicians; about the age and social composition of students; on measures to improve the teaching staff (doc. No. 62, 64, 67, 68).

During the years of the second five-year plan, retraining of workers by passing the obligatory technical minimum received a large scale. The report of the Central Committee of the Komsomol and the People's Commissariat for Tyazhprom to the Central Committee of the Party, as well as the certificate of the State Planning Commission, contain information about the important role of this mass form of advanced training (doc. No. 65, 72). By the end of 1935, as the documents published in the collection show, hundreds of thousands of highly qualified workers had been trained who had mastered advanced technology (documents 61, 62, etc.).

In the last years of the first five-year plan, a new system of organized recruitment of labor for industry took shape under agreements with collective farms. However, in the second five-year plan, this system did not occupy a significant place in the system of recruiting workers for industrial enterprises. As the reports of the factories show, due to the lack of housing, the recruitment of new workers was carried out mainly "from the gate." Even the coal industry and construction organizations were often recruited not only through the organizational recruitment system. The publication of these private documents in the collection is explained by the lack of generalizing materials (doc. No. 69, 73).

During the years of the second five-year plan, significant labor turnover was not eliminated. This is due to both the irregularity of wages and material and living conditions, which were very difficult to improve in a short time. The collection documents give an idea of ​​the situation with the provision of labor for all industries and construction, including seasonal branches of labor. The materials contain information about the training of workers in the republics, about changes in the number of workers by industry in the republics and large industrial regions of the country.

Documents on the composition of the working class at the end of the second five-year plan occupy an insignificant place. This is explained by the fact that the statistical and trade union bodies did not carry out such extensive surveys at the end of the five-year plan as they did in 1929-1932. In 1936, the Central Committee of the Komsomol, together with TsUNKHU, conducted an interesting survey of the composition, level of qualifications, material well-being and cultural needs of working and student youth. The survey materials, along with a number of other statistical data, are published in a special collection [6]

To characterize the composition of specialists, the published materials of the accounting of leading workers and specialists of the national economy, conducted by TsUNKHU on November 1, 1933 and covering more than 560 thousand people (80% of all specialists) are important [7]... Accounting materials make it possible to find out the proportion of young specialists who graduated from educational institutions by the beginning of the second five-year plan, their social origin, the party and Komsomol stratum, educational training, the number of practitioners, the proportion of which even increased slightly by the beginning of the second five-year plan. At the end of the second five-year plan, no such extensive survey was carried out. All the more important are the published results of accounting for the number and composition of engineering and technical sections on January 1, 1938. These materials make it possible to find out the total number of specialists, the percentage of women, party membership, length of service, education, and the percentage of practitioners [8] . In addition, during the years of the second five-year plan, a number of special collections were published on labor issues in the national economy of the country [9]... These collections provide information on the number of workers by industry, wages, the number of apprentices, the network for training and retraining of personnel, interregional transfers of labor and some other issues. Separate materials on the number of workers and specialists are also available in the aforementioned statistical publications, which relate mainly to construction and industry.

The second chapter of the second section of the collection is devoted to issues of socialist emulation and workers' participation in production management. The chapter includes mainly unpublished documents of trade union organizations: information summaries, memoranda, statistical summaries, as well as a number of letters, appeals from enterprise collectives that came out with new labor initiatives. This is because the reporting of the competition was mainly compiled by trade unions. A significant group of reports of the Central Committee of trade unions is also of great value, since all of them have been preserved in single copies (doc. No. 103-106). The published documents contain information about the activities of party and trade union organizations in the widespread dissemination of advanced forms of socialist competition: technical and financial plan, shift-counter planning, which are characteristic of 1933-1934. The need to improve the qualifications of workers and master new technology has given rise to new forms of competition: competition for the fulfillment of technically grounded standards, competition for leading professions, etc.

Such forms of mass work of trade unions as industrial and technical conferences, technical trials over machine tools, competitions for product quality and a number of others also served the technical growth of personnel.

In 1933-1934. the educational work of the trade unions among the new cadres of workers, aimed at improving labor discipline, acquired great importance. The published certificate of the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions contains valuable material about the work of comradely courts - a social form of influence on violators of labor discipline (doc. No. 82).

The mastery of new technology by the bulk of the workers raised the question of the need to increase labor productivity. The collection contains documents on the organization of the Stakhanov movement - the movement of advanced workers who have mastered labor skills to perfection for raising outdated production standards. They contain information about the first Stakhanovites, the role of party and trade union organizations in spreading the movement and overcoming difficulties caused by the resistance of the class enemy, unconscious elements among the workers and the inertia of individual business executives. The materials are supplemented by statistical information from the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions on the number of trade union members participating in socialist competition and its individual forms in 1933, 1935 and 1937. A prominent place is occupied by reports of the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions about work with the foremost workers in production, especially distinguished in 1933-1934. (doc. No. 87).

These materials characterize the foremost workers in industry - workers and specialists who made a great labor contribution during the period of the first five-year plan and in 1933-1934. and were awarded orders for their valiant work. The materials show the best people of the Soviet working class and to a certain extent make up for the lack of documents on the composition of the workers. The published documents broadly cover the participation of workers and trade unions in production management, the main forms and methods of this work: production meetings, promotion, participation in the work of planning bodies and economic organizations.

The already mentioned statistical collections "Labor in the USSR", "Statistical reference book of the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions", as well as collections of documentary materials on the history of industrialization, prepared by state archives, can serve as a necessary addition to this section.

The published documents are kept in the funds of the Central State Archives of the National Economy of the USSR (TSGANKH USSR) and the Central State Archives of the October Revolution, the highest bodies of state power and government bodies of the USSR (TSGAOR USSR). Some of the documents were found in the Central Archives of the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions by II Belonosov. Archaeographic processing of documents was carried out in accordance with generally accepted publication rules. All abbreviated words not included in the abbreviation list are expanded without square brackets, unless the correctness of the expansion is in doubt or may be ambiguous. Figures in the tables have not been corrected in cases where the sum when calculating does not converge with the total number, but the footnotes indicate that the sum of the numbers does not converge with the given total.

Some documents are published as extracts. Information that is not related to the topic of the collection or is of secondary importance is omitted. Extracts are specified in footnotes. Extracts include a list of omitted sections, chapters and paragraphs or a brief summary of them, except for the following documents: resolutions of congresses and conferences of the CPSU (b); statistical tables, if data outside the chronological scope of the collection is omitted. In the explanatory notes of the State Planning Committee of the USSR to the results of the second and to the plans of the third five-year plans for the branches of industry, planning materials are omitted without any reservations, and the text is given an outline. In the materials for the reports of the USSR People's Commissariat of Finance, the omitted chapters and paragraphs are indicated only for the section from which the extract is published. Extracts from documents are indicated in the heading by the word "from" and by dots in the text,

In the documents of the collection, the numbering of tables has been changed in accordance with the extracts. Materials and statistical tables, previously published and without a date, are dated by content, since it is not possible to establish a more precise date.

The appendices to the collection contain notes, a list of abbreviations, a list of sources used, an index of industrial enterprises, as well as a chronicle of decisions of the Communist Party and the Soviet government on industrialization for the period from January 2, 1933 to December 31, 1937.

[1] "Results of the implementation of the second five-year plan for the development of the national economy of the USSR." M., 1939

[2] "Socialist construction of the USSR". Statistical Yearbook. M., 1934, 1935, 1936

[3] "Industry of the USSR". Statistical collection. M., 1936

[4] For publications of this census, see the article by N. G. Grachev "Materials of the census of industrial equipment in 1932-1934." ("Problems of source studies", vol. VII. M., 1959, p. 26).

[5] "Meeting of workers of heavy industry September 20-22, 1934" Verbatim report, M.-L., 1935

[6] "Youth of the USSR". Statistical collection. M., 1936.

[7] "The composition of the leading workers and specialists of the USSR". M., 1936.

[8] "Statistical Handbook of the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions", vol. II. M., 1938.

[9] “Labor in the USSR. 1933 ". Yearbook. M., 1934. “Labor in the USSR. 1934 ". Yearbook. M., 1935. "Woman in the USSR". Statistical handbook. M., 1936.