First five-year plan (Soviet Union) in the context of "1920s"

Industrialization in the Soviet Union was a process of accelerated building-up of the industrial potential of the Soviet Union to reduce the economy's lag behind the developed capitalist states, which was carried out from May 1929 to June 1941.

The official task of industrialization was the transformation of the Soviet Union from a predominantly agrarian state into a leading industrial one. The beginning of socialist industrialization as an integral part of the "triple task of a radical reorganization of society" (industrialization, economic centralization, collectivization of agriculture and a cultural revolution) was laid down by the first five-year plan for the development of the national economy lasting from 1928 until 1932.

The five-year plans for the development of the national economy of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) (Russian: пятилетние планы развития народного хозяйства СССР, pyatiletniye plany razvitiya narodnogo khozyaystva SSSR) consisted of a series of nationwide centralized economic plans in the Soviet Union, beginning in the late 1920s. The Soviet state planning committee Gosplan developed these plans based on the theory of the productive forces that formed part of the ideology of the Communist Party for development of the Soviet economy. Fulfilling the current plan became the watchword of Soviet bureaucracy.

Several Soviet five-year plans did not take up the full period of time assigned to them: some were pronounced successfully completed earlier than expected, some took much longer than expected, and others failed altogether and had to be abandoned. Altogether, Gosplan launched thirteen five-year plans. The initial five-year plans aimed to achieve rapid industrialization in the Soviet Union and thus placed a major focus on heavy industry. The first five-year plan, accepted in 1928 for the period from 1929 to 1933, finished one year early. The last five-year plan, for the period from 1991 to 1995, was not completed, since the Soviet Union was dissolved in 1991.

The Soviet Union introduced collectivization (Russian: Коллективизация) of its agricultural sector between 1928 and 1940. It began during and was part of the first five-year plan. The policy aimed to integrate individual landholdings and labour into nominally collectively-controlled and openly or directly state-controlled farms: Kolkhozes and Sovkhozes accordingly. The Soviet leadership confidently expected that the replacement of individual peasant farms by collective ones would immediately increase the food supply for the urban population, the supply of raw materials for the processing industry, and agricultural exports via state-imposed quotas on individuals working on collective farms. Planners regarded collectivization as the solution to the crisis of agricultural distribution (mainly in grain deliveries) that had developed from 1927. This problem became more severe as the Soviet Union pressed ahead with its ambitious industrialization program, meaning that more food would be needed to keep up with urban demand.

In October 1929, approximately 7.5% of the peasant households were in collective farms, and by February 1930, 52.7% had been collectivised. The collectivization era saw several famines, as well as peasant resistance to collectivization. Resistance took the form of protests and armed resistance amongst peasants to the Soviet regime.

The Soviet famine of 1930–1933 was a famine in the major grain-producing areas of the Soviet Union, including Ukraine and different parts of Russia (Kazakhstan, North Caucasus, Kuban, Volga region, the southern Urals, and western Siberia). Major factors included the forced collectivization of agriculture as a part of the First Five-Year Plan and forced grain procurement from farmers. These factors in conjunction with a massive investment in heavy industry decreased the agricultural workforce. It is estimated that 5.7 to 8.7 million people died from starvation across the Soviet Union. In addition, 50 to 70 million Soviet citizens starved during the famine but ultimately survived.

During this period Soviet leader Joseph Stalin ordered the kulaks (land-owning proprietors) "to be liquidated as a class". As collectivization expanded, the persecution of the kulaks, ongoing since the Russian Civil War, culminated in a massive campaign of state persecution in 1929–1932, including arrests, deportations, and executions of kulaks. Some kulaks responded with acts of sabotage such as killing their livestock and destroying crops designated for consumption by factory workers. Despite the vast death toll in the early stages, Stalin chose to continue the Five Year Plan and collectivization. By 1934, the Soviet Union had established a base of heavy industry, at the cost of millions of lives.

Dekulakization (Russian: раскулачивание, romanized: raskulachivaniye; Ukrainian: розкуркулення, romanized: rozkurkulennya) was the Soviet campaign of political repressions, including arrests, deportations, or executions of millions of supposed kulaks and their families. Redistribution of farmland started in 1917 and lasted until 1933, but was most active in the 1929–1932 period of the first five-year plan. To facilitate the expropriations of farmland, the Soviet government announced the "liquidation of the kulaks as a class" on 27 December 1929, portraying kulaks as class enemies of the Soviet Union.

More than 1.8 million peasants were deported in 1930–1931. The campaign had the stated purpose of fighting counter-revolution and of building socialism in the countryside. This policy, carried out simultaneously with collectivization in the Soviet Union, effectively brought all agriculture and all the labourers in Soviet Russia under state control.

The economy of the Soviet Union was based on state ownership of the means of production, collective farming, and industrial manufacturing. An administrative-command system managed a distinctive form of central planning. The Soviet economy was second only to the United States and was characterized by state control of investment, prices, a dependence on natural resources, lack of consumer goods, little foreign trade, public ownership of industrial assets, macroeconomic stability, low unemployment and high job security.

Beginning in 1930, the course of the economy of the Soviet Union was guided by a series of five-year plans. By the 1950s, the Soviet Union had rapidly evolved from a mainly agrarian society into a major industrial power. Its transformative capacity meant communism consistently appealed to the intellectuals of developing countries in Asia. In fact, Soviet economic authors like Lev Gatovsky (who participated in the elaboration of the first and second five-year plans) frequently used their economic analysis of this period to praise the effectiveness of the October Revolution. The impressive growth rates during the first three five-year plans (1928–1940) are particularly notable given that this period is nearly congruent with the Great Depression. During this period, the Soviet Union saw rapid industrial growth while other regions were suffering from crisis. The White House National Security Council of the United States described the continuing growth as a "proven ability to carry backward countries speedily through the crisis of modernization and industrialization", but the impoverished base upon which the five-year plans sought to build meant that at the commencement of Operation Barbarossa on 22 June 1941 the country was still poor.

The cultural revolution was a set of activities carried out in Soviet Russia and the Soviet Union, aimed at a radical restructuring of the cultural and ideological life of society. The goal was to form a new type of culture as part of the building of a socialist society, including an increase in the proportion of people from proletarian classes in the social composition of the intelligentsia.

The cultural revolution in the Soviet Union as a focused program for the transformation of national culture in practice often stalled and was massively implemented only during the first five-year plans. As a result, in modern historiography there is a traditional, but contested, correlation of the cultural revolution in the Soviet Union only with the 1928–1931 period. The cultural revolution in the 1930s was understood as part of a major transformation of society and the national economy, along with industrialization and collectivization. Also, in the course of the cultural revolution, the organization of scientific activity in the Soviet Union underwent considerable restructuring and reorganization.