The Kirov Premiership (Second Five-Year Plan--planning)
Ch. 10: The Kirov Premiership
Yet the new administration could not move immediately. Not only was the first Five-Year Plan still ongoing, but the ideological dispute eventually settled with the ascendency of the moderates had just started, and there was some question of what, exactly, the changes proposed entailed. As stormy debate settled into quiet dominance, the sheer magnitude of the task became apparent to everyone charged with controlling the Soviet economy. The entire country had only a few tens of thousands of kilometers of railroads or all-weather roads--this for a country with a surface area of over 20 million square kilometers and tens of millions of people! Literacy was abysmal, and the rates of secondary or tertiary education were almost indescribably bad. There was a shortage of all types of trained persons--scientists, mathematicians, engineers, doctors, teachers, everything. Even basic health care was not available to a huge swath of the population. Especially given the size, population, and natural resources of the Union, agricultural and industrial productivity lagged far behind the West. Ukrainians--inhabitants of one of the world's breadbaskets!--were starving to death. In short, the situation was almost beyond words to describe.
Yet, there were a few glimmers of hope. The first Five-Year Plan, while ineffective at increasing agricultural productivity (in fact, that marker had considerably fallen in the last four years) had led to great increases in the production of basic industrial goods, especially coal and iron, vital to the manufacture of steel and hence many other goods and products. Unemployment was rapidly falling due to the demand for workers by the expanding industrial centers. Even literacy and education were being tackled, with new schools, colleges, and universities being built and filled with both students and teachers. Health care was slowly being provided.
Thus, the battle lines were drawn. Over six months in the middle of 1933, GOSPLAN developed the next Five-Year Plan. When announced in late 1933 for implementation beginning in 1934, it marked a clear dominance of the evolutionary program of the moderates. The Union, the plan quietly announced, had achieved a great measure of development in basic and heavy industrial goods; certain other goals were now key to national development. In particular, it went on to state, improved transportation links between city and countryside would be needed to transport food and raw materials from the country to the city and equipment and goods from the city to the country. Therefore, the majority of heavy-industrial production would be focused on building up those links, primarily by utilizing newly increased steel production to expand and improve railroad links but also by building a network of all-weather roads to enable transport by truck of goods, especially agricultural goods, where the railroads could not or did not run.
Besides this later very important part of the plan, increased resource allocation to areas supporting agricultural production was called for. Production of tractors, irrigation equipment, and other agricultural machinery, and fertilizer, pesticides, and other agricultural chemicals was a priority, the plan declared. Forced collectivization was to be temporarily halted while the existing farms focused on improving productivity with these new products (which would first go to state and collective farms).
Beyond the heavy-industrial aspects of the plan, there were important investments in Class B goods and direct consumer production. The expansion of certain relatively non-technological light industries, such as textile manufacture or production of furniture was especially important, as these industries were practical in areas which otherwise could not be profitably industrialized due to lack of transportation or population. This allowed the goals of full employment and, via the new workplace clinics and schools also created by the Plan, education and health care to be more easily implemented.
Finally, major investments were made in many "softer" areas. In conjunction with the investments in more national transportation networks mentioned above, planning for the Moscow metro continued under Lazar Kagonovich. Ideas were also floated for metros in Kharkiv and Leningrad, but construction on either was postponed until after the construction of the Moscow metro, both because of the lack of experience of Soviet engineers in undertaking such projects, and a lack of resources for other metros. Investments in schools, hospitals, universities, colleges, technical schools, and clinics were also increased. The vast new demand for educated technicians, workers, and leaders coupled with the newly expanded educational system to vastly increase the size of the highly-educated population over the next two decades, fueling the "Soviet Spring" of the 1950s and '60s.