Plans
Each five-year plan dealt with all aspects of development: capital goods (those used to produce other goods, like coal, iron, and machinery), consumer goods (e.g. chairs, carpets, and irons), agriculture, transportation, communications, health, education, and welfare. However, the emphasis varied from plan to plan, although generally the emphasis was on power (electricity), capital goods, and agriculture. There were base and optimum targets. Efforts were made, especially in the Third Plan, to move industry eastward to make it safer from attack during World War II. Because meeting the goals of the five-year plans had top priority as a measure of progress toward a communist utopia, official lying about productivity became part of the economic system. The attempt to turn an illiterate peasant society into an advanced industrial economy in a single decade brought intense suffering, but hardship was tolerated because, as one worker put it, Soviet workers believed in the need for "constant struggle, struggle, and struggle" to achieve a Communist society. These five-year plans outlined programs for huge increases in the output of industrial goods. Stalin warned that without an end to economic backwardness "the advanced countries...will crush us." (Hunt 845)
Read more about this topic: Five-Year Plans For The National Economy Of The Soviet Union
Famous quotes containing the word plans:
“Man you ought to see his plans for allsteel buildins. He’s got an idea the skyscraper of the future’ll be built of steel and glass. We’ve been experimenting with vitrous tile recently... crist-amighty some of his plans would knock you out... He’s got a great sayin about some Roman emperor who found Rome of brick and left it of marble. Well he says he’s found New York of brick an that he’s goin to leave it of steel... steel an glass.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“The important thing about travel in foreign lands is that it breaks the speech habits and makes you blab less, and breaks the habitual space-feeling because of different village plans and different landscapes. It is less important that there are different mores, for you counteract these with your own reaction- formations.”
—Paul Goodman (1911–1972)
“A father ... knows exactly what those boys at the mall have in their depraved little minds because he once owned such a depraved little mind himself. In fact, if he thinks enough about the plans that he used to have for young girls, the father not only will support his wife in keeping their daughter home but he might even run over to the mall and have a few of those boys arrested.”
—Bill Cosby (20th century)