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3rd Five-Year Plan - 1938-1941

Towards the end of the 1930s, tendencies towards centralization and strengthening of planning mechanisms intensified in the Soviet economy. All factories and plants were strictly subordinate to the respective people's commissariats represented by their central administrations. The plan was understood as both far-reaching programs and the preparation of current, even small tasks. The initiative of enterprises was curtailed. The main reasons for these phenomena were the increased threat to the security of the USSR, the aggressive behavior of Nazi Germany and its allies, the need for strict control over product output and labor discipline. The lack of material resources, which had to be distributed in accordance with the main priorities, also affected.

In March 1939, the XVIII Congress of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks approved the third five-year plan for the development of the national economy of the USSR for 1938-1942. It set the following tasks: to increase the volume of industrial production almost twofold, to create large state reserves and mobilization reserves, primarily for fuel and defense products; to increase the production of agricultural products by 1.5 times. The main focus was still on heavy industry. The country's leadership has put forward the slogan: in the nearest foreseeable future "to catch up and overtake in the economic respect the most developed capitalist countries."

The Third Five-Year Plan (1938-41) projected further rapid industrial growth. The government soon altered the plan, however, in an attempt to meet the growing danger of war, devoting increasing amounts of resources to armaments. When the country went to war with Finland (1939-40), serious disruptions occurred in the Soviet transportation system. Nonetheless, during these years the economy benefited from the absorption of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Bessarabia, and the eastern part of Poland and from the growing trade with Germany that resulted from the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact.

After the German invasion of 1941, damage to the economy in both human and material terms was devastating. The regime virtually abandoned the Third Five-Year Plan as it sought to mobilize human and material resources for the war effort. During World War II, an increasing proportion of products and materials were allocated centrally, and Gosplan took over more of the balancing and allocation plans. Wartime economic plans did not officially replace the traditional planning process but were simply superimposed as needed to cover activities and goods essential to the war effort in the Great Patriotic War.

People overextended themselves with the hardest work in production and new construction sites. From 1938 to 1940, industrial output increased by 45%, however, a number of industries (railway transport, oil production, energy) were still lagging behind in their development. In view of the war that began on September 1, 1939 in Europe, all the most advanced went to equip, first of all, the Red Army. Its numbers increased from 1939 to 1941. from 1.5 to 5 million people It was necessary to create mobilization reserves, to speed up the strengthening of the country's defense power.

The share of military spending increased from 13 to 25%. Special attention was paid to the development of defense industries in the east of the USSR. The construction of backup plants took place in the Volga region, the Urals and Siberia. It was timely action which made it possible in the initial period of the Great Patriotic War not only to preserve the military potential of the state, but also to evacuate machine tools deep into the USSR from enterprises located in the west.

But serious mistakes were made in defense construction. In pursuit of the number of tanks, aircraft, rifles, they lost sight of the fact that the troops were already receiving outdated weapons designs. New samples were also developed and put into operation - MiGG, LaGG aircraft, KV and T-34 tanks, PPD submachine guns - but they were still not enough to equip a modern army. The repressions of 1936-1938 also had an effect, from which not only the military, but also highly qualified specialists, engineers, directors of enterprises, suffered undeservedly. located in the west.

The repressions of 1936-1938 also had an effect, from which not only the military, but also highly qualified specialists, engineers, directors of enterprises, suffered undeservedly.

In the third five-year plan, disciplinary punishments at work tightened. Under the threat of criminal liability, workers and employees did not have the right to move from one enterprise to another without the permission of the management. In June 1940, the working day was extended from 7 to 8 hours, and the working week became seven days. A worker could be tried and sent to forced labor in the GULAG system for being late for work three times within a month. Cheap prison labor was used in the construction of canals, roads, mines, factories in Siberia, the Far North, Kolyma, Kazakhstan, and other places. The construction of the facilities was carried out manually with a high mortality rate among the convicts. However, it is a fact that the living standards of the population, primarily in cities, began to gradually rise. By the end of the 1930s, the life of ordinary Soviet people improved.

Later there were attempts to "write off" the "costs" of the Stalinist version of solving the problems that the Soviet country faced then to the threat of war. The threat of war was indeed an important factor in the country's development, requiring above all the acceleration of industrialization. But it also made the most stringent requirements for the extremely economical (reasonable, careful) use of material and human forces, for their accumulation, not destruction. It is quite clear that not only the repressions of 1936, 1937 and 1938 against the military, engineering and technical and party-state personnel, but also dispossession in the Stalinist way, and the famine of 1932-1933, and the insane pace of industrial construction imposed on the country, and trampling on the Soviet democracy - all this led to a waste of the country's forces and resources.