S. G. Strumilin

PREFACE TO “PROSPECTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE NATIONAL ECONOMY OF THE USSR FROM 1926/27 TO 1930/31”

The material on the perspective Five-Year Plan for 1926/271930/31 submitted below represents the collective work of all sections of the Gosplan. Representatives of all the republic Gosplans and of the verification departments (Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection and Central Statistical Administration) were asked to collaborate with the Central Commission for Perspective Planning which was set up under the Presidium of the Gosplan on April 10, 1926 to exercise general supervision over the work of the separate sections of the USSR Gosplan. Representatives of other interested departments were likewise invited on every occasion to participate in the work of the sections for the separate branches of the economy. Unfortunately, however, the republic and department planning agencies have thus far been unable, for a number of reasons, to take a sufficiently active part in our work. Hence with regard to region-by-region coverage, which is extremely important for us, and from several other points of view, our material awaits further analysis and refinement.

However-irrespective of the fact that the material is thus incomplete in some respects-we regard our work solely as guideline data for perspective planning, and not as a finished perspective plan that is subject to immediate confirmation and is to be undeviatingly fulfilled. This is because the great bulk of the data being published is subject to no confirmation whatever, being merely supplementary tentative estimates and ideas essential for validation and balanced verification of those basic Control Figures and directives for prospective development of the national economy that do need confirmation and really are to be executed. These include, we consider, only the figures and directives that outline the program of capital investment for several years ahead. None of the other estimates of rates of development is of independent significance in the Five Year Plan, and they can be projected and implemented with a far greater degree of precision through the annual Control Figures and plans.

With respect to the capital investment program, and to the data used to validate it, the Commission followed the method of successive approximations. Several variants in succession were submitted to the Commission for nearly every branch of the economy. But to save space and the reader’s time we are publishing here only the variants which the Commission considered most probable and workable. This serves to indicate the significance of the material being published. The variant proposed here for the development of the economy seems to us the one most probable, but by no means the only one possible. It will be realistic and practical enough granted “average” harvests and a whole series of other equally hypothetical political and economic premises on which our estimates have been based. But should these conditions change, should, for instance, possibilities of foreign credit on a larger scale open up for us, the projected program of investments will have to be revised upward; or, on the other hand, should the country be overtaken by one or two severe crop failures, the investment program will have to be stretched out, and will take not five, but six or seven years to complete.

The Five-Year Plan being submitted represents Gosplan’s second attempt at laying down five year prospective guide lines. The first such plan-for the period from 1925/26 to 1929/30-was reported on to the All-Union Congress of Planning Workers only a year ago. A year hence we shall undoubtedly have to draft a new Five-Year Plan-for the period from 1927/28 to 1931/32-and so on. We shall every year be obliged to move ahead the initiation and completion dates of the projected Five-Year Plans, making the necessary additions and refinements in them on the basis of the experience of the years that have passed.

After checking the first Five-Year Plan for 1925/26-1929/30 against the experience of the years 1925/26 and 1926/27, we must point out that as far as the scale of the construction program is concerned, the plan turned out to have been sufficiently realistic and even somewhat understated in its estimate of the possible volume of accumulation. On the basis of past experience, the Five-Year Plan now being proposed offers a somewhat broader program of accumulation and investment, and what with the fund of “caution” that has been provided in it, we hope that in the subsequent variants of the tentative Five-Year Plans we shall similarly be called upon to make only revisions in the direction of expansion....

S. G. Strumilin, ed., Perspektivy razvertyvaniia narodnogo khoziaistva SSSR na 1926/27-1930/31. Materialv Tsentralnoi Komissii po Piattlet-nemu Planu (Materials of the Central Commission on the Five-Year Plan), Moscow, 1927, pp. xiii-xiv.