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Five Year Plans - Coggle Diagram
Five Year Plans
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Marxist principles
Karl Marx said that in a developed human society, countries would be industrialised and factories made efficient and productive.
There would be a move towards urbanisation, and fewer people would be needed to work the land.
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Problems with the NEP
Under the NEP. more successful farmers could buy land from poorer ones, and employ other people. This was essentially a form of capitalism. This made it unpopular with Politburo members like Stalin.
Ideologically, Stalin needed to get rid of the kulaks (wealthy peasants) who had benefited from the NEP.
Moreover, his rival Bukharin supported the NEP, which gave Stalin even greater motivation to end the policy,
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Historical assessment
Lars T. Lih (1991): "Lenin would have been seriously offended by recent claims that he had moved beyond Marx's definition of socialism. [His] testament contains no critique of war communism. The very concept is missing: Lenin continually refers to the five years since the revolution as a unit, with an occasional mention of the fact that intervention and hunger slowed down the pace of socialist construction. The source of all evils is the pre-revolutionary past and the petit-bourgeois environment."
After the apparent failure of the NEP and its reliance on capitalist principles, Stalin's economic plan switched to Five Year Plans. This involved targets that aimed to generate very fast industrial growth.