The Great Turn: industrial reform

Stalin believed that to industrialise, Russia needed to produce the raw materials needed to build factories and industrial equipment

• These were known as heavy industry: iron, coal, oil and steel
• These materials were useful for rearmament
• Stalin wanted to industrialise within 5 years

The First Five-Year Plan

• A series of targets for every workshop, mill and mine in Russia, set by officials in an organisation known as Gosplan (the State Planning Committee)
• The Plan was published in three large volumes but there were no instructions about how the targets were to be met or how the materials were to be used
• This was known as a 'command economy'

The focus was on heavy industry

• These materials were necessary to …