Five Years from Now

Grim, far-sighted Josef Vissarionovitch Dzhugashvili. known from Leningrad to Cape Horn as Stalin, last week told Russia what to do for the next five years. Dictator Stalin may change his mind, but barring a national catastrophe or acts of God (in whom he does not believe; Russia will do as he says.

What Stalin did last week was twofold: 1) He announced the program for 1932, fourth year of the first Piatiletka (FiveYear Plan). By the end of this year the first Five-Year Plan will have been completed in four years. 2) He outlined the second Five-Year Plan, to begin January 1933. That Stalin could assume the first Plan completed nobody denied, for if Dictator Stalin says the first Five-Year Plan is a success it must be, for Russians, a success.

For 1932. But even Russians know that the Piatiletka lagged in 1931. Transport, steel, iron, coal, the general productivity of Russian labor all failed to fulfill schedules. To make up for lost time Russia will spend this year 21 billion rubles ($10,700,000,000), nearly one-third more than in 1931. Half of this sum will be spent for industrial development. For agriculture 4,400,000,000 rubles (21% more than in 1931) is provided. For transportation there will be 3,300,000,000 rubles (22.4% increase). To fulfill its coal schedule Russia must produce 90 million tons, 31,400,000 more tons than last year.

Chief significance of the 1932 program is that Russia, which has had her shoulder at the wheel for three years, must push even harder this year. The heavy industries of coal, metal, transportation, machine building, backbone of the Five-Year Plan, must meet the country's needs. Russia's "industrial giants"--Dnieprostroy (dam), Magnetogorsk (steel city in remote Ural foothills ) etc.--must be pushed to completion. Then the tired Russian shoulder will get a rest, heavy Russian feet may be better shod.

Second Piatiletka. Since last summer the Caspian (State Planning Commission) has been studying, planning, replanning a program for the years 1933-37. Last week on the eighth anniversary of the death of Bolshevism's sainted Lenin, its work was done. Author of the plan was Gosplan Chairman Valerian Kuybyshev, onetime chairman of the Supreme Eco-omic Council, who looks like an Italian tenor. Sang he:

"The deep crisis in Capitalist lands is the strongest proof that the downfall of the Capitalist world is approaching! The successes of Socialism in the Soviet Union are the best proof of the advantages of the Socialist system. ... All of which strengthens the Soviet Union as a center of attraction for workers of all countries and the oppressed throughout the world. The revolutionary significance of the Soviet Union is increasing!"

What he meant was that Trotskyism (world Socialism through world revolution) was discredited for Stalinism (world Socialism through successful Socialism in one country).

Keystone of the second Five-Year Plan is: Threefold increase in food, clothes and personal utensils for every inhabitant of Soviet Russia ; therefore a 300% improvement in living conditions. This constituted a change of emphasis from the development of heavy industry to the manufacture of commodities which people can use. For Stalin it meant that Russians might learn to love him.

As the burden of the first Five-Year Plan has fallen most heavily lately on the bulky shoulders of Grigoriy Ordzhonikidze, chairman of the Supreme Economic Council until three weeks ago, the weight of the second Piatiletka will be carried mostly by a hitherto minor figure in Russian industry, Isidor E. Liubimov, onetime Deputy Commissar of Trade and delegate to the London wheat conference last spring. In preparation for the new plan, the Supreme Economic Council was recently reorganized into three separate departments--Heavy Industry, Light Industry and Lumber (TIME, Jan. 18). Commissar Liubimov will have the stupendous task of providing Russia's 147,000,000 people with three times as much food & clothing, three times as many farm implements, sewing needles, pens & pencils, milk pails, snow shovels, galoshes, brooms, beds, pots & pans, kettles, knives & forks, window panes, shoestrings, garters and suspender buttons as they have ever had before.

But Commissar Ordzhonikidze will be far from idle. By 1937 the second Five-Year Plan calls for a 350% increase in machine-building industries; increase of electrical energy from 17 to 100 billion kilowatt hours; a 160-million-ton increase in coal production; a 22-million-ton iron production; tripling of oil production; Soviet self-sufficiency in copper and chemicals; building of 18,000 mi. of new railroads; intensification of automobile, road-building and aviation activities; total mechanization of farming to produce 130 million tons of grain in 1937; tripling of sugar beet crops; doubling of flax and cotton production.*

As the "final uprooting of capitalism in the villages" was held the chief cultural result of the first plan, so the abolition of all class differences was the goal set for the second. Immediately higher income taxes were clapped on. From them the workers would feel little effect, but private traders and kulak landowners must pay almost double. Thus the few capitalists left in Russia knew that The Man of Steel, as usual, meant business.

*On the Liverpool Cotton Exchange last week increasing imports of Russian cotton continued to threaten the U. S. cotton trade, alarmed by the purchase of -L-500,000 worth of Russian cotton last fortnight (TIME, Jan. 25). Russian cotton, though 50 to 75 points above the U. S. product, was being bought because buyers could not get U. S. credit.

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