Further Thoughts on the First Soviet Five-Year Plan

Abstract

In his pioneering article, Professor Holland Hunter set himself the limited but difficult task of checking the First Five-Year Plan approved in the spring of 1929 for its internal consistency. He did not attempt to find out whether the targets of the plan for production and investment, and for “qualitative” indicators such as the capital-output ratio, were feasible: he took these targets as given, and tried to find out whether they were mutually compatible. In Professor Hunter’s words, his test “confines itself to the question whether the targets for 1933 could have been achieved under the optimistic parameters embodied in the plan” (p. 239). This point seems to have been overlooked by some of the contributors to the discussion in Slavic Review.