The evolution and finale of the GOELRO Plan

Abstract

This paper reviews the attempts at improving and further developing the GOELRO Plan in the context of general industrial policy of the USSR in the 2nd half of the 1920s and the early 1930s.The fact of the Plan’s transformation and ‘dissolution’ in the documents of the early industrialisation is established for the first time in the relevant historiography. The areas and parameters of national economic development, set up in the GOELRO Plan, were mostly realised after 1928 in the first five-year plan in the format of “control figures” (targets) that significantly exceeded the figures planned in 1920. In this context, this paper raises the questions of the place and role of the GOELRO Plan in history and irrelevance of debating the fact of its fulfillment.The author regards the preparation and implementation of the GOELRO plan as the dawn of the Soviet system of short-term, mid-term and long-term planning and, at the same time, as an antecedent for the development in 1932 of the second strategic plan for electrification that has never been pursued.