The First “Great Leap Forward” Reconsidered: Lessons of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago

Abstract

From 1928 to 1933, the Soviet Union underwent a radical metamorphosis. Almost overnight the economic order of N E P was abandoned in favor of an untested system of economic relations commonly referred to today as command planning. The magnitude of this transformation, the ideological passions it aroused, and the questionable character of official Soviet statistics during the First Five-Year Plan have all made it exceedingly difficult to conceptualize the process of Soviet industrialization in its entirety. As a consequence, most analyses of Soviet industrialization have been highly eclectic, predicated on assumptions which only appear plausible because they have not been interpreted from the standpoint of a closed model, or of an encompassing theory.