Ukraine

Industrialization and collectivization

By the end of the 1920s, Stalin had launched a new “revolution from above.” The introduction of his first five-year plan in 1928 marked the end of the NEP and the onset of breakneck industrialization. In Ukraine this led to rapid economic and social transformation. By the outbreak of World War II, industrial output had increased fourfold, the number of workers had tripled, and the urban population had grown from 19 to 34 percent of the total. Though with a sectoral bias toward heavy industry and a regional concentration in the Donets Basin (Donbas) and central Dnieper area, Ukraine had undergone a remarkable industrial development.

The cost of the accelerated industrialization was borne by the peasantry. In 1928 the regime introduced special measures against the kulaks (arbitrarily defined “wealthy” peasants). These progressed from escalating taxes and grain-delivery quotas to dispossession of all property and finally to the deportation, by the mid-1930s, of some 100,000 families to Siberia and Kazakhstan. Wholesale collectivization began in 1929, under duress from party activists and under threat of economic sanctions. The percentage of farms collectivized rose from 9 to 65 percent from October 1929 to March 1930 and exceeded 90 percent by the end of 1935. Mass resistance to collectivization—in the form of revolts, slaughter of cattle, and destruction of machinery—was answered by the imposition of ever higher delivery quotas and confiscation of foodstuffs.