Implementing the Policy of Forced Industrialization in the USSR and Searching for Sources of Its Financing (the Late 1920s - the 1930s

The article studies the processes of implementing the policy of forced industrialization in the USSR, searching for sources of its financing and developing a centralized economic system. It shows that Stalin’s model of modernizing the Soviet Union with the methods of its implementation and results was rather contradictory. The key issue in the preparation of the industrialization plan was the sources for its financing and implementation. The article shows that the main source of Stalin’s modernization was the rigid redistribution of all the country’s additional products in favour of heavy industry. Given that it was impossible to obtain foreign loans, only domestic resources were used to finance industrialization. They involved plundering the countryside, curbing the growth of living standards, decelerating the development of the social sphere, seizing currency and family values. An important foreign economic factor in strengthening the sources of financing for industrialization was the rejection of the UK and the United States from the gold standard. The devaluation of their currency reduced the real value of the Soviet Union’s foreign debt, which was paid in full by the end of the Second Five-Year Plan. The industrialization enabled the Soviet Union to keep pace with the leading and highly developed countries of Western Europe in the production of basic industrial products. Although Stalin’s modernization in the context of creating an industrial society proved to be quite effective, the price of success was very high. The Soviet economic policy of the 1930s was striving to solve an important historical problem, that is, to preserve independence, its living geopolitical space and confirm the status of an independent state.

Source: Svyashchenko Z. (2021). Implementing the Policy of Forced Industrialization in the USSR and Searching for Sources of Its Financing (the Late 1920s - the 1930s. Antiquities of Lukomorie. №2: 108-115

Source web-site: http://www.lukomor.mosk.mksat.net/index.php/lukomor/article/view/67/60