And I'm also under the impression that the USSR industrialized faster than any country in history under Stalin.
Yes that is probably correct.
ECONOMIC ACCOMPLISHMENTS AND INDUSTRIAL PROGRESS IN THE 30’S
The industrialization of a great community is by itself obviously not unique.... What is unique in the USSR is that a single decade saw developments which required half a century are more elsewhere. Industrialization was achieved, moreover, without private capital, without foreign investments (save in the form of engineering skills and technical advice), without private property as a spur to individual initiative, without private ownership of any of the means of production, and with no unearned increment or private fortunes accruing to entrepreneurs or lucky investors. Resources were developed, labour was recruited, trained and allocated, capital was saved and invested not through the price mechanism of a competitive market but through a consciously devised and deliberately executed national economic plan, drawn up by quinquennia, by years and by quarters for every segment of the economy, for every region, city, town, and village, for every factory, farm, mine and mill, for every store, bank and school, and even for every hospital, theater and sports club.
Schuman, Frederick L. Soviet Politics. New York: A.A. Knopf, 1946, p. 211
The adventure led from the illiteracy to literacy, from the NEP to socialism, from archaic agriculture to collective cultivation, from a rural society to a predominately urban community, from general ignorance of the machine to social mastery of modern technology.
Between the poverty stricken year of 1924, when Lenin died, and the relatively abundant year of 1940, the cultivated area of USSR expanded by 74 percent; grain crops increased 11 percent; coal production was multiplied by 10; steel output by 18; engineering and metal industries by 150; total national income by 10; industrial output by 24; annual capital investment by 57. During the First Five-year Plan, 51 billion rubles were invested; during the Second, 114; and during the Third, 192. Factory and office workers grew from 7,300,000 to 30,800,000 and school and college students from 7,900,000 to 36,600,000. Between 1913 and 1940, oil production increased from nine to 35 million tons; coal from 29 to 164; pig iron from 4 to 15; steel from 4 to 18; machine tools from 1000 to 48,000 units, tractors from 0 to over 500,000; harvestor combines from 0 to 153,500; electrical power output from two billion kWh to 50 billion; and the value of industrial output from 11 billion rubles to more than 100 billion by 1938. If the estimated volume of total industrial production in 1913 be taken as 100, the corresponding indices for 1938 are 93.2 for France; 113.3 for England, 120 United States; 131.6 for Germany, and 908.8 for the Soviet Union.
Schuman, Frederick L. Soviet Politics. New York: A.A. Knopf, 1946, p. 212
The Soviet government has never defaulted and on any of its own obligations.
Schuman, Frederick L. Soviet Politics. New York: A.A. Knopf, 1946, p. 241
Much interest was aroused in both countries [the USSR and USA] by the 1944 summer journey of Eric Johnston, President of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, who visited the Urals, Siberia, and Kazakhstan and declared that Soviet economic progress since 1928 was "an unexampled achievement in the industrial history of the whole world."
Schuman, Frederick L. Soviet Politics. New York: A.A. Knopf, 1946, p. 491
Therefore to Stalin belongs the credit for having in the course of a decade lifted the largest country in the world, and the richest in natural resources, from a backward peasant state to an industrial state, and for having at the same time transformed its agriculture by American methods and carried culture, education, science, and, above all, the possibility of obtaining these, literally to every one of its cottages.
Ludwig, Emil, Stalin. New York, New York: G. P. Putnam's sons, 1942, p. 119
The Soviets attained under Stalin's rule the first place in the world in regard to tractors, machines, and motor trucks; the second as to electric power. Russia, 20 years ago the least mechanized country, has become the foremost.... In the same decade between 1929 in 1939, in which the production of all other countries barely mounted, while even dropping in some, Soviet production was multiplied by 4. The national income mounted between 1913 in 1938 from 21 to 105 billion rubles. The income of the individual citizen was increased by 370% in the last eight years--with only irrelevant income taxes and reasonable social security contributions imposed upon them--while it dropped almost everywhere else in the world.
Ludwig, Emil, Stalin. New York, New York: G. P. Putnam's sons, 1942, p. 129
The arguments of the "left" and right opposition groups that their actions were justified because the Party policy was undermining the state are belied by the economic and social record. Between 1928 and 1934 iron production rose from 3 million to 10 million tons, steel from 4 to 9 million, oil from 11 to 24 million. The figures, though stark and simple, have social as well as economic significance. "We inherited from the past," Stalin noted in 1935, "a technically backward, impoverished, and ruined country. Ruined by four years of imperialist war, and ruined again by three years of civil war, a country with a semi-literate population, with a low technical level, with isolated industrial islands lost in a sea of dwarf peasant farms." The figures show that this impoverished and largely feudal country was pulling out of the ruins and establishing the economic foundations of socialism.
In 1933 Stalin could announce that (in the midst of the world capitalist depression) "unemployment has been abolished." The following year he reported on the developing "new village":
"The appearance of the countryside has changed even more. The old type of village, with a church in the most prominent place, with the best houses--those of the police officer, the priest, and the kulaks--in the foreground, and the dilapidated huts of the peasants in the background, is beginning to disappear. Its place is being taken by the new type of village, with its public farm buildings, with its clubs, radio, cinemas, schools, libraries, and creches; with its tractors, harvester combines, thrashing machines, and automobiles."
Cameron, Kenneth Neill. Stalin, Man of Contradiction. Toronto: NC Press, c1987, p. 73
In 1939 Stalin reported that the iron and steel industry, which had been virtually non-existent in the early 1920s, had made great strides: "In 1938 we produced about 15 million tons of pig iron; Great Britain produced 7 million tons." Agriculture had been mechanized. In 1938 there were 483,500 tractors in use and 153,500 harvester combines--in a previously horse and plow countryside. Wages had doubled, from an annual average of 1,513 rubles in 1933 to 3,447 in 1938. Similar advances had been made in education; in a nation of centuries-old mass illiteracy there were now nearly 34 million "students of all grades"; in higher educational institutions there were 600,000 students; in 1938, 31,300 engineers, 10,600 agricultural specialists, and 35,700 teachers graduated. A new "stratum" of professionals had been born:
Cameron, Kenneth Neill. Stalin, Man of Contradiction. Toronto: NC Press, c1987, p. 74
When we consider Stalin's facts and figures, it becomes clear that we are witnessing the most concentrated economic advance ever recorded--greater even than those of the Industrial Revolution. Within 10 years a primarily feudal society had been changed into an industrialized one. And for the first time in history such an advance was due not to capitalism but to socialism.
Cameron, Kenneth Neill. Stalin, Man of Contradiction. Toronto: NC Press, c1987, p. 75
In 1928 I wrote (It is I, Barbusse, who is speaking now) that: "In the Five-Year Plan now in progress, it was not a question of speculations on figures and words by bureaucrats and literary men, but one of a cut-and-dried programme; the figures of the State Plan should be considered more as accomplished victories than as indications and," I concluded, "when the Bolsheviks assure us that by 1931 Soviet industry will have increased by 8%, that 7 billion rubles will have been invested in economic revival, that their hydro-electric stations will reach a power of 3,500,000 kilowatts, etc.... we must admit that these things virtually exist already...."
...Now if, at the date indicated, the above figures were not exactly as had been foretold, it was because they were nearly all exceeded.
...If any of the prophesied figures have not been reached, their percentage is absolutely insignificant and negligible. In a great many directions they have been exceeded. The Soviet economic plans were realized to the extent of 109% in 1922-23 and 105% in 1923-25, on all the main heads, to speak only of the earlier Plans.
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 142
By the time of the holding of the 17th Party Congress in January 1934, the Soviet people under the glorious leadership of the CPSU headed by Stalin, that resolute opponent of all reactionaries, had made the following unprecedented achievements:
(a) Industrial production in the USSR now accounted for 70% of total production, and the country had been transformed from an agrarian country to an industrial one.
(b) Capitalist elements in the sphere of industry had been completely eliminated and the socialist economic system had become the sole economic system in this sphere.
(c) The kulaks had been eliminated as a class and the socialist economic system had become predominant in the sphere of agriculture.
(d) The collective-farm system had put an end to the poverty and misery of millions of people in the countryside who now enjoyed material conditions hitherto unknown to them.
(e) As a result of the development of socialist industry, unemployment had been abolished, and though the eight-hour day had been retained in certain industries, in the majority of the enterprises a seven-hour day had been instituted; in the case of industries representing special danger to health, the length of the working day was reduced to six hours.
(f) The victory of socialism in all branches of the national economy had put an end to the exploitation of man by man.
No wonder that the 17th Party Congress is known as the Congress of Victors.
Brar, Harpal. Trotskyism or Leninism. 1993, p. 181
The second five-year plan brought unprecedentedly high rates of industrial growth. In 1934 gross industrial output rose by 19 percent, in 1935 by 23 percent, and in 1936 by 29 percent. The majority of people's commissars and obkom secretaries in1935-1936 were awarded the Order of Lenin, which at that time was a rare and very high honor. In 1936 no more than two or three hundred persons bore this honor....
After several years of stagnation, agricultural production also began to increase: in 1935 gross industrial output was 20 percent higher than in 1933. Soon after rationing was ended, collective farms were permitted to sell grain on the open market, which stimulated farmers' interest in his increasing grain production. (The system of grain procurements did not create such a stimulus because of low procurement prices.) Consumer goods prices began to drop. The acute food crisis of the early 30s was apparently over. The standard of living, both urban and rural, rose appreciably. It was at this time that Stalin uttered his famous phrase: "Life has become better, comrades; life has become more joyful."
Life really did become a bit "more joyful," and this atmosphere engendered a certain enthusiasm.
Medvedev, Roy. Let History Judge. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989, p. 352
It was only in the late 30s that the fruits of the second revolution began to mature. Towards the end of the decade Russia's industrial power was catching up with Germany's. Her efficiency and capacity for organization were still incomparably lower. So was the standard of living of her people. But the aggregate output of her mines, basic plants, and factories approached the level which the most efficient and disciplined of all continental nations, assisted by foreign capital, had reached only after three-quarters of a century of intensive industrialization. The other continental nations, to whom only a few years before Russians still looked up, were now left far behind. The Industrial Revolution spread from central and western Russia to the remote wilderness of Soviet Asia. The collectivization of farming, too, began to yield positive results. Towards the end of the decade agriculture had recovered from the terrible slump of the early '30s; and industry was at last able to supply tractors, harvester-combines, and other implements in great numbers and the farms were achieving a very high degree of mechanization. The outside world was more or less unaware of the great change and the shift in the international balance of power which it implied. Spectacular failures of the first five-year plan induced foreign observers to take a highly skeptical view of the results of the second and the third. The macabre series of 'purge' trials suggested economic and political weakness. The elements of weakness were undoubtedly there; and they were even greater than may appear when the scene is viewed in retrospect from the vantage point of the late '40s. But the elements of strength were also incomparably greater than they were thought to be in the late 30s.
[Footnote]: A detailed description of the achievements of the planned economy can hardly have its place in Stalin's biography. Only a brief statistical summary can be given here, in which the strength of Russian industry in 1928-29 is compared with that of 1937-38, i.e., towards the end of the second and the beginning of the third five-year plan. In the course of that decade the output of electricity per annum rose from 6 to 40 billion kwh, of coal from 30 to 133 million tons, of oil from 11 to 32 million tons, of steel from 4 to 18 million tons, of motor cars from 1,400 to 211,000. The value of the annual output of machine-tools rose from 3 billion to 33 billion rubles (in 'stable prices'). (In 1941 the total output of the Soviet machine-building industry was 50 times higher than in 1913). Between 1928 and 1937 the number of workers and employees rose from 11.5 million to 27 million. Before the revolution the number of doctors was 20,000; it was 105,000 in 1937. The number of hospital beds rose from 175,000 to 618,000. In 1914, 8 million people attended schools of all grades; in 1928, 12 million; in 1938, 31.5 million. In 1913, 112,000 people studied at university colleges; in 1939, 620,000. Before the revolution public libraries possessed 640 books for 10,000 inhabitants; in 1939, 8610.
Deutscher, Isaac. Stalin; A Political Biography. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967, p. 340
The achievement was remarkable, even if measured only by the yard-stick of Russian national aspirations. On a different scale, it laid the foundation for Russia's new power just as Cromwell's Navigation Act had once laid the foundation for British naval supremacy. Those who still view the political fortunes of countries in terms of national ambitions and prestige cannot but accord to Stalin the foremost place among all those rulers who, through the ages, were engaged in building up Russia's power. Actuated by such motives even many of the Russian White emigres began to hail Stalin as a national hero. But the significance of the second revolution lay not only and not even mainly in what it meant to Russia. To the world it was important as the first truly gigantic experiment in planned economy, the first instance in which a government undertook to plan and regulate the whole economic life of its country and to direct its nationalized industrial resources towards a uniquely rapid multiplication of the nation's wealth.... What was new in Stalin's planning was the fact that it was initiated not merely as a wartime expedient, but as the normal pattern of economic life in peace. Hitherto governments had engaged in planning as long as they had needed implements of war. Under Stalin's five-year plans, too, guns, tanks, and planes were produced in great profusion; but the chief merit of these plans was not that they enabled Russia to arm herself, but that they enabled her to modernize and transform society.
Deutscher, Isaac. Stalin; A Political Biography. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967, p. 341
The dam on the Dnieper was built by the firm of Col. Hugh Cooper, a prominent American hydraulic engineer; the majority of the largest Soviet power plants were equipped by the British firm Metropolitan-Vickers; Western companies designed, built, and equipped Magnitogorsk and Kuznetsk, the Urals Machinery Works, the Kaganovich Ball Bearing Plant in Moscow, an automobile plant in Nizhny Novgorod, and a truck plant in Yaroslavl, among others. Ordjonikidze, the commissar of heavy industry, was able to state with full justification: "Our factories, our mines, our mills are now equipped with excellent technology that cannot be found in any one country.... How did we get it? We bought the most highly perfected machinery, the very latest technology in the world, from the Americans, Germans, French, and English, and with that we equipped our enterprises." And he added caustically, "Meanwhile, many of their factories and mines still have machinery dating from the nineteenth century, or the early part of the twentieth."
Nekrich and Heller. Utopia in Power. New York: Summit Books, c1986, p. 231
On the eve of World War II the Soviet Union held first place in the world for extraction of manganese ore and production of synthetic rubber. It was the number one oil producer in Europe, number two in the world; the same for gross output of machine tools and tractors. In electric power, steel, cast iron, and aluminum it was the second-largest producer in Europe and the third largest in the world. In coal and cement production it held third place in Europe and fourth place in the world. Altogether the USSR accounted for 10 percent of world industrial production.
Nekrich and Heller. Utopia in Power. New York: Summit Books, c1986, p. 317
Granted, the aforementioned "socialist" regimes did make healthcare, housing, etc. accessible to everyone without first world economies, which is an impressive feat, but it goes without saying that all of those regimes sans Castro's exercised levels of repression of extreme levels
Take the CSSR for an example,there was hardly any repression,but the country advanced in a acceptable rate,and was successful.
I guess what I'm looking for are reasons that the economic growth that Albania/Cuba/etc. achieved was unique beyond simple egalitarian measures.
When we are talking of those countries and their economic growth,we are usually mentioning them in the context of a debate involving usually different tendencies,unfortunately.
Like comrade Topple says here,the Eastern Bloc was generally a good place to live in,(aside from some countries that were in crisis) the GDR,for example,tried to keep up with the FRG (and it did,up to some point) but it was hard to go directly against a state that received huge amounts of money from other capitalist powers.
The GDR used its natural resources with efficiency:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/88/DDR_economy-en.svg
Retail trade in the east was slowly being absorbed by two state-controlled organizations (Konsum and Handelsorganisation -HO-) which were given special preferences. On 2 January 1949, a two-year plan of economic reconstruction was launched, aiming at 81% of the 1936 production level, and, by cutting 30 per cent off production costs, hoping to raise the general wage level 12% to 15%. The plan also called for an increase in the daily food ration from 1,500 to 2,000 calories.
Here we have an account on agrarian reforms:
The agrarian reform ("Bodenreform") expropriated all land belonging to former Nazis and war criminals and generally limited ownership to 1 km². Some 500 Junker estates were converted into collective people's farms (German: Landwirtschaftliche Produktionsgenossenschaft -LPG-), and more than 30,000 km² were distributed among 500,000 peasant farmers, agricultural laborers, and refugees. Compensation was paid only to active anti-Nazis. In September 1947 the Soviet military administration announced the completion of agrarian reform through the Soviet zone. This report listed 12,355 estates, totaling 6,000,000 acres (24,000 km2), which had been seized and redistributed to 119,000 families of landless farmers, 83,000 refugee families, and some 300,000 in other categories. State farms were also established, called Volkseigenes Gut ("People's Owned Property").
By mid-1960, nearly 85% of all arable land was incorporated in more than 19,000 LPGs; state farms comprised another 6%. By 1961 the socialist sector produced 90% of the GDR's agricultural products. An extensive economic management reform by the SED in February 1958 included the transfer of a large number of industrial ministries to the State Planning Commission. In order to accelerate the nationalization of industry, the SED offered entrepreneurs 50-percent partnership incentives for transforming their firms into VEBs. At the close of 1960, private enterprise controlled only 9% of total industrial production. Production Cooperatives (Produktionsgenossenschaften--PGs--) incorporated one-third of the artisan sector during 1960–61, a rise from 6% in 1958.
Much has been done,especially if you consider the fact that both Germany and the USSR and the East-bloc countries were razed by Hitler.While the economies of the western capitalists were left almost untouched.
Not to mention that the West tried to sabotage the GDR by all means.
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[...]
The West German magazine Der Spiegel reported later on a typical organization, the 'Kampfgruppe gegen Unmenschlichkeit' ('Fighting group against inhumanity') which for a time received American funds. Staffed partly by former SS men, it made food unusable, gave out fake ration cards, created food shortages, sabotaged industrial enterprises, tried to destroy bridges, and intimidated the families of SED officials.
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