The First Five-Year Plan is presented as a state-directed effort to remake Russia: industrial expansion in the cities depended on a corresponding increase in agricultural production, while the methods used to pursue that goal helped bring hardship and mass starvation to the countryside. Its launch marks a turning point in the book’s national history, but the account also shows how a sweeping plan could collide with local resistance, scarce resources, and the realities of the harvest.

Background and Aims

The book gives the Plan a precise place in its chronology: historians identify 3 January 1928 as its launch. From the perspective of later events, it was a decisive step in transforming Russia from a nineteenth-century agrarian society into a twentieth-century industrial power. The date is presented as one of the moments historians mark as a turning point, even as the narrative cautions that consequential changes do not always announce themselves with such clarity.

The Plan’s industrial ambitions depended on food. As power stations, steel mills, and heavy-machinery plants were built in urban centers, the grain-producing regions were expected to meet the cities’ increased demand for bread through sharply increased agricultural output. Industry and agriculture were therefore not separate campaigns: the intended acceleration of one placed new demands on the other.

Agricultural Measures and Their Limits

To prepare for this transformation, the authorities deemed it necessary to exile a million kulaks, designated as profiteers and enemies of the common good. The account stresses the contradiction in that designation: the people expelled were also the regions’ most capable farmers. Their removal did not simply eliminate political opponents; it deprived agricultural districts of experienced producers at a moment when production was expected to rise.

The remaining peasants regarded new agricultural methods with resentment and suspicion, resisting even modest efforts at innovation. Tractors, meant to usher in a new era of farming, were in short supply. Uncooperative weather further reduced output. Rather than easing demands as the harvest faltered, the state increased quotas and enforced requisitions at gunpoint. The gap between the Plan’s targets and conditions in the fields thus became a source of compounding pressure: the demand for more grain intensified precisely as the capacity to produce it was undermined.

Consequences

The book traces these accumulating forces toward the widespread hardship of 1932. Collectivization and the drive to feed the cities formed part of the background to a precipitous agricultural decline; increased quotas and armed requisitions added coercion to scarcity. The stated outcome is death by starvation for millions of peasants in Ukraine. The passage presents this catastrophe as still in the future when Nina Kulikova’s train reaches Ivanovo, but it makes clear that the decisions and failures leading toward it were already in motion.

That contrast gives the historical account a human scale without making Nina’s journey a direct consequence of the Plan. She and her three companions travel east with energy, excitement, and a sense of purpose. On arrival, Nina is nearly overwhelmed by the beauty of the landscape and feels that her life has just begun. The open fields of young wheat carry both promise and unease: the landscape appears abundant, while the narrative has already shown how political demands, disrupted farming, and poor harvests can turn agricultural abundance into vulnerability.

Historical Time and Administrative Order

The Plan appears within a narrative that repeatedly sets measured time against lived experience. Its launch is given an exact date, and the historian’s backward glance turns that date into a marked point in a much larger transformation. Elsewhere, the Count’s twice-tolling clock makes minute-by-minute precision tangible, while his reflections on confinement present a year endured as a measure of survival. These different scales do not make the Plan a personal clockwork mechanism; they place a national timetable beside the slower, uncertain time of individuals and seasons.

The book also places the Plan’s drive to coordinate production alongside more immediate systems for making work legible. At the Boyarsky, new procedures require an order to pass through a waiter’s pad, a bookkeeper’s ledger, a kitchen log, and stamped slips before the dish reaches the table. That restaurant procedure is not part of the Plan, but it offers a smaller-scale parallel: both systems translate complex activity into records and stages that can be tracked. In the agricultural campaign, however, the distance between administrative targets and conditions on the ground carries far more severe consequences. The Plan’s significance lies not only in its industrial ambition, but in the human cost of trying to make production conform to that ambition.