Word: piatiletka
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...beginning of Soviet Russia's climb from a plow-horse to a horsepower economy, the Five-Year Plan, or Piatiletka, was a dramatic slogan as well as an effective method of primitive state planning. But when the sixth Piatiletka arrived last year, the word had lost its power for millions of Russian workers, case-hardened by 30 years of ceaseless urging to achieve ever higher production norms. Last week the Soviet leaders indicated that they were ready to drop the old Piatiletki for a more relaxed method of planning and executing the progress of their national economy...
...joint session of the Supreme Soviet (Russia's rubber-stamp legislature), Economic Boss Mikhail Pervukhin admitted that scores of economic targets set for 1956 had not been achieved. Then Pervukhin made, for a Soviet leader, a surprising statement: instead of scolding the workers, he blamed the Piatiletka planners. They had placed too much emphasis on oversized industrial complexes, particularly in the coal, steel and chemical industries. Pervukhin promised that industrial targets for 1957 would be lowered by nearly 4% on previous planning, with continued emphasis on heavy industry. More important than the substance of Pervukhin's announcement...
Actually each successive Five-Year Plan (piatiletka) is a set of production targets which the state planners then exhort the Russian people to attain by superhuman effort. The sixth piatiletka (1956-60) is more than usually superhuman: in the next five years heavy industry must be up 70%, pig iron up 70%, steel up 51%, coal up 49%, oil up 100%, building up 52%, consumer goods up 60%; in agriculture grain production must increase 80%, while labor efficiency on state farms must rise 70%, on collectives 100%. Incentives are a calculated feature of piatiletki: 55 million workers will...
...sixth Five-Year Plan will be the subject of endless stakhanovite speech-making in coming months, but Russian workers may well recall an exhortation made by Stalin of an earlier piatiletka: "We are 50 to 100 years behind the advanced countries. We have to run this distance in ten years. Either we do this or we disintegrate." That was a quarter of a century ago. Even in the unlikely event of the targets being attained, the gross national product of the U.S.S.R. in 1960, experts calculate, will be only two-thirds that of the U.S. at the present moment...
...Army's top age level for privates and noncommissioned officers down to 32. Chief benefit to Russia (and probably the prime reason): farms and factories, starved for qualified man-&-woman-power during the war, will recruit millions of foremen, technicians and reasonably adept laborers for the new piatiletka (FiveYear Plan) recently announced by Stalin...