Five-year plans for the national economy of the Soviet Union

The five-year plans for the development of the national economy of the Soviet Union were multiple nationwide centralized economic plans in the Soviet Union, starting in the late 1920s.

In the end of 1920s, the USSR economy was sluggish, inefficient and mostly agrarian because of the New Economic Policy (NEP) was designed for the inherited agrarian economy of the former Russian Empire.

In 1929, Soviet head-of-state Joseph Stalin enacted the five year plans (known in Russian shortly as pyatiletka), along with the collectivization of the agricultural economy in order to accelerate the industrialization of the Soviet Union. This strategy consisted of stockpiling grain and selling (exporting) the excesses abroad to make money for the needed industrial equipment. This came at the cost of the Holodomor, a famine which killed several million people.