Donbass coal in the second five-year period: the causes of the failure of the plan for fuel production.

Abstract

On the basis of rich sources, involving new archive materials (including the recently declassified ones) of the highest general service bodies of power of the USSR and party committees of Ukraine, the paper reveals ways of resolving difficult problems of coal mining in Donbas region in the second five-year plan. According to the decree of the Council of People’s Commissars and the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party Bolsheviks on the coal Donbas (April, 1933) the basin became a testing area of formation of authoritarian style of industry management. In the mid 1930s, because of the poor financing of the coal industry the leaders of “Main Coal” of the People’s Commissariat of Heavy Industry of the USSR and the coal-mining complex of “Donbas Coal” suggested a “theory of concentration of mining”. Due to this theory and Stakhanov movement in 1936 miners reached the coal-output level of the end of the five-year plan. This enabled the party and state rulers to proclaim a fulfillment of the five-year plan in four years. In fact, the coal Donbas and the coal industry in general failed to fulfill the state plan in 1937, the last year of the five-year plan. It was proved by documents that the second five-year plan was non-fulfilled for the coal industry. Authorities of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs condemned the “theory of concentration of mining” as subversive one. The names and quantity of victims of the Stalin repressions have been provided in the paper.