ABSTRACT
The result of the Five Year Plan was that great investments were made in a poor country, in a country which had not yet had time to recover from the devastation of foreign war, social revolution and civil war. Without the technical assistance of capitalist countries the great industrial building projects could not have been carried out; but while before the war foreign capital played a very important part in the development of Russian industry, financial assistance from abroad was now quite modest. 1 The great investments, therefore, were made out of the resources of a poverty-stricken country. Hence we may consider the specific achievement of the planned economy to be the fact that it compelled a poor nation to make great savings. Anything of the sort would have been impossible in a market economy.
