The Place of the Ural Region in the Planning of the USSR's Economic Development in 1920-1927
Authors:   Institute of History and Archaeology, Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Simonov Maxim A. 
Published: December 2021

The relevance of the topic lies in the study of factors that contribute to overcoming the backwardness and rapid development of individual economic regions. One important example of such a model of regional development is the Urals, which in a short time turned from a losing region into one of the pillars of the Soviet economic model. In this regard, the research object is the economic complex of the Ural region with the focus on the planning of the economic development of the Urals and the external economic and political factors that affected it. The chronological framework of the study is determined by the period from the presentation of the GOELRO (State Commission for Electrification of Russia) plan at the VIII Congress of Soviets in 1920 to the approval of the directive on the development of the first five-year plan at the XIV Congress of the CPSU(b) in 1927. It was at this time that the basic principles and proportions of territorial development of the USSR and the Urals were elaborated; they were only strengthened and developed during the first five-year plans. The source base for the study is the long-term development plans of Soviet Russia and the Soviet Union, the GOELRO plan, the general plan of the reconstruction of the national economy of the USSR for 15 years, and the general plan of the economy of the Urals for the period from 1927 till 1941. Detailed information about the first two plans was published in the open Soviet press, and the last, the general plan of the economy of the Urals, was fully published. For a more detailed disclosure of the topic, materials from the meeting of the Presidium of the State Planning Committee of the USSR were also involved. The presentation of the results is arranged in chronological order, which allows tracing the evolution of planning authorities' ideas about the ways of development of the Ural economy. The main results of the study are: the idea of a rapid economic development of the country proposed in the GOELRO plan meant for the Urals the creation of new industrial capacities and the gradual approximation of its economic potential to the potential of the Donetsk region. At the same time, the remoteness of the Urals from export-oriented transport routes pushed the central leadership to integrate the Urals with Western Siberia and create a second major industrial base in the East of the country. This vector of development was enshrined in the general plan for the reconstruction of the national economy and the economy of the Urals, and this idea gained a complete form of an inter-territorial project of the Ural-Kuznetsk combine. The development of this vector took place in the conditions of the NEP: however, after the beginning of the transition to a single-person dictatorship and command-based administrative system, the country's top leadership did not abandon this course: on the contrary, it began to implement it in a more hypertrophied form than the developers of the 1920s had anticipated.