Der Funfjahrplan der UdSSR [The Five Year Plan of the USSR]

A German translation of the Soviet Five Year Plan.

Joseph Stalin launched the Soviet Union’s first Five-Year Plan in 1928, attempting to usher in a period of rapid modernization and industrialization across the vast and largely agrarian nation. While it enjoyed some success in tapping Russia’s vast deposits of natural resources, it came with enormous social, economic, and cultural costs.

This map offers a decidedly Communist perspective on the efficacy of the first two years of the Five-Year Plan. The image is broken into two, offering overviews of the Asian and European sections of the Soviet Union. In each, a dense assortment of factories, mines, and industrial facilities are connected by a relatively robust network of roads and railways. A scale of capital investments is amusing in its simplicity, while text at the top clarifies the image does not take into account all existing infrastructure and companies (implying there is far more than shown).

The map was designed by N.A. Kowalewski and A.W. Strelbitzki to accompany an uncommon German translation of Grigorii Grinko’s analysis of the first two years of the Soviet Five-Year Plan. The copy that is included was published in 1930 by the ‘Publisher for Literatur and Politics’ (Verlag Fur Literatur und Politik) in Vienna.

Source.