16th Conference

Sixteenth Conference of the All-Union Communist Party (b). 23 - 29 April 1929.

Verbatim record. - M.-L.: Gosizdat, 1929.

The sixteenth conference of the CPSU (b) was held on April 23-29, 1929 in Moscow. There were 254 delegates with a casting vote and 679 with an advisory vote. Order of the day: Five-year plan for the development of the national economy (speakers AI Rykov, GM Krzhizhanovsky, VV Kuibyshev); Ways of raising agriculture and tax relief for the middle peasant (MI Kalinin); Results and immediate tasks of combating bureaucracy (Ya.A. Yakovlev); On the cleaning and verification of members and candidates of the CPSU (b) (E.M. Yaroslavsky).

The main issue of the conference was the discussion and adoption of the first five-year plan for the development of the national economy of the USSR. The development of the five-year plan and its discussion at the conference took place in the struggle against the so-called "right deviation in the CPSU (b)", whose leaders (N.I. Bukharin, A.I. Rykov, M.P. Tomsky) questioned the reality of the plan, insisted on its "minimal" version. [The first five-year plan was drawn up in two versions - the initial ("minimum") and "optimal", calculated for the full mobilization of all reserves and opportunities inherent in the Soviet social system. The tasks of the "optimal" variant exceeded the starting one by about 20%.] The conference approved the "optimal" variant of the five-year plan.

The first five-year plan was a broad program for the economic, social, and cultural transformation of society. Its implementation meant a sweeping offensive of socialism along the entire front and was supposed to lead to the construction of the foundation of the socialist economy and the ousting of the capitalist elements in order to completely eliminate them. Having defined the tasks in the field of organizing large-scale socialist agriculture, the conference at the same time outlined a number of measures for rendering assistance to the poor and middle peasant individual farms; approved a new law on agricultural. tax, according to which the poor farms were exempted from the tax, the taxation of the middle farms was reduced, and the main burden was shifted to the kulaks. The conference condemned the position of the "right" as aimed at disrupting collectivization, and qualified their views "... as a direct transition to the position of kulaks ...", calling on the party to fight them as a serious danger in its ranks.