4A

'The Salvation of the Socialist Economy': The Two-Year Plan and the Five-Year Plan

These plans were central economic programmes to which the Czechoslovak economy was subordinated in the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s. While the Two-Year Plan (1947–1948) focused on post-war reconstruction, the First Five-Year Plan (1949–1953) introduced radical restructuring based on the Soviet model. These plans set unrealistic production targets for food and timber, definitively binding the countryside to a system of compulsory deliveries. Agriculture became merely one link in a chain of state directives, while excessive logging depleted forest stands. The inflated production norms became a political practice and an ideological priority, and failure to meet them was automatically treated as sabotage.