The rational allocation of productive forces in the USSR was given special importance: it was supposed to increase the pace of socialist construction and help catch up and overtake the capitalist West. However, the specific conditions of the Second Five-Year Plan made changes to the ideal scheme for the allocation of productive forces: the real picture of the distribution of capital investments was formed mainly due to the inertial processes of the allocation of productive forces; the convenience for government departments of building up industrial potential in the center of the country; the availability of qualified personnel. By the beginning of the Second Five-Year Plan, the Soviet leadership had a different experience managing the economy than at the end of the 1920s. By the autumn of 1932, the catastrophic situation in the economy was recognized by all members of the Politburo, including Stalin, who knew about the true situation with labor productivity and product quality; about the damage and deadening of huge resources in unfinished construction projects and useless import orders. The resolutions of the First All-Union Conference on the Deployment of the Productive Forces of the USSR in the Second Five-Year Plan are indicative in this regard. The recognition that «the territory of the USSR is still very poorly studied geologically» and «the identified reserves are deprived of proper study of the chemical and technological properties of minerals» returned to the need to use indicative growth indicators. In the spirit of the documents of the First Five-Year Plan, there was a call for the development of specialization and cooperation within the framework of economic relations between enterprises. The Ural-Kuzbass Industrial Combine was to become a training ground for specialization and cooperation. At the same time, the rigidly centralized, departmental nature of economic management, which dictates the formation of economic ties of regions on an industry basis, led to the grid of large economic regions is intended only for initial preliminary planning. In real life, Ural-Kuzbass planned as a system of complex inter-district cooperation functioned in the format of a top-controlled exchange of coal and ore between the Urals and the Kuznetsk Basin.
location; space; industry; regions; plans; territory.