Industrialisation, Socialist, the process of eliminating a country’s economic backwardness and transforming it into an industrial country through the planned building of large-scale socialist industry, above all heavy industry, which ensures that socialist relations of production will predominate. Socialist industrialisation differs radically from capitalist industrialisation (see Industrialisation, Capitalist) in its objectives, sources, methods and social consequences. It must restructure the economy on socialist principles, ensure a high standard of well-being for all, and raise people’s cultural and technical levels. It ensures the triumph of socialist forms of economy over the capitalist forms, and serves as the base for transforming small individual peasant economies into large socialist collective farms, and for strengthening the positions of socialism in the struggle against capitalism inside the country and internationally. Industrialisation in the USSR during the pre-war five-year economic development plans eliminated the contradictions between the most advanced socio-political system and the backward material and technical base inherited from pre-revolutionary Russia, and led to the victory of socialist production relations in both town and country. It created the material base for eliminating the antithesis between town and country and between mental and physical labour. The means for socialist industrialisation are found in internal resources, accumulation in the economy, such as the profit of state enterprises and banks, part of the surplus product made by peasants, resources obtained from domestic and foreign trade, etc. Industrialisation in the socialist countries occurs at high rates, which is one of their huge advantages over the capitalist countries. Socialist industrialisation in the USSR had the following features: 1) The Soviet Union had to build large-scale machine production and ensure the industrial development of the entire economy even though it lacked adequate experience and was surrounded by hostile capitalist states. 2) The Soviet Union relied on its own resources, as it was denied material and financial assistance by other countries. 3) The Soviet Union built its entire industrial complex, in particular heavy industry. Industrialisation in the other socialist countries had its own peculiarities, 164 stemming from the existence of the world socialist system and the international socialist division of labour (see Division of Labour, Socialist International). In the new international conditions, these countries are now able to concentrate their efforts on building those industries for which they have the most propitious natural and economic conditions. Apart from their internal resources, the countries of the world socialist system extensively use credits granted by the USSR and other socialist states, and draw on mutual assistance in developing science and technology and in training national personnel. The USSR had to build the material and technical base to sustain developed socialism once foundations of the new, socialist system had been built. This is the common way that will be followed by all countries which are embarking on socialist economic transformations beginning at a low or medium level of development. The tasks of industrialisation in the countries which have developed their productive forces by the time the socialist revolution triumphed are very different from those of the countries with a low or medium level of economic development. But there is no doubt that here too, many fundamentally new tasks have to be dealt with, such as subordinating large-scale machine production to the interests of society as a whole, changing its structure, rationally locating the productive forces throughout the country in conformity with the new objectives of production, learning the science of planning and new economic management, etc.