With the defeat of the Right Opposition, Stalin, Molotov and Kaganovich, constituting a form of triumvirate, assumed full control of the party-state machine. In January 1930 the policy of all-out collectivization and dekulakization was launched. The ‘revolution from above’ placed the party Secretariat, under Kaganovich and Molotov, at the centre of the drive to mobilize the party, to assign cadres and to enforce policy. Industrial policy was shaped by Gosplan, Vesenkha and officials of CCC-Rabkrin, which, under the leadership of Ordzhonikidze, took over Vesenkha in November 1930. The economic commissariats responsible for the management of the NEP, especially the People's Commissariat of Agriculture and the People's Commissariat of Finance, were downgraded. The cause of industrialization was advanced by the strong regional lobbies of Ukraine and the Urals. Stalin, at the XVI Party Congress dismissed the Trotskyists as ‘the most extreme minimalists and the most wretched capitulators’ on industrial tempos and continued to indulge in the wildest fantasies regarding economic growth. These ideological and institutional pressures led to an extraordinary radicalization of policies in which the whole of the ruling group was caught up, which carried serious implications for the economy and for the future of the regime itself.

The collectivization of agriculture was a long-term goal of the Bolsheviks. In 1917 it was abandoned, as the peasant revolution in the countryside destroyed the large landed estates. The system of small peasant holdings that thereafter dominated was inefficient and technically backward.