The XXth Century Political History of Russia: lecture materials. Gennady Bordyugov

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СКАЧАТЬ of industry started to develop. Commerce contributed to the process, creating a nation-wide market. Social stratification began at the same time. The mass of the population began to envy the prosperous life of kulaks and the city bourgeoisie.

      The policy was confronted with its first crisis in 1923; it was the «crisis of sales.» At that time, industrial prices were adjusted according to the needs of the countryside. But the desire to get the highest profits possible provoked a rise in prices of industrial goods by more then three times in relation to prices for agricultural production. The unevenness of prices led to a decreased spending capacity in rural areas. The government intervened in the price formation and administratively lowered industrial production prices and increased prices for agricultural production.

      The reconstruction process was over by the mid-twenties. However, it was substantially influenced by a reduction in military spending. The armed forces, for instance, were reduced to 600 thousand people from 5.3 million people. Yet the future of the Soviet Union depended on the activity of capitalist powers. A perception of increased military threats could influence the further support of the NEP.

      In 1925 the government decided to move towards industrial modernization of the country to place it among developed countries, making it capable of defending its borders. The industrialization program required an increase in grain exports to purchase necessary machinery and equipment.

      The new phase of NEP began at the same time as the intensification of the power after the death of the founder of the Soviet state Vladimir Lenin. Leon Trotsky started to actively criticize the expanding bureaucracy because administration functionaries were appointed directly by Joseph Stalin instead of being elected by the people. And since Stalin was the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, the party became the only institution providing access to the nomenklatura. The nomenklatura was to become the basis of Soviet state organization. But Trotsky’s «new course» was based on the idea of free discussion of any issue. He believed that the old guard of the party was turning into a group of «new-style bureaucrats» who had forgotten the language of the revolution and were adopting a «party-style» of speech. This fact made it necessary to replace the old functionaries with new ones.

      This was also the moment when Stalin advanced the theory of «Socialism in One Country» – that is, that a socialist regime could be established independently in the USSR. Other party leaders, such as Grigorii Zinoviev and Leo Kamenev, disagreed. They argued that socialism could only triumph if the Western European proletariat revolted as well, which meant in effect a «world revolution.» They regarded Stalin’s theory «national-bolshevist,» implying that it was more nationalist than socialist.

      In 1927, with the tenth anniversary of the October revolution at hand the struggle among party leaders became more intense. Besides personal ambitions it was also driven by objective reasons. The NEP had not completely succeeded; it did not reach down to the production collectives – the fundamental components of the economy. Industry could not continue to exist without active state support. Workers demanded an administrative guarantee of their interests, and over a third of the peasantry (proletarians, half-proletarians, and the poor) were directly supported by the government’s intervention in the economy. Tax policy was based on the class principle. The same principle was applied to the elections to different levels of soviets. The bureaucracy became the indispensable component of every sphere of life.

      The preceding analysis demonstrates that the country was nearing a historic choice between further pursuit of the NEP and an increase in the centralization of and administrative interference in all domains of state policy. Not only did the new crisis of the NEP reveal all of these contradictions; it also changed the direction of Russia’s development in the 20th century.

      Theme 6

      NEP DOWNSIZING AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE POLICY OF EXTRAORDINARY MEASURES INTO A PERMANENT SYSTEM OF GOVERNMENT

      The end of the 1920s – beginning of the 1930s was a period in which the policy of NEP (New Economic Policy, 1921–8) was overthrown in favor of the Stalinist «revolution from above.» It is extremely important to understand in what way and by what means the Leninist principles embodied in the NEP were revised and replaced by a purely Stalinist understanding of the course to be taken in advancing the country further and strengthening the new, post-Leninist regime.

      In December 1927, at its XV congress, the ruling party adopted a program concerning the smooth «reconstruction» of the NEP. This Program envisaged the involvement of peasants in cooperative production on a scale realistic for that time, and was orientated towards a gradual, balanced, carefully considered tempo for industrial modernization, the strengthening of ties between city and countryside and, most important, the retention, to quite a considerable extent, of individual peasant ownership as the basis for the development of the agrarian sector of the economy and the market. At the same time the resolutions adopted by the Congress permit us to judge quite precisely the serious ideological changes that had occurred in the position of the ruling party. If the idea of socialism, as a system of civilized cooperatives, survived in the resolutions of the Congress, it was present only in an extremely reduced and stunted form. In one of the principal documents, «Concerning Directives on the Drawing up of a Five-Year Plan for the Economy», repeated mention was made of the need to overcome the anarchy of the NEP market and to set up a stricter framework for its operation. In general the market was seen in a very negative light; indeed it figured in the document only in one capacity, as the private market. The market was seen as a capitalist leftover, an attribute of capitalism as such, and was judged accordingly. Moreover, the process of overcoming the anarchy of the market was seen, in the long run, in terms of transforming the system of government regulation of the market into «an apparatus for the socialist distribution of goods.»

      The redefinition of socialism implicitly adopted at the Congress strengthened the orientation towards strict centralization and a strictly regulated economic system. It might be said that the ideological shift towards the idea of «state socialism» had begun, but it was still envisaged at this stage as existing within the context of the market, which for doctrinal reasons naturally aroused hostility.

      These ideological maneuvers were soon transferred to the practical plane with the occurrence of the grain procurement crisis at the end of 1927 – beginning of 1928. The immediate cause of the crisis had been mistakes in the economic administration, in particular the reduction of government grain prices at the beginning of the procurement campaign. In the winter of 1927/28 the largest granaries effectively ceased selling grain to the cooperation and to state purchasers. Hoping for more favorable market circumstances, and more advantageous conditions for selling, the «middle peasants» too began hoarding grain. The main point, however, was that both concrete tactical mistakes, and a fundamental strategic miscalculation, came together in the procurement crisis of 1927/28.

      Analyzing the causes of the crisis in retrospect, Nikolai Bukharin concluded that the grain problem had already been neglected in the period from 1925 to 1927. The country’s leadership, including the General Secretary of the Communist Party, Iosif Stalin, had «for some period of time failed to take heed of the state of affairs with regard to grain, and for some time carried on with the process of industrialization, which was financed by foreign currency reserves and taxes.» Instead of paying attention, during the previous years, to the situation of the grain sector and achieving a significant increase in the rate of construction, on a firm basis, in one to three years» time, the leadership ran into inevitable difficulties, Bukharin observed. These difficulties became even more evident when the very sources on which we had been relying for some time were exhausted and we all realized that we could no longer continue on that basis. This moment coincided with our greatest problems. But once things had worked out in that way, once these difficulties had become an objective fact, we ended up in the first round of extraordinary measures.

      From the very beginning a certain group within the leadership was inclined to see the outbreak of the grain procurement crisis in war-like terms, as a fresh attack on socialism by СКАЧАТЬ