Russia A History by Gregory L. Freeze

Author:Gregory L. Freeze
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2009-05-27T23:00:00+00:00

10. The New Economic Policy (NEP) and the Revolutionary Experiment 1921–1929

WILLIAM B. HUSBAND

With NEP, the new Bolshevik regime pragmatically sought to consolidate power and rebuild a shattered economy. But these were also years of insoluble economic problems, fierce social tensions, and deep divisions in the party. Ultimately, NEP did more to exacerbate than solve fundamental problems; it was a critical prelude to Stalin’s ‘great turn’ in the late 1920s.

ONCE the Bolsheviks had consolidated their victory in the Russian civil war, the revolutionary experiment in socialism could begin in earnest. The defeat of principal military enemies in conjunction with the use of mass mobilization and repressive force seriously impaired those rivals not completely driven from the political arena. By that time, the Bolsheviks had already undertaken a broad programme of social and economic change. They attempted to co-ordinate all economic life by creating the Supreme Council of the National Economy in 1917, soon thereafter nationalized factories, and outlawed private trade. Their endorsement of workers’ control aspired to establish innovative management and labour relations, and the collapse of the national currency appeared to hasten the transition to a barter economy. New laws attacked social institutions and practices that reflected the values of the former regime. And in both city and village, workers and peasants implemented their own agendas, beginning with the appropriation of property belonging to élites of the old order.

Only revolutionary maximalists could have equated these early measures with socialism: by the early 1920s building a new society was still a task for the future. Despite the bold language of revolutionary pronouncements, years of ‘government by decree’ in 1917–20 had given the Communist Party only a paper hold on most spheres of life, while seven years of warfare had reduced the national economy to ruin. During the closing months of the civil war, the population increasingly demanded that the state produce tangible improvements to justify the sacrifices made in the name of revolution. As public tolerance of grain requisitioning and other emergency measures reached its limit, workers and peasants openly defied Soviet power. Even the most ideological Bolshevik could not deny the gravity of the situation. In March 1921—on the eve of the important Tenth Party Congress—the state had to use force to repress an anti-Bolshevik uprising at the Kronstadt Naval Base, a bastion of revolutionary radicalism in 1917.

Both in response to public pressure and in keeping with their own ideological predilections, in 1921–9 the Bolsheviks pursued what would be the most open and experimental phase of Russian communism. The turning-point came in 1921 when the Tenth Congress endorsed the controversial New Economic Policy (NEP). Its aims were many: to ease public resentment against the emergency measures of the civil war; to regularize supply and production through a limited reintroduction of the market; to invigorate the grass-roots economy and generate investment capital for industrialization; and, in general, to lay the foundation for the transition to socialism at some unspecified but inevitable future date. At the same time, the political and military

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