The Whites' unsuccessful three-pronged attack against Moscow in March 1919 decided the military outcome of their war against the Reds. Despite their initial success, the Whites went down in defeat that November, after which their routed forces replaced General Anton Denikin with Petr Wrangel, the most competent of all the White officers. Coinciding with an invasion of Russia by forces of the newly resurrected Polish state, the Whites opened their final offensive in the spring of 1920. When Red forces overcame Wrangel's army in November, he and his troops retreated back to Crimea from which they then withdrew from Russia. In the meantime, the Bolsheviks' conflict with the Poles ended in stalemate; the belligerent parties signed an armistice in October 1920, followed by the Treaty of Riga in 1921, which transferred parts of Ukraine and Belorussia to Poland.
Although at civil war's end the difference between victory and defeat seemed a small one, it is hard to imagine how the Whites might have prevailed in the ordeal: the Constituent Assembly elections made clear that over 80 per cent of the population had voted for socialist parties. The Whites simply lacked mass appeal in a war in which most people were reluctant to get involved. Concentrated on the periphery, the Whites relied on Allied bullets and ordnance to fight the Reds. True, a more determined Allied intervention might have tipped the scales in the Whites' favour in the military conflict, but their failure was as much political as it was military. Recent scholarship reaffirms the ineptitude and corruption of the White forces, emphasising that their virtual government misunderstood the relationship between social policy and military success.[148] Moreover, the alliance with the moderate socialists, made frail by lack of a common ideology to unite them, contributed to the Whites' political failures, as did the hollow appeal of their slogan, 'One, Great, and Indivisible Russia'.[149]
Apart from their military encounters with the Whites, the Bolsheviks also had to contend with a front behind their own lines because of the appeal of rival socialist parties and because Bolshevik economic policies alienated much of the working class and drove the peasantry to rise up against the requisitioning of grain and related measures. Viewing October 1917 as a stage in the bourgeois-democratic revolution, the Menshevik Party refused to take part in an armed struggle against the Bolsheviks, but found their neutrality difficult to sustain when the White threat intensified. The party's political and ideological concessions to the Bolsheviks, however, damaged its identity, even its ideals, thus jeopardising its support among workers. Adopting hardline policies towards Right Menshevik critics opposed to accommodating the Bolsheviks, the Menshevik Central Committee disbanded certain local party organisations, and expelled members from others.[150] True, some Right SRs experienced a short-lived period of co-operation with the Bolsheviks during the White offensive of 1919, but for the most part they threatened the Soviet government with the possibility of forming a third front comprising all other socialist groups. Given the far-reaching opposition to Bolshevik rule by 1920, Mensheviks and SRs believed the Leninists would be forced to co-opt the Menshevik/SR programme or face defeat. This encouraged them, as well as anarchist groups, to step up their agitation against the Bolsheviks at the end of the year.
The activities of the rival socialist parties provided the frame for popular revolt. Recent studies underscore the vast scale of the crisis of early 1921, documenting workers' strikes and armed peasant rebellions in many locales.[151]Peasant discontent, which the Communists called the Green movement, and mass worker unrest convinced the party to replace its unpopular economic policies known, in retrospect, as War Communism - characterised by economic centralisation, nationalisation of industry and land and compulsory requisitioning of grain - with the New Economic Policy (NEP), which swapped the hated grain requisitioning with a tax in kind and restored some legal private economic activity. The necessity of this shift in policy was made clear when, in early March 1921, sailors of the Kronstadt naval fortress rose up against the Bolsheviks whom they had helped bring to power. Demanding the restoration of Soviet democracy without Communists, the sailors met with brutal repression. Although most historians view the Kronstadt uprising, worker disturbances, the Green movement and the introduction of the NEP as the last acts of the civil war, after which the party mopped up remaining pockets of opposition in the borderlands, the famine of 1921 marks the real conclusion to the conflict, for it helped to keep the Bolsheviks in power by robbing the population of initiative. Holding broad swaths of the country tightly in its grip until late 1923, the famine and related epidemic diseases took an estimated 5 million lives; countless more would have perished had it not been for foreign relief.
Moreover, the Bolshevik Party took advantage of mass starvation to end its stalemate with the Orthodox Church. Turning many believers against the new order, the Bolsheviks had forced through a separation of Church and state in 1917 and removed schools from Church supervision. Once famine hit hard, the party leadership promoted the cause of Orthodox clergy loyal to Soviet power, so-called red priests, or renovationists. They supported the party's determination to use Church valuables to finance famine relief, hoping thereby to strengthen their own position. Popular opposition to what soon amounted to a government confiscation of Church valuables, however, triggered violent confrontations. Viewing these as evidence of a growing conspiracy, party leaders allied with the renovationists. But this move was one of expedience, for 'the Politburo planned to discard them in the final stage of destroying the church'.17
The defeat of the Whites, the end of the war with Poland and famine made it possible for the Lenin government to focus on regaining breakaway territories in Central Asia, Transcaucasia, Siberia and elsewhere, where issues of nationalism, ethnicity, religion, class, foreign intervention and differing levels of economic development and ways of life complicated local civil wars. Russians had comprised approximately 50 per cent of the tsarist empire's multinational population. At times tolerant, but increasingly contradictory and even repressive, tsarist nationality policies had given rise to numerous grievances among
17 Edward E. Roslof, RedPriests:Renovationism,Russian Orthodoxy, andRevolution, 1905-1946 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), pp. 39-73, quote on p. 72.
the non-Russian population. Yet only a minority of intellectuals in the outlying areas before 1914 championed the emergence of independent states. The situation in Poland and perhaps Finland was the exception to this generalisation. The Revolution of 1917, however, gave impetus to national movements in Ukraine and elsewhere.
As Marxists engaged in an international struggle on behalf of the interests of the proletariat, the Bolsheviks backed self-determination of nations. This policy contributed to the destabilisation of the Provisional Government, and also created problems for the Bolsheviks once they took power. In January 1918 Sovnarkom's Commissariat ofNationalities (Narkomnats) headed by Stalin confirmed the Soviet government's support for self-determination of the country's minorities, characterising the new state as a federation of Soviet republics. The first Soviet constitution of July 1918 reiterated these claims, without specifying the nature of federalism. The cost of survival, however, made it necessary to be pragmatic and flexible: Lenin made clear already in early 1918 that the interests of socialism were more important than the right of self-determination. The sober reality of ruling, disappointment over the failure of world revolution, fear of hostile border states that could serve as bases for new intervention and the Soviet state's inability to prevent the emergence of an independent Poland, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, shaped emerging Soviet nationality politics.
Fostered by intellectuals and politicians, local nationalisms tended to develop into political movements with popular support in territories most affected by industrial development, whereas national consciousness arose more slowly where local nationalities had little presence in towns. Often, however, class and ethnic conflicts became entangled as these territories turned into major battlefields of the civil war and arenas of foreign intervention. The situation in regard to Ukraine illustrates these points. The Ukrainian authorities had demanded autonomy from the Provisional Government, and the Bolsheviks recognised Ukraine's independence at the end of 1917. But Ukraine's support of General Kaledin and the consequences of the short-lived Brest- Litovsk Peace with Germany dramatised the dangers of an unfriendly border state. Soon the activities of peasant rebel Nestor Makhno obscured the intertwining hostilities among Reds, Whites, Ukrainian nationalists, Germans and Poles, as Ukraine changed hands frequently. Under the black flag of anarchism, Makhno first formed a loose alliance with the Communists, but then battled against Red and White alike until Red forces crushed his army in 1920. With its rich farmland, developed industry and complex ethnic and social situation that included a sizeable Russian population in the cities, Ukraine was too important to the emerging Soviet state to be allowed to go its separate way. In Belorus- sia, nationalists had declared their independence under German protection in 1918, but this effort at statehood failed with Germany's withdrawal from the war. Nevertheless, the signing of the Treaty of Riga forced the Bolsheviks to give up parts of both Western Ukraine and Belorussia.
The Bolsheviks also had to accept other circumstances not to their liking. Recognising the non-socialist government set up in Finland in 1918, they backed an unsuccessful Red Army uprising in the former tsarist territory, after which they had to bow to political realities. With Germany's patronage, the Baltic states ofLatvia, Estonia and Lithuania achieved their independence in a similar manner. Declaring their independence in 1918, the states floundered after Germany's defeat since coherent nationalist movements had not set them up. Yet with the assistance of the British navy and of units from the German army, they managed to prevail against the Red Army and local socialists.
In the Caucasus, Georgian Mensheviks, Armenian Dashnaks and Azeri Musavat established independent regimes in 1918. Because these states had developed so unevenly in the preceding decades, their nationalist movements remained distinct. Thus, when they attempted a short-lived experiment at federalism, irreconcilable differences and the territorial claims they had on each other forced them to turn to foreign protectors for self-defence. The Germans, followed by the British, came to the aid of the popular Georgian socialist republic set up by Mensheviks. Meanwhile, the Turks assisted their co-Muslim Azeris, while the Allies expressed support for the Armenians. The defeat ofthe Germans and the Turks, and the withdrawal ofthe British made it possible for ethnic strife to break out between Azeris and Armenians in Baku, especially since the Soviet government that held power briefly in the city in 1918 failed to rally the ethnically diverse region around the platform of Soviet power. The Red Army invaded Armenia and Azerbaijan in 1920, and Georgia the following year. Meeting with stiff resistance from religious leaders and guerrilla forces in mountain regions of the northern Caucasus, Soviet forces eventually overcame opposition there, too.
The situation in the Islamic regions of Russia proved to be particularly difficult to handle, since Islam, like Marxism, also espoused internationalist sentiments and there was always the fear that these feelings would find expression in support for the idea of a pan-Turkic state. By the late nineteenth century, elements within Russia's Muslim elite felt at home within a broader community of the world's Muslims. Some of Russia's Muslim intellectuals, the Jadids, advocated a complete reform of culture and society to meet the modern world's challenges. Embracing modernity and searching for what it meant to be Muslim, they encountered resistance from Muslim society's leaders, ever the more so because some would-be reformers had become socialists. To be sure, notions of statehood remained inchoate, but Jadids among the Crimean Tatar population did criticise tsarist policies, while war and revolution added impetus to anti-Russian feelings. Violent anti-European uprisings flared up in Central Asia in 1916, leaving embittered feelings on both sides. Moreover, the revolution emboldened the All-Russian Muslim Congress to press claims against the Provisional Government. Disintegration ofstate power further pitted reformers against traditional elites and Muslims against Russian settlers. For instance, angry clashes between Russian-controlled soviets and natives in Tashkent and Kazan' prompted some Muslims to side with the Whites. But this marriage of convenience was short-lived, since the Whites failed to dispel fears that they were little more than Russian oppressors.
Appreciating the need to win support within the Muslim world, the Bolsheviks granted autonomy to the Bashkirs in 1919 and to the Tatars in 1920. However, the party faced a diverse partisan movement deep in Central Asia that drew support from all classes but whose separate parts often fought for different reasons. Recapturing the khanates of Bukhara and Khiva in 1920, the Bolsheviks continued to face stubborn opposition elsewhere from armed bands of Islamic guerrillas, whom the Bolsheviks labelled brigands, or basmachi. They resisted the Red Army takeover until 1923. Given political realities, some Jadids joined the Communists in order to fulfil their vision of transforming Muslim society.
The Bolsheviks' victory in the civil war led to the founding of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in December 1922. Under the supervision of Narkomnats, the Soviet government set up a federation, granting statehood within the framework of the Soviet Russian state to those territories it had recaptured. Seeing the nationalist threat as a serious one - including that among Russians, which had the potential to provoke defensive nationalism among others - Lenin and Stalin supported the development of non-Russian territories and downplayed Russian institutions, hoping to create a centralised, multi-ethnic, anti-imperial, socialist state, an 'affirmative action empire'.18
The Bolshevik party-state
War, geopolitics and the prolonged crisis beginning in 1914 shaped the emerging Bolshevik party-state, which differed radically from the utopian views of
18 Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939 (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001).
the commune state that Lenin had formulated in 1917 in his State and Revolution. True, political power devolved to the locales for much of the civil war, but this was not by design. In many localities, revolutionary leaders headed up their own councils of people's commissars (sovnarkomy), which frequently declared themselves independent republics or communes. Localism emerged because each local unit of administration had to rely on its own resources to establish state power. In these dire circumstances, the revolutionary soviets became transformed into pillars of the state bureaucracy as their plenums lost influence and their executive committees and presidiums came to govern Russia. These small bands of revolutionaries justified their actions by insisting that opposition to Soviet power had made them necessary.
From the Sovnarkom's perspective, localism made it difficult to prosecute the war effort. To combat separatist tendencies, the Commissariat of Internal Affairs purged soviet executive committees of those opposed to centralism and turned party organisations into overseers of local soviets. The gradual implementation of the Soviet constitution helped to transform the country's network of soviets into pillars of state power by more narrowly defining their functions, making them financially dependent upon the Centre, and obliging local soviets to execute the decrees ofhigher organs ofpower. As a result, some soviets no longer held elections. In others, the party ended secret balloting and organised Communist election victories or had to settle for majorities of 'unaffiliated' deputies forced to conceal their real party preferences.
The government's attempts to centralise the political system gained momentum at the Eighth Party Congress in March 1919, as a result of which a principle of dual subordination was introduced: all administrative departments formed by soviet executive committees became subordinate to them but also to the corresponding Moscow commissariats. The debate over how centralised the new state should be, however, was fuelled by the Democratic Centralists (DCs), who believed that the decline in elective offices and collective decision-making had caused a malaise within the party. The DCs supported the integrity of the soviets vis-a-vis local party organisations and the Centre, opposing Moscow's periodic redistribution of cadres. The DCs debated these issues before the 1919 party congress and later led a full-scale attack against 'bureaucratic centralism'. But true reform 'remained a dead letter'[152] because open debate threatened the party's tenuous hold on power.
To be sure, the cultural frame that defined the parameters of Bolshevik civil-war practices was rooted in centuries of autocracy characterised by Russia's frail representative institutions; low levels of popular participation in political life; centralisation; a bureaucratic, authoritarian government with broad powers; and highly personalised political attachments.[153] Yet political culture does absorb new influences from historical experience. The conditions of the 1914-21 period endowed civic practices with exaggerated, even grotesque features. Some historians ground the party elite's maximalism in the circumstances of the First World War, which created a new political type prone to apply military methods to civilian life. The attitudes and skills the new leaders acquired during a period of destruction, violence, social unrest, hunger and shortages of all kinds made them enemies of compromise who believed that anything that served the proletariat was moral. Such beliefs fed corruption, abuses of power and arbitrary behaviour, as well as a system of privileges that kept the party afloat often in a sea of indifference and hostility from the people whose support they lost.[154] Moreover, in promoting the use of violence in public life, the civil war affected the political attitudes not only of Bolsheviks: a synchronous birth of 'strong power' forms of government emerged among both Reds and Whites, producing chrezvychaishchina, or forms of government based on mass terror, which left a deep mark on the country's political culture.[155] Although Russia's vulnerable democratic traditions continued to coexist with Soviet power, the civil-war experience reduced the likelihood that the democratic strains in Russian public life would supplant the authoritarian ones.
The civil war widened access to the political elite for members of all revolutionary parties, young adults, women, national minorities and the poorly educated, creating not a workers' party, but a plebeian one, run mainly by intellectuals. Throughout the conflict, workers made up roughly 40 per cent of the party's membership and the peasantry 20 per cent. Officials and members of the intelligentsia accounted for the rest, and perhaps for this reason the party remained better educated than the population at large. Approximately 1.5 million people enrolled in the party between 1917 and 1920, but fewer than half a million members were left by 1922.[156] Moreover, at this time the overwhelming majority of party members had joined it in 1919-20.[157] Civil-war circumstances had propelled recent converts into positions of prominence, but Old Bolsheviks monopolised the political leadership, which also contained a larger percentage of minority nationalities than among the rank and file.
Dramatising their differences from non-Communists, the Bolsheviks cast themselves as disciplined, hard, selfless, dedicated, committed, honest and sober. The gulf existing between Bolshevik self-representation and individual party members' personal attributes was so large, however, that party diehards mistrusted the rank and file. Party leader L. B. Krasin, for instance, opined that 90 per cent of the party's members were 'unscrupulous time-servers'.[158]Appreciating the powerful role of cultural constraints, the party enrolled thousands of young recruits on probation, maintaining a revolving-door policy and expelling members who compromised it. The most serious attempts to flush the party of undesirable elements tookplace in the spring of 1919, when 46.8 per cent of the party's total membership was excluded. During the purge of 1920, 28.6 per cent ofthe party's members were expelled, and in 1921,24.8 per cent.[159]
One of the most widespread problems that purging the party sought to remedy was corruption. Blaming it for the Whites' success, the party made corruption a class issue by depicting it as a 'dirty' form of class relationships inherited from old Russia, as bourgeois specialists and former tsarist bureaucrats obtained administrative positions - and rations - 'simply by applying for party membership the day before applying for the job itself'.[160] Indeed, in 1918, necessity forced the Bolsheviks to co-opt into the emerging state apparatus individuals whose political views were often inimical to Bolshevism: the Bolsheviks needed their class enemy not only to run the machinery of state but also to blame when its (mal)functioning provoked mass discontent. The process of 'othering' the bourgeoisie likewise had practical limitations because the vicissitudes of class war could be turned on and off during this time of terrible shortages with a bribe or valuable personal contact.
The consequences of the Bolsheviks' arbitrary policies proved difficult to eradicate. When the party in April I9I9 broadened the activities of the State Control Commission to do something about the problem of corruption, the commission found malfeasance, theft, speculation and other forms of corruption in virtually all Soviet institutions. As part of a national campaign to curb abuses of power, restore discipline, cut down on red tape, revive industry and overcome growing worker alienation from the party by involving workers in participatory practices, the party replaced the State Control Commission in 1920 with the Workers'-Peasants' Inspectorate (Rabkrin). But it too failed to remedy the problem because of the billiard-ball interaction of circumstances, ideologically fuelled initiatives, rivalries, misunderstandings, deep cultural patterns and the unbelievably awful functioning of essentially all institutions and organisations.
Revolution and culture
Bolshevik cultural policies underscore the complex interaction between the empowering environment of revolution, utopian stirrings of Communists and intellectuals alike, Russian cultural practices and the larger contemporary arena of Western and even American culture.[161] Bent on retaining power and the symbols of legitimacy, the Bolsheviks disagreed over how best to implement new cultural practices, which they saw as essential to the success of their revolution. Like the French Revolutionaries, they sought to create a new national will through revolutionary ideology. Although some party members opposed the complete destruction of the cultural past and instead sought to 'proletarianise' it by making it more accessible, others promoted efforts to sweep away old cultural forms.
The institution most identified with cultural revolution was Proletkul't, organised in October 1918. An acronym for proletarian cultural-educational organisations, Proletkul't aimed to awaken independent creative activity among the proletariat. Without a common vision of what 'proletarian culture' was or ought to be, cultural activists showed that their struggle 'was just as contestuous as the efforts to change the political and economic foundations of Soviet society'.[162] Their efforts reveal that an intelligentsia divided among itself, but mostly ill-disposed toward a marketplace in culture, played the leading role in promoting proletarian culture, and for this reason had limited success.[163]
In its hurried drive to reconstitute society, the Soviet government abolished titles, private property and ranks. It fashioned a new language, social hierarchies (and divisions), rituals and festivals, myths, revolutionary morality and revolutionary justice. It emancipated women by promulgating a radical family code in 1918. It separated Church and state. It modernised the alphabet, introduced calendar reform, and sought to make revolution itself a tradition. Revolutionary songs, party newspapers, slogans, pamphlets, brochures, elections and festivals acquired new meaning. For instance, Bolshevik festivals left little room for spontaneity and popular initiative. Revolutionaries also sought to obscure the past by making it difficult to observe traditional holidays, especially religious ones.
The Communists likewise fashioned a new public ideological language that, in erasing the difference between ideas and reality, liberated them from the need to provide any logical proof for their claims.[164] Communism's public language emphasised distrust of the class other; a hierarchy of class, soviets, privileges, even of countries; coercion as the necessary means that justified the hoped-for ends; and a national ideology as opposed to a parochial one. The specifics of the ever-changing narrative are less important than how it underscored the battle of the new world against the old, the need to sacrifice, and the despicable nature of the opposition. By the time the civil war drew to a close, the Bolsheviks were proclaiming that the Communist victory and survival of the Soviet state were inevitable, that capitalism was doomed, and that it would trigger a new war and world revolution. This conveyed the message that resistance was not only improper, but also futile. In promising a glorious future, the Bolsheviks thus inscribed historically delayed gratification into their narrative of revolution, which they presented to the population through newspapers, propaganda efforts, visual arts and other forms.[165] During periods of vulnerability the party took additional measures to propagate its views; however, these frenzied efforts only underscored how little cultural capital the Communists had at this point. Indeed, to make their ideology the ruling one, the Bolsheviks took over the state educational system, giving literacy and the spread of 'enlightenment' a top priority in order to facilitate the reception of their propaganda, but met with stiff opposition.
As party leaders and intellectuals quarrelled among themselves over how best to effect cultural change, practices immersed in everyday life continued to direct people's perceptions along more familiar, less revolutionary pathways, preventing a complete destruction of past culture. Ultimately, the Bolsheviks sacralised a new world that privileged workers and at times peasants not only through class-based policies but also through the construction of a heroic narrative of the revolution that reflected new social hierarchies. While this narrative of integration - and exclusion - made it possible for later generations of Soviet leaders to co-opt and mobilise individuals and groups, the ready employment of the despotic power of the state to effect cultural change helped obscure the fact that the party had failed to establish cultural domination, while its ideology continued to invite argument.
War Communism and Russia's peasant majority
The economic formation that prevailed between 1918 and March 1921 has subsequently come to be known as War Communism. A term lacking analytical precision, it was originally popularised by L. Kritsman, its leading spokesperson, and used by Lenin to discredit the opposition. In elucidating the term, the partisan and scholarly literatures either emphasise the role of ideology in implementing 'communist' economic principles during civil-war conditions, or downplay it, underscoring instead the emergency nature of the measures enacted.[166] Yet the lessons learned are less about the new economic order itself than about the significance of how the Bolsheviks attempted to put it into practice.
Civil war in industry started immediately after October 1917, when the Bolsheviks limited private property and the market, encouraging workers' control and nationalising banks.[167] Economic localism soon clashed with centralising impulses against a background of various ideological legacies. These included the tsarist wartime economic model in place since 1915 in which state intervention and control played a major role, and utopian Marxist visions of a socialist economy, which presumed an inherent hostility in class relations and the superiority of socialist principles.[168] Although previous state policies shaped economic practices during the civil war, Bolshevik ideology transformed practices of state intervention by justifying coercion. This point is manifested in the implementation of the food dictatorship and nationalisation of industry in 1918; in the obligatory grain quota assessment or razverstka and co-optation of the consumer co-operatives in 1919; and in the militarisation of labour and greater use of violence in the countryside in 1920.
The Soviet government created an organ responsible for economic life, the Supreme Economic Council (Sovnarkhoz), and urged local soviets to establish provincial councils. Industrial breakdown in 1918 posed the most pressing problem for local economic councils, which likewise navigated the rocky transition from workers' control to centralisation, and resolved which industries to nationalise and how to improve transportation, becoming embroiled in inter-agency squabbles in the process, particularly with the Food Supply Commissariat (Narkomprod). But pragmatism as well as conflict coloured the relationship between local councils and Moscow, especially since industries managed by the Centre had a greater chance of securing fuel to keep operating. The military threat also defined local councils' activities as some of their departments worked exclusively for the Red Army and eventually all of them did so to some degree. Their main problem, however, remained lack ofclearly defined jurisdiction between the councils and local agencies of Moscow's chief industrial branch administrations (glavki).
Growingfood shortages accompanied the collapse ofindustrial production. The problem had begun already during the war and gained momentum in 1917, when local agencies proved reluctant to release resources, fearing the destabilising consequences of the scarcity of food. As civil war unfolded, provincial agencies struggled to satisfy both local and larger demands on food supplies. To cope with the crisis, the Soviet government set up the Food Supply Commissariat on 27 May 1918. Local agencies soon registered the population in order to issue rations cards according to a class principle that privileged workers and discriminated against the bourgeoisie. The class principle of doling out food proved to be largely symbolic, however, owing to a constant reclassification of professions and to the fact that members of the bourgeoisie often tookjobs in the bureaucracy to obtain rations.[169] The Bolsheviks' co-opting of the consumer co-operatives, responsible for distributing food and other items, further exacerbated the distribution of food and other essentials. Oppositional socialists fought to retain the co-operatives' independence, adding to the difficulty the Bolsheviks had in taking them over.
Centring on procurement, Bolshevik economic practices alienated the peasantry and contributed to the famine of 1921-3. The party launched its first annual grain procurement programme in August 1918; however, the breakdown ofthe state infrastructure made procurement highly problematic. Shortages of employees in the procurement bodies, the parallelism of government organisations, destruction caused by the Whites, transportation difficulties and sundry decrees issued by local executive committees undermined campaigns. Moreover, the peasants' reluctance to hand over grain convinced the Bolsheviks to foment class war in the countryside by introducing committees of the village poor (kombedy). In the summer and autumn of 1918 brigades of Narkomprod's Food Army (prodarmiia), comprising workers from the capitals and other industrial cities, participated in the government's procurement programme. Most of them ended up speculating in grain, thereby sabotaging the Soviet government's system of fixed prices.
The exchange of manufactured goods for agricultural products (tovaroob- men) served as the linchpin of procurement. Established by a decree of 2 April 1918, tovaroobmen became mandatory for thirteen 'grain producing' provinces.[170] This involved setting up a food monopoly, abolishing private trade and establishing fixed prices, creating central supply organs and combating 'speculation'. Despite unfavourable sowing conditions in the spring of 1919 and the disruption of civil war, the government's assessment in 1919 represented a significant increase over the previous year. Acknowledging that a black market in just about everything undermined state procurement efforts, the party justified the use of force to carry out requisitioning. Although repression sparked disturbances throughout the countryside, the Bolsheviks needed to rely on the measures to hold onto power while they tried to effect the changes that they believed would make coercion unnecessary in the long run. To be sure, the peasantry designed their own strategies to ward off domination. The result was famine. The introduction of NEP was made possible only after a massive social and political rejection of War Communism on the part not only of the peasantry, but also of workers and elements in the party and state apparatus.
But it did not have to be that way. Until mid-1918 village autonomy flourished as the peasants finished the social revolution in the villages, liquidating gentry landholding and promoting a levelling process. In fact, the Right SRs' bid for power failed in part because the peasantry, satisfied with the land settlement, remained neutral before that summer. However, the Communist Party's decision on 11 June 1918 to establish kombedy to promote social revolution in the villages, facilitate grain collection and curb free trade marked a tragic turn in the party's course in the countryside. Combined with the introduction of the grain monopoly and food dictatorship in May and the first mobilisations into the Red Army, the party's resolve to manufacture class war in the villages represented the beginning of the end of the fleeting period of peasant self- rule.38 These measures also exacerbated the rift between town and country, strained relations between the Bolsheviks and Left SRs, and eventually forced the Bolsheviks to reject their own policies.
Although the Red Army served as an institution ofsocialisation, mandatory service also turned the countryside against the Communists, as is evinced in the colossal rate of desertion. Soldiers deserted because they wanted to be left alone, because they were concerned about the fate oftheir loved ones, because ofthe terrible conditions in the ranks andbecause oftheir opposition to specific policies such as requisitioning and the imposition of an extraordinary tax. The failure of rural soviets to work the fields of Red Army men contributed to the problem, as did the vile conditions in military hospitals. The party applied carrot and stick measures to deserters, including execution, the taking of hostages and amnesties, yet between 1918 and 1920 probably over half of all of those drafted deserted.39
Ultimately, the ideology of Bolshevism, as well as a strain in Russian intellectual life that viewed the countryside in a negative light, drove the Bolsheviks to force unfavourable rates of exchange on the peasants. In fact, the language the party used in describing the peasantry -' disorganised', 'poor and ignorant know-nothings', who lacked 'consciousness' because they were 'politically illiterate' and had a 'low cultural level' - bears some striking similarities to the language of colonialism.40 Communists blamed the 'darkness' of the village for the peasants' antipathy towards Soviet power, susceptibility to rumours and failure to understand the imminence of world revolution. They understood
38 Orlando Figes, Peasant Russia, Civil War: The Volga Countryside in Revolution (1917-1921) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 71.
39 Raleigh, Experiencing, pp. 332-7; and Mark Von Hagen, Soldiers in the Proletarian Dictatorship: The Red Army and the Soviet Socialist State, 1917-1930 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990), pp. 69-79.
40 Alvin W Gouldner, 'Stalinism: A Study of Internal Colonialism', in Political Power and Social Theory: A Research Annual (Greenwich, Conn., 1978): 209-59; 212, 216, 238; S. V Leonov,RozhdenieSovetskoiimperii: Gosudarstvoiideologiia, 1917-1922gg. (Moscow: Dialog MGU, 1997), p. 183.
that the peasantry demonstrated little interest in Communism, seeking solace in the argument that economic ruin caused the peasantry's lack of enthusiasm. That is, if Communism had worked, the peasantry would have been all for it.
In 1919 forced requisitioning replaced the hitherto haphazard approach to obtaining grain deliveries. Discontent stemming from unfair quotas and from confiscations surfaced immediately, as a result of which punitive measures proved necessary to realise the state's objectives. One illustrative episode from Saratov province involved an armed unit under the command of N. A. Cheremukhin in the summer of 1919, which violently struck out against desertion and the brewing of illicit spirits. Known in party circles for his 'tact, experience . .. and devotion to the interests of the Revolution', Cheremukhin torched 283 households in the village of Malinovka. Applying 'revolutionary justice', he confiscated 'kulakproperty', levied contributions on entire villages that participated in anti-Soviet uprisings and shot 'active opponents of Soviet power, deserters, kulaks, and chronic brewers of moonshine'. Between July and September his forces executed 139 people in an attempt to break the spirit ofthose opposed to Soviet decrees. Party members, non-Communists and Red Army units protested against Cheremukhin's repression.[171] But local party boss V A. Radus-Zen'kovich insisted that Cheremukhin's detachment 'did not use force at all'.[172] Such episodes made it certain that peasants would later welcome armed peasant bands bent on overthrowing Bolshevik power.
Beginning in mid-1918, peasant rebellions against Communist policies represented attempts to restore an earlier, partially mythical, time before Soviet power, which had done plenty to drive the peasantry into the opposition. Soviet power mobilised peasant youth. It brought in hungry urban workers from the outside to wrench grain from the countryside. It created havoc when it set up the kombedy. It levied an extraordinary tax. It attacked religion. It threatened traditional power and gender relations. It subjected the peasantry to abuses of power that exceeded anything rural inhabitants had experienced before. As a result, peasant bands known as Greens composed of deserters and others surfaced in 1918 and again in 1919 during the White offensive. Triggering uprisings in Tambov, the Volga and Urals regions, Ukraine and Siberia, the peasant revolt reached a crescendo in 1920 and 1921, when Lenin remarked that this 'counter-revolution is without doubt more dangerous than Denikin, Yudenich, and Kolchak taken together'.[173]
Although the SR Party might not have orchestrated the peasant revolt, SR values - including violence - provided the political frame for the peasant rebels' programme.[174] Despite some differences in the demands of particular groups, the Greens did not oppose Soviet power, but rather the specific policies of War Communism and the arbitrary lording over them of 'vampire-Communists, Jews and commissar-usurpers'. Seeking to put an end to 'Bolshevik tyranny', the Greens advocated restoration of the Constituent Assembly. The relative isolation of local communities and the subaltern nature of the peasant world made it unlikely that a peasant revolt triggered by one-time Red Army men would succeed without outside leadership and organisation, but the Bolsheviks feared that the spate of uprisings could have tipped the scales against the party because of the potent ferment in the cities. Interrupting grain requisitioning and agricultural production, the Greens killed Communists whenever they encountered them, destroyed collective farms, disbanded Soviet agencies and seized seed, agricultural products and livestock, thereby exacerbating food shortages in the cities.
The party's decision to employ force in the villages also contributed to the famine of 1921-3, which provided the Bolsheviks with an opportunity they exploited to fortify their position. Although climatic conditions played a role in the famine's origins, the major cause was Bolshevik agricultural policies.[175]Moscow did not knowingly allow the famine to develop, but it ignored local reports until late spring 1921, when mass discontent and chilling news on the magnitude of the potential human suffering put an end to any doubts about the gravity of the crisis.
If the civil war was a process whereby a fractious society renegotiated its values, then the government's rapacious policies in the villages, the rupture of market relations and the increase in savagery strengthened the internal mechanisms of cohesion in the countryside and the appeal of landownership at the expense of whatever collectivist principles might have existed. Largely alienated from power, the peasant withdrew into the local economy and everyday life. In order to survive, the peasant had to become more self-sufficient by the winter of 1918-19. The famine furthered this trend. Ironically, by the end of the civil war many peasants rejected communal land tenure even though during the revolution they had clamoured for egalitarian distribution.[176]
Workers against Bolsheviks
Although the Bolsheviks understood and depicted the events of October 1917 as a workers' revolution, many workers became alienated from the new party- state. Their world-view shaped by ideology, Bolsheviks interpreted workers' estrangement as the consequence of de-urbanisation during the civil war, and not as a change in workers' attitudes, maintaining that the number of'real' proletarians (in effect, a metaphysical concept tautologically defined as a worker who supported the party) simply had declined. The social turmoil at this time did reduce the size ofRussia's working class and reconfigure its gender and age composition. Many workers perished; most who enrolled in the Communist Party left their factory benches to serve in the burgeoning state bureaucracy. Others entered the Red Army, returned to the villages or joined the ranks of the unemployed. Yet a substantial core of urban workers remained in the factories, and their attitudes towards the Bolsheviks were indeed transformed. Working-class consciousness did not disappear during the civil war, but found expression in resistance to and circumvention of Bolshevik practices, both in the implicit language of symbolic activity such as labour absenteeism and foot-dragging, and in more antagonistic ways. A consciousness based on their experience of dealing with the Bolsheviks gave some workers their own collective identities outside those the Bolsheviks created for them. While economic hardship certainly galvanised workers during the civil war, they also blamed the Bolsheviks for the rift within the democracy, political repression and the betrayal of the promises of 1917.
Debate over issues of labour policy already rocked the party in the weeks following October 1917, when the Bolsheviks reconsidered the role factory committees and trade unions would play under the new regime. As factory committees began to run rather than supervise factory administrations, the Bolsheviks realised that spontaneous industrial democracy could become a political handicap. As a result, they reorganised unions by industry, thereby undermining the factory committees, and then made the unions extensions of party organs. This transformation proved to be highly contested, especially since Mensheviks backed independent trade unions. Workers, in the meantime, enrolled in them to obtain larger rations. The union leadership's support in 1920 of centralisation, discipline and labour conscription further alienated them from workers. Tensions within the Communist Party over labour conscription and other controversial policies resulted in angry debate over what role unions should play in the post-war environment, involving the so-called Workers' Opposition associated with A. G. Shliapnikov, the Democratic Centralists, as well as Lenin and Trotsky. Strictly a party affair, the debate did not appeal to workers.[177]
The further deterioration of the economy - as well as discontent over broken political promises - drove many workers into the opposition. The collapse of the economy resulted in factory closures and unemployment. Wages did not keep up with prices, despite a chaotic system of bonus pay. To survive, workers were forced to rely on the black market and on other survival strategies such as pilfering, absenteeism and shirking responsibilities. The economic experience of civil war thus left an indelible imprint on their individual and mass consciousness by shaping a culture of mutual dependence in conditions of utmost want. Growing indifference towards work and a drop in labour discipline had manifested themselves already in 1918. The situation deteriorated in 1919, when fuel shortages shut down factories.
Needing working-class support in order to justify and rationalise the dictatorship of the proletariat they claimed to have established, the Bolsheviks endowed workers with a symbolic capital that the party manipulated through its control over the language used to give meaning to the term 'worker'. Invoking class as a weapon of exclusion and inclusion in their efforts to reconfigure Russian culture, the Bolsheviks reconstructed a working-class identity. Given the claims the party made about the working class, the new identity the party formulated for workers became something one attained through correct behaviour. Class had become a social-psychological and political projection in which any act of opposition brought symbolic expulsion from the ranks of the true proletariat and confinement to the ranks of an inferior class 'other'. As one Communist put it, 'given his class position a worker can be nothing but a Communist'.[178]
The party viewed workers hierarchically, casting highly skilled members of the industrial proletariat as the conscious revolutionary vanguard that supported Soviet power. But it was precisely these workers who challenged the Bolsheviks the most.49 Denying workers agency, the party depicted dissatisfaction among skilled workers as temporary wavering caused by the deceptive propaganda practices of rival socialist parties, and opposition among unskilled and female workers as the result of their lack of consciousness. As the civil war deepened, the Bolsheviks blamed the physical disappearance of the working class for labour conflicts, representing opposition as the work of counterrevolutionaries, saboteurs and misguided peasant workers.
Although economic issues provided the venue for voicing dissatisfaction, workers' actions indicate that they understood economic life as contested political ground. Workers expressed their consciousness in routine acts of resistance and circumvention: voting against Communist candidates and resolutions, abstaining from voting when elections lacked real choices, foot-dragging, inertia, absenteeism, pilfering, dissimulation, co-opting Soviet public language and practices and using them to their advantage, spreading rumours and so on. They opposed one-party rule, the silencing of the opposition press, attempts to co-opt labour organs and other repressive measures. Such opposition often amounted to demands for secret ballots during elections to factory committees and soviets. For their part, the Bolsheviks alternated between repression and solicitousness, depending upon how vulnerable they felt, but remained determined to control, manipulate and repress the workers' movement so as not to encourage the opposition.50
After thrashing the White armies in 1920, the Bolsheviks devoted all of their energies to 'peaceful construction', to attempts to address industrial collapse, transportation breakdown, shrinking rations and dying cities. The party declared war on economic ruin, filth, disease and hunger, addressing the need to restore industry, raise productivity and mobilise labour armies at the rear. It extendedlabourbonuses and introduced a labour ration based on the type of work one did. It stepped up its campaign to involve citizens in unpopular volunteer workdays (subbotniki). It set up labour disciplinary courts to deal with absenteeism, instituted one-person management and restructured unions to raise productivity. These measures, as well as use of bourgeois specialists, piece- rate wages and labour books to control movement, provoked waves of unrest in Russia, uniting workers who otherwise had little in common and once again showing how they created themselves as workers. In turn, labour disturbances ended a period of relaxation in the party's tolerance of rival socialist parties, just as it gave rise to opposition groups within the Communist Party.
49 Aves, Workers against Lenin, passim.
50 Raleigh, Experiencing, pp. 367-77; and Narskii, Zhizn', pp. 461-8.
While workers' strikes in Petrograd at this time are well known and usually viewed as a prelude to the soldiers' revolt at Kronstadt in March 1921, recent research documents similar ferment in Moscow and perhaps most provincial capitals. In fact, the party announced the end of grain requisitioning and approved the NEP not only in response to rural unrest, but also in response to the powerful wave of industrial strikes - which the party represented as a work slowdown or volynka - in key urban centres.[179] In Saratov, for instance, an 'all but general strike' broke out, which the party brutally repressed by sentencing 219 workers to death and others to various prison terms, and by expanding its network of informants throughout the province.[180]
Conclusion
In accounting for the Bolshevik victory in the civil war, historians have emphasised the self-sacrifice, relative discipline and centralised nature ofthe Bolshevik Party; its control over the Russian heartland and its resources; the military and political weaknesses of the Whites, particularly their failure to promote popular social policies; the subaltern nature of the Green opposition; the inability of the Bolsheviks' opponents to overcome their differences; the tentative nature of Allied intervention; the effectiveness of Bolshevik propaganda and terror; and, during the initial stage of the conflict, the support of many workers and peasants. In defeating the Whites the Bolsheviks had survived the civil war, but the crisis of March 1921 suggests that mass discontent could have continued to fuel the conflict. It did not, owing to the concessions ushered in by the NEP, which gave the impression that the Leninists had fallen under the influence of their rivals' programmes, and which took the edge off the opposition, since so many longed to have order restored. The famine also helped to keep the Bolsheviks in power by preventing popular discontent from flaring up again.
The Russian civil war caused wide-scale devastation, economic ruin, loss of life through military operations and disease and the emigration of an estimated 1-2 million middle- and upper-class Russians. Most estimates of human losses during the ordeal range from 7 million to 8 million, of which more than 5 million were civilian casualties of fighting, repression and disease. These figures do not include the estimated 5 million who died from the famine of 1921-3. Moreover, the civil war produced a steep decline in the standard of living, causing the destruction of much of the country's infrastructure.
Industrial production fell to less than 30 per cent of the pre-1914 level and the amount of land under cultivation decreased sharply.[181] Soviet policies resulted in a large measure of de-urbanization, created a transient problem of enormous proportions, militarised civilian life, ruined infrastructures, turned towns into breeding grounds for diseases, increased the death rate and victimised children.
Furthermore, War Communism strengthened the authoritarian streak in Russian political culture by creating an economic order characterised by centralisation, state ownership, compulsion, the extraction of surpluses, forced allocation of labour and a distribution system that rhetorically privileged the toiling classes. Six years of hostilities, of wartime production that exhausted supplies, machinery and labour, and of ideologically inspired and circumstantially applied economic policies had shattered the state's infrastructure, depleted its resources, brutalised its people and brought them to the brink of physical exhaustion and emotional despair. In political terms, the party's economic policies contributed to the consolidation of a one-party state and the repression of civil society as the population turned its attention to honing basic survival strategies. In practical terms, the price of survival was the temporary naturalisation of economic life, famine and the entrenchment of a black market and a system of privileges for party members.
The sheer enormity of the convulsion shattered traditional social relations. Although it has been argued that a 'primitivisation' of the whole social system occurred,[182] it was not simply a matter of regression, but also of new structuring, which focused on the necessities of physical survival. People had little time for political involvement, resulting in 'estrangement from the state',[183]and contributing to the Bolsheviks' winning the civil war. Everyday practices mediated or modified in these extreme circumstances of political chaos and economic collapse became part of the social fabric, as the desire to survive and withdraw from public life created problems that proved difficult to solve and undermined subsequent state efforts to reconfigure society. In this regard, the civil war was not a formative experience, but a defining one, for it ordained how the Bolsheviks would, in subsequent years, realise their plan for social engineering: many of the practices we associate with the Stalinist era became an integral part of the new order already during the civil war, as did the population's strategies of accommodation and resistance.
Building a new state and society: NEP, 1921-1928
ALAN BALL
As 1921 dawned, the Bolsheviks could proclaim themselves victors in the civil war and celebrate an accomplishment that would stand as one of the great triumphs in official lore for the rest of the Soviet era. At the same time they presided over a nation whose borders were uncertain and whose peasantry protested ever more aggressively against grain requisitioning and other measures of the civil war that continued beyond the conflict itself. In fact, growing opposition to these exactions was the principal development that convinced Lenin to change course in the direction of what soon became known as the New Economic Policy. By February, in Tambov province alone, tens of thousands of peasant fighters faced Bolshevik commanders who could not be certain of the loyalty of their own troops. Similar peasant violence gripped many other regions, and some areas, notably the lower Volga provinces and Siberia, were not pacified until the summer of i922. In Moscow, Petrograd and other principal cities, diminishing food rations in the winter of 1920-1 sparked strikes among workers who hadbackedthe Bolsheviks during the civil war. Mutiny at the Kronstadt naval base in March 1921 may have delivered the severest shock, given that the sailors' support for the Bolsheviks reached back to 1917. But the inflamed countryside had already convinced Lenin that a new approach was required, and he made this clear in March to delegates at the Tenth Party Congress who approved what turned out to be the first major plank of the New Economic Policy. To be sure, none of this signalled a wavering of the Bolsheviks' political monopoly, for they continued to arrest leaders of other parties active beside them in the revolutionary ferment of previous years. Only the Bolshevik (Communist) Party remained to guide the nation to socialism, and even this vanguard faced tighter discipline during the i920s. On Lenin's initiative, the same Tenth Party Congress that authorised dramatic economic concessions also ordered an end to factions in the party itself.i
1 Vladimir Brovkin, Behind theFrontLines of the Civil War:PoliticalPartiesandSocialMovements in Russia, 1918-1922 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); Robert Service, Lenin: A Political Life, vol. 111: The Iron Ring (London: Macmillan, 1995).
The New Economic Policy (NEP) emerged neither as a single decree nor a planned progression but as a label pinned eventually on a series of measures that appeared over the course of several months beginning in the spring of 1921. NEP was 'new' - that is, a departure from the practices of the civil-war era - in a number of ways. Most important initially, grain requisitions were replaced by a fixed tax, lower than the grain requisition targets. Soon peasants were also allowed to sell at free-market prices any produce left after their taxes had been paid. Not long thereafter, most of the rest of the population received the right to engage in small-scale trade and manufacturing, with the result that cities and towns followed the countryside in acquiring a legal private economic sector that coexisted with state-run factories and stores.[184]
Large-scale industry, retained by the state, also found itself placed on a new footing. No longer could enterprises expect to receive raw materials and other resources from Moscow, and they could not rely on the state to absorb their output regardless of cost or demand for the products. Wartime privation and turmoil had undermined such support in any case, but NEP did so officially. Efforts to administer industry from Moscow had grown so unwieldy during the civil war that the state now sought to place thousands of its factories on a cost-accounting basis (khozraschet). Individual enterprises were grouped into trusts, organised most often according to activity - the State Association of Metal Factories, for instance, or the Moscow Machine Building Trust. Whether subordinated directly to the Supreme Economic Council in Moscow or to local economic councils, a trust's factories were now instructed to cut expenses and produce goods that could be marketed successfully to other state customers or, in some instances, to private entrepreneurs. They could not anticipate automatic assistance from Moscow, where officials were busy cutting the central budget sharply in an effort to gain control over spending that had borne little relation to actual government resources during the civil war.
This aspect of NEP did not mean that the Bolshevik leadership had abandoned dreams of a centrally planned system of state industry, just as the legalisation of private trade did not replace the long-term goal of socialism. In fact, NEP's initial year witnessed not only the announcement ofkhozraschet and the concessions to private enterprise, but also the formation ofthe state planning agency (Gosplan). However, the time seemed propitious for theory rather than practice, as Gosplan's employees occupied themselves more with the study of planning than its implementation. Vital factories might receive orders and subsidies from the centre, and provincial party secretaries intervened on occasion in the operation of local industry. But economists in Moscow had no means of obtaining comprehensive data about the nation's trusts and individual enterprises that would have been necessary to establish a planned economy - little suspecting that such a campaign was less than a decade away.[185]
Ambitious social and economic projects appeared far beyond reach in 1921 amid the accumulated death and destruction inherited from the First World War and the civil war. Millions of city residents had perished, emigrated or returned to the villages of peasant relatives, leaving Russia even less an urban society than it had been at the end of the nineteenth century. Metropolises tended to experience the largest proportional declines, with Moscow and Petrograd losing more than half of a combined population that had reached 4 million by 1917. The nation's industrial workforce shrank even more rapidly than the general urban population during the civil war, gutting the class on whom the Bolsheviks depended most for support. By 1922 only 1.6 million people were counted as workers, less than two-thirds the number shortly before the First World War.[186]
This proved to be the low point, however, as cities recovered in the comparative calm ofNEP and again attracted millions ofpeasants seeking permanent or seasonal work. Demobilisation reduced the Red Army's ranks from 4.1 million to 1.6 million in 1921, worsening overpopulation in the hungry countryside and boosting migration to cities. Roughly a million peasants settled permanently in towns during the decade's middle years, and a few million more arrived for temporary employment - accounting together for over 75 per cent of urban population growth at this time. While not all sought industrial occupations, enough did to help swell the proletariat to the neighbourhood of 5.6 million and ease fears that the regime's pillar of social support was eroding.
At last the Soviet state emerged from nearly a decade of crises that had plagued the people of the region and their successive governments. The death rate declined steadily, and in I925 the nation's population passed the level it had reached before the First World War. Meanwhile, currency reform eliminated the inflation that had rendered the rouble nearly worthless over the period 1921-3, and by fiscal year 1923/4 the government had managed to produce a balanced budget, with a surplus following in 1924/5. Industrial production, both heavy and light, as well as foreign trade improved far above the abysmal levels of the civil war and the beginning of NEP Rail transport recovered so impressively that in 1926 it surpassed the level of traffic in 1913, to say nothing of 1921. As the number of workers increased, the improvement in their standard of living seemed all the more striking when measured against their plight just a few years before.[187]
Encouraging as these signs were for those promoting the construction of socialism's foundation, NEP also encompassed a variety of developments difficult to reconcile with Bolshevik visions. More galling than private trade itself was an atmosphere of extravagant consumption among newly wealthy entrepreneurs and others in the largest cities. In contrast to the privation and egalitarian dreams of War Communism, the Soviet Union's principal urban centres seemed to have joined the Roaring Twenties. 'Moscow made merry', observed the Menshevik Fedor Dan in the winter of 1921-2, 'treating itself with pastries, fine candies, fruits, and delicacies. Theatres and concerts were packed, women were again flaunting luxurious apparel, furs, and diamonds.' Casinos and nightclubs opened, American jazz bands arrived and Hollywood's movies reached Soviet screens by the hundreds, exceeding the number of Soviet films released from 1924 until the end of NEP.[188]
The raucous nightlife seemed particularly unpalatable to Bolsheviks because it flourished alongside extensive social misfortune, especially during the decade's early years. In the second halfofi92i, a famine withered countless villages in the Volga basin, all the way from the Chuvash Autonomous Region and the Tatar Republic through Simbirsk, Samara, Saratov and Tsaritsyn provinces down to Astrakhan' on the Caspian Sea. Beyond the Volga region, starvation extended as far north as Viatka province, as far east as Cheliabinsk and the Bashkir and Kirghiz republics and west as far as southern Ukraine. Severe drought that year, combined with the legacy of protracted warfare, had given rise to a catastrophe destined to claim at least 5 million lives. Not until the end of 1922 did a better harvest and a relief campaign mounted by foreign organisations (notably, Herbert Hoover's American Relief Administration) provide reason for hope. Alarm over the nation's food supply faded through the following year, but other evidence of human trauma persisted.
Millions ofjuveniles had already found themselves abandoned or otherwise homeless in the seven years before 1921, as families disintegrated through violence, starvation or disease brought by the First World War and the civil war. The subsequent Volga famine played an even greater role in severing youths from their parents, and destitute juveniles flooded numerous Soviet cities at the beginning of NEP. Street children gained recruits not only through the deaths of mothers and fathers but also whenparents abandoned dependants they could no longer feed. Principal municipalities in the Volga epicentre of the famine accumulated hundreds of new waifs each day by the spring of 1922, and cities at major rail junctions in the region contained tens of thousands.
In the early 1920s, estimates of the nation's contingent of street children settled at around 7 million, including tens of thousands drawn to Moscow itself. Whether in the capital or provincial towns, they laboured to sustain themselves through begging, petty street trade, theft and prostitution. Almost at once they overwhelmed orphanages into which they were crammed. Revolutionary visions of collective childcare - to emancipate women from household chores and instil socialist principles in a new generation - dissolved in the reality of institutions that could offer little more than a piece of bread and a spot on the floor, and from which children often departed as fugitives or corpses. Not until the middle of the decade did the number of street children decline steadily, providing reason at last for optimism that a blight the Bolsheviks associated with capitalist society could be removed from their own.[189]
For that to happen, however, the circumstances of families and especially single mothers would have to improve considerably, and here NEP generated mixed results. Industry, for example, revived briskly, but women seeking employment encountered new obstacles at the factory gate and inside. They had poured into the proletariat during the First World War and represented close to half of the industrial labour force that remained at the beginning of 1921, many of them working in branches of production where they could not have expected employment in 1913. As labour patterns reverted during NEP to gender divisions more common before 1914, women were concentrated in textiles and other light industries and in lower-paying, lower-skilled occupations - if they were able to escape the 'last hired, first fired' retrenchment at enterprises placed on khozraschet. A variety of other factors appear to have played a part in augmenting the ranks of unemployed women, including a belief among employers that men, on average, possessed a higher level of industrial skills and could cope more readily with heavy physical labour. Party organisations also instructed state labour exchanges to assign priority to placing demobilised soldiers in jobs, while labour laws barred women from certain industrial occupations and stipulated that they receive substantial time off for maternity and the care of sick children. All of this hindered women in competing for jobs against male candidates who arrived on the scene in large numbers beginning in 1921. By 1923, women and juveniles (also protected under labour laws that restricted their use by factory directors) accounted for over half of all unemployed workers.[190]
Thus, labour laws formulated to benefit women with such rights as generous maternity leave yielded results in practice that were difficult to celebrate. Much the same could be said of broader Bolshevik legislation on women and the family. Less than ayear afterthe revolution, a Code on Marriage, the Family and Guardianship had proclaimed equal standing for men and women regarding divorce and alimony, while removing legal stigmas attached to 'illegitimate' children and their mothers. In 1926 a new Family Code recognised de facto marriage, effectively eliminating the legal distinction between common-law and officially registered unions. Modified alimony and child-support provisions from the first code were joined by a declaration that property acquired during marriage belonged jointly to husband and wife. When a relationship turned sour, divorce could be obtained as easily as sending a postcard of notification to one's partner.
These measures, intended as a stride towards emancipation and equality, met with a chilly reception from most Soviet women during NEP. Three out of four were peasants, and patriarchal views on family relations proved tenacious in the countryside. Even in the cities, reformers found women more cautious than exultant over the new freedom of divorce and the legal acceptance of unregistered relationships. They suspected, correctly, that alimony would be difficult to collect, and that men, more than women, would avail themselves of the new opportunity to secure divorce on demand at a time when NEP had opened a forbidding landscape before single mothers. The same budget-cutting imperatives that had prompted the state to place factories on khozraschet also led to reductions in government spending on childcare facilities and other social services sorely needed by women left to support children on their own. For the jurists who drafted these codes, talk of liberation clashed with reality throughout the period and found little support even from the intended beneficiaries.[191]
Nowhere was this more glaring than in Soviet Central Asia, once activists embarked on a drive to emancipate Muslim women from a variety of customs deeply rooted in the region. During the mid- to later years of the decade, a series of laws banned such practices as polygamy and the abduction of a fiancee, while strengthening women's property rights in marriage. Mutual consent paved the way for divorce, and courts favoured women more often than not in cases where spouses failed to reach agreement. Taken together, the laws invited women to enjoy public rights equal to men - an endeavour described by Bolsheviks as vital to modernise a region they viewed as backward. The Women's Section of the party and the Communist Youth League (Komsomol) often led the charge by staging public events at which women removed their long veils or renounced other traditions. These efforts assumed the form of an all-out campaign by i927, but most Central Asian women (let alone men) saw little to tempt them. The few who did unveil, adopt Russian clothing or join the Komsomol risked ostracism and, in scattered instances, murder. Eventually, at the end of the decade, Moscow reined in the endeavour. The hostility it caused had come to seem counter-productive and a distraction from goals more important to the new Stalinist leadership bent on industrialising the nation.[192]
The frustrating venture in Central Asia underscored one of the challenges faced by the Bolsheviks from the moment of their revolutionary triumph. They presided over scores of non-Slavic regions whose inhabitants had not always relished their experience as part of the tsarist empire and now contemplated warily a union of soviet republics. In i92i the fragmented remains of the tsarist empire included six republics bearing the name Soviet - the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (by far the largest) and counterparts in Ukraine, Belorussia, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan - along with more nebulous 'republics' in Central Asia and the Far East. Bilateral treaties signed between the Russian Republic (RSFSR) and the other five created a confusing impression that suggested both an understanding between independent nations and an administrative reform of a single state, depending on the portion of the document consulted. As Bolshevik leaders prevailed in the civil war, they gained the opportunity to exert their will in outlying regions and thereby address this unstable equilibrium. From 1920 to 1922, taking advantage of the leading role played by the Russian Communist Party in all six republics, Moscow transferred an ever-larger share of authority to itself. Even the Commissariats for Foreign Affairs, symbolic bastions of independence in the other five republics, yielded to the Kremlin and allowed Russia to speak for all six at the Genoa Conference early in 1922. This vexed Ukrainian officials in particular, but dismay over evaporating sovereignty rang out most loudly in a smaller republic further south.
Not long after the Red Army conquered Georgia in February I92I, friction developed between Georgian Bolsheviks leading the new Georgian Soviet Republic and plenipotentiaries sent from Moscow to supervise government in the Caucasus. Regarding the formation of a union of soviet republics, for instance, the Georgians desired to preserve their republic's individual identity and enter on the same terms as, say, the Ukrainians rather than as part of a single Transcaucasian Republic that would also include Armenia and Azerbaijan. Moscow's representatives, led by Sergo Ordzhonikidze and backed by Stalin, insisted that all three join the Soviet Union together as one republic. The dispute grew bitter - Ordzhonikidze pinning the label of selfish nationalism on the Georgians who responded with charges of Great Russian chauvinism - and by 1922 it had alarmed Lenin. He had no particular objection to bringing Georgia into the Soviet Union as part of a Transcaucasian Republic, but he, more than Stalin or Ordzhonikidze, was troubled by cries of Great Russian chauvinism, which he described as much more reprehensible than local nationalism rising in defence of a small region menaced by large powers. Lenin also showed concern about propaganda consequences that might ensue in other soviet republics and abroad from heavy-handed treatment of the Georgian comrades. Nevertheless, his misgivings over the process under way in Georgia were not fundamental, and as his health deteriorated he watched Georgia pressed into a Transcaucasian Republic that signed a treaty with the RSFSR, Ukraine and Belorussia, joining them all in a new Soviet Union on 30 December I922.
In this larger venture, too, Lenin did not see eye to eye with Stalin, though here again the difference was more a matter of methods and appearances than ultimate goals. Lenin argued that each republic should participate in the Soviet Union as, ostensibly, an equal, independent member, while Stalin showed less patience for such language and favoured a more streamlined structure that left no doubt over the dominance of central authority. Lenin, in other words, demonstrated a lighter touch regarding the diverse national units of the Soviet Union, but he, like Stalin, intended to maintain control through the Communist Party, whose centralised apparatus extended through all of the republics and ethnic 'autonomous regions' that made up the state. As the process worked itself out - a constitution for the Soviet Union was drafted in the summer of 1923 and approved by the All-Union Congress of Soviets on 31 January 1924 - Stalin made more verbal concessions than Lenin. But in the Soviet state that emerged there could be no doubt that authority resided in Moscow rather than the constituent republics.[193]
That said, for the remainder of NEP party leaders indicated that they would not rely solely on military pacification and Politburo commands. The Soviet Union took shape as an assemblage of national or ethnic units, and the Kremlin advanced the line that national identity was an inevitable feature of incipient socialism as well as capitalism. Following Lenin, the party even stipulated that past Russian oppression had indeed given rise to valid complaints among numerous ethnic groups now inhabiting the Soviet Union. The proper policy, then, was to accept national sentiment and steer it in healthy directions, away from those who might fan such passions in opposition to socialism and the Soviet state. As long as national loyalties did not threaten Soviet unity, they might be permitted as a means of rendering Soviet rule more palatable. If power could be made to seem local rather than Russian, in other words, the leadership would take great strides in holding the Soviet Union together and gaining support for its policies. Such was the party's strategy during NEP, and it unfolded along two lines. The state declared its intent to support (or even help create) national languages and cultures, while also seeking local people to fill positions in the administrative organisations of their regions. If this could be done, the face of authority would appear less alien and incomprehensible.
The party's approach, known eventually as indigenisation (korenizatsiia), soon produced striking changes. Local candidates were heavily recruited for party membership in their republics and smaller regions, transforming party ranks filled mainly by Russians just a few years before. By 1927, for example, over half the members and candidate members of the Communist Party in a number of republics (Ukraine, Belorussia, Armenia and Georgia) belonged to the republic's titular nationality, while in Central Asia over 40 per cent of the party's cadre in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan came from the local, non-Russian population. As for administrative bodies, notably the executive committees of regional soviets, non-Russians accounted for two-thirds to four-fifths of the membership in Ukraine, Belorussia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.
At the same time the party encouraged the use of indigenous languages and art forms as tools for promoting socialist practices. With this approach, 'national in form, socialist in content' as Stalin put it, the Kremlin's proprietors hoped not only to pacify but to guide their multi-ethnic domain to a new society where, eventually, a universal socialism would supplant the scores of national cultures whose narrower outlook the community had finally outgrown. It was a tolerant strategy, characteristic of NEP's concessions in other areas, but this also made it another of NEP's gambles. Just as no one could be certain about the consequences of permitting private trade on the road to socialism, it remained to be seen if national forms might eclipse or disfigure socialist content.[194]
In the meantime, though, NEP's largest gamble lay elsewhere, for whatever the nature of Moscow's policy towards the nation's far-flung ethnic groups, most Soviet citizens were Slavic peasants. This enduring aspect of Russian life the revolution could not change, at least during NEP, and peasant villages with their traditional communes continued to dominate the landscape as they had for centuries. But if the events initiated in 1917 left Soviet Russia a peasant society, they nevertheless transformed the countryside. Gone were the nobles' estates and even many of the most substantial peasant holdings. Over 100 million peasants had seized these properties and parcelled them out among themselves, yielding a rural panorama that consisted almost entirely of small plots. Roughly 85 per cent of the Russian Republic's peasant households worked fields of less than 11 acres in 1922 and did so with fewer than two draught animals per family. Although a more modern plough had largely replaced the archaic wooden scratch-plough by the end of the decade, most work was still performed manually by humans and horses. As late as 1928, hand labour accounted for three-quarters of the spring sowing, and it took place in fields where less than 1 per cent of the ploughing had been done by tractors.
Here were the people the Kremlin hoped to mollify in 1921 by abandoning grain requisitions and permitting free trade of surplus produce. The new grain tax for 1921/2 was set at 57 per cent of the requisition target for the previous year, and only a fraction of this was actually collected. Even in the best of conditions the Bolsheviks' fledgling government was not capable of fanning out through the boundless countryside to gather the tax, and 1921 was far from the best ofyears. The famine that had begun to strangle several grain-producing provinces in the Volga basin, combined with the disruption of agriculture left by the civil war, yielded a grain harvest of less than half the average garnered before the First World War. So severe was the famine that stricken regions found the grain tax waived altogether as fields dried up and life drained from villages. Only by late 1922 had the worst passed. The nation's peasants improved their harvest almost 40 per cent that year, and the following one was better still. After 1922 the rural population grew rapidly until the end of the decade and as early as 1926 approached 120 million (over 80 per cent of the nation's total). That same year, the grain harvest exceeded the best return of the tsarist era, while the number of cows, pigs, sheep and goats had already recovered to totals above pre-war levels. At last the peasantry closed a decade of calamities that had begun in 1914 and extinguished as many as 15-20 million lives.[195]
The Bolsheviks, of course, sought not a return to life as it had been before these storms, but a new, socialist countryside. Although NEP signalled no wavering in this desire, it did announce that the transition would be made peacefully. Whatever Lenin had said about the peasants previously, he felt by 1921 that a union or bond between workers and peasants - called the smychka and symbolised by the hammer-and-sickle emblem - was not only essential for the survival of his government but also represented the key for building socialism in Russia. As the country industrialised, the proletariat would supply the peasants with manufactured household goods and agricultural equipment (especially tractors) through such channels as rural co-operatives, while peasants would deliver food to the co-operatives for shipment to their urban comrades. Such an exchange, it was hoped, would breathe life into the smychka and serve to persuade peasants to join (or form) co-operatives. They would not be forced. Lenin and other Bolshevik defenders of NEP believed that co-operatives possessed such striking advantages over conventional village ways that peasants could be enticed to join, once model co-operatives were established for them to observe.
To be sure, it would require some time to launch such a network throughout the country and revive industry to the point where it could saturate the cooperatives with attractive goods. But the passing of the civil war gave the Bolsheviks time, and by the end of 1922 it finally seemed to be on their side in the villages. Co-operatives marked the beginning, and once they were securely rooted, peasants would be prepared to recognise the virtues of pooling their strips of land in collective farms. The advantages of mechanisation and other modern techniques demonstrated on model collective farms would convince peasants to drop their attachment to the unproductive practices of bygone generations. Then, as collective farms gained members at an accelerating pace without coercion reminiscent of the civil war's grain requisitioning, Bolsheviks would witness the triumph of socialism in the countryside. So ran official hopes during NEP.
One thing that did carry over from the civil war was the Bolsheviks' view of a stratified rural society. Out in the villages, they affirmed, lived three distinct groups. Poor peasants (roughly one-third ofthe total) possessed little or no land and often worked as hired labourers. Their 'proletarian' condition was thought to render them natural allies for the party's rural policies. A much larger group, the 'middle peasants', were described as those with enough land and livestock to support a meagre existence. Winning them over to co-operatives and ultimately socialism would demand considerable exertion, party officials believed, and it became the Kremlin's most ambitious goal in the countryside during NEP. Whenever these efforts proved frustrating, Bolsheviks commonly pointed in blame at a third rural category, the kulaks. In Soviet ideology these villagers loomed as a rapacious elite, perhaps 3-5 per cent of the peasant community. More prosperous in terms of land, livestock and equipment, they were said to fill the role of rural capitalists exploiting the hired labour of other peasants in a manner suggested by their label kulak - a fist. Together with the Nepmen (as private traders were dubbed), they appeared to Bolsheviks as the 'new bourgeoisie', and like the Nepmen they experienced discrimination in such forms as higher taxes and deprivation of the right to vote.[196]
All in all, though, peasants identified as kulaks were tolerated during NEP and experienced less badgering than did urban private traders who operated more directly under the gaze of the authorities. Compared to the years preceding and following NEP, the countryside appeared tranquil. Departing nobles and other owners of large estates abandoned fields, forests and meadows to the peasants, whose tax obligations to the Soviet regime were not backbreaking. Indeed, the new government left the peasants largely to their own devices, with rural agitators only occasional visitors to most villages. If some peasants responded warmly to Bolshevik forays - campaigns to spread literacy, for example, or to introduce modern agricultural or medical techniques - they did not set the tone in most villages. Here, life went on in harmony with traditions that the peasantry had found congenial for generations. When harvests began setting post-revolutionary records by the middle of the decade, it seemed that Russian history had rarely smiled as brightly on the villages. No doubt few peasants cared or even realised that the recovery did little to promote NEP's strategy for transforming their lives. But the scant progress towards socialism did not escape notice among Bolsheviks, and it became a matter of greater urgency as the years passed.
In many respects, then, NEP embraced practices that revolutionaries viewed with misgiving but felt compelled to tolerate temporarily. This delay on the journey to socialism might be attributed to the failure of revolution to erupt in Western countries, or to the destruction left by the civil war, or to stubborn habits rooted in the population. Whatever the explanation, though, much of NEP from the activist's vantage point amounted to concessions that must yield as soon as possible to superior arrangements appropriate in a socialist community. This was obvious regarding the Nepmen and peasant society, which did not fit visions of a planned economy supplying necessities to one and all. In the juridical realm, too, partisans described the family codes as temporary rather than socialist. The drafters conceded, for instance, that child-rearing would have to remain centred in traditional family units for a time, until the state acquired the means to provide a more enlightened upbringing in collective settings. Nor were myriad differences among nationalities expected to figure in the community desired by Bolshevik prophets. Korenizatsiia took shape as an attempt to help unify the country and commence the process of socialist development necessary to produce a future generation no longer concerned with the disparate cultural norms of a fractious past. Analogous concessions appeared in other endeavours, and taken together they produced a landscape in which socialism remained on the horizon.
Thus, while most peasants and other Soviet citizens doubtless welcomed NEP as a distinct improvement over the policies and misery of War Communism, many Bolsheviks viewed the legalisation of private business activity with consternation. It seemed naive to speak of a brief, orderly retreat when the doors were opening again to the 'bourgeoisie', the class said to have been overthrown in the 'Great October Socialist Revolution' of 1917. Such concerns surfaced regularly at party meetings, forcing Lenin to argue time and again that a hostile peasantry would doom the revolution in a country still overwhelmingly rural. NEP has been called a peasant Brest-Litovsk, and so it began - with concessions unpalatable to Bolsheviks but indispensable, Lenin insisted, for them to retain power.
Pacification of the countryside was not the only reason for tolerating private economic activity, as Lenin explained on the basis of assumptions widely shared among Bolsheviks. All could agree, for instance, that socialism presupposed a thoroughly industrialised country because industrialisation provided both a large proletariat and sufficient productive capacity to fulfil the material requirements of the entire population. In addition, it seemed clear to most party members that they would not industrialise the nation without amassing a grain surplus. Grain could be exported to obtain foreign currency for purchasing Western technical expertise, and it would be essential for feeding the growing proletariat. Yet the state could not gather this surplus through coercion, having adopted the 'peasant Brest-Litovsk'. The heart of NEP lay in a hope that peasants would produce a surplus through incentives rather than compulsion, and Lenin defended the legalisation of private trade as an important means for inducing the peasantry to boost production. Private entrepreneurs (and not the state) possessed the numbers, experience and initiative to offer the peasants desirable products and thereby encourage them to raise more grain for the market. Anyone who increased the flow of goods between cities and countryside helped build socialism, Lenin wrote in 1921, and this included private traders. 'It may seem a paradox: private capitalism in the role of socialism's accomplice? It is in no way a paradox, but rather a completely incontestable economic fact.'[197]
Still, as private traders gained control of most retail trade in 1921-2 and ran circles around inexperienced state enterprises, only an optimistic Bolshevik could accept the spectacle calmly and regard Nepmen as 'socialism's accomplices'. Facing considerable unease in the party on this score, Lenin returned often to the argument during the last years of his life. 'The idea of building communism with communist hands is childish, completely childish', he lectured the Eleventh Party Congress in March 1922. 'Communists are only a drop in the sea, a drop in the sea of people . . . We can direct the economy if communists can build it with bourgeois hands, while learning from this bourgeoisie and directing it down the road we want it to follow.'[198]
How long this would take, Lenin was less certain. NEP had been adopted 'seriously and for a long time', he emphasised at party meetings, while also acknowledging that he could not specify how many years the Bolsheviks would require to operate the economy efficiently and render the private sector obsolete. Uncertainty over NEP's duration might not have proved so divisive for the Bolsheviks had Lenin continued to steer the party as he had in the contentious transition from War Communism to NEP. But his death in 1924, three months before his fifty-fourth birthday, left the party with neither a clear sense of how long to abide by NEP, nor a consensus on how to end it whenever the appropriate time seemed at hand. As a result, when debate over NEP's future tore the party after Lenin's death, both those who desired to end NEP in short order and those who wanted to prolong it could claim to be following a Leninist path.
In the meantime, NEP had sanctioned a struggle between the private sector and the state for the preference of the peasantry and the remainder of the population. Could the state provide satisfactory merchandise and service to entice citizens from private shops and marketplaces? For Lenin this was a vital question, as he emphasised in one of his last works, written for the Twelfth Party Congress in January 1923: 'In the final analysis the fate of our republic will depend on whether the peasantry sides with the working class, preserving this alliance, or allows the "Nepmen", i.e. the new bourgeoisie, to separate it from the workers, to split off from them.'17 Not only were the stakes high, but Lenin could even betray concern on occasion that the party appeared to be losing the contest - a misgiving soon recalled by those determined to end NEP without delay.
At the beginning of the i920s Lenin was clearly the most formidable of the Bolshevik leaders. He did not always get his way in party disputes, but his prestige and influence stood unrivalled. No one else could have taken the party on such an abrupt - and, for many Bolsheviks, unpopular - change of course as the implementation of the New Economic Policy. Among Lenin's colleagues in the Politburo, Trotsky seemed the most prestigious in 1922 because of his prominent role in the October Revolution and his moulding of the Red Army that saved the revolution duringthe civil war. If the question ofparty leadership after Lenin were to arise, Trotsky's name would occur first to most Bolsheviks, whether they viewed his possible ascension with enthusiasm or alarm.18
The latter emotion proved more common among other members of the Politburo, including Stalin. His service to the party had not been as spectacular as Trotsky's during the revolution or civil war, and now, at the beginning of the new decade, he devoted himself to offices in the party bureaucracy that did not signal his leadership ambitions to associates in the Politburo. Neither the Central Committee's Organisational Bureau, where Stalin had served since its inception in i9i9, nor its Secretariat, which he joined in i922 as General Secretary, was regarded originally as a locus of power. But their responsibilities - including the promotion or transfer of provincial cadres and the appointment of party personnel to carry out decisions of the leadership - provided a stream of opportunities for an ambitious figure to expand his own influence. This Stalin did, advancing local officials who showed potential as allies, while obstructingthe careers ofthose seemingly beholden to Trotsky and other rivals. If Stalin's offices appeared benignly administrative at NEP's birth, some in the party, including Lenin, formed a different impression before long.
In May 1922 Lenin suffered a stroke that removed him from political and governmental activities for several months. He had not recovered fully when he returned to work in October, and by December more strokes left him partially paralysed. Aware that the rivalry between Trotsky and Stalin had not ended along with the civil war, and spurred by his physical deterioration to set down words of guidance for the party, he dictated a series of notes to his secretary that became known as his Testament. Over a period of nearly two weeks at the end of 1922 and the beginning of the new year, Lenin gave voice to assessments and recommendations that he hoped would be presented to the next party congress. Some of his attention focused on suggestions for reorganising the party - expanding the Central Committee, for instance, in the hope that this would yield a body less susceptible to factional paralysis or schism. But he seemed most troubled by the tension between Trotsky and Stalin. The early notes did not clearly favour either man, but Lenin's final dictation abandoned a dispassionate listing of various party leaders' strengths and shortcomings to
18 The following pages on the party debates and power struggle during NEP are informed by discussions in numerous works, including: Stephen Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: APoliticalBiography, 1888-1938 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980); Robert Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary, 1879-1929: A Study in History and Personality (New York: Norton, 1973); Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Unarmed: Trotsky, 1921-1929 (London: Oxford University Press, 1959); Michal Reiman, The Birth of Stalinism: The USSR on the Eve of the 'Second Revolution', trans. George Saunders (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987); and Alexander Erlich, The Soviet Industrialization Debate, 1924-1928 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, i960).
direct a scorching attack on the General Secretary alone. 'Stalin is too rude', Lenin declared, 'and this shortcoming, though quite tolerable in our midst and in relations among us communists, becomes intolerable in the position of General Secretary.'[199] He urged the party to find a way to remove Stalin from this position.
It is not entirely clear what prompted Lenin to change his assessment of Stalin so dramatically in less than two weeks. Perhaps he was reacting to an abusive phone call made by Stalin to Lenin's wife, who had taken down a note that Lenin asked her to convey to Trotsky (hindering the doctors' efforts to care for Lenin, claimed Stalin). Also, Lenin had probably learned enough by this time to develop vexation over Stalin's bare-knuckled approach to curtailing Georgian autonomy. In any case, through January and February 1923 Lenin grew increasingly concerned with Stalin's treatment of the Georgians. At the beginning of March he contacted Trotsky on the subject of taking up the Georgian case and broached an even more dramatic move to deprive Stalin of his political power. That same day, however, Lenin's health deteriorated sharply. Almost at once another stroke paralysed much of his body and eliminated his power of speech, thereby ending his political career well before he died in January i924.
The final collapse of Lenin's health in the spring of 1923 triggered the decisive phase of the struggle between Trotsky and Stalin, with Stalin gaining the upper hand through his alliance with Politburo colleagues Grigorii Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev. To Stalin's partners in this triumvirate, Trotsky appeared the obvious menace - a high-voltage personality inclined to thrust himself into the position vacated by Lenin. Trotsky mounted an ineffectual effort to challenge the triumvirate and could not dislodge them from their pre-eminent position in the Politburo. Lenin's Testament lay in the shadows until May 1924, when it was disclosed to the Central Committee in what must have been a tense session. After the reading, Zinoviev rose to defuse Lenin's alarm over Stalin. The leadership's harmonious work over the past few months demonstrated that Lenin need not have harboured any anxiety over the party's General Secretary, Zinoviev explained, while Trotsky and Stalin remained silent. The party would not publish Lenin's Testament in Stalin's lifetime.
A few months later, in the autumn of 1924, Trotsky published a long essay titled The Lessons of October in which he discussed mistakes that revolutionaries might make when the moment for action arrived. Here he singled out Zinoviev and Kamenev for their opposition to Lenin's determination to seize power in the October Revolution. They responded in kind by reviewing Trotsky's numerous, often bitter, disputes with Lenin prior to Trotsky's belated entry into the Bolsheviks' ranks. Stalin furthered the campaign to contrast Trotsky and Lenin, notably in a speech titled 'Trotskyism or Leninism?', but he also hounded Trotsky on a broader theoretical plane, dismissing the latter's 'pessimistic' notion of 'permanent revolution'. How could one have so little confidence in the Soviet proletariat and Communist Party to imagine that revolution must spread to the West before the Soviet Union could build socialism, he asked. Surely the nation's progressive forces could build 'socialism in one country' without having to wait for assistance from the West that might be expected following the international triumph of the revolution. The ultimate victory of communism presumed the spread of revolution to the West, of course, but in the meantime, contended Stalin, the Soviet Union could set out to construct socialism on its own.
By the beginning of 1925, Trotsky's position had deteriorated sufficiently for the Central Committee to remove him as commissar of war. The victory, however, did not belong to Zinoviev and Kamenev, for as Trotsky's star dimmed, Stalin began to distance himself from them in order to form a new alliance with another set of Politburo members: Nikolai Bukharin, Aleksei Rykov and Mikhail Tomskii. All three accepted the general assumptions behind the notion of constructing 'socialism in one country', and they believed that the New Economic Policy represented the most prudent course to follow towards this end.
Zinoviev and Kamenev, joined in 1926 by their former adversary Trotsky, were more inclined to view NEP as a retreat from socialism, a dangerous concession to the nation's 'new bourgeoisie', and an inadequate policy for extracting enough grain from the countryside to support a rate of industrial growth that they deemed essential. This 'Left Opposition' became the principal political challenge to Stalin and his new allies in 1926-7, which meant that Stalin emerged as a gradualist and defender of NEP. Whether he was genuinely comfortable in this guise or whether it merely served the temporary requirements of factional struggle, he left most of the public defence of NEP to Bukharin and the others, while he toiled to derail the careers of officials linked to the opposition.
In this respect, the Stalin-Bukharin faction succeeded with such efficiency that the Left Opposition was thoroughly routed by 1927. During the previous year, Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev all lost their Politburo seats, and in 1927 the Central Committee dismissed them as well. In November, after authorities thwarted demonstrations planned by the Left Opposition to marshal popular support on the tenth anniversary of the revolution, Trotsky and Zinoviev were expelled from the party altogether. Two months later, Trotsky and numerous followers found themselves exiled to distant parts of the land, in Trotsky's case the Central Asian city of Alma-Ata. No longer did the party contain a Left Opposition of any potency, and, to some observers, NEP had never appeared more secure.
But just as Stalin had parted company in 1925 with Zinoviev and Kamenev, he now abandoned Bukharin, Rykov and Tomskii to join forces with more recent arrivals at the party's summit, men whose ascent owed much to Stalin's patronage. Among these new supporters - including Viacheslav Molotov, Kliment Voroshilov, Sergei Kirov, Anastas Mikoyan and Lazar Kaganovich - Stalin proceeded to embrace policies in i928 that matched or exceeded the militancy demanded by the Left Opposition just a year or two earlier. Thus began the climactic stage of debate, a struggle in the party over the two policy options recognised by the Bolsheviks throughout the i920s. While the champions of each approach rose and fell (or switched sides) over the years, as did the emphases placed on specific issues, the principal dispute remained recognisable and reached the point of starkest contrast between the contending options in 1928-9. The outcome would put an end to NEP.
By this time, Bukharin's pronouncements had marked him as the most prominent advocate of maintaining NEP for an indefinite period, certain to be measured in years. He could accept such modifications as slightly higher taxes on the peasantry, but nothing that would threaten NEP's original foundation - including a peasant's option to dispose of surplus produce at free-market prices and the opportunity for others to engage in private trade beyond the countryside. In general, Bukharin and colleagues of similar mind believed that NEP should continue until the party succeeded in a number of vital tasks. First, the state had to convince (not force) peasants to join co-operatives or other forms of collective life. As noted previously, this might be accomplished by establishing model co-operatives, supplying them generously with consumer goods and equipment, and letting the peasants see for themselves that the new organisations yielded a more bountiful life. Then it would not be difficult to persuade them to join co-operatives and collective farms, thereby enabling the countryside to make the turn to socialism. Bukharin was confident about the eventual triumph of large-scale, socialist practices, but this outcome would beckon only after the state had learned to manage its own sector of the economy productively enough to supply and distribute a substantial volume of goods to the countryside. Until then, NEP's acceptance of traditional peasant agriculture would have to continue.
So, too, with the toleration of private vendors in cities. The advantages of 'socialist' trade would prove decisive, Bukharin maintained, as state stores and co-operatives supplied merchandise at the lowest possible prices - a public service distinct from the inclination ofNepmen to charge as much as the market could bear. Consumers would flock to the 'socialist sector', and private shops would wither for lack of customers. Bukharin did not relish the Nepmen, and he could support taxingthem more heavily than co-operatives. But he rejected the adoption of 'administrative measures' (such as confiscatory taxation, seizure of goods and arrest) to eliminate private economic activity. Were the state to liquidate private traders before it could replace them itself, the result would not be socialism but 'trade deserts', a term used to describe locales where few goods were available.
All of this meant that those inclined to accept NEP indefinitely were also prepared to accept a modest rate of industrial growth. In the Bolshevik mind, rapid industrialisation required (1) a large grain surplus (to feed a mushrooming proletariat and export in exchange for foreign technology) and (2) investment decisions that favoured heavy industry as much as possible. Steel mills, coal mines, hydroelectric projects and machine shops turned out products that could be used to produce still more factories, while light (consumer goods) industry did not. Neither of these things - a massive grain surplus and overwhelming investment in heavy industry - seemed compatible with the New Economic Policy. NEP anticipated the production of a large quantity of consumer goods, enough to turn state stores into successful competitors with urban private entrepreneurs and to stock rural co-operatives sufficiently to win the favour of the peasantry. Not only that, NEP took funds from the state budget (which might otherwise have been devoted to heavy industrial projects) in the form of payments to obtain peasants' surplus grain. Both of these aspects of NEP left the budget with less in the short run for heavy industry, while failing over the years to accumulate a substantial grain reserve for the state. To Bukharin and prominent allies like Rykov and Tomskii, none of this seemed cause for anything more than modifying NEP. The state might raise taxes on the kulaks, they could agree, but it should also offer peasants higher prices for the grain they marketed. Such incentives continued to figure in the strategies of NEP's defenders, for they understood that the primacy of coercion would signal the end of the path taken in 1921.
There were others in the party, however, who favoured a decisive change, and without further delay. For some with this outlook, NEP seemedto threaten cultural contamination from diverse sources, including nightclubs, casinos, jazz and Hollywood films common in the nation's largest cities. Here, capitalist decadence rather than socialist fervour seemed in the offing, and a campaign would soon erupt to generate a proletarian culture suitable for the new society said to be close at hand. But the main thrust of NEP's most formidable Bolshevik opponents took place along the 'industrial front', where critics dismissed Bukharin's course as incompatible with industrialisation at a pace necessary to construct socialism and defend the nation.
Stalin's voice could be heard most clearly in this chorus, revealing that he had lost patience with NEP as a means to provide the state with grain to export in substantial volume. By i928, developments 'on the grain front' indicated that he was parting company with Bukharin and other former allies. The preceding year's harvest had not been poor, but during the last quarter ofi927 the state acquired little more than half the grain it had received during the corresponding period in i926. Peasants were withholding supplies from the market, apparently for a variety of reasons that included the insufficient price offered by the state and the scarcity of manufactured consumer goods. They preferred to sell other crops and animal products for which prices were more favourable, while retaining grain to build up herds of livestock or in anticipation of better prices to come. At any rate, the party faced a problem that Stalin seized to promote stern measures more reminiscent ofWar Communism than NEP. Local officials received instructions to force peasants to 'sell' grain to the state at low prices, and Stalin himself toured Siberia in January-February 1928, ordering administrators to crack down on peasants hoarding grain. Keeping a surplus off the market was legal under NEP, but Stalin described it as a crime ('speculation'), permitting authorities to confiscate the produce in question. Like-minded Bolshevik leaders toured other grain-producing regions, and their efforts helped net the state two-thirds more grain during the first quarter of 1928 than in the same three months of the previous year.
Bolsheviks more devoted to the continuation of NEP were appalled by the coercive nature of the 'extraordinary measures' and by Stalin's remarks in Siberia about pushing forward with sweeping collectivisation. Their criticism prompted Stalin to beat a brief verbal retreat. He rejected talk of NEP's demise and condemned 'excesses' of over-zealous procurement officials here and there. At the same time, he continued to defend his approach to collecting grain, and when shortages reappeared later in the year, he again supported the extraction of 'surpluses' through forced delivery and confiscation. With every month in i928 it grew more fanciful to suppose that anyone could quickly regain the peasants' trust in NEP, which encouraged party members to presume that increased pressure remained the only alternative. This was probably Stalin's intent all along, but the effect of the 'extraordinary measures' in any case tended to steer Bolsheviks towards a conclusion that some form of collectivisation represented the solution to their seemingly chronic difficulty in amassing enough grain for the army, the proletariat and the export market.
Stalin and his new allies dismissed suggestions from Politburo colleagues to obtain more grain by offering the peasants higher prices and additional consumer goods. These options, consistent with NEP, would have drained funds from heavy industry and other portions of the budget. At a Central Committee plenum in July 1928, Stalin bluntly defended the maintenance of prices unfavourable to peasants in order to extract 'tribute' to support industrialisation. The government's recent difficulties in collecting grain stemmed not from misguided prices, he explained, but from class struggle spearheaded by the kulaks, whose opposition had to be vanquished. Nor was the Stalinist faction prepared to 'coddle' the Nepmen much longer. Private entrepreneurs had no place in socialism, and if socialism was now proclaimed to be close at hand, the Nepmen must leave the scene in short order. For this to happen in harmony with NEP, the party would have to invest far more in the production of consumer goods and a network of state stores (again, at the expense of heavy industry). With such a course unacceptable to Stalin and his supporters, it soon became clear that 'administrative measures' rather than economic competition would be the road taken to liquidate the 'new bourgeoisie'.
Other groups, never popular with the Bolsheviks but regarded during NEP as vital for economic recovery, now joined the Nepmen and kulaks as targets of unsettling rhetoric. The term 'bourgeois specialist' - referring to non-party engineers, economists and other technical experts employed by the state - surfaced ominously in the press as a label for people allegedly responsible for shortages and other economic difficulties that grew more common with the onset of rapid industrialisation at the end of the decade. As early as 1928 the Kremlin staged a trial of fifty-three engineers from the coal industry, accusing them of sabotaging the mining facilities in which they worked. These proceedings, the well-publicised Shakhty trial, alarmed Bukharin and Rykov among others, but they could not shield bourgeois specialists from what became a series of such prosecutions continuing into the 1930s. Once the nation accelerated its drive to socialism, Stalin declared, bourgeois counter-revolutionary elements would, in desperation, intensify their opposition. Let there be no doubt, he added, that true Bolsheviks possessed the resolve to crush this sedition.
As struggle in the party ran its course through i928-9, Stalin's faction triumphed in part because of his superior command of the party's apparatus. As noted above, Stalin's position and temperament allowed him to advance the careers of supporters and undermine opponents far more effectively than did any of his chief rivals - Trotsky first, then Zinoviev, Kamenev and Trotsky together, and finally Bukharin, Rykov and Tomskii. By the end of the decade, most of Stalin's new confederates in the party leadership owed their rise largely to him. He understood the power of patronage and exploited it tirelessly throughout the decade.
However, Stalin's defeat of Bukharin, Rykov and Tomskii did not stem solely from administrative manoeuvring. He offered the party an alternative that enjoyed considerable appeal among Bolsheviks - a bold end to the retreat and concessions of NEP. The government really was failing to boost grain exports during NEP, and, in fact, by 1927/8 they had dwindled to a meagre level not only several times lower than in mid-NEP but a tiny fraction of the grain exported before the First World War. While industrial production had increased during the first five years of NEP, it had done so largely through the revitalisation of existing enterprises previously damaged or otherwise dormant for lack of resources. Thereafter, the same rate of industrial growth, to say nothing of an increase, would require substantially greater investment than the Soviet regime had managed so far. The government's experience during the 1920s offered no guarantee that this could be accomplished through reforms within the framework of the New Economic Policy. If Western scholars have approached unanimity in deeming a continuation of NEP preferable to the carnage ofthe 1930s, Bolsheviks in 1928 had a different perspective, unburdened by knowledge of their fate under Stalin. For many of them, NEP had failed to hasten economic modernisation and the arrival of socialism. How long would Lenin himself have been prepared to accept modest industrial growth, if that were the best that NEP could offer into the 1930s?
Stalin for one had seen enough, and he readily found party members in agreement. They invoked the 'revolutionary-heroic' tradition of the party, recalling the Lenin ofthe October Revolution ratherthan the Lenin of i92i.The time for patient, gradual measures was over, they proclaimed. True Bolsheviks must now complete the revolution, finishing the work begun by the party in i9i7 and defended heroically by the Red Army during the civil war. 'There are no fortresses Bolsheviks cannot storm', ran a slogan that captured the tone favoured by the new leadership. While it is impossible to establish what percentage of party members approved the path urged by Stalin - by no means all local officials jumped to employ the severe grain-collection methods of 1928, for example - there was certainly room for profitable campaigning against NEP inside a party devoted to socialism.
As i928 gave way to i929, Stalin's grip tightened. In April, Bukharin lost his positions as editor of Pravda, the party's flagship daily, and as head of the Comintern, an organisationbased in Moscowthat devised strategies for Communist Parties around the world. By the end of the year he had been expelled from the Politburo, while new leaders embarked on a series of policies that were completely incompatible with the party line of 1925. NEP was dead, though no decree materialised to announce the fact, just as none had appeared in 1921 to proclaim its birth. On occasion, Soviet authors even alleged that a modified NEP continued well into the 1930s. More often it was simply ignored, having been shoved into an unmarked grave by an offensive that featured massive collectivisation of agriculture and breathtaking industrialisation according to five-year plans. Not until the nation lay on its own deathbed half a century later, with some reformers already casting furtive glances to the capitalist West for alternatives, would NEP be recalled in the Soviet Union as a worthy path to socialism. In the meantime, new Stalinist policies became the centrepiece of a different Soviet model that would be recommended to socialist aspirants far and wide for decades to come.
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