The New Economic Policy, 1921-8
The economic policies of War Communism led inevitably to clashes with the labour force, which had understood socialism as industrial self-management. With the threat and reality of hunger ever present, forced requisitioning was resisted and strikes became endemic, especially in Petrograd. This general situation, coupled with revolt in Tambov province in 1920, forced Lenin to change his War Communism policy - while he and the Bolshevik leadership were willing to slaughter the mutinous sailors of the Kronshtadt naval base in March 1921, they could not survive if the countryside turned against them, A tactical retreat from enforced socialism was therefore deemed necessary, a move that was deeply unpopular with the Bolshevik rank and file. The New Economic Policy (NEP) was inaugurated at the 10th Party Congress, one of the periodic gatherings of party delegates that determined major policies, in March 1921. The key sectors of the economy - heavy industry, communications, and transport - remained in state hands, but light and consumer-goods industries were open to the entrepreneur.
Generally speaking, the NEP had the intended economic results. The peasants, now allowed to control their property, began to work their holdings profitably. Small traders began to take over the transfer of rural food products to the towns. In the towns small consumer-goods producers began to turn out the products for which the peasants now had an incentive to pay. Overall, the entire country soon began to return to economic normality. Precise figures are still incompletely researched (over the 1920s they are defective mainly for various intrinsic reasons; in the 1930s and later, because of massive falsification), but the speed and extent of the recovery were phenomenal. Roughly speaking, the 1922 crop was already up to three- quarters of normal. Industry, it is true, only reached a quarter of its pre-war production, and most of this was in light industry, such as textiles.
Yet over the whole NEP period the disproportion between agricultural and industrial progress was seen as a major problem, producing what Trotsky described at the 12th Party Congress in 1923 as the "scissors crisis", from the shape of the graph of (comparatively) high industrial and low agricultural prices. The original "scissors crisis" was a short-lived phenomenon, due mainly to the government setting prices of agricultural goods too low, and it disappeared when this was remedied. But the party was still faced with the challenge of building up heavy industry. This could be funded, for the most part, only by "primitive socialist accumulation" of resources from the peasant sector, whether by fiscal or by other means.
Thus the NEP was in general regarded as no more than a temporary retreat that would have to be made good as soon as the economy had to some degree recovered. In the Communist Party as a whole the policy was accepted only with reluctance, out of perceived necessity, and by the end of the decade the economic debate would be won by those who favoured rapid industrialization and forced collectivization.
Culture and Ideology
Determined not only to change drastically the political and economic order but also to create a new type of human being, the Bolsheviks attached great importance to every aspect of culture, especially education and religion.
The Bolsheviks suppressed political dissidence by shutting down hostile newspapers and subjecting all publications to preventive censorship. In 1922 they set up a central censorship office, known for short as Glavlit, with final authority over printed materials as well as the performing arts. The 1920s also saw the formation of the Agitation and Propaganda Section of the Central Committee Secretariat, known as agitprop for short. Affiliated to the Communist Party, this department aimed to determine the content of all official information, overseeing political education in schools, watching over all forms of mass communication, and mobilizing public support for party programmes. Many artists - writers, dramatists, film-makers - were engaged to this end, and every unit of the Communist Party, from the republic to the local- party level, had an agitprop section; at the local level, agitators (party-trained spokespeople) were the chief points of contact between the party and the public.
In literary and artistic matters, however, as long as Lenin was alive, the regime showed a degree of tolerance absent from other spheres of Soviet life. Aware that the overwhelming majority of intellectuals rejected them, and yet wishing to win them over, the Bolsheviks permitted writers and artists creative freedom as long as they did not engage in overt political dissent. Trotsky popularized the term "fellow travellers" for writers who, without joining the communists, were willing to cooperate with them and follow their rules. As a result, the early 1920s saw a degree of innovation in literature and the arts that contrasted vividly with the regime's political rigidity. Among the few writers and artists who joined the Bolsheviks were the Futurists, led by the poet Vladimir Maya- kovsky, who closely followed the models set by their Italian counterparts, and the "constructivists", Russian analogues of the German Bauhaus group. In the theatre and cinema, experiments in staging and montage, greatly influenced by Max Reinhardt and D. W. Griffith, were in vogue. Even so, many of Russia's best writers and artists, finding conditions at home insufferable, chose to emigrate. Others withdrew into their private world and gradually ceased to publish or exhibit.
To destroy what they considered the "elitist" character of Russia's educational system, the communists carried out revolutionary changes in its structure and curriculum. All schools, from the lowest to the highest, were nationalized and placed in the charge of the Commissariat of Enlightenment. Teachers lost the authority to enforce discipline in the classroom. Open admission to institutions of higher learning was introduced to assure that anyone who desired, regardless of qualifications, could enrol. Tenure for university professors was abolished, and the universities lost their traditional right of self-government. Fields of study deemed potentially subversive were dropped in favour of courses offering ideological indoctrination. These reforms thoroughly disorganized the educational system, and in the early 1920s many of them were quietly dropped. Party controls, however, remained in place and in the following decade were used by Stalin to impose complete conformity.
The Bolsheviks, in common with other socialists, regarded religious belief as gross superstition, and they were determined to eliminate it by a combination of repression, ridicule, and scientific enlightenment. A decree issued on January 20, 1918 (February 2), formally separated church from state, but it went far beyond its declared purpose by prohibiting religious bodies from engaging in instruction and from collecting dues from their members. Since the state nationalized all church property, the clergy were left destitute. In the spring and summer of 1922 numerous incidents of resistance occurred, in consequence of which priests were arrested and numerous believers killed. On Lenin's orders show trials were staged in Moscow, Petrograd, and other cities, in which some priests were sentenced to death and prison terms. A splinter "Living Church", composed of renegade priests and operating under instructions from the Cheka, was created to serve the interests of the state.
Lenin concentrated on the Orthodox establishment because of its traditional links with the monarchy and its hold on the Russian population. But he did not spare the other faiths. A trial of Catholic priests resulted in death sentences and the closure of churches. Synagogues were also desecrated, and Jewish holidays subjected to public derision. Muslim religious institutions suffered the least because of Lenin's fear of alienating the colonial peoples of the Middle East, on whose support he counted against the western imperial powers.