The reforms themselves are thus of considerable interest, because they reveal a concerted willingness to impose modern patterns of land organisation as well as new kinds of behaviour upon a sceptical peasantry. These grand ambitions (like the land commune itself) persisted into the Soviet period. Yet, in economic terms, the direct results of the Stolypin land reforms were quite modest. As Esther Kingston-Mann and others have pointed out, the reformers refused to accept that the land commune was quite compatible with improved cultivation on peasant farms. In truth, of much greater consequence for the advance of Russian agriculture before the war was the growth of new markets and the improvement in the terms of trade for food producers, which enabled farmers to diversify into new products and to invest in agricultural equipment. Institutions such as co-operatives helped to sustain this activity.
Equally important in economic terms was the continued process of internal migration. The land reforms gave an added impulse to migration, primarily by cancelling the redemption payments that peasants had incurred as a result of emancipation in 1861 and by enabling poorer peasants to sell land (although they could not sell to non-peasants) and to move from depressed regions such as the lower Volga. Some sought work in the expanding urban economy of European Russia, becoming workers and (as Lenin had suggested) consumers with 'civilised habits and requirements'.[3] Others decided to explore opportunities further east. The government's Siberian Committee and the Colonisation Department for Turkestan provided peasant migrants with maps and itineraries - a noteworthy contrast to the much more chaotic population displacement that occurred in the First World War. Between 1896 and 1915 around 4.5 million peasants settled permanently in western Siberia and Central Asia, where a thriving rural economy began to develop on the eve of war. But the government continued to impose tight restrictions on the mobility of the inorodtsy ('foreigners'), including Jews and the indigenous population of Siberia, Central Asia and the Caucasus. Freedom of settlement was not an option available to all.
The reform impulse in Russian economic history (1): New Economic Policy
The New Economic Policy (NEP) had its roots in the shift away from 'War Communism', a system that heralded imminent utopia so far as some enthusiasts were concerned, demonstrating the kind of economic fundamentalism that would become fashionable in the 1930s and again during the 1990s. Between 1918 and 1920 money virtually lost its function as a medium of exchange, and capitalist institutions evaporated. But the underlying economic reality showed War Communism in a disastrous light. Production collapsed (industrial output in 1921 was a mere 12 per cent of the 1913 level) and established economic links were broken, being replaced by somewhat arbitrary bureaucratic determination of priorities for the supply of inputs. This was an economy of absolute shortage. Deprivation and dictatorship went hand in hand. The collapse of workers' control during the civil war represented defeat for a more libertarian vision of Soviet socialism, and the triumph of one-man management. Workers who held on to their jobs received payment in kind, and bartered goods in order to survive. Others returned to the village. Russia suffered a demographic haemorrhage. Thanks to the 'Red Terror', the propertied elite (including many former landlords, whose estates were seized by the peasantry in 1917-18) decided to emigrate. Those who remained on Russia's war-ravaged territory were exposed to infectious disease and famine, which domestic and foreign aid organisations (such as the American Relief Administration and the Society of Friends) struggled valiantly to overcome.
In 1921 what came to be seen as the hallmarks ofWar Communism - compulsory deliveries of produce by peasant farmers (according to assigned quotas, or prodrazverstka), the nationalisation of enterprises and the administrative allocation of goods and labour, particularly to support the war effort against the Bolsheviks' enemies - were abandoned. In their stead came greater commercial freedom, although NEP led neither to complete deregulation nor to the abandonment of the ultimate objective of a planned socialist economy. (In a significant indication of the new state's ambitions, Gosplan was established in 1921.) Crucial to the transition to NEP was the decision to introduce a single tax on peasants' output and to permit them to retain the residual product. It is not difficult to see this as a political accommodation that the Bolshevik Party reached with the peasantry, and that brought with it profound economic implications. Other policy decisions logically followed: the creation of a stable currency (finally completed in 1924), the stabilisation of the state budget (a factor contributing indirectly to a rising level of unemployment), the abolition of restrictions on trade, and the introduction of commercial principles in enterprise transactions (khozraschet). Private traders (Nepmen) replaced the 'bagmen' who had engaged in illegal trade in grain during the civil war. By 1923 private traders accounted for more than 75 per cent of all retail trade. The Communist Party - which enjoyed a monopoly of political power - did not abandon all forms of economic intervention. In particular, it forced down industrial prices in 1924, in order to offset the consequences of the 'scissors' crisis' (Trotsky's famous expression describing the relative movement of agricultural and industrial prices in 1923-4) and to encourage peasants to bring grain to the market. This was consistent with the social contract between party and peasantry.
How dynamic was NEP? The question is important (and has been much debated), because it raises issues concerning the mainsprings of economic growth beyond 1928. The official Soviet view was that the potential for stimulating further growth within the NEP framework had been exhausted by 1928. However, Paul Gregory argues that the economy had still not recovered pre-war (1913) levels of output by that date, the implication being that part of the subsequent Stalinist economic transformation was a consequence of utilising reserve capacity. Other scholars have taken an intermediate position, arguing that Gregory overstated the prosperity of the Russian economy in 1913 and thus understated the rate of growth in 1913-28. Certainly, the Soviet economy under NEP had important achievements to its credit, for example by greatly extending the tsarist experiment with electrification and introducing new products, such as oil-drilling equipment. Yet some important sectors (iron and steel, food and drink) lagged considerably. Non-Bolshevik economic specialists had to answer criticism from the political leadership that NEP was failing to address issues of technological backwardness in industry, against a backdrop of greater dynamism in the developed capitalist West.
All economy comes down in the last analysis to an economy of time.' Marx's words were quoted approvingly by Trotsky, for whom socialism meant not only the removal of capitalist exploitation but also a greater economy of time, 'that most precious raw material of culture'. Most commentators, whether tsarist or Soviet, had a more narrow conception of labour productivity, but they all agreed that Russian labour productivity had to be improved if the gap on economically more advanced countries were to be closed. That perception was shared by V I. Grinevetskii, the pre-revolutionary engineer, and by Aleksei Gastev, the Soviet populariser of 'scientific organisation of labour' (NOT, nauchnaia organizatsiia truda), whose manuals continued to find favour as late as the 1960s. By 1925 the main authority for state industry (Vesenkha, the Supreme Council of the National Economy) called for the 'rationalisation' of production, by means of improved working methods and management. The strategy was crucial to NEP, because an improvement in labour productivity made possible a lowering of costs of production, thereby enabling enterprises to realise profits, without simply forcing up prices and jeopardising the relationship with the peasantry, as happened in the scissors' crisis. But the pace of modernisation remained relatively sluggish.
3
VI. Lenin,