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]
184
Alan Ball,
185
David Shearer,
186
Diane Koenker, William Rosenberg and Ronald Suny (eds.),
187
Roger Pethybridge,
188
F. I. Dan,