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.
195
Viktor Danilov,