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).
197
V I. Lenin,