Other groups, never popular with the Bolsheviks but regarded during NEP as vital for economic recovery, now joined the Nepmen and kulaks as targets of unsettling rhetoric. The term 'bourgeois specialist' - referring to non-party engineers, economists and other technical experts employed by the state - surfaced ominously in the press as a label for people allegedly responsible for shortages and other economic difficulties that grew more common with the onset of rapid industrialisation at the end of the decade. As early as 1928 the Kremlin staged a trial of fifty-three engineers from the coal industry, accusing them of sabotaging the mining facilities in which they worked. These proceedings, the well-publicised Shakhty trial, alarmed Bukharin and Rykov among others, but they could not shield bourgeois specialists from what became a series of such prosecutions continuing into the 1930s. Once the nation accelerated its drive to socialism, Stalin declared, bourgeois counter-revolutionary elements would, in desperation, intensify their opposition. Let there be no doubt, he added, that true Bolsheviks possessed the resolve to crush this sedition.
As struggle in the party ran its course through i928-9, Stalin's faction triumphed in part because of his superior command of the party's apparatus. As noted above, Stalin's position and temperament allowed him to advance the careers of supporters and undermine opponents far more effectively than did any of his chief rivals - Trotsky first, then Zinoviev, Kamenev and Trotsky together, and finally Bukharin, Rykov and Tomskii. By the end of the decade, most of Stalin's new confederates in the party leadership owed their rise largely to him. He understood the power of patronage and exploited it tirelessly throughout the decade.
However, Stalin's defeat of Bukharin, Rykov and Tomskii did not stem solely from administrative manoeuvring. He offered the party an alternative that enjoyed considerable appeal among Bolsheviks - a bold end to the retreat and concessions of NEP. The government really was failing to boost grain exports during NEP, and, in fact, by 1927/8 they had dwindled to a meagre level not only several times lower than in mid-NEP but a tiny fraction of the grain exported before the First World War. While industrial production had increased during the first five years of NEP, it had done so largely through the revitalisation of existing enterprises previously damaged or otherwise dormant for lack of resources. Thereafter, the same rate of industrial growth, to say nothing of an increase, would require substantially greater investment than the Soviet regime had managed so far. The government's experience during the 1920s offered no guarantee that this could be accomplished through reforms within the framework of the New Economic Policy. If Western scholars have approached unanimity in deeming a continuation of NEP preferable to the carnage ofthe 1930s, Bolsheviks in 1928 had a different perspective, unburdened by knowledge of their fate under Stalin. For many of them, NEP had failed to hasten economic modernisation and the arrival of socialism. How long would Lenin himself have been prepared to accept modest industrial growth, if that were the best that NEP could offer into the 1930s?
Stalin for one had seen enough, and he readily found party members in agreement. They invoked the 'revolutionary-heroic' tradition of the party, recalling the Lenin ofthe October Revolution ratherthan the Lenin of i92i.The time for patient, gradual measures was over, they proclaimed. True Bolsheviks must now complete the revolution, finishing the work begun by the party in i9i7 and defended heroically by the Red Army during the civil war. 'There are no fortresses Bolsheviks cannot storm', ran a slogan that captured the tone favoured by the new leadership. While it is impossible to establish what percentage of party members approved the path urged by Stalin - by no means all local officials jumped to employ the severe grain-collection methods of 1928, for example - there was certainly room for profitable campaigning against NEP inside a party devoted to socialism.
As i928 gave way to i929, Stalin's grip tightened. In April, Bukharin lost his positions as editor of Pravda, the party's flagship daily, and as head of the Comintern, an organisationbased in Moscowthat devised strategies for Communist Parties around the world. By the end of the year he had been expelled from the Politburo, while new leaders embarked on a series of policies that were completely incompatible with the party line of 1925. NEP was dead, though no decree materialised to announce the fact, just as none had appeared in 1921 to proclaim its birth. On occasion, Soviet authors even alleged that a modified NEP continued well into the 1930s. More often it was simply ignored, having been shoved into an unmarked grave by an offensive that featured massive collectivisation of agriculture and breathtaking industrialisation according to five-year plans. Not until the nation lay on its own deathbed half a century later, with some reformers already casting furtive glances to the capitalist West for alternatives, would NEP be recalled in the Soviet Union as a worthy path to socialism. In the meantime, new Stalinist policies became the centrepiece of a different Soviet model that would be recommended to socialist aspirants far and wide for decades to come.