As we see, Lenin had abandoned his original ‘class war in the villages’ scenario long before the introduction of NEP in early 1921. In its place arose a scenario whose protagonist was the previous walk-on role of the middle peasant. An official ‘shift to the middle peasant’ was inaugurated with much fanfare in early 1919. According to émigré economist Leo Pasvolsky, the open letters to the peasants written by Lenin and Trotsky, the various official decrees, and ‘the dozens of articles that were devoted to the subject in the whole Soviet press for weeks after that… constitute the most elaborate scheme of agitation ever used for any one purpose by the Soviet regime’.35 The peasants were quick to grasp that the soviet power was seeking a new base of social support and that the bednota (the poor peasants) were no longer unchallenged masters in the villages. Despite the prominence of this campaign at the time, it has disappeared from the present-day historian’s horizon, because it does not fit into prevailing stereotypes about Bolshevism during the civil war.
Gradually Lenin worked out a new and more ambitious scenario: enlist the middle peasant directly into the socialist cause. But how? What could convince the middle peasant of the advantages of socialism? Existing models of collective agricultural production – the kommuny and state farms run by poor peasants – were embarrassing failures. Furthermore, the use of violence to transform production relations was a non-option. This point needs to be brought out, precisely because there was a lot of state violence against the peasantry during the civil war, both to extract needed resources and to crush peasant rebels. But these traditional forms of state violence were sharply distinguished in Lenin’s mind – and no doubt in peasant consciousness as well – from violence used to transform production methods. From a Marxist point of view coercing people to adopt a higher form of production was not so much wrong as absurd.
As he watched his hopes for state farms and kommuny crumble Lenin only became more insistent on the inadmissibility of using force – a fundamental contrast with Stalin. Precisely in 1919, at the height of the civil war, we find Lenin’s most emphatic pronouncements on this subject. ‘Before anything else, we must base ourselves on this truth: violent methods will achieve nothing here, due to the very essence of the matter… There is nothing more stupid than the very idea of violence in the area of property relations of the middle peasantry.’36 ‘The absurdity of [any use of violence to install kommuny] is so obvious that the Soviet government long ago forbade it’. Soon ‘the last trace of this outrage [bezobrazie] will be swept from the face of the Soviet Republic’.37
Lenin finally decided that the advantages of socialism would be demonstrated to the middle peasants, not directly by collective experiments within the village, but indirectly. Instead of propagating ‘oases of collective production’ in the petty-bourgeois desert, the new path to socialist transformation in the countryside would rely on the transforming power of socialist industry. In January 1920, at the height of his disillusionment with sovkhozy and kommuny, Lenin read an article by the Bolshevik engineer Gleb Krzhizhanovsky on the vast potential of Russia’s electrification. Lenin himself was electrified: here was a way out of his dilemma. For him, the plan for electrification represented ‘a second party program’ (symbolically taking the place of the aborted ‘second October’). This new peasant strategy is the inner meaning of Lenin’s famous slogan from late 1920: ‘Communism is soviet power plus electrification of the whole country.’38
Another and even more direct way of way of revealing the advantages of socialism was providing the peasants with equipment, clothing, medical supplies and other necessary items through state channels. As with the issue of violence, a common misunderstanding makes it imperative to stress that even during the civil war Lenin insisted on the need to provide material incentives to the countryside. He hardly needed to wait for NEP to realize this. Of course, during the civil war, material items to exchange with the peasants were far and few between:
August 1919:
It’s not hard to understand that the workers’ government cannot now give the peasant goods, because industry is at a standstill. There’s no bread, no fuel, no industry. Every reasonable peasant will agree that it is necessary to give his surplus grain to the starving worker as a loan to be paid off by industrial items.39
March 1920:
The imperialist war and then the war against counter-revolution, however, have laid waste to and ruined the entire country. We must bend all efforts to conquer the chaos, to restore industry and agriculture, and to give the peasants the goods they need in exchange for grain.40
Lenin and the Bolsheviks promised to provide the peasants with exchange items, but they wanted to provide these goods via state channels. Lenin admitted that the state organs of distribution still had many defects ‘of which the workers’ government is very well aware, but which cannot be eliminated in the first period of the transition to socialism’.41 Nevertheless, Lenin looked forward to steady progress toward genuinely socialist distribution. Hostilities would cease, industry would revive and the socialist state would get its act together by improving its own organizations.
The decriminalization of the private grain trade in 1921 ended this scenario of steady progress toward socialist distribution. The reliance on long-term projects such as electrification also meant that socialist transformation of the countryside had to be put on hold. In spring 1921 Lenin justified the introduction of NEP by remarking that ‘as long as we have not remade [the peasant], as long as large-scale machinery has not remade him, we have to assure him the possibility of being his own boss’.42 The key economic link between town and country was no longer the state, but once again the market and the private merchant. This was indeed a severe setback, a retreat on the road to socialism. Therefore, in one of his final articles, Lenin urged his readers not to forget about the original project of using state-controlled channels such as the cooperatives to gradually crowd out private trade.43
NEP did not change Lenin’s strategy for enlisting the support of the middle peasant for socialism – it merely changed the dimensions of the problem. The basic goal remained, as before, to provide abundant material goods through state channels. Before NEP, the enemy to be overcome was the pervasive underground market. After NEP, it was the decriminalized private grain market – the same enemy, with a different legal status.
Lenin’s strategy can be labelled the kto-kovo scenario. This label may strike some readers as paradoxical, because the phrase kto-kovo, or ‘who-whom’, has entered educated folklore as Lenin’s favourite phrase and an expression of his essentially hard-line outlook. ‘Who-whom’ is therefore usually glossed as something on the order of ‘who shall destroy whom?’ In reality Lenin only used the phrase two or three times at the very end of his career, and even then did not give it any prominence. If kto-kovo had not been picked up, first by Zinoviev and then by other Bolshevik leaders, the phrase would have been long forgotten. Kto-kovo was adopted as a pithy expression of the logic of NEP – not usually considered Lenin at his most hard-line.44 The phrase should be glossed as something like the following: ‘which class will succeed in winning the loyalty of the peasants: the proletariat or the now-tolerated bourgeoisie (the so-called nepman)?’ Although Lenin only let drop the phrase kto-kovo a couple of offhand times, he expressed often and forcefully the scenario to which the term later became attached. Perhaps the most eloquent version is found in the concluding words of one of his last articles: