The tax-in-kind was the beginning of a series of new policies that collectively became the New Economic Policy (NEP). The NEP emerged in stages over the next year or so, guaranteeing the peasants tenure of land and allowing them to hire labour and lease plots. Within six months, as Cohen records, “The principles of NEP came to permeate the whole economy”.22 Reciprocal buying and selling of goods swept across Soviet territory. The dominance of the state sector in industrial production was retained–state-controlled heavy industry still employed 84% of the labour force–but private capital circulated around the rejuvenated retail and merchandise sector.
Crucially, the rural economy and peasant industry was set free of the iron control of War Communism. By the mid–1920s there were 25 million small holdings in the countryside. Whilst these produced small fortunes for some, they supplied the towns and cities with the food and resources they had sorely lacked before the NEP. The Soviet economy during the heyday of the NEP (roughly 1922 to 1927, although it survived until Stalin began mass collectivisation in 1929) was a form of “mixed economy”, albeit with a very powerful and politically illiberal state.
Victor Serge recorded that within a few months the NEP “was already giving marvelous results. From one week to the next the famine and the speculation were diminishing perceptibly”. Restaurants re-opened and food that had been unobtainable shortly before made a reappearance. On the other hand, “the confusion among the party rank and file was staggering. For what did we fight, spill so much blood, agree to so many sacrifices?”23 Many of the party cadres did not directly benefit. If they worked in heavy industry they had no more money than before and could not afford the new luxuries appearing in the shops. Although party membership still conferred privileges these tended to be at the higher levels, with lower orders no more likely to secure special goods than the peasantry.
A new species of private entrepreneur, middle-men who bought surplus product in the country and sold it at a profit in the cities, pre-empted the fledgling system of barter and exchange that NEP was supposed to create. These “Nepmen”, often well-dressed and with glamorous women on their arms, became familiar figures in the 1920s and were deeply resented by hardcore Bolsheviks and the less privileged working class. When Stalin turned on them in 1929 he did not lack for supporters in the party.
Lenin explained his conception of the NEP in a major article “The Tax in Kind: The Significance of the New Policy and its Conditions”. In it he referred back to a 1918 article, “The Chief Tasks of Our Day: Left Wing Childishness and the Petty-Bourgeois Mentality”, in which he had assumed the transition phase from capitalism to socialism would last about a year. He admitted the timescale “turned out to be longer than was anticipated at the time”. Lenin claimed it was solely the Civil War and foreign intervention that had forced the Bolsheviks on to the path of War Communism and that any assertion to the contrary by “Mensheviks, SRs and Kautsky and co” were those of “lackeys of the bourgeoisie”.
Forgetting that his first pronouncement after 25th October, 1917 had been “We will now proceed to construct the socialist order”, Lenin now wrote that the only alternative to the failure to do so was “not to try to prohibit or put the lock on the development of capitalism, but to channel it into state capitalism”. He claimed that state capitalism and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat were perfectly compatible. As long as the state controlled concessions and leases to foreign and private capital then the transition to socialism was still on course. He waxed lyrical about the paramount need for mass electrification of the far-flung Soviet provinces and village economy, which in his view was an essential precondition for the transition to socialism. Although Lenin claimed, in a famous mantra, that socialism would consist of “Soviet power plus electrification”, he never explained how a new form of energy supply would have such seismic political consequences.
The most telling part of the “Tax in Kind” article was its assault on the programme of the Kronstadt sailors and its reaffirmation of political repression. Lenin condemned Martov for claiming “in his Berlin journal” that “Kronstadt not only adopted Menshevik slogans but also proved that there could be an anti-Bolshevik movement which did not entirely serve the interests of the White Guards, the capitalists and the landowners”. Although the Kronstadt programme had proven exactly that, Lenin considered that there was no difference, no space at all, between the Miliukovs of the world, who wished to restore capitalism to Russia, and what he called “a proletarian vanguard that is capable of governing”. Tactical concessions aside, Lenin had learnt nothing from the disasters of 1917-21 or the mass alienation of workers and peasants from his regime.
The “Tax in Kind” article–relatively unknown and yet as crucial to an understanding of Lenin as the April Theses–demonstrated beyond doubt that the NEP, whilst bringing economic liberalisation, did not herald a lessening of political control and repression. After urging yet more promotion of workers from the rank and file “to the work of economic administration”, Lenin finished,
As for the non-party people who are only Mensheviks or SRS disguised in fashionable non-party attire a la Kronstadt, they should be kept safe in prison, or packed off to Berlin, to join Martov in freely enjoying the charms of pure democracy and freely exchanging ideas with Chernov, Miliukov and the Georgian Mensheviks.24
The article was published and distributed in May 1921 in the magazine Krasnaya and distributed throughout Soviet territory.
And yet both workers and peasants continued to resist, to strike and rebel. Even after Kronstadt and the promulgation of the NEP strikes continued. Aves records that in 1922 there were 538 strikes with 197,000 participants, but the real total must be higher as this derives from official statistics. These occurred in tandem with what were known as the “Green” rebellions, i.e. those in the countryside. The best-known was that centred on Tambov, but there were many others. Some of these had clear political goals. Others took the form of roaming bandit armies, particularly in the deep south, where peasants and Cossacks found common cause in mutual hatred of the Bolsheviks. In the Caucasian Mountains a rebel army of 30,000 peasants almost matched Antonov’s in size. The first six months of 1921 saw the entire province of western Siberia lost by the Soviet regime as an army of approximately 60,000 peasant rebels held the Omsk, Tiuman, Tobolsk, Ekaterinburg and Tomsk regions.
The Green rebellions were systematically put down throughout 1921-22 by a mixture of military action, famine, and a slackening-off of peasant discontent as the tax-in-kind policy fed through. Tambov, in particular, went down hard. In April 1921 Tukchachevsky arrived with 100,000 men, a fleet of armoured cars and his own small airforce to drop poison gas on rebel hideouts. By June 50,000 peasants had been rounded up and placed in newly constructed concentration camps. Figes reports estimates that 100,000 peasants were imprisoned or deported while 15,000 were shot.25 By summer the rebellion was effectively over, with famine in the region delivering the literal death blow. Antonov and a small core of rebels evaded capture and continued to harry the authorities until summer 1922 when they were trapped, surrounded and eliminated.