household’s level of income and its number of dependents. (By 1923-1924, by which time the inflation was halted, this tax was converted to cash.) Peasants would be free to market any surplus left after mandatory deliveries, which were reduced from the quotas imposed in 1920-1921. Some effort was made to establish scientific farms and to persuade peasants to enter cooperatives, but few did until the forced collectivization of 1928-1929. Rural, interregional, and retail trade was freed, somewhat reluctantly, and taken up by privateers, known universally as “nepmen.” Prices were effectively free, despite the government’s efforts to fix them for such monopolized commodities as tobacco, salt, kerosene, and matches. Trade unions became voluntary, and workers were free to seek whatever employment they could find.
In 1921 the Soviet government decided to lease back or sell back most medium- and small-sized enterprises to private owners or cooperatives. The largest 8.5 percent of them, called the “commanding heights,” were retained. They employed six-sevenths of all the industrial workers and produced more than nine-tenths of all industrial output even at the peak of NEP in 1925-1926. These larger factories were coordinated by the Supreme Council of National Economy (Vesenkha) and its “trusts.” Banks, railroads, and foreign trade also remained in the hands of the state. But the state had insufficient fuel and materials to keep the larger plants open. Unemployment grew. Efforts to attract foreign concessionaires to provide timber, oil, and other materials were mostly unavailing. The sixty-eight foreign concessions that existed by 1928 provided less than 1 percent of industrial output. Foreign capitalists were rather reluctant to invest in a hostile and chaotic environment with a Bolshevik state that had defaulted on all tsarist debts, confiscated foreign property, and declared its intentions to overthrow the capitalist order worldwide.
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To achieve some measure of efficiency the state now required industrial enterprises to operate on commercial principles (khozraschet), paying wages and other bills and to sell, even at distressed prices relative to the rising relative price of foodstuffs. By 1923-1924, the government balanced its budget by levying excise taxes, enterprise and personal taxes on income and property, and a forced bond issue. The tsarist vodka monopoly was reintroduced, to the dismay of many. Centralized expenditures, especially on education, were cut, and school fees introduced. All this allowed stabilization of the new currency (chervonets), which had replaced the ruined ruble or sovznak notes used before.
The NEP period was also the golden era of Soviet economics, with many different points of view, mathematical and sociological, permitted to publish and debate. Nikolai Kondratiev, Alexander Chaya-nov, Yevgeny Preobrazhensky, Grigory Feldman, Stanislav Strumilin, and the young Vasily Leontiev, inventor of input-output analysis, were active at this time. In addition to theoretical matters, the industrialization debate centered on whether Russia’s peasant economy could produce enough voluntary savings to permit industrialization beyond the recovery phase. That debate, and most free inquiry, would end in 1928. Political freedom had already been closely limited to the Bolsheviks alone; by 1922 publications had to pass prior censorship.
In practice, planning was still rudimentary. There was no operational program for command allocations, as there would be during the 1930s, but the “balance of national economy,” patterned on German wartime experience, served as a kind of forecast for key sectors and basis for discussion of investment priorities.
These policies were strikingly successful in allowing the Soviet economy to regain its prewar levels of agricultural and industrial production by 1926-1927. School enrollment exceeded the prewar numbers. But food marketings, both domestic and export, were down significantly, probably owing to the higher cost and relative unavailability of manufactured goods the peasants wanted to buy and also the breakup of larger commercial farms during the Revolution and civil war. Yet by 1927 reduced grain marketings convinced many in the Party (particularly the so-called left opposition) that administrative methods would be needed in addition to market incentives. Even though this was largely due to a mistaken price and tax policy by the government-comparable to the earlier Scissors Crisis- the authorities now began to use “extraordinary measures” to seize grain early in 1928. This policy and its consequences effectively ended the NEP, for once it was decided that industrialization and military preparedness required more investments than could be financed from voluntary savings in this largely peasant country, the way was open for Josef Stalin to pursue a radical course of action, once advanced by his enemies Leon Trotsky and his allies on the left. See also: COMMANDING HEIGHTS OF THE ECONOMY; GOODS FAMINE; GRAIN CRISIS OF 1928; SCISSORS CRISIS; TRUSTS, SOVIET; WAR COMMUNISM
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Carr, Edward Hallett. (1958). Socialism in One Country, 1924-1926, vol. 1. London: Macmillan. Davies, R. W. (1989). “Economic and Social Policy in the USSR, 1917-41.” In The Cambridge Economic History of Europe from the Decline of the Roman Empire, Vol. 8: The Industrial Economies: The Development of Economic and Social Policies, ed. Peter Mathias and Sidney Pollard. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Erlich, Alexander. (1960). The Soviet Industrialization Debate, 1924-1928. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Nove, Alec. (1969). An Economic History of the USSR. London: Allen Lane.
The term new-formation (“western-model,” “foreign-model,” or “western-formation”) regiment refers to military units organized in linear formations, utilizing gunpowder weapons and tactics developed in the West. These regiments consisted of eight to ten companies, each ideally numbering 100 (infantry) to 120 (cavalry and dragoons) soldiers, though few regiments were at full strength. The colonel and lieutenant colonel commanded the first and second companies of the regiment, though de facto command of the colonel’s company was given to a first (lieutenant) captain. Captains or lieutenants (either Russian or European) commanded the remaining companies. Other personnel included ensigns, sergeants, and corporals, at the company level, and administrative officers, such as captains of arms, quartermasters, camp masters, clerks, priests, drummers, and buglers. The regiments featured combined arms: muskets, pikes, artillery, grenadiers,
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and engineers (sappers, miners). The predominant organizational features of the new-formation regiment were its hierarchical command structure and its relative tactical flexibility.
New-formation regiments participated in the major campaigns of the seventeenth century. The first regiments were formed prior to the Smolensk War (1632-1634). The state employed European officers to train and arm Russians to fight in the Western manner, which represented a significant departure from the former practice of hiring entire regiments of foreign troops. The impact of these officers is reflected in the fact that the Treaty of Polyanovka (1634) ordered Russia’s foreign mercenary commanders to leave Muscovy after the war, though Alexander Leslie, Adam Gell-Seitz, and others returned to help reorganize Muscovy’s regiments again during the 1640s.
Between 1630 and 1634 ten regiments were formed, comprising seventeen thousand men, nearly half of the Russian army at Smolensk. During the Thirteen Years’ War, new-formation regiments constituted a significant portion of Russia’s armed forces: fifty-five infantry and twenty cavalry regiments. The cost of these regiments was greater than traditional forces because the state supported their supply and salary needs.
The regiments in the 1630s were formed from marginal groups, such as landless gentry, Cossacks, Tatars, and free people (volnye liudi, unattached to towns, estates, or communes). Increased income and status associated with state service motivated these groups to assimilate into the new-formation regiments. During the 1650s and 1660s the new-formation regiments included more and more peasants and townsmen, whom the Russians conscripted to offset heavy wartime losses. The nature of the soldiers serving in the new-formation regiments changed over time, though they continued to include marginal groups. Later in the century (1680s-1690s), the new- formation regiments continued to be a stage for retraining traditional forces.
The state continued to hire European officers to command new-formation regiments throughout the seventeenth century. Russians also held command positions in the regiments, most predominantly in ranks below colonel. Tensions existed among the foreign and Russian officers, especially regarding administration and implementation of the regiments. The foreign officers brought with them their military experience and technical literature to train their regiments. Since few printed military manuals were available in Russian, the foreign officers’
