Workers were not the only group to cause perplexity: the whole society baffled the authorities. The NEP had reintroduced a degree of capitalism; but it was a capitalism different from any previous capitalism in Russia or the external world. Bankers, big industrialists, stockbrokers and landlords were a thing of the past. Foreign entrepreneurs were few, and those few kept out of public view. The main beneficiaries of the NEP in the towns did not conform to the stereotype of a traditional high bourgeoisie; they were more like British spivs after 1945. As a group they were called ‘nepmen’ and were quintessentially traders in scarce goods. They trudged into the villages and bought up vegetables, ceramic pots and knitted scarves. They went round urban workshops and did deals to obtain chairs, buckles, nails and hand tools. And they sold these products wherever there were markets.
It was officially recognized that if the market was to function, there had to be rules. Legal procedures ceased to be mocked as blatantly as in the Civil War. A Procuracy was established in 1922 and among its purposes was the supervision of private commercial transactions. More generally, people were encouraged to assert their rights by recourse to the courts.43
But arbitrary rule remained the norm in practice. The local authorities harassed the traders, small-scale manufacturers and stall-holders: frequently there were closures of perfectly legal enterprises and arrests of their owners.44 Lenin had anyway insisted that the Civil Code should enable the authorities to use sanctions including even terror.45 This had the predictable effect of inducing the nepmen to enjoy their profits while they could. The dishonest, fur-coated rouble millionaire with a bejewelled woman of ill-repute on either arm was not an excessive caricature of reality in the 1920s. Yet if many nepmen had criminal links, the fault was not entirely theirs; for the regime imposed commercial conditions which compelled all traders to be furtive. Without the nepmen, the gaps in the supply of products would not have been plugged; with them, however, the Bolsheviks were able to claim that capitalist entrepreneurship was an occupation for speculators, sharpsters and pimps.
Yet the Bolshevik belief that the middle class was striving to grab back the economic position it had occupied before 1917 was untrue not only of the higher bourgeoisie but also of lower members of the old middle class. The Russian Empire’s shopkeepers and small businessmen for the most part did not become nepmen. Instead they used their accomplishments in literacy and numeracy to enter state administrative employment. As in the Civil War, they found that with a little redecoration of their accounts of themselves they could get jobs which secured them food and shelter.
The civil bureaucracy included some famous adversaries of the communist party. Among them were several economists, including the former Menshevik Vladimir Groman in the State Planning Commission and ex-Socialist- Revolutionary Nikolai Kondratev in the People’s Commissariat of Agriculture. But such figures with their civic dutifulness were untypical of bureaucrats in general. The grubby, unhelpful state offices became grubbier and even less helpful. Citizens got accustomed to queuing for hours with their petitions. Venality was endemic below the central and middling rungs of the ladder of power. Even in the party, as in Smolensk province in 1928, there was the occasional financial scandal. A pattern of evasiveness had not ceased its growth after the Civil War, and it affected the workers as much as the bureaucrats. In the factories and mines the labour force resisted any further encroachment on their rights at work. Although by law the capacity to hire and fire was within the gift of management, factory committees and local trade union bodies still counted for something in their own enterprises.46
Older workers noted that infringements which once would have incurred a foreman’s fine resulted merely in a ticking off. The workers sensed their worth to a party which had promulgated a proletarian dictatorship; they also knew the value of their skills to enterprises which were short of them. One task for the authorities was to inhibit the work-force from moving from job to job. Other jobs and enterprises were nearly always available at least for skilled labour (although unemployment in general grew in the 1920s). Managers were commencing to bribe their best men and women to stay by conceding higher wages.47
All these factors reduced the likelihood of the working class revolting against ‘Soviet power’. The mixture of blandishment, manipulation and coercion meant few labourers were keen to join the scanty, scattered groups of anti-Bolshevik socialists — be they Mensheviks, Socialist-Revolutionaries or disillusioned former Bolsheviks — who tried to stir them into organized resistance. Nor is it surprising that the peasants were not minded to challenge ‘Soviet power’. The peasantry had not forgotten the force used by the party to obtain food-supplies, labour and conscripts in the Civil War. They also remembered that the NEP, too, had been introduced by means of unremitting violence. The Red Army, including cavalry units, had been deployed not only to suppress revolts but also to force peasants to increase the sown area in 1921–2. A deep rancour was still felt towards the town authorities, but it was the rancour of political resignation, not of rebellious intent.
In any case, not everything went badly for the peasantry. The total fiscal burden as a proportion of the income of the average peasant household differed little from the normal ratio before the Great War; and their standard of living recovered after the Civil War. Certainly the pattern of the grain trade changed in the 1920s. This was mainly the result of the fall in prices for cereals on the world market. Consequently most of the wheat which had gone to the West under Nicholas II stayed in the country. A large amount of any harvest was not sold to the towns, for peasant households could often get better deals in other villages. Alternatively they could feed up their livestock or just hoard their stocks and wait for a further raising of prices. The villages were theirs again, as briefly they had been in 1917–18. Rural soviets were installed by visiting urban officialdom, but their significance consisted mainly in the creation of an additional layer of administrative corruption. Moscow’s political campaigns went barely noticed. Peasants continued to have a hard, short and brutish life; but at least it was their own style of life, not a style inflicted upon them by Emperor, landlord or commissar.
This was a phenomenon regretted by the Bolsheviks, who managed to establish only 17,500 party groups in the countryside by 192748 — one for every 1200 square kilometres. It was bad enough that workers preferred Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford to Soviet propaganda films.49 Worse still was the fact that few peasants even knew what a cinema was or cared to find out. The USSR was a predominantly agrarian country with poor facilities in transport, communication and administration. As a result, it was virtually as ‘under- governed’ as the Russian Empire.
Such a structure of power was precarious and the Soviet regime reinforced its endeavour to interpose the state into the affairs of society. The stress on ‘accountancy and supervision’ had not originated in Russia with the Bolsheviks: it had been a feature of the tsarist administrativetradition. But Leninist theory gave huge reinforcement to it. Surveillance, both open and covert, was a large-scale activity. Contemporary bureaucracies in all industrial countries were collecting an ever larger amount of information on their societies, but the trend was hyper- developed in the USSR. Vast surveys were conducted on economic and social life: even the acquisition of a job as a navvy entailed the completion of a detailed questionnaire. For example, Matvei Dementevich Popkov’s work-book shows that he was born in 1894 to Russian parents. He had only a primary-school education. Popkov joined the Builders’ Union in 1920 but refrained from entering the communist party. He had had military experience, probably in the Civil War.
The distrust felt by the central party leadership for both its society and even its own state continued to grow. Control organs such as the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate and the Party Central Control Commission had their authority increased. Investigators were empowered to enter any governmental institution so as to question functionaries and examine financial accounts.50
And yet who was to control the controllers? The Bolshevik leaders assumed that things would be fine so long as public institutions, especially the control organs, drew their personnel mainly from Bolsheviks and pro-Bolshevik workers. But how were the leaders to know who among such persons were genuinely reliable? Under the NEP the system known as the
And provincial party secretaries, whose posts belonged to this central nomenklatura, were instructed to draw up local nomenklaturas for lower party and governmental posts in analogous fashion. The internal regulation of the one-party state was tightened. The graded system of nomenklaturas was meant to ensure that the policies of the Politburo were carried out by functionaries whom it could trust; and this system endured, with recurrent modifications, through to the late 1980s.
