came to define the party. The change in e culture, though not a direct expression of ideology, was easily justified jg in terms of it. As M. S. Ol'minsky told the Ninth Party Conference in
Finally, the civil war saw the hardening conviction that the state was the modality through which socialism would be built. Lenin's ideology - his absolutization of the state as an instrument of class rule - was at the root of this process. But the hypertrophy of the party-state was as much the result of improvisation in the face of crises and unforeseen developments as of wilful intention. Indeed ideology in many respects left the Bolsheviks powerless to make sense of the forces that were shaping their regime, nowhere more so than in their primitive u nderstand ing of' bu reaucracy' .Having el im inated private ownersh ip of the means of production with astounding ease, Lenin became
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convinced that the state alone was the guarantor of progress to socialism. Proletarian power was guaranteed exclusively by the state and had nothing to do, for example, with the nature of authority relations in the workplace. Lenin thus had no inkling that the state itself could become an instrument of exploitation and little insight into how the Bolsheviks themselves could be 'captured' by the apparatus they notionally controlled.
Chapter 4
NEP: politics and
the economy
In March 1921 Lenin told the Tenth Party Congress that Russia was like a man 'beaten to within an inch of his life*. The Congress, in session as the Kronstadt rebellion was underway, took place against a background of utter devastation in the economy and nation-wide peasant insurgency. Many feared that the regime might not survive. The response of Congress was to endorse a policy that had been urged by some in the party for well over a year; the abandonment of forced requisitioning in favour of a tax in kind on the peasantry, calculated as a percentage of the harvest. This relatively modest step marked the inauguration of the New Economic Policy (NEP), which soon turned into a wholescale repudiation of War Communism. Following the Congress, the Soviet CEC made clearthat grain surpluses might be sold to cooperatives or on the open market (the word 'trade'was still taboo). Rationing and state distribution of subsistence items were soon dismantled; and cooperatives and private individuals were permitted to lease small-scale enterprises. Later, in response to the so-called 'scissors crisis' - which saw the'blades' of industrial and agricultural prices open ever wider to the point where in October 1923 the ratio of the former to the latter stood at three times the 1913 level -the government imposed stringent fiscal, credit, and price measures to cut industrial prices. This entailed slashing public expenditure and subsidies to state enterprises. By 1924 a stable currency had been established in which the ruble was backed by gold. Full NEP was now in place: a hybrid, evolving system that
combined a peasant economy, a state sector subject to 'commercial accounting', private trade and industry, a state and cooperative network of procurement and distribution, a credit system, and a rudimentary capital market.
In the jargon of the day, the aim of NEP was to cement the alliance
between the proletariat and the peasantry. Lenin spoke of it both as a
'retreat' and as a policy intended to last 'seriously and for a long time'.
In his last writings, penned when he was already seriously ill, he seemed
to sketch a scenario in which the transition to socialism would be a
gradual one, based upon cultural revolution (see Chapter 5) and the
expansion of cooperatives among the peasantry, even going so far as to
concede that 'there has been a radical modification in our whole
outlook on socialism'. Historians argue over the significance of these
valedictory meditations. Some see them as evidence that Lenin had
come to embrace a semi-liberal, market-based alternative to statist'g
socialism, in which the Soviet Union would evolve gradually from state
capitalism to socialism. Others point out that neither he nor his party g.
ever deviated from a conception of socialism as the elimination of the «Г
market and complete state ownership of the means of production.
What is clear is that Lenin came to see NEP as more than a 'retreat', as a J transitional system in which market mechanisms would gradually strengthen the state sector at the expense of the private sector over at least 'one or two decades'. All leading Bolsheviks came to accept that NEP was more than a temporary retreat, but they disagreed violently about the nature and duration of this transition period.
The economic year 1925-6 marked the apogee of NEP, this being the time when official policy, as articulated by Bukharin and backed by Stalin, was at its most favourable to the peasantry, particularly to the kulaks. The leadership announced that taxes were to be lowered and subsequently restrictions on hiring labour and leasing land were relaxed. In 1923-4 the tax in kind had been commuted into an exclusively money tax levied on cultivated land, cattle, and horses. It
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operated on a progressive basis: in 1924-5 one-fifth of households were exempt on the grounds that they were poor peasants and by 1929 this proportion had risen to one-third. Overall, the level of direct taxation on farm incomes increased in comparison with the pre-war period; but since land rents had been abolished, the combined burden of indirect and direct taxes fell from 19% in 1913 to just under 10% in 1926-7. By that year, grain production had recovered to its pre-war level and output of n on-grain products was well above pre-war levels. Yet all was not as well as it seemed. The fundamental purpose of NEP- notwithstanding all the mollifying talk about the peasantry - was to squeeze the rural sector in order to raise the capital necessary for industrial investment. In particular, the government wished to export grain - which in fact accounted for only 35% of net agricultural produce in 1926 - in order to pay for imports of machinery. To its alarm, however, the peasants were still marketing less grain than before the war, preferring to use it to feed ? the growing rural population and rebuild livestock herds. The g government responded by raising procurement targets and moving e from procurement through the market to procurement by state and jg cooperative organs. After January 1928, it behaved as though grain were
During the period of NEP, the underlying resilience and traditionalism of agriculture made itself powerfully felt. The land revolution had reversed the long-term decline in communal land use, the commune even spreading to new areas such as Ukraine. Agriculture remained woefully primitive, with equipment such as horse-drawn sowing machines, harvesters, mowers, and threshing machines extremely rare. The robustness of the commune was a factor inhibiting mechanization and government efforts to encourage genuine collective farms. Yet it would be an
