Russian revolution. A very short introduction

mean that ideology necessitated the violent 'dekulakization', wildly escalating planning targets, the terror, and forced labour that Stalin proceeded to unleash. The choice to go on an all-out 'offensive' was precisely that: a choice made by Stalin and his supporters.

With NEP the meaning of the revolution changed profoundly: it was no longer principally about equality, justice, popular power, or ? internationalism, but about the party-state mobilizing the country's

g human and material resources to overcome economic, social, and

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e cultural backwardness as rapidly as possible. As the Bolsheviks

jg themselves recognized, the options were now heavily circumscribed by

1 international isolation and by a backward economy and social

structure. It should also be added that their options were

circumscribed by the institutions and practices of the party-state that

were now in place, although they were less capable of appreciating this.

In this context, the project of proletarian self-emancipation gave

way to one of exploiting the productive power of the proletariat and

peasantry in order to drag the country out of backwardness. As this

happened, Bolshevik ideology mutated, with more elitist and

technocratic tendencies coming to prevail, at least for the time being.

It was in this limiting structural context that the inner party struggle

was played out.

Lenin bequeathed a structure of power that rested on personalized leadership, making the individual qualities of the leader of far more consequence than is the case for leaders in democratic states. The

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struggle to find a successor to Lenin, and the ideological conflicts bound up with that struggle, were thus fraught with consequence for the future course of the revolution. The death of Lenin at the age of 53 was a fateful contingency, not least because he had become convinced that Stalin posed a threat to party unity. Had he lived, he could probably have nipped in the bud the ambitions of a man whom he had done much to promote. Moreover, notwithstanding the narrowing of revolutionary options or the narrowing of the permitted debate within the party, Bolshevism still retained some ideological diversity. Lenin had begun to reflect on the implications for socialism of Russia's backwardness and isolation. It was on these rather sketchy reflections that Bukharin built his model of NEP, one in which the state and private sectors would interact through the market and in which civil peace would be the paramount goal of the party. Avery different scenario was offered by the Left, in which industrialization would proceed robustly at the expense of the peasantry until revolution broke out in the more developed world. There were, in other words, real choices to be made. But one should not, finally, lose sight of the fact that these choices were fundamentally circumscribed by the exigencies of backwardness and international isolation. One may speculate that Bukharin's socialism at a snail's pace would have gradually eroded the party's monopoly of power and allowed the economic and military gap between the Soviet Union and the capitalist powers to widen. Similarly, Trotsky's hope that Russia could be saved by revolution in the West proved vain. Notwithstanding the acute instability of world capitalism after 1929, or the rise of fascism, no western country experienced the systemic breakdown that constitutes a true revolutionary situation, i.e. one in which revolutionaries have a real chance of taking power. In the absence of revolution in the capita list West, it is unlikely that the Left could have avoided some form of coercion in its bid to industrialize, since the capacity of the peasant to thwart the goals of the regime was considerable and coercion was built into the very structure of the relationship between state and society. Use of coercion, however, does not imply the Great Terror. It was Stalin who recognized that the

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totalitarian state could be used to smash the constraints of backwardness through a 'revolution from above'. He did not scruple at the cost.

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Chapter 5

NEP: society and culture

With the onset of NEP social inequality began to increase. Class remained a fragile structure, since its material underpinnings such as ownership of means of production, the employment of labour, and the exercise of managerial authority were weak. Moreover, there were plenty of opportunities to advance oneself - by leaving the village, by getting an education, by joining the Komsomol, by getting a job in a soviet institution - so social relations remained fluid. Compared with capitalist societies, Soviet society was not highly differentiated, yet its pattern of differentiation was more complex than official categories allowed. Leaving aside the emerging nomenklatura elite, which not surprisingly was absent from official categories, the most rapidly growing occupational group were the service employees, a heterogeneous category, which embraced hundreds of thousands of office workers and petty functionaries in the state and party apparatuses, clerical, managerial, and technical staff in industry, and unskilled workers in the service sector. By 1926 they constituted the largest occupational group in Moscow. In strict Marxist terms, these were an unproductive stratum that formed part of the petty-bourgeoisie. Faced by the seemingly spontaneous proliferation of social groups that had no place in the idealized model of socialism, the Bolsheviks struggled to control the confusing social world of NEP by imposing familiar categories of class upon it.

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The Bolsheviks were convinced that differentiation was increasing among the peasantry. The recovery of the rural population had been rapid. By 1926, 82% of the 147 million people in the Soviet Union -5.5% higher than in 1914 - lived in the countryside. The number of peasant households was rising fast - from 18.7 million in 1914 to about 24 million in 1927 - owing to the desire of sons to split from the parental household. In spite of these tendencies, the great bulk of peasant households were classed as middle peasants, since they worked principally for subsistence and relied on their own labour. The Bolsheviks, however, were convinced that NEP was increasing the number of rich and poor households at the expense of those in the middle. This is how they interpreted statistics such as those which purported to show that in 1927 26% of households were poor; that 57% belonged to the 'middle' peasantry; 14% to the 'upper middle'; and 3.2% to the kulaks. These statistics classified households ? according to the value of their 'means of production', but the extent g of differentiation varied according to the means of production one e looked at. Sown area per capita, for example, was distributed fairly jg equally; holdings of livestock, rented land, and hired labour were 1 distributed less equally; and ownership of machinery was distributed very unequally. Moreover if one measured the data by household rather than per capita the degree of differentiation became greater. The real concern of the Bolsheviks was with what they believed to be the growing influence of kulaks. Of all categories, none was harder to define than this. Formerly associated