The Penguin History of Modern Russia

by Robert John Service

  Such disputes demonstrated how hard it was to promote any change of policy; for Trotski’s proposal seemed bold only within a milieu which viscerally detested capitalism. Lenin, too, suffered as he had made Trotski suffer. When a Soviet republic was set up in Azerbaijan in April 1920, Lenin proposed that foreign concessionnaires should be invited to restore the Baku oilfields to production. Since 1918 he had seen ‘concessions’ as vital to economic recovery, but his suggestion now caused outrage among Bolshevik leaders in the Transcaucasus. If Baku oil were to be exploited again by the Alfred Nobel Company, hardly any non-private industry would be left in Baku.53 Lenin also urged, at the Eighth Congress of Soviets in December 1920, that richer peasant households should be materially rewarded for any additional gains in agricultural productivity rather than be persecuted as kulaks. The Congress was horrified and most of Lenin’s scheme was rejected.54 The party leadership at the centre and the localities was determined to maintain existing economic policy.

  And so it came about that the great controversy in the Bolshevik party in the winter of 1920–21 was not about grain requisitioning or about the return of foreign companies but about the trade unions. In November, Trotski had proposed that the unions should be turned into agencies of the state. Strikes would be banned; wage increases would be forgone. The Workers’ Opposition criticized this as yet another sign of the bureaucratization of the October Revolution. Others in the party, including Lenin, simply felt that Trotski’s project was unrealizable at a time of turmoil in the country. Ferocious debate broke out within the party. But as Bolshevik leaders haggled over Marxist doctrine on the labour movement, the Soviet economy moved towards catastrophe and a growing number of peasants, workers, soldiers and sailors rebelled against the victors of the Civil War.

  7

  The New Economic Policy

  (1921–1928)

  The basic compound of the Soviet order had been invented by Lenin and his fellow communist leaders within a couple of years of the October Revolution. There had been created a centralized, one-ideology dictatorship of a single party which permitted no challenge to its monopoly of power. The Bolshevik party itself was strictly organized; the security police were experts at persecution and there was systematic subordination of constitutional and legal propriety to political convenience. The regime had also expropriated great segments of the economy. Industry, banking, transport and foreign trade were already nationalized and agriculture and domestic trade were subject to heavy state regulation. All these elements were to remain intact in ensuing decades.

  The Civil War had added to the pressures which resulted in the creation of the compound. On taking power in 1917, the communist leaders had not possessed a preparatory blueprint. Nevertheless they had come with assumptions and inclinations which predisposed them towards a high degree of state economic dominance, administrative arbitrariness, ideological intolerance and political violence. They also lived for struggle. They wanted action; they could barely contain their impatience. And they were outnumbered by enemies at home and abroad. They had always expected the party to be ‘the vanguard’ of the Revolution. Leadership was a key virtue for them. If they wanted to prevail as the country’s rulers, the communists would have been pushed into introducing some kind of party-run state even in the absence of a civil war — and, of course, the way that the October Revolution had occurred made a civil war virtually certain.

  This in turn meant that once the Civil War was over, the party-state was unlikely to be dismantled by the Russian Communist Party. The party-state was at the core of the Soviet compound. Without the party-state, it would not be long before all the other elements in the compound underwent dissolution.

  Even as things stood, not all the elements were as yet sustainable — at least, not in their entirety — in the harsh conditions of 1920–21. Popular discontent could no longer simply be suppressed. Even among those segments in society which had preferred the Reds to the Whites in the Civil War there were many people unwilling to tolerate a prolongation of wartime policies. Administrative disorder was increasing. Whole nations and whole regions were supervised only patchily from Moscow. The technical facilities for control were in a ruinous state: transport and communications were becoming a shambles. Most industrial enterprises had ceased production: factory output in 1920 was recorded as being eighty-six per cent lower than in 1913. Agriculture, too, had been reduced to a shabby condition. The grain harvest of 1920 was only about three fifths of the annual average for the half-decade before the Great War.1

  By the start of 1921, strategical choice could no longer be avoided. Lenin, having had conversations while visiting peasants, at last recognized the enormity of the emergency. For him, the ultimate alarm bell was sounded by the rural revolt in Tambov province. The last great peasant risings in Russia had occurred in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries under the leaderships of Razin, Bolotnikov and Pugachëv. Ancient Russia now confronted the Bolsheviks in struggle. Lenin foresaw that force alone would not be enough to quell the peasants, and he decided that in order to sustain the political dictatorship he had to offer economic relaxations.

  In his opinion, the peasantry had to be placated by the replacement of grain requisitioning with a tax in kind. Knowing that this would evoke intense opposition in his party, he initially limited the discussion to the Politburo. On 8 February 1921 he convinced its members of the need for urgent measures and a resolution was passed calling for a partial re-legalization of ‘local economic exchange’ in grain.2 Such fussiness of language was necessary to avoid offending the ideological sensibilities among fellow Bolsheviks. But the underlying purpose was unmistakable: the Politburo intended to restore private commercial activity. In addition, the tax-in-kind was to be set at a much lower level than the grain-requisitioning quotas and would secure only the minimum of the state’s requirements on behalf of civilian consumers. These measures were the core of what quickly became known as the New Economic Policy (or NEP).

  Some such gamble was essential for the regime to survive. The Politburo permitted a press campaign to commend the NEP’s merits to the rest of the party. Having had his fingers burnt in the Brest-Litovsk controversy, Lenin for some weeks distanced himself from the policy by getting obscure party officials to put his case; and the commission established by the Politburo to elaborate the details was headed not by himself but by Kamenev.3

  But thereafter Lenin, supported by Trotski and Kamenev, canvassed for the NEP. It was of assistance to him that the party had exhausted itself in the winter’s dispute about the trade unions. A desire for unity had emerged before the opening of the Tenth Party Congress on 15 March 1921, a desire stiffened by news of the outbreak of a mutiny by the naval garrison on Kronstadt island. The sailors demanded multi-party democracy and an end to grain requisitioning. Petrograd was affected by discontent and strikes broke out in its major factories. Those many Congress delegates who had not accepted Lenin’s arguments were at last persuaded of the argument for economic reform. Lenin anyway stressed that he did not advocate political reform. Indeed he asserted that the other parties should be suppressed and that even internal factions among the Bolsheviks should be banned. The retreat in economics was to be accompanied by an offensive in politics.

  Congress delegates from all factions, including the Workers’ Opposition, volunteered to join the Red Army units ordered to quell the Kronstadt mutineers. Mikhail Tukhachevski, a commander who had recently returned from the Polish front, clad his soldiers in white camouflage to cross the iced-over Gulf of Finland undetected. In the meantime a depleted Party Congress ungratefully condemned the Workers’ Opposition as an ‘anarcho-syndicalist deviation’ from the principles of Bolshevism.

  Lenin had got his way at the Congress in securing an end to grain requisitioning. And yet there was trouble ahead. The NEP would remain ineffective if confined to a legalization of private trade in foodstuffs. Other economic sectors, too, needed to be removed from the state’s monopolistic ownership and control.
Peasants would refrain from selling their crops in the towns until they could buy industrial goods with their profits; but large-scale state-owned factories could not quickly produce the shoes, nails, hand-ploughs and spades that were wanted by the peasantry. Rapid economic recovery depended upon a reversion of workshops and small manufacturing firms to their previous owners. There was no technical impediment to this. But politically it would be hard to impose on local communist officials who already at the Party Congress had indicated their distaste for any further compromises with the principle of private profit.4

  Lenin had to come into the open to persuade these officials to soften their stance. Indefatigably he tried to attract Western capitalists to Soviet Russia. On 16 March, after months of negotiation, an Anglo-Soviet Trade treaty was signed; and Soviet commercial delegations were established in several other European countries by the end of the year. Lenin also continued to push for the sale of ‘concessions’ in the oil industry in Baku and Grozny. The Red Army’s defeat in the war in Poland convinced him that temporary co-operation with international capitalism would better facilitate economic reconstruction than the pursuit of ‘European socialist revolution’. If Lenin needed proof, it was supplied by the German communists. In the last fortnight of March 1921, encouraged by Zinoviev and Bukharin, they tried to seize power in Berlin. The German government easily suppressed this botched ‘March Action’; and Lenin roundly upbraided his comrades for their adventurism.

  By then Lenin was no longer looking only to foreign concessionaires for help with economic recovery. In April he argued in favour of expanding the NEP beyond its original limits; and he achieved his ends when the Tenth Party Conference in May 1921 agreed to re-legalize private small-scale manufacturing. Soon afterwards peasants obtained permission to trade not only locally but anywhere in the country. Commercial middlemen, too, were allowed to operate again. Private retail shops were reopened. Rationing was abolished in November 1921, and everyone was expected to buy food from personal income. In August 1921, state enterprises had been reorganized into large ‘trusts’ responsible for each great manufacturing and mining subsector; they were instructed that raw materials had to be bought and workers to be paid without subsidy from the central state budget. In March 1922, moreover, Lenin persuaded the Eleventh Party Congress to allow peasant households to hire labour and rent land.

  Thus a reintroduction of capitalist practices took place and ‘War Communism’, as the pre-1921 economic measures were designated, was ended. A lot of Bolsheviks felt that the October Revolution was being betrayed. Tempers became so frayed that the Tenth Conference proceedings were kept secret.5 Not since the Brest-Litovsk controversy had Lenin had to endure such invective. But he fought back, purportedly shouting at his critics: ‘Please don’t try teaching me what to include and what to leave out of Marxism: eggs don’t teach their hens how to lay!’6

  He might not have succeeded at the Conference if his critics had not appreciated the party’s need for unity until the rebellions in the country had been suppressed; and Lenin sternly warned about the adverse effects of factionalism. Throughout 1921–2 there persisted an armed threat to the regime. The Kronstadt mutiny was put down; its organizers were shot and thousands of ordinary sailors, most of whom had supported the Bolsheviks in 1917, were dispatched to the Ukhta labour camp in the Russian north.7 The rural revolts, too, were crushed. Red Army commander Tukhachevski, after defeating the Kronstadters, was sent to quell the Tambov peasant uprising in mid-1921.8 Insurrections in the rest of the Volga region, in Ukraine, Siberia and the North Caucasus were treated similarly. The Politburo also smashed the industrial strikes. The message went forth from the Kremlin that the economic reforms were not a sign of weakened political resolve.

  Not only real but also potential trouble-makers were dealt with severely. Those members of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party’s Central Committee who were still at liberty were rounded up. In summer 1922 they were paraded in Soviet Russia’s first great show-trial and given lengthy prison sentences. There was a proposal by Lenin to do the same to the Menshevik Organizational Committee, and he was annoyed at being overruled by the Politburo.9 But the lesson was administered that the Bolshevik party, having won the Civil War, would share its power with no other party.

  Nor were there to be illusions about national self-determination. It is true that Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania had gained independence and that provinces had been lost to Poland, Romania and Turkey. Yet by March 1921, when Georgia was re-conquered, the Red Army had largely restored the boundaries of the Russian Empire. Russian nationalists applauded this. It would not be long, they surmised, before the Bolsheviks accommodated themselves to Russia’s geo-political interests and abandoned their communist ideas. Red Army commanders, some of whom had served as officers in the Imperial Army, were delighted that Russian military, political and economic power had risen again over two continents. In the People’s Commissariats, too, many long-serving bureaucrats felt a similar pride. The émigré liberal Professor Nikolai Trubetskoi founded a ‘Change of Landmarks’ group that celebrated the NEP as the beginning of the end of the Bolshevik revolutionary project.

  The Bolsheviks responded that they had made the October Revolution expressly to establish a multinational state wherein each national or ethnic group would be free from oppression by any other. They refused to accept that they were imperialists even though many nations were held involuntarily under their rule. They were able to delude themselves in this fashion for two main reasons. The first was that they undoubtedly wanted to abolish the old empires around the world. In this sense they really were anti-imperialists. Secondly, the central Bolshevik leadership had no conscious desire to give privileges to the Russian nation. Most of them were appalled by the evidence that Russian nationalist sentiment existed at the lower levels of the Soviet state and even the communist party. And so by being anti-nationalist, Lenin and his colleagues assumed that they were automatically anti-imperialist.

  But how, then, were they going to resolve their very complex problems of multi-national governance in peacetime? Probably most leading Bolsheviks saw the plurality of independent Soviet republics as having been useful to gain popularity during the Civil War but as being likely to reinforce nationalist tendencies in the future.10 There was consensus in the party that a centralized state order was vital; no one was proposing that any of the republican governments or communist parties should have the right to disobey the Bolshevik leadership in the Kremlin. But how to achieve this? Stalin, who headed the People’s Commissariat for Nationalities, wished to deprive the Soviet republics of even their formal independence by turning them into autonomous republics within the RSFSR on the Bashkirian model. His so-called federalism would therefore involve the simple expedient of incorporating Ukraine, Belorussia, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia into an enlarged RSFSR, and he had been working along these lines since mid-1920.11

  Lenin thought Stalin’s project smacked of Russian imperial dominance; and his counter-proposal was to federate the RSFSR on equal terms with the other Soviet republics in a Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.12 In summer 1922 their disagreements became acrimonious. Yet it must be noted that the ground separating Lenin and Stalin was narrow. Neither aimed to disband the system of authoritarian rule through a highly centralized, unitary communist party run from Moscow. While castigating the United Kingdom’s retention of India with her empire, the Politburo had no scruples about annexing states which had gained their independence from Russia between 1917 and 1921.

  In any case Lenin and Stalin themselves faced common opposition in the localities. Their adversaries fell into two main groups. The first group demanded a slackening of the Kremlin’s grip on republican political bodies.13 Even so, none of these persons demanded a complete release. They wished to remain part of a common Soviet state and understood that they depended upon the Red Army for their survival in government. The other group of adversaries felt that official policy was not too strict but too indu
lgent towards the non-Russian republics. Both Lenin and Stalin wished to keep the promises made since the October Revolution that native-language schools, theatres and printing presses would be fostered. Stalin in 1921 was accused of ‘artificially implanting’ national consciousness; the charge was that, if the Belorussians had not been told they were Belorussians, nobody would have been any the wiser.14

  This debate was of great importance (and the reason why it remains little noticed is that Stalin suppressed discussion of it in the 1930s when he did not wish to appear indulgent to the non-Russians). Stalin’s self-defence was that his priority was to disseminate not nationalist but socialist ideas. His argument was primarily pragmatic. He pointed out that all verbal communication had to occur in a comprehensible language and that most of the people inhabiting the Soviet-held lands bordering Russia did not speak Russian. A campaign of compulsory Russification would therefore cause more political harm than good.

  Nor did Stalin fail to mention that the vast majority of the population was constituted by peasants, who had a traditional culture which had yet to be permeated by urban ideas.15 If Marxism was to succeed in the Soviet Union, the peasantry had to be incorporated into a culture that was not restricted to a particular village. Whatever else they were, peasants inhabiting the Belorussian region were not Russians. It behoved the communist party to enhance their awareness of their own national culture — or at least such aspects of their national culture that did not clash blatantly with Bolshevik ideology. Thus would more and more people be brought into the ambit of the Soviet political system. Bolshevism affirmed that society had to be activated, mobilized, indoctrinated. For this reason, in contrast with other modern multinational states which had discouraged national consciousness, Politburo members fostered it. They did so because they worried lest there should be further national revolts against Bolshevism; but they also calculated that, by avoiding being seen as imperial oppressors, they would eventually win over all their national and ethnic groups to principles of international fraternity. The central party leaders had not ceased being militant internationalists.