25. THE NEW ECONOMIC POLICY
January to June 1921
The winter months of 1920–21 jolted Lenin into thinking hard again about state policies. He felt no remorse about his wartime strategy. His policies had ruined the economy, induced popular revolts, isolated the country from diplomatic and financial assistance and engendered military disaster in Poland. But, while he had reluctantly acknowledged that a mistake had been made over Poland, he was singularly unrepentant about the rest. Indeed he had few regrets. But steadily he had been driven to the conclusion that mortal danger would engulf the regime without strategic change. Lenin’s new idea was very simple. He proposed to replace forcible grain requisitioning with a tax-in-kind on grain. Once the peasants had delivered the fiscal contribution assigned to them, he said, they should be allowed to trade their produce in local markets. Private commerce in grain should again be allowed. Lenin successfully put this idea to the Politburo on 8 February 1921.
No great acumen was required of Lenin to invent his New Economic Policy (or NEP). In agricultural essentials it had been advocated since 1918 by the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries and in February 1920 by Trotski, who in 1921 reminded Lenin that the change could have happened a year earlier but for his stubbornness. The NEP was the obvious way to restore the exchange of products between village and town. This was also the prerequisite for ending famine, disease, industrial ruin and popular rebellion. But, if Lenin’s proposal lacked cerebral distinction, it nevertheless demanded political tenacity – and all the biographers of Lenin, despite extolling his feat in winning the Brest-Litovsk dispute in 1918, have understated the equal achievement involved in introducing the NEP.1 The reason is probably that the dispute about the NEP was not as raucous as the controversy over Brest-Litovsk or even as the ‘trade union discussion’. But this should not disguise the obstacles in Lenin’s path. He had to persuade the Politburo, the Central Committee and the Party Congress, and then he had to push the legislation through the Soviet legislative agencies, and even then he had to return and defend the NEP at the Party Conference in May 1921. Without Lenin quite possibly there would have been no NEP. Without the NEP, the Soviet state would have been overwhelmed by popular rebellions.
The policy was exceptionally annoying to his party, which considered a state economic near-monopoly to be a wonderful achievement. This aspect of the party’s ideology had been stiffened through the Civil War, and the Bolsheviks concurred about much more than they disagreed about. Several fundamental policies had become articles of faith. Lenin, who had been toying with ideas for reform in late 1920, was offering a programme of action that seemed to empty Bolshevism of its revolutionary content. Although he remained devoted to the one-party, one-ideology state, he appeared disgracefully keen to abandon state ownership and regulation in the economy.
At the time the party was being buffeted by its so-called ‘trade union discussion’. The dispute had started with Trotski insisting that post-war economic reconstruction needed to operate on the basis of the ‘militarisation of labour’. Trotski wanted to ban strikes and to reduce trade unions to the condition of state organisations. He could not care less about keeping the Bolshevik party as the main instrument of enforcement; he had ignored the party when setting up political commissariats in the Red Army in the Civil War and in 1920 had campaigned for the transference of this system to civilian needs. Trotski also demanded that transport by rail and water should be organised through just such a system.
The dispute was a nightmare for Lenin, who thought Trotski was threatening the unity that had been restored at the Ninth Party Conference. Lenin, while not intending to indulge the trade unions, saw no sense in offending them. But the dispute had got out of hand. Trotski argued that under the dictatorship of the proletariat there was no need for the workers to have a class organisation for protection against their own ‘workers’ state’. Lenin retorted that ‘bureaucratic distortions’ had taken place after the October Revolution and that trade unions still had a useful purpose. A buffer group led by Bukharin formed itself between Lenin and Trotski. The Workers’ Opposition condemned Lenin, Trotski and Bukharin equally. The Democratic Centralists had no agreed position; their members sided with whichever group they fancied. Leaders of each group toured the country trying to drum up support among Bolsheviks in the provinces. Lenin was one of the few leading figures who stayed in Moscow; but even he was preoccupied by the ‘trade union discussion’. As well as producing a lengthy booklet in order to win the debate, he also had to manipulate the levers of factional power to secure victory. Zinoviev travelled around the largest party organisations and Stalin kept watch over the provincial debates from the vantage point of Moscow. To Lenin’s relief, the victory of his group was put beyond serious challenge by February 1921.
Much more important, he argued, was the question what to do to save the October Revolution. The ‘trade union discussion’ was an integral element of this question, but it was not the whole question. Lenin wanted a more direct and fundamental debate. The most effective way to start this was to tackle the policy on food supplies. Only when the party had decided what to do about the acquisition of grain could it begin to sort out its strategic orientation over the next few years.
Yet Lenin could ride two horses at once. He kept on thinking about agrarian policy even while Trotski was ripping the party apart over the trade unions. Lenin did not reveal what had caused his change of mind. But he had talked frequently to peasant representatives at the Eighth Congress of Soviets in December 1920, and he gave audiences to small delegations of peasants in subsequent weeks. He had taken little trips to Yaropolets and Modenovo in the Moscow countryside and spoken to the local villagers. He was left in no doubt that the regime’s popularity stood at its lowest ebb. The evidence coming into the offices of Sovnarkom pointed in the same direction. Lenin was often compelled to absolve provinces from the need to comply with grain-delivery quotas fixed by himself and his government in Moscow. Current policy was unable to feed the country and the situation was getting worse. Soon there were Bolsheviks who were pressing the same case. One of them, V. N. Sokolov, arrived from Siberia where he had witnessed the rural disturbances. Unless the Politburo acted, he privately urged Lenin on 2 February, the problem might turn into a catastrophe.
At the Politburo on the same day a report was given by Bukharin, who had returned from Tambov province. The Politburo at last began to face the fact of ‘peasant uprisings’ across the Russian heartland.2 Tambov was in the Volga region. The leadership of the revolt was a Socialist-Revolutionary, A. S. Antonov. But it was clear that the peasants, many of whom were starving because of the wartime official economic measures and a sudden drought, were infuriated with the Soviet government. Lenin had always taken a dim view of the peasantry of the Volga and in the Civil War he had practised preventive mass repression. In 1921, however, it was too late to apply prevention. The Red Army was needed to crush a rebellion that threatened to bring down the regime. Lenin transferred Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko as political commissar and Mikhail Tukhachevski as commander to carry out the necessary campaign. But this was not enough in itself. There had also to be some steps toward agrarian reform. The October Revolution itself was under threat. It was the Tambov revolt that convinced Lenin that the wartime requisitioning system had to be abolished. But he did not let on to anyone as yet and went on seeing eyewitnesses of the rural scene. One such was the peasant Osip Chernov, who was surprised that the leader of world communism agreed to see him. When Lenin asked him to read out his pencil-written account of his experiences, Chernov told him some uncomfortable truths about the Siberian peasantry. In particular, he pointed out that the richer peasants in that great region had fought against Kolchak as hard as their poorer neighbours and that they were being unfairly treated as anti-Soviet. Chernov stressed that there was no kulak threat there:3
When I’d finished reading, he put the question to me: ‘What’s your background?’ I told him how I belonged to a grou
p of exiled forced-labour prisoners, that I’d been sentenced to forced labour for having belonged to the Socialist-Revolutionary Party but that I now regarded myself as a non-party person and had my own farm in Siberia.
Chernov was precisely the kind of peasant whom the Bolsheviks were routinely designating as a ‘kulak’, depriving him of his entire grain stock and even killing him. Lenin needed to meet people who could talk knowledgeably and frankly. Father Gapon had opened his eyes for him in 1905, and peasants like Osip Chernov were performing the same function in early 1921.
By the time the Politburo next met, on 8 February 1921, Lenin had become a committed advocate: grain requisitioning had to be abolished. Not everyone could be present. The ‘trade union discussion’ was continuing and Trotski and Zinoviev were chasing each other around the Urals trying to maximise support at the forthcoming Party Congress. But four members – Lenin, Kamenev, Stalin and Krestinski – were able to attend. They regarded themselves as being quorate; and having listened to a report by Agriculture Deputy People’s Commissar Nikolai Osinski, Lenin took a single sheet of paper and sketched the agreed change of policy. His ‘Preliminary Rough Draft of Theses on the Peasants’ was the basis for the future NEP. The die had been cast. A working party was set up under Kamenev to fill in the policy details. Not a squeak about the Politburo decision was uttered in public. But on 16 February the Politburo, with some trepidation about the party’s sensitivities, sanctioned the publication of a pro-reform article in Pravda; the joint authors would be low-level Bolshevik activists, not Politburo members.4 Unfortunately A. D. Tsyurupa was upsetting Lenin’s progress by raising objections in the secret working party. The Politburo drew breath and handed the matter to the Central Committee. The tension was tremendous because Central Committee members were already at each other’s throats over the ‘trade union discussion’.
Yet Lenin need not have worried about the Central Committee’s response; meeting on 24 February, its members accepted the working party’s report with just a few modifications.5 By then the depth of the political emergency in the country as a whole was evident. Strikes had broken out in Petrograd, Moscow and the other large industrial cities. There was an incipient mutiny in the Kronstadt naval garrison, and Zinoviev was unsure that he would be able to handle it from his base in nearby Petrograd. Aggravating all this were the peasant uprisings in the Volga region, in Ukraine, in southern Russia and in western Siberia. The disturbances continued even in Moscow. On 2 March, indeed, Kronstadt flared into open mutiny and the Petrograd strikes intensified. Yet still Lenin could not feel confident that his project was accepted in the party. There were plenty of Bolsheviks wishing to continue with the wartime economic programme even if it was provoking armed popular resistance. But Lenin and Trotski were together on this. The revolts were themselves the most powerful argument for reform. When the Central Committee met on 7 March, there was no serious attempt to reverse the Politburo’s agrarian proposals.
The Tenth Party Congress had yet to confirm this. The proceedings started on 8 March and Lenin had prepared well by agreeing a preferred list of members of the new Central Committee at a series of meetings with Stalin and his other closest associates. While he wanted a majority for his faction, Lenin also wanted a sprinkling of Trotskyists, Democratic Centralists and Workers’ Oppositionists to be included. He wanted to control but not to humiliate and exclude the critics. In his Congress opening speech, he acknowledged that a mistake had been made over Poland; he also claimed, surprisingly for a leader who was meant to be the workers’ friend, that too much indulgence had been shown to the working-class consumers at the expense of disgruntled peasants. The party, Lenin said, had to accept military retrenchment, economic reform and intensified political control. He accused the Workers’ Opposition, which appealed for the working class to be enabled to control the factories, of deviating from Marxism. The fact that Marx – and indeed Lenin himself in 1917 – had emphasised the need for workers to control the factories in the era of socialist Revolution was robustly ignored by Lenin. Rather than argue out the case, he announced bleakly that the regime might fall if a consensus on reform and repression did not prevail in the party. As proof he adduced the information about the mutinous talk in the Kronstadt naval garrison. The threat was greater, he declared, than when Kolchak and Denikin had been on the loose.
Towards the end of his speech of two hours he seemed to sense that the Congress, which was being told about the NEP for the first time, might think that he was going soft – or, worse, going pro-peasant and pro-capitalist. He uttered a phrase that chilled the heart:
The peasant must do a bit of starving so as to relieve the factories and towns from complete starvation. On the level of the state in general this is an entirely understandable thing, but we’re not counting on the exhausted, destitute peasant–owner understanding it. And we know you can’t manage without compulsion, to which the devastated peasantry is reacting very strongly.
Plainly the NEP was not going to work by persuasion alone.
As yet there was no answer to the more fundamental question whether the Congress would sanction the NEP. The task was not easy for Lenin. The party had been torn into factions by the ‘trade union discussion’. There was fury even inside Lenin’s faction about the policy on foreign business concessions. There was widespread discontent about the internal organisation of the party since, while some delegates wanted looser discipline, others thought Lenin too gentle. There was confusion about the current diplomatic measures of the party leadership, and not a few delegates wondered how the victories in the October Revolution and the Civil War could be protected and enhanced. Lenin was at his wiliest in coping with the expected tumult. The fact that the Trotskyists, Workers’ Oppositionists and Democratic Centralists were at each other’s throats was helpful. There was no broad agreement on any policy and Lenin had the advantage of at least seeming to know where he wanted the party to go. Others such as Trotski and Shlyapnikov had their own strategy too; but they lacked Lenin’s reputation in the party for getting things right. The April Theses, the October 1917 seizure of power and the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk had acquired canonical status inside the doctrines of Bolshevism. Lenin was regarded as having the party’s wisest head. There was also an affection for him across the factions; he simply did not incur the personal rancour that was provoked by the other two most prominent Politburo members, Trotski and Zinoviev; and the entire party was aware that if it did not reseal its rifts, it would be overwhelmed by the tide of popular resentment.
Only second-rank leaders openly attacked the NEP in principle. Although it was a close-run thing at times, Lenin held out for victory, and victory was his. The NEP, foreign business concessions, Lenin’s trade union policy, the condemnation of the Workers’ Opposition as a deviation from Marxism: all were resoundingly sanctioned by the Congress.
His triumph would not have been achieved with such aplomb if it had not been for events outside the capital. Midway through the Congress came the news from Kronstadt. The naval garrison had risen in revolt. The mutineers demanded an end to terror, to dictatorship, to grain requisitioning and to one-party rule; they despaired of the Bolshevik party and had grown to hate it; they demanded ‘all power to soviets and not to parties’. This was the deepest internal military crisis since the July 1918 uprising of the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries. The Kronstadters, moreover, were renowned as great supporters of the Bolsheviks in 1917. It was an awful time for a mutiny to occur. The Soviet regime was threatened by peasant revolts in Russia, Ukraine, the north Caucasus and western Siberia. A terrible famine had started in the Volga and Ukraine. Industry everywhere was in ruins. Rival political parties had been suppressed, but none of them had given up hope of making a return to public life. Religious and national bodies across the former Russian Empire wanted an end to the communist regime. The great foreign powers – Britain, France, Japan and the United States – wished Soviet Russia nothing but ill. Now even Kronstadt had turned against the Bolsheviks
.
In this situation it was easier than beforehand to urge the Congress that unity was the supreme requirement. Even the Workers’ Oppositionists, whom Lenin was denouncing, volunteered for the military operation to cross the ice from Petrograd to Kronstadt Island. Red Army troops were camouflaged by new white uniforms and rushed north. Trotski went with them, and the fortress of Kronstadt was seized back for the Bolsheviks. Lenin stayed behind and had to wait for news. The most he could do was to produce propaganda, and his Pravda articles were among his most disgraceful travesties of truth. According to Lenin, the Kronstadt mutineers had been duped by the Socialist-Revolutionaries who in turn were the agents of foreign capitalist powers. Lenin, consulting with fellow Central Committee members about the punishment to be meted out to the Kronstadters, demanded ferocious reprisals. The Kronstadt fortress fell to superior numbers. The relief of those Congress delegates remaining in Petrograd was almost palpable. The result was that Lenin’s agrarian reform was not criticised as savagely as it might otherwise have been. He saw his chance and pushed through a resolution banning factional activity from the party altogether. If economic retreat was to succeed, he argued, the Bolsheviks had to strengthen their internal unity. He had won by the skin of his teeth, but he had won.
Yet he had no respite. In the last week of March 1921 the German Communist Party, egged on by the Hungarian communist leader Béla Kun on behalf of Comintern, attempted to seize power in Berlin. Almost certainly this had the support of both Grigori Zinoviev and Nikolai Bukharin, but the planning and execution of the insurrectionary measures were botched. When he heard of the ‘March Action’ Lenin was furious.
Lenin: A Biography Page 56