The year 1923 witnessed the famous ‘scissors crisis’, a complete reversal of the price relationships of the previous year. In essence, agriculture had now begun to recover more quickly than industry. Although food was still not abundant, the shortage was no longer desperate. The supply of agricultural products thus outstripped the production of manufactured goods; as a result the index for industrial prices in 1923 rose to a level three times higher than agricultural prices. When plotted on a graph, these price indices—industrial prices rising, agricultural prices falling—resembled scissors, hence the name. In response, peasants resorted to grain-hoarding and a low level of marketing in the subsequent two years; that caused agricultural prices to recover in 1924–5, although obviously not in the way the state desired. As a result, the scissors crisis further exposed the fragility of NEP, suggested an incompatibility of private agricultural and industrial sectors, and—perhaps of greater long-term significance—reinforced the chronic fears of the kulak.
Nevertheless by 1924 the national economy began a recovery of sorts. Industrial reconstruction proved deceptively rapid: restarting factories closed during the civil war caused a sharp rise in manufacturing output. Supply networks also began to function once again: the workers who had fled during the civil war and famine made their way back to the plants. As a result, the output of large-scale industry reached nearly half its pre-war scale in 1924 and 75 per cent a year later. Industrial exports rose to nine times what they had been at the beginning of the decade, even if still but a third of pre-war figures. Recovery was still more marked in agriculture: by 1924 the cultivation of arable land approached 1913 levels, and marketable output in agriculture increased 64 per cent between 1922 and 1925.
But this was recovery, not expansion of the pre-war base. And industry, in particular, soon reached a point of diminishing returns. Seven years of warfare, followed by new hardships in the early 1920s, had destroyed a significant portion of the industrial base. There had been virtually no renewal of the capital stock since before the First World War; what the Russian civil war had not destroyed was badly worn or outmoded. Restarts could increase output, but without significant new investment it could never reach the pre-war standard. But that was precisely the Bolsheviks’ charge: to create the industrial foundation for socialism. And trade and foreign investment, although up considerably after 1921, fell far short of underwriting a venture of such magnitude.
This was the context of the party debate over industrialization. All leading protagonists agreed that the transformation was necessary and that the peasantry would absorb the chief cost. But they disagreed on three main issues: (1) tempo; (2) whether short-term development would centre first in heavy or light industry; and, (3) the degree of peasant entrepreneurship the state would tolerate during the process. Simply put, all sides agreed that capital investment would be generated in agriculture and ‘pumped over’, as the communists phrased it, to the industrial sector. The left—Trotsky and the economist Evgenii Preobrazhenskii, joined later by Zinoviev and Kamenev—favoured the rapid development of heavy industry and the substitution of centralized planning for the market. The right—Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomskii—championed a gradual tempo, the development of consumer goods manufacturing, and above all an alliance (smychka) with the peasantry. In their view, a tax on peasant profits could generate the needed investment capital. Scholars frequently present Stalin’s position as simply opportunistic. In one popular scenario, he first cynically sides with the right; then, after the left was politically defeated in 1927, he shifts maliciously to a position even more radical than that of Trotsky–Preobrazhenskii in order to attack the right.
In reality, the politics was more subtle and complex. It began in 1924, when Preobrazhenskii addressed the Bolsheviks’ need to create the material pre-conditions for socialism in Russia. Marx had written that in the early stages of Western industrialization, entrepreneurs practised ‘primitive capitalist accumulation’ by denying workers the full value of their labour and by reinvesting a significant portion of the surplus profit. Preobrazhenskii called for something analogous in the USSR. Since, however, the majority of toilers were not factory workers, but peasants, Preobrazhenskii proposed a ‘primitive socialist accumulation’ by turning the terms of trade against the peasantry. By setting state prices for agricultural produce artificially low but artificially high for industrial goods, the state could create the analogue of profit to be reinvested. This position, with its hostility towards peasant prosperity and to market economics, signalled a fundamental attack on NEP.
Bukharin countered in 1925. He argued that the Preobrazhenskii plan risked alienating the peasants, and he reiterated the logic of the smychka. Not exploiting but taxing a prosperous peasantry made more economic and political sense. For Bukharin, industrialization would best result from a healthy economy that was reinvigorating itself in stages from the bottom upward. In this spirit he borrowed a phrase attributed to François Guizot that would haunt him politically: hoping to drive home the importance of grass-roots prosperity for long-term economic growth, Bukharin encouraged the peasants to ‘enrich yourselves’. He warned that investment in heavy industry, as Preobrazhenskii proposed, was suicidal: such ventures required several years to produce a return, and in the interim the Soviet economy would collapse. Investment in the production of consumer goods, he reasoned, was more rational in an impoverished country that needed a rapid return on its limited capital. Preobrazhenskii replied that Bukharin’s more gradual tempo posed the larger danger. What was left of the national economy would erode while implementing it.
Stalin was not simply opportunistic: he too was a proponent of heavy industrialization in 1924–5, but in his own way. At that time Stalin was politically aligned with Bukharin, and he allowed Bukharin the main role in articulating their public position against the opposition. It is doubly significant, however, that Stalin’s formula of ‘socialism in one country’ in December 1924 ascribed primary importance to the development of heavy industry. Of even greater importance, before 1925 had ended, Stalin took special care to distance himself publicly from Bukharin’s slogan ‘enrich yourselves’, which opponents of Bukharin denounced as excessively sympathetic to the kulaks.
It is, of course, beyond question that Stalin wanted fervently to become party leader in the 1920s, but this does not mean that he desired only power, free of ideological or policy preferences. Something far more complex guided his behaviour. Stalin adjusted his short-term course of action several times during the decade in response to manifold crises, but the same can be said of all party leaders. More significant is his unwavering commitment to certain ideas—above all, an ongoing preference for heavy industry and an abiding fear that kulaks withholding grain from the market could undermine the state and its programmes. Equally consistent was his antidote of using state power to deal with recalcitrant social elements. Thus, when Stalin attacked the right opposition in late 1927–early 1928, this marked an assault on his remaining political rivals and an intensification of a position he had defined by mid-decade. In early 1928, when he blamed the kulaks for the grain shortage (and, by extension, for jeopardizing the industrialization programme) he certainly brought his ideas more clearly into public view, but they were nothing new. The Stalinist tempo of industrialization and collectivization would later outstrip anything Trotsky and Preobrazhenskii had envisioned, but it was foreshadowed in the positions he established earlier against gradualism in industrialization and against NEP agriculture.
The full scope of economics, however, reached far beyond policy-making at the national level. Local considerations loomed large, for NEP pulled the state and society in contradictory and frequently conflicting directions. It ended outright starvation, but not hard times. It also renewed social antagonisms: most Russians still struggled to subsist, while private traders—the Nepmen—often made exorbitant profits and enjoyed a life-style of conspicuous consumption.
The petulance of lower officials, in combination with a li
mited enthusiasm at the top, produced an inconsistent implementation of NEP in various regions of the country. Private trade was legal but not secure. Some local officials disobeyed national directives and arrested Nepmen on the basis of laws already repealed, or simply on their own whim. In 1923–4, as Lenin lay dying, the national leadership responded to public resentment against Nepmen by arbitrarily closing 300,000 private enterprises. This proved short-sighted: by late 1924 it was clear that the state itself could not provide many of the services it had eliminated. In some locales, driving out the private traders had closed up all supplies; areas called ‘trade deserts’ sprang up where Nepmen had previously operated. But the period 1925–7—not coincidentally the high point of Bukharin’s influence—brought a policy reversal; it was during these years that the Soviet state showed its greatest tolerance of private enterprise under NEP. Understandably sceptical of resuming business at first, many Nepmen had to be reconvinced of the state’s sincerity, but by the end of 1927 the market was in full swing again.
The following year, however, brought yet another change of course. In early 1928 Stalin’s rhetoric against the ‘right deviation’ began to include talk of a showdown with both kulaks and Nepmen. The state used administrative measures to crack down on private entrepreneurs, and it increased business taxes exponentially. If a Nepman somehow scraped together enough to pay an initial levy the tax-collector doubled the bill on his next visit. The state even applied a retroactive tax to those who had already gone out of business. Those who could not pay had their possessions seized and were thrown into the street; they lost access to ration cards, housing, and other public services. The entire process could take as little as three days.
Their fate as lishentsy aroused scant sympathy. NEP had brought back not only the market, but also prostitution, gambling, drugs, and other affronts to public morality. The fact that many Nepmen flaunted their wealth caused deep anger. Moreover, the preferential treatment the state gave the trained specialists, engineers, and factory managers from the old regime, who were technically not Nepmen per se, did nothing to make NEP more popular with the masses. In a different vein, a large number of Russians distrusted the profit motive and operated from the belief that personal enrichment can come only at the expense of another. The prevailing prices beyond the means of most citizens certainly reinforced this view. In the end, Nepmen became the focus of all these resentments.
The lowest level of the economy experienced additional problems. Stricter cost-accounting in reopened factories and the demobilization of six million Red Army soldiers increased unemployment from 640,000 in 1923 to more than 1.3 million in 1929. In addition, rural poverty drove the desperate into the cities despite the shortage of jobs. Moscow, for example, gained 100,000 new residents per year. Not surprisingly, the major urban centres experienced acute housing problems: not enough spaces and chronic disrepair in overcrowded, occupied units. The homeless population overwhelmed urban social services. Gangs of homeless orphans, the besprizorniki, in combination with the unemployed, contributed to a serious rise in crime as both groups fed an expanding corps of thieves, petty hoodlums, and prostitutes.
The situation, however, was not universally bleak. Workers’ real wages rose steadily, albeit slowly, throughout the decade. By the late 1920s the shortages of goods and services were far less serious than at the beginning of NEP. The Soviet state could point to legitimate improvements in public health, working conditions, and infant mortality rates. And if workers still devoted too much of their income and energy to acquiring housing, food, and clothing, the standard of living stood well above that of 1918–21.
The village underwent its own transformation. By 1921 millions had acquired private holdings from the seizure of land belonging to the nobility, Church, crown, and richer peasants. As a result, the number of farms rose sharply, but the average size fell. In addition, the peasant commune—subjected to a frontal assault in the Stolypin reforms—reappeared. And when the commune reinstituted traditional, collective modes of cultivation, agriculture regressed technologically. Inefficient strip-farming, along with the primitive three-field system of crop rotation, once again predominated. In 1928 more than five million households utilized the traditional wooden plough, the sokha; the scythe and sickle still reaped half the annual harvest. Such backwardness of technique meant a low yield per acre, which in turn aggravated the long-standing peasant ‘land hunger’. With more mouths to feed than such agriculture could support, the village had to push its marginal elements towards the city.
This village economics both influenced and was influenced by other realities. Social differentiation in the rural areas narrowed;as extremes of income closed, categories such as kulak, middle peasant, and poor peasant became blurred. Moreover, the Soviet state had only a minimal administrative presence in the countryside. After grain requisitioning ended in 1921, the villages had recouped much of their pre-revolutionary insularity and control over internal affairs. Although rural soviets formally held power, the peasant commune actually exercised the principal authority over day-to-day economics and law. And it was not until 1925 that the Communist Party made a serious attempt to increase membership in its rural organizations. In short, the Russian village—historically separated from and suspicious of the towns—closed ranks. In 1921–9, it identified with its own past and its own interests, not with Bolshevik visions of a revolutionary transformation.
‘The New Soviet Man’
Despite upheavals, the Bolsheviks did not narrow their social vision, which went far beyond the transfer of political authority, reassessment of foreign relations, and redistribution of goods and services discussed thus far. While that political and economic reorientation was a mandatory first step, the Bolsheviks understood ‘revolution’ more broadly: it must also encompass a fundamental transformation of not only social institutions, but also values, myths, norms, mores, aesthetics, popular images, and traditions. Ultimately, the result would be not only a citizen of a new type (known in Bolshevik parlance as ‘the new Soviet man’) but nothing less than the recasting of the human condition for the better.
In 1921–9, therefore, a central element in the process the Bolsheviks called ‘building socialism’ was the inculcation of a new world-view. Bolshevism held that if Russia were to progress from its present condition through socialism to communism, society would have to understand its collective experience in a new way, that is, in terms of the rational application of scientific principles to human development. As Marxists, the Bolsheviks believed this would promote a more objective understanding of social existence that would, in turn, achieve greater mass co-operation and co-ordination among citizens. As Russian revolutionaries, they also intended that it would enable science and technology to help overcome economic and material backwardness.
Such an undertaking presented a multi-faceted challenge. At the very least it required extensive utilization of state power, and central authorities initiated ambitious projects—ranging from the eradication of illiteracy to the electrification of the whole country. By the end of NEP, the regime would ultimately use its administrative power to attempt to reconceptualize law, eliminate religious superstitions, recast education, and in general construct a proletarian culture in both the aesthetic and sociological sense. But wielding power was not enough: the Bolsheviks recognized that they could not simply impose new modes of thinking on society. Laws and decrees alone, even when backed by repression, could not automatically alter popular consciousness. They therefore also launched an unprecedented effort to educate and indoctrinate the masses.
Some campaigns to create the ‘new Soviet man’ addressed specific audiences. Party organizations such as the Zhenotdel (Women’s Department) and the Komsomol (Young Communist League) concentrated on distinct groups, but suffered from the fact that—as in politics and economics—the party did not speak with a single voice. Even before the announcement in early 1930 that the Zhenotdel would be disbanded, for example, tepid support from the party leade
rship and open hostility from local officials undercut agitational and instructional work among women. For its part, the Komsomol instructed adolescents on topics as diverse as basic politics and sexual morality, but was frequently criticized for accomplishing little.
Other messages focused on correcting specific problems and were aimed at society as a whole. To deal with the problem of chronic alcohol abuse, for example, the Bolsheviks initially continued the prohibition policy adopted by the tsarist state in 1914. When this failed to stem the widespread production of illegal spirits, the government conceded defeat and in 1925 reintroduced the state production of vodka. In a different instance, until conservatives finally prevailed in mid-1929, reformers sought to improve criminal justice by making penalties more lenient and taking into account the circumstances surrounding crime. To cite a third case, the state took steps to improve public health and sanitation. Building on reforms initiated in the last decades of imperial Russia, the People’s Commissariat of Health raised the level of professionalism in health care markedly after 1921; preventive medicine and the curtailment of infectious diseases subsequently made impressive strides. But inadequate funding impeded additional plans to improve sanitation, and the reluctance of doctors to take rural posts left medicine in the countryside largely in its pre-revolutionary condition.
In their effort to create a new social ethos, the Bolsheviks also devoted special energy to redefining the family and the individual. Perceiving the patriarchal, religiously sanctioned family as tsarist society in microcosm, Soviet state legislation in 1918 gave official recognition only to civil marriages, made divorce readily available, declared the legal equality of women, and granted full rights to children born out of wedlock. Subsequent decrees stripped fathers of their extensive legal and proprietary authority over wives and children and dropped adultery from the list of criminal offences. Easing the divorce law had particularly rapid and widespread ramifications. Under tsarism, civil and church law made divorce impossible except for a few, and then only after lengthy proceedings. Allowing Soviet citizens to dissolve marriages easily produced a true social revolution. In addition to contributing to a general atmosphere of emancipation for all citizens, liberalizing divorce assaulted patriarchal authority, provided women with new social latitude, and co-opted a valued prerogative of the Russian Orthodox Church.
Russia A History Page 37