Suny R.G. (ed.) The Cambridge History of Russia, Volume 3: The Twentieth Century

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the Soviet Union as, ostensibly, an equal, independent member, while Stalin

showed less patience for such language and favoured a more streamlined

structure that left no doubt over the dominance of central authority. Lenin, in

other words, demonstrated a lighter touch regarding the diverse national units

of the Soviet Union, but he, like Stalin, intended to maintain control through

the Communist Party, whose centralised apparatus extended through all of

the republics and ethnic ‘autonomous regions’ that made up the state. As the

process worked itself out – a constitution for the Soviet Union was drafted

in the summer of 1923 and approved by the All-Union Congress of Soviets on

31 January 1924 – Stalin made more verbal concessions than Lenin. But in the

Soviet state that emerged there could be no doubt that authority resided in

Moscow rather than the constituent republics.

That said, for the remainder of NEP party leaders indicated that they would

not rely solely on military paciﬁcation and Politburo commands. The Soviet

Union took shape as an assemblage of national or ethnic units, and the Kremlin

advanced the line that national identity was an inevitable feature of incipient

socialism as well as capitalism. Following Lenin, the party even stipulated

that past Russian oppression had indeed given rise to valid complaints among

numerous ethnic groups now inhabiting the Soviet Union. The proper policy,

then, was to accept national sentiment and steer it in healthy directions, away

from those who might fan such passions in opposition to socialism and the

Soviet state. As long as national loyalties did not threaten Soviet unity, they

might be permitted as a means of rendering Soviet rule more palatable. If

power could be made to seem local rather than Russian, in other words, the

leadership would take great strides in holding the Soviet Union together and

gaining support for its policies. Such was the party’s strategy during NEP, and

it unfolded along two lines. The state declared its intent to support (or even

help create) national languages and cultures, while also seeking local people to

ﬁll positions in the administrative organisations of their regions. If this could

be done, the face of authority would appear less alien and incomprehensible.

The party’s approach, known eventually as indigenisation (korenizatsiia),

soon produced striking changes. Local candidates were heavily recruited for

party membership in their republics and smaller regions, transforming party

ranks ﬁlled mainly by Russians just a few years before. By 1927, for example,

over half the members and candidate members of the Communist Party in a

11 Jeremy Smith, The Bolsheviks and the National Question, 1917–23 (New York: St Martin’s

Press, 1999); Carr

ere d’Encausse, Great Challenge; Terry Martin, ‘An Afﬁrmative Action

Empire: The Soviet Union as the Highest Form of Imperialism’, in Suny and Martin,

State of Nations.

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number of republics (Ukraine, Belorussia, Armenia and Georgia) belonged to

the republic’s titular nationality, while in Central Asia over 40 per cent of the

party’s cadre in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan came from the local, non-Russian

population. As for administrative bodies, notably the executive committees of

regional soviets, non-Russians accounted for two-thirds to four-ﬁfths of the

membership in Ukraine, Belorussia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Turkmenistan and

Uzbekistan.

At the same time the party encouraged the use of indigenous languages

and art forms as tools for promoting socialist practices. With this approach,

‘national in form, socialist in content’ as Stalin put it, the Kremlin’s proprietors

hoped not only to pacify but to guide their multi-ethnic domain to a new society

where, eventually, a universal socialism would supplant the scores of national

cultures whose narrower outlook the community had ﬁnally outgrown. It

was a tolerant strategy, characteristic of NEP’s concessions in other areas, but

this also made it another of NEP’s gambles. Just as no one could be certain

about the consequences of permitting private trade on the road to socialism,

it remained to be seen if national forms might eclipse or disﬁgure socialist

content.

In the meantime, though, NEP’s largest gamble lay elsewhere, for whatever

the nature of Moscow’s policy towards the nation’s far-ﬂung ethnic groups,

most Soviet citizens were Slavic peasants. This enduring aspect of Russian life

the revolution could not change, at least during NEP, and peasant villages

with their traditional communes continued to dominate the landscape as

they had for centuries. But if the events initiated in 1917 left Soviet Russia a

peasant society, they nevertheless transformed the countryside. Gone were

the nobles’ estates and even many of the most substantial peasant holdings.

Over 100 million peasants had seized these properties and parcelled them out

among themselves, yielding a rural panorama that consisted almost entirely of

small plots. Roughly 85 per cent of the Russian Republic’s peasant households

workedﬁelds of less than 11 acres in 1922 and did so with fewer than twodraught

animals per family. Although a more modern plough had largely replaced the

archaic wooden scratch-plough by the end of the decade, most work was

still performed manually by humans and horses. As late as 1928, hand labour

accounted for three-quarters of the spring sowing, and it took place in ﬁelds

where less than 1 per cent of the ploughing had been done by tractors.

12 George Liber, Soviet Nationality Policy, Urban Growth, and Identity Change in the Ukrainian

SSR, 1923–1934 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Martin, ‘Afﬁrmative

Action Empire’; Smith, Bolsheviks and National Question.

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Here were the people the Kremlin hoped to mollify in 1921 by abandoning

grain requisitions and permitting free trade of surplus produce. The new

grain tax for 1921/2 was set at 57 per cent of the requisition target for the

previous year, and only a fraction of this was actually collected. Even in the

best of conditions the Bolsheviks’ ﬂedgling government was not capable of

fanning out through the boundless countryside to gather the tax, and 1921

was far from the best of years. The famine that had begun to strangle several

grain-producing provinces in the Volga basin, combined with the disruption

of agriculture left by the civil war, yielded a grain harvest of less than half the

average garnered before the First World War. So severe was the famine that

stricken regions found the grain tax waived altogether as ﬁelds dried up and

life drained from villages. Only by late 1922 had the worst passed. The nation’s

peasants improved their harvest almost 40 per cent that year, and the following

one was better still. After 1922 the rural population grew rapidly until the end

of the decade and as early as 1926 approached 120 million (over 80 per cent of

the nation’s total). That same year, the grain harvest exceeded the best return

of the tsarist era, while the number of cows, pigs, sheep and goats had already

recovered to totals above pre-war levels. At last the peasantry closed a decade

of calamities that had begun in 1914 and extinguished as many as 15–20 million

lives.

The Bolsheviks, of course, sought not a return to life as it had been before

these storms, but a new, socialist countryside. Although NEP signalled no

wavering in this desire, it did announce that the transition would be made

peacefully. Whatever Lenin had said about the peasants previously, he felt by

1921 that a union or bond between workers and peasants – called the smychka

and symbolised by the hammer-and-sickle emblem – was not only essential

for the survival of his government but also represented the key for build-

ing socialism in Russia. As the country industrialised, the proletariat would

supply the peasants with manufactured household goods and agricultural

equipment (especially tractors) through such channels as rural co-operatives,

while peasants would deliver food to the co-operatives for shipment to their

urban comrades. Such an exchange, it was hoped, would breathe life into the

smychka and serve to persuade peasants to join (or form) co-operatives. They

would not be forced. Lenin and other Bolshevik defenders of NEP believed

that co-operatives possessed such striking advantages over conventional

13 Viktor Danilov, RuralRussiaunderthe NewRegime, trans.Orlando Figes (London:Hutchin-

son, 1988); Moshe Lewin, Russian Peasants and Soviet Power: A Study of Collectivization

(Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1968); Nove, Economic History.

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village ways that peasants could be enticed to join, once model co-operatives

were established for them to observe.

To be sure, it would require some time to launch such a network throughout

the country and revive industry to the point where it could saturate the co-

operatives with attractive goods. But the passing of the civil war gave the

Bolsheviks time, and by the end of 1922 it ﬁnally seemed to be on their side in

the villages. Co-operatives marked the beginning, and once they were securely

rooted, peasants would be prepared to recognise the virtues of pooling their

strips of land in collective farms. The advantages of mechanisation and other

modern techniques demonstrated on model collective farms would convince

peasants to drop their attachment to the unproductive practices of bygone

generations. Then, as collective farms gained members at an accelerating pace

without coercion reminiscent of the civil war’s grain requisitioning, Bolsheviks

wouldwitness the triumph of socialism in the countryside. So ran ofﬁcial hopes

during NEP.

One thing that did carry over from the civil war was the Bolsheviks’ view of

a stratiﬁed rural society. Out in the villages, they afﬁrmed, lived three distinct

groups. Poorpeasants (roughly one-third of the total) possessed little or no land

and often worked as hired labourers. Their ‘proletarian’ condition was thought

to render them natural allies for the party’s rural policies. A much larger

group, the ‘middle peasants’, were described as those with enough land and

livestock to support a meagre existence. Winning them over to co-operatives

and ultimately socialism would demand considerable exertion, party ofﬁcials

believed, and it became the Kremlin’s most ambitious goal in the countryside

during NEP. Whenever these efforts proved frustrating, Bolsheviks commonly

pointed in blame at a third rural category, the kulaks. In Soviet ideology these

villagers loomed as a rapacious elite, perhaps 3–5 per cent of the peasant

community. More prosperous in terms of land, livestock and equipment, they

were said to ﬁll the role of rural capitalists exploiting the hired labour of other

peasants in a manner suggested by their label kulak – a ﬁst. Together with the

Nepmen (as private traders were dubbed), they appeared to Bolsheviks as the

‘new bourgeoisie’, and like the Nepmen they experienced discrimination in

such forms as higher taxes and deprivation of the right to vote.

All in all, though, peasants identiﬁed as kulaks were tolerated during NEP

and experienced less badgering than did urban private traders who operated

more directly under the gaze of the authorities. Compared to the years preced-

ing and following NEP, the countryside appeared tranquil. Departing nobles

14 Siegelbaum, Soviet State and Society.

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and other owners of large estates abandoned ﬁelds, forests and meadows to the

peasants, whose tax obligations to the Soviet regime were not backbreaking.

Indeed, the new government left the peasants largely to their own devices,

with rural agitators only occasional visitors to most villages. If some peas-

ants responded warmly to Bolshevik forays – campaigns to spread literacy, for

example, or to introduce modern agricultural or medical techniques – they did

not set the tone in most villages. Here, life went on in harmony with traditions

that the peasantry had found congenial for generations. When harvests began

setting post-revolutionary records by the middle of the decade, it seemed that

Russian history had rarely smiled as brightly on the villages. No doubt few

peasants cared or even realised that the recovery did little to promote NEP’s

strategy for transforming their lives. But the scant progress towards socialism

did not escape notice among Bolsheviks, and it became a matter of greater

urgency as the years passed.

In many respects, then, NEP embraced practices that revolutionaries viewed

with misgiving but felt compelled to tolerate temporarily. This delay on the

journey to socialism might be attributed to the failure of revolution to erupt

in Western countries, or to the destruction left by the civil war, or to stubborn

habits rooted in the population. Whatever the explanation, though, much of

NEP from the activist’s vantage point amounted to concessions that must

yield as soon as possible to superior arrangements appropriate in a social-

ist community. This was obvious regarding the Nepmen and peasant soci-

ety, which did not ﬁt visions of a planned economy supplying necessities to

one and all. In the juridical realm, too, partisans described the family codes

as temporary rather than socialist. The drafters conceded, for instance, that

child-rearing would have to remain centred in traditional family units for

a time, until the state acquired the means to provide a more enlightened

upbringing in collective settings. Nor were myriad differences among nation-

alities expected to ﬁgure in the community desired by Bolshevik prophets.

Korenizatsiia took shape as an attempt to help unify the country and com-

mence the process of socialist development necessary to produce a future

generation no longer concerned with the disparate cultural norms of a frac-

tious past. Analogous concessions appeared in other endeavours, and taken

together they produced a landscape in which socialism remained on the

horizon.

∗∗∗∗∗

Thus, while most peasants and other Soviet citizens doubtless welcomed

NEP as a distinct improvement over the policies and misery of War Com-

munism, many Bolsheviks viewed the legalisation of private business activity

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with consternation. It seemed naive to speak of a brief, orderly retreat when

the doors were opening again to the ‘bourgeoisie’, the class said to have been

overthrown in the ‘Great October Socialist Revolution’ of 1917. Such concerns

surfaced regularly at party meetings, forcing Lenin to argue time and again that

a hostile peasantry would doom the revolution in a country still overwhelm-

ingly rural. NEP has been called a peasant Brest-Litovsk, and so it began –

with concessions unpalatable to Bolsheviks but indispensable, Lenin insisted,

for them to retain power.

Paciﬁcation of the countryside was not the only reason for tolerating pri-

vate economic activity, as Lenin explained on the basis of assumptions widely

shared among Bolsheviks. All could agree, for instance, that socialism presup-

posed a thoroughly industrialised country because industrialisation provided

both a large proletariat and sufﬁcient productive capacity to fulﬁl the material

requirements of the entire population. In addition, it seemed clear to most

party members that they would not industrialise the nation without amass-

ing a grain surplus. Grain could be exported to obtain foreign currency for

purchasing Western technical expertise, and it would be essential for feeding

the growing proletariat. Yet the state could not gather this surplus through

coercion, having adopted the ‘peasant Brest-Litovsk’. The heart of NEP lay

in a hope that peasants would produce a surplus through incentives rather

than compulsion, and Lenin defended the legalisation of private trade as an

important means for inducing the peasantry to boost production. Private

entrepreneurs (and not the state) possessed the numbers, experience and ini-

tiative to offer the peasants desirable products and thereby encourage them

to raise more grain for the market. Anyone who increased the ﬂow of goods

between cities and countryside helped build socialism, Lenin wrote in 1921,

and this included private traders. ‘It may seem a paradox: private capitalism

in the role of socialism’s accomplice? It is in no way a paradox, but rather a

completely incontestable economic fact.’

Still, as private traders gained control of most retail trade in 1921–2 and ran

circles around inexperienced state enterprises, only an optimistic Bolshevik

could accept the spectacle calmly and regard Nepmen as ‘socialism’s accom-

plices’. Facing considerable unease in the party on this score, Lenin returned

often to the argument during the last years of his life. ‘The idea of building

communism with communist hands is childish, completely childish’, he lec-

tured the Eleventh Party Congress in March 1922. ‘Communists are only a

15 V. I. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 5th edn, 55 vols. (Moscow: Gosizdpolit, 1958–65)

(hereafter cited as Lenin, PSS), vol. xliii,p.233.

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drop in the sea, a drop in the sea of people...Wecandirecttheeconomy

if communists can build it with bourgeois hands, while learning from this

bourgeoisie and directing it down the road we want it to follow.’

How long this would take, Lenin was less certain. NEP had been adopted

‘seriously and for a long time’, he emphasised at party meetings, while also

acknowledging that he could not specify how many years the Bolsheviks

would require to operate the economy efﬁciently and render the private sector

obsolete. Uncertainty over NEP’s duration might not have proved so divisive

for the Bolsheviks had Lenin continued to steer the party as he had in the

contentious transition from War Communism to NEP. But his death in 1924,

three months before his ﬁfty-fourth birthday, left the party with neither a

clear sense of how long to abide by NEP, nor a consensus on how to end it

whenever the appropriate time seemed at hand. As a result, when debate over

NEP’s future tore the party after Lenin’s death, both those who desired to

end NEP in short order and those who wanted to prolong it could claim to be

following a Leninist path.

In the meantime, NEP had sanctioned a struggle between the private sector

and the state for the preference of the peasantry and the remainder of the

population. Could the state provide satisfactory merchandise and service to

entice citizens from private shops and marketplaces? For Lenin this was a vital

question, as he emphasised in one of his last works, written for the Twelfth

Party Congress in January 1923: ‘In the ﬁnal analysis the fate of our republic

will depend on whether the peasantry sides with the working class, preserving

this alliance, or allows the “Nepmen”, i.e. the new bourgeoisie, to separate

it from the workers, to split off from them.’

Not only were the stakes high,

but Lenin could even betray concern on occasion that the party appeared to

be losing the contest – a misgiving soon recalled by those determined to end

NEP without delay.

∗∗∗∗∗

At the beginning of the 1920s Lenin was clearly the most formidable of the

Bolshevik leaders. He did not always get his way in party disputes, but his

prestige and inﬂuence stood unrivalled. No one else could have taken the party

on such an abrupt – and, for many Bolsheviks, unpopular – change of course as

the implementation of the New Economic Policy. Among Lenin’s colleagues

in the Politburo, Trotsky seemed the most prestigious in 1922 because of his

prominent role in the October Revolution and his moulding of the Red Army

that saved the revolution during the civil war. If the question of party leadership

16 Lenin, PSS, vol. xlv,p.98. 17 Ibid., pp. 387–8.

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after Lenin were to arise, Trotsky’s name would occur ﬁrst to most Bolsheviks,

whether they viewed his possible ascension with enthusiasm or alarm.

The latter emotion proved more common among other members of the

Politburo, including Stalin. His service to the party had not been as spectacular

as Trotsky’s during the revolution or civil war, and now, at the beginning

of the new decade, he devoted himself to ofﬁces in the party bureaucracy

that did not signal his leadership ambitions to associates in the Politburo.

Neither the Central Committee’s Organisational Bureau, where Stalin had

served since its inception in 1919, nor its Secretariat, which he joined in 1922

as General Secretary, was regarded originally as a locus of power. But their

responsibilities – including the promotion or transfer of provincial cadres and

the appointment of party personnel to carry out decisions of the leadership –

provided a stream of opportunities for an ambitious ﬁgure to expand his own

inﬂuence. This Stalin did, advancing local ofﬁcials who showed potential as

allies,while obstructingthe careers of those seemingly beholden to Trotsky and

other rivals. If Stalin’s ofﬁces appeared benignly administrative at NEP’s birth,

some in the party, including Lenin, formed a different impression before long.

In May 1922 Lenin suffered a stroke that removed him from political and

governmental activitiesforseveral months. He had not recovered fully when he

returned to work in October, and by December more strokes left him partially

paralysed. Aware that the rivalry between Trotsky and Stalin had not ended

along with the civil war, and spurred by his physical deterioration to set down

words of guidance for the party, he dictated a series of notes to his secretary

that became known as his Testament. Over a period of nearly two weeks at the

end of 1922 and the beginning of the new year, Lenin gave voice to assessments

and recommendations that he hoped would be presented to the next party

congress. Some of his attention focused on suggestions for reorganising the

party – expanding the Central Committee, for instance, in the hope that this

would yield a body less susceptible to factional paralysis or schism. But he

seemed most troubled by the tension between Trotsky and Stalin. The early

notes did not clearly favour either man, but Lenin’s ﬁnal dictation abandoned

a dispassionate listing of various party leaders’ strengths and shortcomings to

18 The following pages on the party debates and power struggle during NEP are informed

by discussions in numerous works, including: Stephen Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik

Revolution:A PoliticalBiography,1888–1938(Oxford:Oxford University Press, 1980); Robert

Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary, 1879–1929: A Study in History and Personality (New York:

Norton, 1973); Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Unarmed: Trotsky, 1921–1929(London: Oxford

University Press, 1959); Michal Reiman, The Birth of Stalinism: The USSR on the Eve of the

‘Second Revolution’, trans. George Saunders (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,

1987); and Alexander Erlich, The Soviet Industrialization Debate, 1924–1928 (Cambridge,

Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960).

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direct a scorching attack on the General Secretary alone. ‘Stalin is too rude’,

Lenin declared, ‘and this shortcoming, though quite tolerable in our midst

and in relations among us communists, becomes intolerable in the position of

General Secretary.’

He urged the party to ﬁnd a way to remove Stalin from

this position.

It is not entirely clear what prompted Lenin to change his assessment of

Stalin so dramatically in less than two weeks. Perhaps he was reacting to an

abusive phone call made by Stalin to Lenin’s wife, who had taken down a note

that Lenin asked her to convey to Trotsky (hindering the doctors’ efforts to

care for Lenin, claimed Stalin). Also, Lenin had probably learned enough by

this time to develop vexation over Stalin’s bare-knuckled approach to curtail-

ing Georgian autonomy. In any case, through January and February 1923 Lenin

grew increasingly concerned with Stalin’s treatment of the Georgians. At the

beginning of March he contacted Trotsky on the subject of taking up the Geor-

gian case and broached an even more dramatic move to deprive Stalin of his

political power. That same day, however, Lenin’s health deteriorated sharply.

Almost at once another stroke paralysed much of his body and eliminated

his power of speech, thereby ending his political career well before he died in

January 1924.

The ﬁnal collapse of Lenin’s health in the spring of 1923 triggered the decisive

phase of the struggle between Trotsky and Stalin, with Stalin gaining the upper

hand through his alliance with Politburo colleagues Grigorii Zinoviev and

Lev Kamenev. To Stalin’s partners in this triumvirate, Trotsky appeared the

obvious menace – a high-voltage personality inclined to thrust himself into the

position vacated by Lenin. Trotsky mounted an ineffectual effort to challenge

the triumvirate and could not dislodge them from their pre-eminent position

in the Politburo. Lenin’s Testament lay in the shadows until May 1924, when

it was disclosed to the Central Committee in what must have been a tense

session. After the reading, Zinoviev rose to defuse Lenin’s alarm over Stalin.

The leadership’s harmonious work over the past few months demonstrated

that Lenin need not have harboured any anxiety over the party’s General

Secretary, Zinoviev explained, while Trotsky and Stalin remained silent. The

party would not publish Lenin’s Testament in Stalin’s lifetime.

A few months later, in the autumn of 1924, Trotsky published a long essay

titled The Lessons of October in which he discussed mistakes that revolution-

aries might make when the moment for action arrived. Here he singled out

Zinoviev and Kamenev for their opposition to Lenin’s determination to seize

19 Lenin, PSS, vol. xlv,p.346.

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Building a new state and society: NEP, 1921–1928

power in the October Revolution. They responded in kind by reviewing Trot-

sky’s numerous, often bitter, disputes with Lenin prior to Trotsky’s belated

entry into the Bolsheviks’ ranks. Stalin furthered the campaign to contrast

Trotsky and Lenin, notably in a speech titled ‘Trotskyism or Leninism?’, but

he also hounded Trotsky on a broader theoretical plane, dismissing the latter’s

‘pessimistic’ notion of ‘permanent revolution’. How could one have so little

conﬁdence in the Soviet proletariat and Communist Party to imagine that rev-

olution must spread to the West before the Soviet Union could build socialism,

he asked. Surely the nation’s progressive forces could build ‘socialism in one

country’ without having to wait for assistance from the West that might be

expected following the international triumph of the revolution. The ultimate

victory of communism presumed the spread of revolution to the West, of

course, but in the meantime, contended Stalin, the Soviet Union could set out

to construct socialism on its own.

By the beginning of 1925, Trotsky’s position had deteriorated sufﬁciently for

the Central Committee to remove him as commissar of war. The victory, how-

ever, did not belong to Zinoviev and Kamenev, for as Trotsky’s star dimmed,

Stalin began to distance himself from them in order to form a new alliance

with another set of Politburo members: Nikolai Bukharin, Aleksei Rykov

and Mikhail Tomskii. All three accepted the general assumptions behind the

notion of constructing ‘socialism in one country’, and they believed that the

New Economic Policy represented the most prudent course to follow towards

this end.

Zinoviev and Kamenev, joined in 1926 by their former adversary Trotsky,

were more inclined to view NEP as a retreat from socialism, a dangerous

concession to the nation’s ‘new bourgeoisie’, and an inadequate policy for

extracting enough grain from the countryside to support a rate of industrial

growth that they deemed essential. This ‘Left Opposition’ became the prin-

cipal political challenge to Stalin and his new allies in 1926–7, which meant

that Stalin emerged as a gradualist and defender of NEP. Whether he was gen-

uinely comfortable in this guise or whether it merely served the temporary

requirements of factional struggle, he left most of the public defence of NEP

to Bukharin and the others, while he toiled to derail the careers of ofﬁcials

linked to the opposition.

In this respect, the Stalin–Bukharin faction succeeded with such efﬁciency

that the Left Opposition was thoroughly routed by 1927. During the previous

year, Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev all lost their Politburo seats, and in 1927

the Central Committee dismissed them as well. In November, after authorities

thwarted demonstrations planned by the Left Opposition to marshal popular

185