The XXth Century Political History of Russia: lecture materials. Gennady Bordyugov
of suicides committed by peasants in Kiev province because of the excessive rates of the agricultural tax in kind.»
This is why the agricultural tax in kind did not really mean any relief for most of peasants in the situation of famine and economic chaos in 1921 and 1922, and therefore it could not have had a real impact on pacifying the insurgent peasants. The Bolshevik administration decided to crush the peasant movement. In Tambov province, for instance, regular troops under the command of Mikhail Tukhachevsky were deployed for this purpose. He issued a secret order in June 1921: «The remnants of defeated bands that fled from villages are gathering in forests. To immediately clear these forests I hereby command: Use poisonous gases in the forests where bandits are hiding, so that the poison cloud fills all the forest killing anyone hiding in it». Concentration camps were established in the province, families of insurgent peasants who refused to surrender became hostages, and their property was confiscated. But, after comparing various sources, we know that all these government steps were ineffective in suppressing the mass insurgency of peasants.
The scale of the famine of 1921–1922 in Russia and part of Ukraine surpassed by far that of all other famine disasters of previous decades. According to the Central Statistics Office (CSO) over 40 million people from 35 provinces suffered from famine in 1921–1922. According to information from the People’s Commissariat of Agriculture about 60 % of agricultural territories of Russia were affected by the disaster. Famine, and the diseases and epidemics that it provoked, caused over 5 million deaths. Thanks to the aid of overseas organizations – the American Relief Administration first and foremost – the death toll did not increase. The ARA provided food for 10.5 million people at the peak of its activity in August of 1922. Egregiously, this contribution of the United States in saving millions of Russian lives remains unrecognized— even by the current regime of the Russian Federation.
The famine catastrophe had a great demographic, economic, and social impact. The results of a new analysis of the situation in a number of provinces reveal a direct relationship between famine and peasant revolts. The famine was the determinative factor in the pacification of peasant revolts.
The urgent necessity to overcome the crisis and claims by peasants boosted the introduction of market and commodity-money relations. The new Land Code authorized the lease of land and the hiring of labor. Soon after that the agricultural tax in kind was replaced with the unified agricultural tax mostly paid in cash.
With the introduction of the market, private traders appeared in the national economy. The state aimed at privatization of handicraft, small-scale and (some time later) medium-scale industry. The leasing of state companies and licenses to operate (a special form of lease) were authorized. Cooperation was promoted. Industrial companies under the Supreme Council of National Economy were allowed to form trusts. They operated on the basis of self-support, self-finance and self-repayment. Universal labor duty was abrogated, and the system for equal remuneration of labor at state companies was cancelled. In-kind compensation (rations in kind) was replaced with wages. The rationing system was finally cancelled.
Industrial management was decentralized. The number of branch central offices for industrial management was dramatically decreased. The National bank was created to regulate and revitalize finances. It had the right to issue chervonetses (bank bills backed by the gold standard) instead of devaluated Soviet rubles. The ruble became a convertible currency in Russia and abroad by 1924.
These swift and profound changes in economic policy took place at the same time as important steps in state construction. The state of disunity that had followed the collapse of the Russian Empire in 1917–1918 was replaced with a movement toward unification; it resulted in the creation of the United Soviet Socialist Republics in December, 1922. The Russian Communist party played the central role in the unification movement and the creation of a union of equal Slavic (Russia, the Ukraine, Byelorussia) and Transcaucasian republics (Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia). The Central Asian republics (Kirghizia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenia, Tajikistan) joined the union in late 1920s.
In 1923/1924 the Constitution of the USSR was adopted, the USSR government was created and the second chamber of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR was assembled.
The New Economic Policy led to an economic upturn. Agriculture and related branches of industry started to develop. Commerce contributed to the process, creating a nation-wide market. Social stratification began at the same time. The mass of the population began to envy the prosperous life of kulaks and the city bourgeoisie.
The policy was confronted with its first crisis in 1923; it was the «crisis of sales.» At that time, industrial prices were adjusted according to the needs of the countryside. But the desire to get the highest profits possible provoked a rise in prices of industrial goods by more then three times in relation to prices for agricultural production. The unevenness of prices led to a decreased spending capacity in rural areas. The government intervened in the price formation and administratively lowered industrial production prices and increased prices for agricultural production.
The reconstruction process was over by the mid-twenties. However, it was substantially influenced by a reduction in military spending. The armed forces, for instance, were reduced to 600 thousand people from 5.3 million people. Yet the future of the Soviet Union depended on the activity of capitalist powers. A perception of increased military threats could influence the further support of the NEP.
In 1925 the government decided to move towards industrial modernization of the country to place it among developed countries, making it capable of defending its borders. The industrialization program required an increase in grain exports to purchase necessary machinery and equipment.
The new phase of NEP began at the same time as the intensification of the power after the death of the founder of the Soviet state Vladimir Lenin. Leon Trotsky started to actively criticize the expanding bureaucracy because administration functionaries were appointed directly by Joseph Stalin instead of being elected by the people. And since Stalin was the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, the party became the only institution providing access to the nomenklatura. The nomenklatura was to become the basis of Soviet state organization. But Trotsky’s «new course» was based on the idea of free discussion of any issue. He believed that the old guard of the party was turning into a group of «new-style bureaucrats» who had forgotten the language of the revolution and were adopting a «party-style» of speech. This fact made it necessary to replace the old functionaries with new ones.
This was also the moment when Stalin advanced the theory of «Socialism in One Country» – that is, that a socialist regime could be established independently in the USSR. Other party leaders, such as Grigorii Zinoviev and Leo Kamenev, disagreed. They argued that socialism could only triumph if the Western European proletariat revolted as well, which meant in effect a «world revolution.» They regarded Stalin’s theory «national-bolshevist,» implying that it was more nationalist than socialist.
In 1927, with the tenth anniversary of the October revolution at hand the struggle among party leaders became more intense. Besides personal ambitions it was also driven by objective reasons. The NEP had not completely succeeded; it did not reach down to the production collectives – the fundamental components of the economy. Industry could not continue to exist without active state support. Workers demanded an administrative guarantee of their interests, and over a third of the peasantry (proletarians, half-proletarians, and the poor) were directly supported by the government’s intervention in the economy. Tax policy was based on the class principle. The same principle was applied to the elections to different levels of soviets. The bureaucracy became the indispensable component of every sphere of life.
The preceding analysis demonstrates that the country was nearing a historic choice between further pursuit of the NEP and an increase in the centralization of and administrative interference in all domains of state policy. Not only did the new crisis of the NEP reveal all of these contradictions; it also changed the direction of Russia’s development in the 20th century.
Theme 6
NEP DOWNSIZING AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE POLICY OF EXTRAORDINARY MEASURES INTO A PERMANENT SYSTEM OF GOVERNMENT
The end of the 1920s – beginning of the 1930s was a period in which the policy of NEP (New Economic