The period of the New Economic Policy ranged between the years 1921-28 in the union of Soviet socialist republics. A detailed study of this Policy and its repercussions can only be carried out with some knowledge of the events leading up to this period.
The period of the New Economic Policy ranged between the years 1921-28 in the union of Soviet socialist republics. A detailed study of this Policy and its repercussions can only be carried out with some knowledge of the events leading up to this period.
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The period of the New Economic Policy ranged between the years 1921-28 in the union of Soviet socialist republics. A detailed study of this Policy and its repercussions can only be carried out with some knowledge of the events leading up to this period.
Copyright:
Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
Available Formats
Download as DOC, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
Q: Analyse the main developments in the Soviet State, economy and
society in the period of the New Economic Policy (NEP). A: The period of the New Economic Policy ranged between the years 1921-28 in the Union of Soviet Socialist Rupublics. However, a detailed study of this Policy and its repercussions can only be carried out with some knowledge of the events leading up to this period. The starting point is the October Revolution of 1917, when the Bolshevik Party seized power in an almost bloodless coup from the Provisional Government, which had itself come into being with the fall of tsarism in the February Revolution of 1917. The Provisional Government was first led by Prince George Lvov and then by Alexander Kerensky as Prime Ministers. However, this government was not able to make decisive decisions regarding the military situation of Russia (during World War 1), holding of democratic elections, the growing economic chaos and some other smaller issues, which eventually led to another change of power at the Centre. Lenin and the Bolsheviks first heavily criticized the government, and then took advantage of the power vacuum that had emerged at the Centre, because the Provisional Government’s authority was greatly undermined by the fact that it had to share power with the Petrograd Soviet. With Trotsky’s careful planning, the Bolshevik Red Guards occupied all key positions during the night of October 24-25 (by the old Julian Calender, which was being used in Russia at the time) in the name of the Soviets, and later arrested all ministers of the Provisional Government, except Kerensky, who managed to escape. The takeover was not so smooth in other places like Moscow, where fighting lasted for a week, and other cities were only brought to heel by the end of November, but eventually a new government was established. However, at this point the Bolsheviks lagged far behind the Social Revolutionaries (SRs) Party in terms of mass support. When there was a sustained call for elections by various opposition parties which quickly recovered from the shock of the Bolsheviks seizing power, Lenin and Trotsky had no illusions as to the outcome. The Social Revolutionaries were far ahead of the Bolsheviks in terms of popular support, as was evident at the Second Congress of Soviets, which was essentially convened soon after the takeover of power, in order to ratify the actions of the Bolsheviks. At a point in the Congress, the Mensheviks and SRs walked out, leaving the Bolsheviks in a majority. Lenin then took the stage to thunderous applause, and the Congress could then ratify the takeover. This move legitimized the takeover of power by the Bolsheviks in the name of the Soviets. The results of the elections found the SRs as the single largest party, which had about 40.4% of the votes. The Bolsheviks had only about 24% of the vote. As such, when the Constituent Assembly met in January 1918, the SRs refused to recognize the Bolshevik government, which was not willing to form a coalition with any other Party or share power in any way. After a night of heated speeches and refusals, Lenin sent in the Red Guards to disperse the Assembly, which was not allowed to meet again. He simply argued that as the Bolsheviks were already in power and knew what the workers really wanted, this dispersal was justified. Over the next three years, however, the groups which had supported the Bolsheviks because of Lenin suddenly changing the Bolsheviks’ political strategy, found that the Bolsheviks were not going to fulfill their promises. With these groups turning hostile to the Bolsheviks, and a mixed bag of SRs, Mensheviks, ex-tsarist officers, foreign governments (Britain, France, USA etc.) and other groups which were against the new government, banding together (the ‘Whites’), the country slipped into Civil War. In this Civil War, the Bolsheviks were known as the ‘Reds.’ The Red Army was better organized, outnumbering the Whites greatly, and was under the inspired leadership of Trotsky, who was appointed as the Commissar for War. The Whites were a group of different backgrounds and ideologies, who had simply banded together against the Bolsheviks to fight them. They were not as cohesive as the Reds. Lenin took decisive measures, which he termed later as ‘War Communism’ to fight the Whites. Under this, all factories were nationalized, all private trade was banned and grain was seized at a fixed rate (decided and paid by the government) from peasants to feed the towns and troops. Lenin was also able to present the Reds as a nationalist government fighting against foreigners. While there was much public hatred for war communism and other measures, the Whites were even more unpopular because of their foreign connections. Under the circumstances, by the end of 1919 it was clear that the Reds were going to win the Civil War. The task now at hand for Lenin and the Bolsheviks (who now called themselves communists) was rebuilding the country, whose economy had been shattered by the First World War and the Civil War. The main political problem now for Lenin was disagreement and criticism from inside the communist party. In March 1921, ‘factionalism’ was banned within the party. This meant that discussions and debates on issues would be allowed, for Lenin did not behave as a dictator, and persuaded rather than decreed, but once a decision had been taken, all sections of the party would have to accept it. Those who persisted in holding different views from the official party line would be expelled from the Party. As such, during 1921, about one-third of the party members were ‘purged’ (expelled) with the help of the ruthless secret police, the Cheka. Another political development of the time was the adoption of the first Soviet Constitution by the Fifth All-Russian Congress of Soviets. It was promulgated on July 10, 1918. It created the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic, or RSFSR. Local soviets elected delegates to a provincial Congress of Soviets and provincial congresses, in turn, elected the membership of the All-Russian Congress of Soviets. This elected the Executive Committee, and the Council of People’s Commissars. Elections were open, and organized on a class basis, with industrial workers being especially heavily represented. The Communist Party, particularly the Central Committee and Political Bureau (first headed by Lenin), dominated the government apparatus and the same leading communists occupied top positions in both Party and Government. On December 30, 1922, a new Constitution brought the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics into being. The NEP was then introduced by Lenin, perhaps as a temporary solution to Russia’s economic problems. The most notable communists (Lenin and Trotsky, among others) admitted that capitalism existed in Russia, but had not developed to the extent that Marxism allowed for before social conditions would be ripe for a Socialist Revolution. In the context of this argument, we can understand the reasons behind Lenin’s implementation of the NEP. War communism had been very unpopular with the peasants. They saw no point in working hard to produce more food, as it was simply taken away from them at prices decided by the state. They had begun to produce only enough for their own needs, which led to a severe shortage of food in the cities and towns. The shortages were aggravated by droughts in 1920-21. Industry was almost at a standstill after the war. Unrest began to manifest itself in the form of a serious naval mutiny at Kronstadt, the celebrated island naval base in the Gulf of Finland. Trotsky suppressed it quickly, but this convinced Lenin that some drastic measures had to be taken. His answer to this was the NEP. Riasonovsky terms the NEP as “a temporary retreat of Socialism.” It was a period of relaxation of the economy in order to let the country recover from the wars. An important detail to be noted is that the NEP only provided for economic relaxation. The State retained full political control at the time. The communists had fought tooth-and-nail for their victory, and were not going to endanger it in any way. This can be contrasted with USSR under Mikhail Gorbachev. At this time, in 1985 onwards, reform was required in two areas: the communist party and government, and the economy. Gorbachev believed that these reforms could only happen one at a time, and introduced the political reforms first, without any real economic innovations. He introduced policies like glasnost and perestroika, which backfired as it gave the people freedom without the state being able to use force upon them effectively. This perhaps accelerated, if was not amongst one of the most important causes for the collapse of USSR. Under the NEP, large and medium industries were entirely controlled by the state through the policy of nationalization. Foreign trade and commerce, too, was monopolized by the state. As such, coal, iron and steel, power, transport and banking remained with the state. Often, however, old managers had to be brought back, as well as some capitalist incentives like bonuses and piece-rates. Private enterprise was allowed to a very limited extent. Plants employing fewer than twenty workers were allowed, but there was no cap on the number of such units that an individual could own. It must be noted, however, that during the NEP the government demanded that state industries account for costs and pay for themselves. Retail trade was opened to individuals in the course of this policy as well. 75% of retail trade fell into private hands. A class of ‘Nepmen,’ or small businessmen allowed to operate by the new policy, emerged and then increased as well. One of the most important points of the NEP was the establishment of a definite tax on agricultural produce, which could be paid in money or in kind. It was a certain percentage of the produce that a peasant grew. The remaining grain could be sold on the free market by the peasants. This was the incentive provided to increase grain production within the country after the drastic effects of war communism and droughts had nearly brought about a crisis. A limited use of hired labour in agriculture was also allowed, which, in a sense, started distinguishing between richer and poorer peasants, creating a sort of class difference. The restricted lease of land to other individuals was also allowed. However, Lenin probably first envisioned collective farms with full state control to be the future of communist USSR, and the reforms here were perhaps only meant to be temporary, till recovery was assured. The term Kulak came into being, which referred to the wealthy peasants in the villages, who Kamenev and Zinoviev disapproved of and saw as direct enemies of communism. The word kulak means ‘fist,’ and came to designate a prosperous peasant, a man who held on tightly to what was his. It also has connotations of exploitation and greed attached to it. The Eleventh Party Congress declared as early as 1922 that no further “retreat” from Socialism could be tolerated. In 1924 and 1925, the Government introduced certain measures to restrict the Nepmen, and in 1927 to limit the kulaks. The currency system had just about completely collapsed by the time USSR emerged out of the Civil War. The government revamped the entire economic and currency system, which had fallen very low in value when compared with other currencies. A new unit of currency, Chervonet, was also introduced, a number of which made up a Rouble. The NEP was moderately successful. The economy began to recover, and great progress was made with the electrification of industry. When the NEP began to be abandoned towards the end of 1927, the Russian peasant was probably better off than at any time since 1914. Factory production in 1913 was 10,251 million roubles. It fell to 2,004 million roubles in 1921, and rose to 11,083 million roubles in 1926. Steel production in 1913 was 4,231,000 tons; 183,000 tons in 1921; and 3,141,000 tons in 1926. Grain harvest was 80.1 million tons in 1913; 37.6 million tons in 1921; and 76.8 million tons in 1926. However, there were disputes within the Party as to how far the NEP should be carried. There existed the various views of the Left faction, the Right faction and the Central faction within the communist party, who only grew more vocal after Lenin’s death in January 1924. Lenin’s death intensified the struggle for power, with the above-mentioned factions all fighting for supremacy. Ultimately, Stalin emerged victorious. The Left position was best developed by Trotsky, and maintained that without world revolution, socialism in Russia was doomed. He was of the view that socialist movements abroad had to be supported first, while socialism within Russia should be developed as well. Trotsky was against the NEP, and also criticized Stalin for his destruction of democracy within the Party. Gregory Zinoviev and Leo Kamenev essentially shared Trotsky’s views as well. The Right faction was led by Nicholas Bukharin, a prominent theoretician. He agreed with the Left on the concept of Russia’s dependence on world revolution, but since this was not imminent, the Party should not abandon the NEP and try to force the pace towards socialism. The compromise of the NEP should be given a chance to work. The Centrist viewpoint was represented by Stalin, who said that in spite of the world revolution failing to materialize, socialism could be successfully built within USSR, with its huge size, large population and tremendous resources. Stalin’s approach, for the first time in history, gave the Soviet Union the central position in Communist thought and planning. Stalin’s superior control of the Party membership and his position as General Secretary of the Party were hugely influential in his rise to power. Stalin posted his followers to higher positions, and intrigued skillfully, first allying himself with Kamenev and Zinoviev against Trotsky, whom they envied and viewed as their main rival for Party leadership; then with the Right group against the Left. When he felt sufficiently strong, he suppressed the Right as well. As it were, one by one, Trotsky, Kamenev and Zinoviev were voted off the Politburo, replaced with Stalin’s own yes-men, and then expelled from the Party by 1927. The next year Stalin felt that the kulaks were holding up agricultural progress and decided that the NEP had to go. He then introduced his ‘Five Year Plans,’ which were initiated from 1928 onwards. It can thus be seen that Stalin alone offered a sweeping programme and a majestic goal, which were to be achieved by Soviet efforts alone. His view, of the three offered, was the most attractive to Soviet Communists as well. Under these conditions, its not surprising that he finally emerged supreme. *** The February Revolution had swept away not just the monarchy, but an entire civilization. Overnight, all the institutions of power collapsed – the Church, the legal system, the power of the gentry over land, the authority of the officers in the army and navy, deference for senior figures – so that the only real power in the country passed into the hands of local revolutionary committees (the Soviets) of the workers, peasants and soldiers. It was in their name that the Bolsheviks seized power. Popularly seen as a war against privilege, the practical ideology of the Russian Revolution owed less to Marx (who was barely known by the semi-literate masses) and more to the egalitarian customs and utopian yearnings of the peasantry. Long before it was written down by Marx, the Russian people had lived by the idea that surplus wealth was immoral, all property was theft and that manual labour was the only true source of value. This striving for pravda (truth and social justice) gave the Revolution its quasi- religious status in the popular consciousness: the war on private wealth was a bloody purgatory on the way to a heaven on earth. By giving institutional form to this crusade, the Bolsheviks were able to draw on the revolutionary energies of those numerous elements among the poor who derived satisfaction from seeing the rich and mighty destroyed, regardless of whether or not such destruction brought about any improvement in their lot. They rounded up the leisured classes and forced them to do jobs such as clearing snow or rubbish from the streets. For the old intelligentsia, conditions were particularly harsh. They were at the bottom of the Social pile as far as the Dictatorship of the Proletariat was concerned. Most were conscripted by the state for labour teams, but only a few had jobs. Even if they received food from the state, it was the beggarly third-class ration, “just enough bread so as not to forget the smell of it,” in the words of Zinoviev, the Party boss of Petrograd. The provincial gentry were deprived of their estates, their manor houses burned or confiscated by the peasant communes or the local Soviets, and the rich were forced to share their apartments with the urban poor or to give up rooms to their old domestic servants and their families. This was not only a war against the Tsarist past, but was also a way to try to engineer a more collective way of life. By forcing people to share communal flats, the Bolsheviks believed that they could make them communistic in their basic thinking and behavior. Private space and property would disappear, the patriarchal (bourgeois) family would be replaced by communist fraternity and organization, and the life of the individual would become immersed in the community. In the early years of the Revolution, this included socializing of existing houses; families being assigned to a single room, and sometimes even less; and shared kitchens and bathrooms with other families. From the 1920s, new types of housing emerged. Radical Soviet architects proposed the complete obliteration of the private sphere by building ‘commune houses’ (dom kommuny), where all property, including clothes and underwear, would be shared by the inhabitants, and where domestic tasks like cooking and childcare would be assigned to teams on a rotating basis, and where everybody would sleep in one big dormitory, divided by gender, with private rooms set aside for sexual liaisons. Few of these houses were ever built, although they loomed large in the utopian imagination and in futuristic novels such as Zamyatin’s We (1920). Even the houses that were built stopped slightly short of the full communal form, but the aim remained to marshal architecture in a way that would induce the individual to move away from private forms of domesticity to a more collective way of life. It had always been the aim of the Marxists to create a new type of human being. As Marxists, they believed that human nature was a product of historical development, and could thus be transformed by a revolution in the way that people lived. Lenin was greatly influenced by these ideas. Trotsky waxed lyrical on the ‘real scientific possibility’ of reconstructing man. He said “Man is by no means a finished or harmonious being. ...To produce a new ‘improved version’ of man – that is the future task of communism. ...Man must look at himself and see himself as a raw material, or at best a semi-manufactured product, and say: At last my dear homo sapiens, I will work on you.” The artist was ‘the engineer of the human soul,’ and were represented by various groups like the Constructivists, the Futurists, the artists aligned to the Proletkult and the Left Front (LEF), Vsevolod Meyerhold in the theatre, and the Kinok group and Eisenstein in cinema. They all broadly shared the communist ideal and were all involved in their own revolutions against ‘bourgeois’ art. They were convinced that the human mind could be trained to see the world in a more socialistic way through new art forms. The Constructivists detached themselves from the history of art, rejected easel painting and other such artistic modes as individualistic and irrelevant to the new society. They declared their commitment to the design and production of practical objects which they believed could transform social life. They subordinated the artistic element to functionality. Vladimir Tatlin, an artist of this school, designed men’s spring coats to be light, yet able to retain heat, although it was made out of undyed material and lacked decorative design. The Proletkult (Proletarian Culture) movement was equally committed to the idea of the artist fostering new forms of social life. “A new science, art, literature, and morality is preparing a new human being with a new system of emotions and beliefs,” wrote one of its founders, Pavel Lebedev-Poliansky, in 1918. On the extreme left wing of Proletkult, there was a strong iconoclastic trend that reveled in the destruction of the old world. “It’s time for bullets to pepper museums,” said Mayakovsky, the founder of LEF, who even dismissed the classics as “old aesthetic junk.” However, one quandary presented itself to the Proletkult. How was it possible to construct a new culture without learning from the old? Did not the Proletariat have to first be educated in the arts and sciences of the old civilization? If so educated, would they still remain Proletarian? The more moderate members of the Proletkult were forced to recognize that they could not build their new culture entirely from scratch. Lenin had always been a conservative in artistic matters, and confessed to Klara Zetkin, a German communist, that he could not understand or derive any pleasure from works of modern art. His cultural politics was firmly based on the Enlightenment ideals of the 19th century intelligentsia, and he took the view that the Revolution’s task was to raise the working class to the level of the old elite culture. He told Zetkin, “We must preserve the beautiful, take it as a model, and use it as a starting point, even if it is ‘old.’ Why must we turn away from the truly beautiful just because it is ‘old’? Why must we bow low in front of the new, as if it were God, only because it is ‘new’?” “For us, the most important of the arts is cinema,” Lenin is supposed to have said. He valued film for its valuable propaganda role in a country where (in 1920) only two out of every five adults could read. The moving picture was a vital weapon in the battle to extend the Party’s reach to the remote countryside, where makeshift cinemas were established in requisitioned churches and village halls. The Kinok group was formed in 1922 by the brilliant director Dziga Vertov, his wife, the cine newsreel editor, Elizaveta Svilova, and his brother, Michael Kaufman, a daring cameraman who had been with the Red Army in the Civil War. All three were involved in making propaganda films for Soviet agitprop. They took their camera to the streets to “see and show the world in the name of the proletarian revolution,” to catch life as it ought to be. To engineer the Soviet consciousness, they hit upon a new technique – montage. By intercutting shots to create shocking contrasts and associations, montage aimed to manipulate the audience’s reactions, directing them to the idea that the director wanted them to reach. A single, neutral close-up of the actor Ivan Mozzukhin with three different visual sequences: a bowl of steaming soup, a woman’s body laid out in a coffin and a child at play were put forward to test the theory. The audience saw hunger on Ivan’s face in the first sequence, grief in the second and joy in the third, although the three shots of him were identical. With the advent of sound, Eisenstein and Pudovkin proposed to use it ‘contrapuntally,’ contrasting sound with images as an added element of the montage. Also, the scarcity of film compelled all the early Soviet directors to plan out scenes on paper first (storyboarding). The American engineer, F.W. Taylor, used ‘time and motion’ studies to divide and automate the labour tasks of industry. Lenin was a huge fan of Taylorism. Its premise that the worker was the least efficient part of the whole manufacturing process accorded with his view of the Russian working class. He saw Taylorism’s ‘scientific’ methods as a means of discipline that could remould the worker and society along more controllable and regularized lines. Still, perhaps the most radical exponent of the Taylorist idea was Aleksei Gastev, the Bolshevik engineer and poet who envisaged the mechanization of virtually every aspect of life in Soviet Russia, from methods of production to the thinking patterns of the common man. As a proletarian poet, he conjured up the vision of a future communist society in which man and machine merged. He was the first to use the term ‘biomechanics’ in 1922. His aim, by his own admission, was to turn the worker into a sort of ‘human robot,’ a word not coincidentally derived from the Russian and Czech verb ‘to work,’ rabotat. Gastev saw bio- mechanisation as an improvement on humanity. A ‘mechanized collectivism’ would ‘take the place of the individual personality in the psychology of the proletariat.’ There would no longer be a need for emotions, and the human soul would no longer be measured ‘by a shout or a smile, but by a pressure gauge or speedometer.’ This was the Soviet paradise that Zamyatin satirized in his novel We, which depicts a futuristic world of rationality and high technology, with robot-like beings who are known by numbers instead of names and whose lives are controlled in every way by the One State and its Big Brother-like ruler, the Benefactor. All art forms were geared to reflect and propound the communist ideals of the Soviet state, which was firmly laying its foundations during the 1920s. The use of the different forms, as well as the attention showered upon them by Lenin showcases the important role that art had in helping the world’s first communist state to survive both the pressures from the outside world, as well as those from within the state and its citizens. *** Therefore, as we can see, we must not be mislead by the name to only look at the economic policies of the Soviet state during the time of the New Economic Policy or the NEP. A detailed study of the various Political, Economic, Social and Cultural developments of the time must be done, which then give a clear picture of conditions, ideologies and future plans within the state. After a point, however, the communists were unwilling to yield on the issue of how far to take the NEP, and Lenin’s death perhaps greatly shortened the span of this policy. Lenin perhaps meant to continue it for a while longer, and then finally abandon it for full communism once that Soviet state was fully ready for it, but as things stood, Stalin came to power and quickly ended the NEP. He established his own Five Year Plans instead, which were within his interpretations of communism, with no deviation from the Party line being allowed. Lenin was not a dictator, and sought to persuade rather than decree, but Stalin had risen to the position where he could decree if he felt it was necessary. Critics of Lenin saw him as a ruthless dictator who paved the way for the even more ruthless and brutal dictatorship of Stalin. If Lenin had lived for another twenty years, perhaps communism would have turned out to be different through the use of Lenin’s Policies, rather than the dictatorship of Stalin. Today, we know that Stalin extensively helped shape the Soviet state and that his influence in changing the system outlasted his death in 1953.