History of the Soviet Union

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Under a regime of this kind, the Ukraine did in fact in the 1920s experience an unprecedented flowering of its language, its culture and its education system. But it was to prove fragile, since all the elements of tight subordination to Moscow remained in place.

Rather similar developments took place in Bielorussia, where two imperfectly elected radas arose, one in Minsk and the other in Vilnius. They amalgamated for a time, and declared national independence under German protection (following the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk). When the Germans withdrew in November 1918, the Bielorussian state collapsed, and the territory it claimed was subsequently divided between Poland and Soviet Russia at the Treaty of Riga. All the same, its brief, precarious independence served as the basis for later nationalist myths.

The nations of the Transcaucasus broke away from Russia not so much from determination to do so, as because circumstances detached them from the empire. The three main nations of the region, the Georgians, Armenians and Azerbaidjanis, had little in common with one another. The Azerbaidjanis were Muslims, the other two Christians: but whereas the Georgians were a settled people of peasants and nobles (some 5 per cent of the population belonged to the nobility), among the Armenians was a fair number of active and thrusting merchants, many of whom lived outside their homeland, and were resented as successful foreign businessmen usually are. There were substantial Russian minorities, administrators, professional men and workers, in most of the main cities of the region.

All three local nations had territorial claims on each other, and the Armenians and Azerbaidjanis, in particular, had got into the habit of inflicting violence on one another. The numerous nationalist and socialist parties of the region wanted an easing of Russian dominance, but, with the exception of the Muslim movements, they did not seek secession from Russia: their fear and dislike of each other was too great for that, and the Armenians still welcomed Russian protection as an insurance against a repetition of the horrifying Turkish massacre among their countrymen in the 1890s and in 1915.

It is scarcely surprising, in view of all this, that an attempt at a Transcaucasian federation in 1917–18 swiftly broke down, and that each nation tried to go its own way, seeking armed support from abroad. The Georgians received it first from the Germans, then from the British; the Azerbaidjanis from their fellow Muslims, the Turks; and the Armenians from the Whites under Denikin, who, though insensitive to national aspirations, at least offered protection from the hated Turks.

The Germans, the Turks and Denikin were, however, all in turn defeated, while the British withdrew. This left the three republics open to Soviet Russia. During 1920 Armenia and Azerbaidjan, weakened by internal conflicts and border disputes, were reintegrated into Russia by the technique which the Bolsheviks had tried in Finland and the Baltic: military invasion coordinated with an internal coup by the local Reds. Azerbaidjan, with its large colony of Russian oil workers in Baku, was especially vulnerable to such means, while Armenia was weakened by a Turkish attack.

The Georgian Republic was a somewhat more formidable adversary. Alone of the three it had established a stable government, under the Menshevik, Noi Zhordania, and it was carrying out a land reform which brought it solid peasant support. Nevertheless, in February 1921 the Red Army invaded, and was able to conquer the country after a month or so of stubborn fighting. Lenin was doubtful about the timing of this invasion, and he insisted afterwards that a gentler occupation policy should be pursued than in Armenia and Azerbaidjan. He was on the eve of announcing the New Economic Policy in Russia proper, and he was aware of the resentment that brutal Communist policies had aroused elsewhere. ‘It is imperative’, he exhorted, ‘to enforce a special policy of concessions towards Georgian intellectuals and small traders.’ He even talked of a compromise with Zhordania and the Mensheviks. Nothing came of this, not entirely through Lenin’s fault. Stalin was anxious to establish a tightly controlled regime in his own homeland, and, as we shall see, came into direct conflict with Lenin over this.

The relationship between Islam and Bolshevism was an ambivalent one. There was, of course, a basic incompatibility between the atheism of the Marxists and the staunch monotheism of Islam. All the same, many politically active Muslims had become socialists of one kind or another in the decade or so before the revolution. This was partly for instrumental reasons: they had seen socialism in 1905 as a form of politics able to organize an underground party, mobilize the masses and threaten an oppressive government. They saw in it too the means of attracting international support for their own movements. But the adoption of socialism by Muslim intellectuals sprang from reasons of substance too: as a doctrine, socialism offered them, in theory, the brother-hood and equality of all nations, and solidarity in the struggle against Western imperialism. As Hanafi Muzaffar, a Volga Tatar radical intellectual, predicted, ‘Muslim people will unite themselves to communism: like communism, Islam rejects narrow nationalism.’

Significantly, however, he continued: ‘Islam is international and recognizes only the brotherhood and the unity of all nations under the banner of Islam.’ That sentence sums up both what was to attract Muslims to communism, and what was to alienate them from it. The ideal of the Umma, the worldwide Muslim community, was still very different from ‘proletarian internationalism’. It was not a vision to which Lenin could accommodate himself save for passing expediency, especially when combined, as it often was, with the idea of a ‘pan-Turkic’ state–a federation joining all the peoples, both inside and outside Russia, of Turkic language and ethnic origin.

All the same, in the late months of 1917, there was much on which Muslims and Bolsheviks could agree. Muslims had been infuriated by the temporization of the Provisional Government, which had declined to concede the separate educational, religious and military institutions demanded by the All-Russian Muslim Congress in May 1917. As against this, the Bolsheviks opened their eastern policy with a declaration of 20 November 1917 ‘To all Toiling Muslims of Russia and the East’, which expressed abhorrence of religious and national oppression under the tsars, and promised: ‘Henceforth your beliefs and customs, your national and cultural institutions are declared to be free and inviolate. … Know that your rights, like the rights of all the peoples of Russia, are protected by the whole might of the revolution and its organs, the Soviets of Workers’, Soldiers’ and Peasants’ Deputies.’

This promise was to be belied by events soon enough, but for the first two or three months the Bolsheviks were actually in no position to prevent the emergence of Islamic governing institutions, since this usually happened in areas where soviet power was insecure. As a result, soviets and Muslim committees often existed side by side. It soon became clear, however, that the divide between them was a national as well as a religious one. The soviets were usually entirely composed of Russians, and their attitude to the Muslim committees was often suspicious and hostile, especially in Central Asia, where the memory of the 1916 massacres was still vivid. There were also ideological reasons why no indigenous delegates were admitted to the soviets or to responsible party posts in Islamic regions. As Kolesov, chairman of the Tashkent Congress of Soviets, explained, ‘It is impossible to admit Muslims to the supreme organs of the Communist Party, because they do not possess any proletarian organization.’ And indeed, the working class of Tashkent (mostly either railway or textile workers) were largely Russian. The Tashkent Soviet, consequently, was 100 per cent Russian, and the local native population tended to regard it as the bearer of a relabelled but familiar Russian colonialist oppression. Soviet moves to expropriate waqf (religious endowment) lands, and to close mosques, Koranic schools and sharia (Islamic law) courts, vividly exemplified this oppression: indeed the tsarist regime had never attempted religious discrimination on this scale.

The tension between the two communities burst into the open in February 1918, when units of the Tashkent Soviet stormed and destroyed the city of Kokand, where a Muslim People’s Council had proclaimed the autonomy of Turkestan. Similarly in Kazan, the capital of the Volga Tatars, the soviet decreed martial law, arrested the leaders of the Harbi Shuro, the Muslim military council, and stormed the suburb in which its surving members took refuge.

As a result of these ferocious attacks, some Muslims allied themselves with the Whites. But they did not usually stay with them for long, for the Whites were no less ruthless with those who opposed them–they shot the prominent Tatar leader, Mulla-Nur Vakhitov, for example, in August 1919–and they did not even have any theoretical commitment to national or religious freedom: on the contrary, they proclaimed their intention of restoring Russian supremacy over other nations within the empire. This may explain the fact that most Muslims continued to try to work with the Communists, despite the frequent brutality of their policy in the localities.

For their part, the Communist government in Moscow did come half way to meet them, at least as long as they needed their support in the civil war. As part of Narkomnats, Stalin set up a Central Muslim Commissariat, headed by Vakhitov (until his death), to coordinate Muslim affairs, and to articulate the views of the Muslim population. They were even allowed for a time to run a Muslim Military College, directed by the Tatar, Mir-Said Sultan Galiev: at one stage nearly half the Red troops on the eastern front facing Kolchak were Muslim, so that the Bolsheviks had an overwhelming interest in their morale and training, in spite of the obvious dangers, from their point of view, of authorizing separate Islamic fighting units.

Stalin even held out the hope that the Soviet government would create a large Tatar-Bashkir Republic, to act as an arena for the development of Islamic socialism: though less than a pan-Turkic republic, it could be seen as the first step towards such a state. The Russian Communist Party also recognized at this stage the existence of an independent Muslim Communist Party, not directly subordinated to Moscow.

At the height of their fortunes, in the summer of 1918, the Muslim socialists had succeeded in creating the embryos from which an Islamic socialist state could grow: a state apparatus, a party, an army. The potential ideology of such a state was adumbrated by Sultan Galiev in Zhiznnatsionalnostei (The Life of the Nationalities), the organ of Narkomnats. He extended Lenin’s view, expounded in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, that the class struggle was now taking place on an international scale: Sultan Galiev actually claimed that European nations as a whole objectively exploited the colonized nations as a whole.

All Muslim colonized peoples are proletarian peoples and as almost all classes in Muslim society have been oppressed by the colonialists, all classes have the right to be called ‘proletarians’.... Therefore it is legitimate to say that the national liberation movement in Muslim countries has the character of a socialist revolution.

This was the first statement of a thesis which has become enormously influential in the twentieth century, as developed by Mao Tsetung, Ho Chiminh, and other Asian, African and Latin American Marxists. Like them, Sultan Galiev increasingly suspected that only the colonized peoples were really revolutionary in spirit. He feared that the Russian people, having achieved supremacy in a revived empire, albeit now socialist in name, would resume their oppression of other peoples. He could not give vent to such fears in Zhizn natsionalnostei, but he did express the conviction, unwelcome to most Bolsheviks at the time, that revolution was to be expected, not from Western Europe, where the workers were already, from an international viewpoint, ‘bourgeois’, but from the East, where colonized and oppressed peoples could be united by the joint Islamic and Communist battle cry of anti-imperialism. Like Mao, he saw the army–in his case the Muslim units of the Red Army–as a nucleus and training ground for a revolutionary movement, and ultimately for a legitimate and popular socialist government. In Tashkent a similar line was taken by the Kazakh Tarar Ryskulov, who hoped to establish an autonomous Turkic Republic and Turkic Communist Party.

As soon as the Bolsheviks had a little more confidence in their military position, they moved to inhibit any developments which might impart substance to Sultan Galiev’s vision. Already in November 1918 they merged the Muslim Communist Party with the Russian Communist Party, as a subordinate unit. The scheme for a Tatar-Bashkir Republic was dropped and instead two smaller republics, Tatarstan and Bashkiria, were set up within the Russian Republic: in this way hopes of a homeland for Islamic socialism were dashed.

Once the civil war was safely over, and Sultan Galiev’s doubts became even more irksome to the Bolsheviks, in 1923 he was arrested on Stalin’s orders, charged with collaborating with the Basmachi (see below), and expelled from the Communist Party. He was released for a time, but finally rearrested in 1928, and sent to the concentration camp of Solovki. Once the Bolsheviks were securely in power, they unambiguously disavowed the temporary alliance with Muslim ‘national communism’.

This way having been closed, there remained to Muslims only meek submission or outright armed resistance. The latter began with the Soviets’ overthrow of the Kokand government, whose chief of militia escaped and began to organize raids against Russian settlements and Red Army detachments. Gradually more and more partisan bands came into existence, contesting Soviet control over the whole of Turkestan, at a time when the region was cut off from European Russia by White armies.

To begin with, the partisans came from all social classes. The various bands were not always in agreement with one another: they fought under different leaders and for different aims. Some continued the anti-Russian tradition of 1916; some wanted to reverse the Bolsheviks’ anti-Islamic legislation; yet others actually fought alongside Russian peasants in anti-Bolshevik movements. Nearly all of them, however, believed that they were fulfilling a religious duty in resisting Russian and infidel domination. In Fergana they called themselves an ‘army of Islam’, and proclaimed a jihad, or ‘holy war … in the name of our founder and prophet, Muhammad’. Traditionalist and reformist Muslims were at one in their estimation that Bolshevik policy posed a grave threat to Islam. The term basmachi (brigands) was fastened on these various partisan groups by their opponents: they referred to themselves, however, as ‘freemen’.

The fall of the Central Asian Khanates of Khiva and Bukhara during 1920 brought more recruits to these irregular armies, and a new element of political organization and coordination was injected the following year by the arrival of Enver Pasha, former leader of the Young Turk government in Istanbul. Ironically, he had come determined to convert the Muslims of Turkestan to the cause of communism: what he saw there changed his mind completely, and he began planning the overthrow of Bolshevism and the establishment of Turkestan as a base for an international pan-Turkic state. He made considerable progress towards the formation of a unified army with its own, partly Turkish, officer corps. He regularized communications with the Afghans who, long accustomed to anti-Russian resistance from tsarist days, were supplying the Basmachi with arms and affording them asylum.

By 1921 the Communist government had realized that the Basmachi posed a serious threat to their control of Central Asia. They began to send in European Red Army troops, with aerial support, and they devoted an all-out effort to the capture of Enver Pasha. In this they succeeded, capturing and killing him in August 1922.

As in their treatment of the Tambov peasant revolt, the Communists combined repression with a degree of appeasement. In May 1922 they restored waqf land to the mosques, reinstated the sharia courts and relegalized the Koranic schools. At least for a time they were prepared to compromise with Islam in its traditional forms (while turning against Islamic reformism and socialism).

This combination was quite successful. Popular support for the partisans dwindled sharply from 1922, and was largely confined to the mountainous regions thereafter, at least until it revived with compulsory collectivization of agriculture (see below), which once again entailed a direct assault on Islamic values and institutions.

By the beginning of 1921 the territorial and national composition of the new Soviet Russia was becoming clearer. Lenin had hoped, of course, for a worldwide union of Soviet republics, but with the collapse of the short-lived Bavarian and Hungarian Soviet regimes, and the defeat of the Red Army in Poland, this vision had receded.

The Communists found themselves the masters of ethnic Russia–now called the RSFSR (Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic)–surrounded by a network of theoretically independent Soviet republics, whose territory covered approximately the same area as the former tsarist empire, with the significant exceptions of Finland, Poland and the Baltic area.

The Soviet republics now within the Russian sphere of influence were of two types. There were those on the borders (later to be known as ‘union republics’), which had known at least a period of genuine independence during the turmoil of 1917–21, and had established diplomatic relations with foreign powers: these were the republics already mentioned in this chapter. Then there were the republics surrounded by Russian territory, known as ‘autonomous republics’, the largest of which were Tatarstan and Bashkiria, which had never been in a position to exercise any real sovereignty. The situation of these ‘autonomous republics’ was fairly straightforward from Moscow’s point of view: they were permitted their own governmental bodies (people’s commissariats), but subordinate to those in Moscow, while their local Communist Party organizations were equivalent to those of the Russian provinces. The border republics, however, posed greater problems. They had been led to believe that they would be able to exercise genuine self-determination, and all of them had done so, at least briefly, during 1917–21, notably Georgia, whose new Communist rulers proved almost as anxious to assert the nation’s self-government as their Menshevik predecessors.

With these republics–Ukraine, Bielorussia, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaidjan, Bukhara, Khoresm (formerly Khiva) and the Far Eastern Republic–Soviet Russia concluded bilateral treaties which varied somewhat from one another, and were highly ambiguous in form. In some respects they were worded like treaties with separate sovereign states, yet in others they were more like articles of federation: they reflected, in fact, the ambiguities of ‘proletarian internationalism’. They began as military treaties, offering guarantees in case of external attack; but the military clauses were supplemented by economic ones, which placed decisive authority in most economic matters in the hands of organizations in Moscow. Anomalously, some of the republics actually retained a separate diplomatic service, and foreign representation, for a year or two, but this was lost when the RSFSR claimed and secured the right, in 1922, to negotiate for all the republics at the European conference of Genoa.

These anomalies and ambiguities could not last for long. Already during the civil war, the population of the border republics had mostly become accustomed to accepting the authority of certain centralized institutions controlled from Moscow: Sovnarkom, the Red Army, the Council of Labour and Defence (which since November 1918 had coordinated the civilian war effort) and the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic (the political branch of the army). Except in the special case of Georgia, it did not stretch custom and expectation too much to extend and formalize these arrangements and establish a unitary Soviet Russian Republic containing all these disparate political entities.

That was precisely what Stalin, as people’s commissar for nationalities, had in mind. He wanted to see a political framework which would give expression to the dominance Russia had assumed in the world revolutionary movement. As one delegate at the Tenth Party Congress proudly declared: ‘The fact that Russia had first entered on the road of revolution, that Russia had transformed itself from a colony–an actual colony of Western Europe–into the centre of the world revolutionary movement, this fact has filled with pride the hearts of those who have been connected with the Russian revolution, and has engendered a peculiar Red Russian patriotism.’

This process might have been accomplished unproblematically had it not been that Lenin himself became concerned by the Russian nationalist implications of Stalin’s project, as exemplified in such speeches. His fears were deepened when Stalin and his local lieutenant, Sergei Ordjonikidze, came into conflict with the Georgian Bolshevik leaders, Budu Mdivani and Filip Makharadze, over the place of Georgia in the new state. Stalin wanted Georgia to enter the proposed new republic merely as part of a ‘Transcaucasian federation, which would also include Armenia and Azerbaidjan. Mdivani and Makharadze objected vehemently to this downgrading of their homeland. Lenin eventually gave his blessing to Stalin’s scheme, but during an argument on the subject, Ordjonikidze became very heated and actually struck one of Mdivani’s followers. Lenin was incensed at this uncouth behaviour, which confirmed his worst fears about Stalin, and he ordered an investigation into the incident; but he suffered his third and most serious stroke before it could be completed, and was never able to intervene effectively and ensure that the lessons of the incident were absorbed.

He did, however, prepare a memorandum on the national question for the forthcoming Twelfth Party Congress: it was suppressed by Stalin (with the scarcely explicable connivance of Trotsky), and did not come to light until 1956. In it Lenin recognized that ‘self-determination’, embodied in the theoretical right to secede from the Soviet state, had been reduced in practice to ‘a scrap of paper’, and that as a result the minority nationalities were in danger of being delivered up to ‘this 100 per cent Russian phenomenon, Great Russian chauvinism, which is characteristic of the Russian bureaucracy’. He demanded ‘exemplary punishment’ for Ordjonikidze, to demonstrate that this would not be tolerated, and recommended that the Soviet constitution should guarantee real governmental power to the minority nationalities, in the form of people’s commissariats for all except diplomatic and military matters, as well as enshrining in an explicit code the right to use local language.

Although Lenin’s memorandum was not publicly discussed, some of its spirit did find its way into the formal provisions of the Soviet constitution of 1923. For one thing the new state did not bear the appellation ‘Russia’: it was called the ‘Union of Soviet Socialist Republics’ (USSR), and was formally a federal union between its various constituent republics, in which none of them was supreme. Also Narkomnats as a forum for national opinion survived as a second chamber of the All-Union Executive Committee of the Soviets (VTsIK): called the Council of Nationalities, it gave equal representation to each union and autonomous republic, regardless of population. Significantly, though, Lenin did not recommend any change in the highly centralized functioning of the party: his conversion to the cause of the nationalities was never more than partial.

In most respects the new constitution embodied Stalin’s conceptions rather than Lenin’s. The distribution of governmental powers between the republics and the Union as a whole left the latter with all real authority not only in diplomatic and military matters, but also in the running of the economy, while the Union also secured the right to lay down general principles in the fields of justice, labour, education and public health. With the notable exception of culture and linguistic policy, this left most power in internal affairs, as well as external, in the hands of the Union.

Another strong centralizing factor, in practice, was the disparity between the Russian Republic and all the others. The RSFSR contained 90 per cent of the land-area and 72 per cent of the population of the Soviet Union, so that its constitutional status as just one republic among seven was a fiction. Add to this the fact that 72 per cent of members of the Communist Party were Russian, and it will be clear that only ironclad constitutional guarantees could have restrained Russia from dominating the Union. In the words of E. H. Carr, the Soviet Union was ‘the RSFSR writ large’. Or, to put it another way, the Soviet constitution of 1923 was Leninist in form, but Stalinist in content.

All the same, just a few residuary ambiguities remained in practice. The revolution and civil war had given most of the nationalities of the former tsarist empire at least a brief experience of real independence, such as they had not known for centuries, or in some cases had never known. This gave a tremendous impetus to feelings of national identity, and, taken together with the policies of cultural and linguistic autonomy pursued for some years yet, rendered non-Russian national identity far stronger than it had ever been under the tsars. This fact built permanent tensions into the working of the Soviet system.

5 (#ulink_527c5fb4-f818-5465-8a0e-dabf637a39b3)

The New Economic Policy and its Political Dilemmas (#ulink_527c5fb4-f818-5465-8a0e-dabf637a39b3)

Even as the delegates to the Tenth Party Congress were voting for tight party discipline and the violent repression of the Kronstadt revolt, they also approved a radical change in economic policy, this time towards greater freedom. This was the abolition of grain requisitioning and its replacement by a tax in kind set at a much lower level than the compulsory deliveries. This measure was being tried out in Tambov and had been announced in Petrograd: it was conceived as a way of taking the sting out of popular discontent without making political concessions.

The abandonment of requisitioning had, however, profound economic consequences. Since the tax was both lower and more predictable than the requisitions had been, it gave the peasant an incentive once again to maximize the productivity of his plot of land, secure in the knowledge that whatever surplus he achieved could be sold for profit on the market. This meant, of course, that the government had to restore freedom of private trade. Since, moreover, peasants could not be expected to trade unless there was something to buy with the proceeds, it was obviously important to generate at least a reasonable supply of consumer goods. In practice, the easiest way to do this was to abolish the state monopoly of small- and medium-scale manufacture, retail trade and services.

This was in fact what the government did during 1921, while keeping heavy industry, banking and foreign trade in the hands of the state. Taken together, these measures became known as the New Economic Policy (NEP). In the urban markets the results were apparent immediately. When a hero of the novelist Andrei Platonov returned to his native town in 1921:

At first he thought the Whites must be in town. At the station was a café where they were selling white rolls without ration cards or queuing.... In the shop he came across all the normal equipment of trade, once seen in his long forgotten youth: counters under glass, shelves along the walls, proper scales instead of steelyards, courteous assistants instead of supply officials, a lively crowd of purchasers, and stocks of food which breathed an air of well-being.

Although some private trade recovered remarkably quickly, in general the economy was still in deep crisis. Years of war, conscription and food requisitioning had devastated agriculture, particularly in the most fertile regions. On top of this, the Volga basin experienced drought in 1920 and 1921. Unprotected by any reserves, peasant households faced two very poor harvests in succession. The result was famine on a scale that the government simply could not meet. For the one and only time, it allowed direct foreign aid inside Soviet Russia. An international relief committee was formed, which included prominent Russian non-Communists (who were all arrested once the emergency was over). But in spite of its efforts, probably about 5 million people died.

Industry, too, was in a desperate state. In the major branches of manufacture, output in 1921 was a fifth or less of the 1913 level: in the case of iron and steel it was actually below 5 per cent. The number of workers employed to generate this output did not fall below 40 per cent of the 1913 level, and here lay one of the major problems of the new era. For these underemployed workers were soon joined by a flood of new job-seekers, heading in from the countryside as soon as there was any prospect of a job, and also by millions of former soldiers demobilized from the Red Army. They joined the labour market at the very time when industrial concerns were having to adjust to the new conditions. Whether they were nationalized or private firms made no difference: henceforth there were to be no direct state subsidies. That meant the expenditure for fuel, raw materials, wages and further investment had to be met out of sales revenue. Firms had to balance their books, or they could well go out of business. This was a reality which workers, party and trade unions had to recognize.

The industrial recovery thus started on a very shaky basis. Initially this led to an imbalance in the terms of trade with agriculture. In spite of the famine, the ploughing and sowing of underused fields proved to be a much faster process than the re-equipment of damaged and dilapidated factories. By the summer of 1923 the shortage of industrial products in relation to agricultural ones had reached such a pitch that the ratio of industrial to agricultural prices stood at more than three times its 1913 level. What this meant in practice was that peasants who sold their produce on the market were not thereby raising enough revenue to buy the industrial goods they wanted. The danger was that repeated experiences of this kind would induce them to cut back their sowings–as they had done during the civil war–and food shortages would resume. Industrial products would then remain unsold, to everyone’s mutual disadvantage. Although the fact was not immediately recognized, this ‘scissors crisis’ (as it was called in reference to the divergent parabolas of industrial and agricultural prices) proved to pose a fundamental threat to NEP. The disputes generated by it formed the first stage in the long-term debate on the economic development strategy of the Soviet government (see below, pages 136–40).

Another result of the uncertain industrial recovery was that the workers, who were theoretically the inheritors of the new society, in practice found it very difficult to understand their place within it. The large reserve of unemployed ensured that their wages remained low: in 1925, Sokolnikov, people’s commissar for finance, admitted that the pay of miners, metal workers and engine drivers was still lower than it had been before 1914. This in turn meant that workers’ housing and nourishment was often inadequate. The factory committee of a cement works in Smolensk reported, for example, in 1929: ‘Every day there are many complaints about apartments: many workers have families of six and seven people, and live in one room.... [We] have about 500 applications from workers who do not have apartments.’ Food supplies, though far better than before 1922, fluctuated and so prices were unstable: again from Smolensk it was reported that wheat flour doubled in price and rye flour trebled between the end of 1926 and early 1929. ‘Workers are being inadequately supplied by consumers’ cooperatives [run by the soviets to cushion the workers from the worst effects of price fluctuation] … , and as a result, private traders virtually occupy a dominant position in the market.’ It is understandable that workers consequently felt resentment about the peasants, who charged them such high prices, and about the specialists and officials, who were paid so much better. How was this possible in a society allegedly ‘moving towards socialism’ under the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’?

The structure of industrial enterprises was also a disappointment to workers who recalled the heady days of October. All remnants of ‘workers’ control’ had now finally disappeared. Factory administration was once more hierarchical, with clearly identifiable individual managers in charge (sometimes drawn from pre-revolutionary managerial staff, for their expertise and experience), while technical specialists and foremen enjoyed unambiguous authority over the ordinary operatives. Since efficiency and productivity were paramount, some enterprises (though not enough for Lenin) were experimenting with ‘Taylorite’ schemes for time-and-motion rationalization and conveyor-belt mass production. Lenin had once regarded such schemes as the quintessence of capitalist exploitation, but now favoured them for the higher output they generated. As a further incentive, most workers were paid on a piece-rate system, which tied their income directly to productivity.

Before 1917 the workers would have expected the trade union or indeed the party to act on their behalf. But both these organizations were now explicitly part of the state economic mechanism, and hence tended only to support workers in conflict with private employers. In 1925 the trade union newspaper Trud (Labour) itself complained that unions seemed to be ‘occupied in dismissing and fining workers, instead of defending their interests’. The mood on the shop floor seems to have been volatile (though research on worker attitudes in this period is still embryonic), and quite a lot of labour disputes and strikes did break out, typically over housing, supplies, late or inadequate pay, or conflicts with specific administrators. The unions hardly ever supported the workers in such disputes.

Although further research on this needs to be done, there appears to be no link between industrial protests and any of the opposition groups within the party. Most workers, in fact, seem to have regarded the party as ‘them’, a part of the structure of authority with which they had to deal. Political and production meetings were shunned as ‘boring’, unless they dealt with something of immediate interest to the workman, such as pay or housing. Some workers, of course, looked on the party as a way to get on in life, seeking training, promotion, and ultimately perhaps escape from the shop floor. Party workers, for their part, often complained that the workers were ‘contaminated by bourgeois tendencies’ and ‘petty bourgeois individualism’.

Mutual relationships between the party and the class they claimed to represent were, in fact, by the late 1920s, rather cool. For a ‘working-class’ party about to embark on a major industrialization programme, that was a discouraging, not to say dangerous, situation.

Relations with the peasants were even worse. In the peasantry the Bolsheviks faced the only social class which had survived the revolution in substantially its previous form. Indeed revolution and civil war had actually strengthened the more traditional and underproductive aspects of Russian agriculture. The landowners, who had by and large used more modern equipment and methods and who had provided much of the pre-1914 grain surplus, had been expropriated, and their estates had mostly been divided up among the peasants. The ‘Stolypin’ peasants likewise had their enclosed plots of land taken away from them, and they were either expelled from the village or reabsorbed into the mir. Enclosed holdings were once again divided up into strips and often made subject to periodic redistribution; modern crop rotations were abandoned where they did not fit the communal pattern. The mir, in short, achieved a dominance in Russian rural life which it had never known before. This was a direct consequence of the Bolsheviks having adopted the Socialist Revolutionary programme in 1917, but that did not mean to say it was welcome to them now.

Landholdings, even among peasants themselves, had also tended to get smaller since 1917, in spite of the new awards of land. The problem was that millions of unemployed and hungry workers had streamed out of the towns, looking to resettle on the land, and many of them were awarded communal strips, where they still had claims. The revolution also seems to have intensified strains and disputes within peasant households, which provoked younger family members to break away and claim holdings of their own. As a result of all these new awards, the total number of family holdings rose from 17–18 million in 1917 to 23 million in 1924 and 25 million in 1927. The average size of each holding naturally fell also, in spite of the annexations from landowners, church and state in 1917, as did the proportion of the crop from each holding which was sold on the market rather than used for subsistence.

For the government the implications of this fragmentation of holdings, and of the reversion to primitive techniques were very alarming. As they began to conceive ambitious industrial projects, they needed more food to be both produced and sold. Yet their own policies aggravated the situation. The better-off and more productive peasants were usually taxed more heavily and felt themselves to be under stronger political pressure than their poorer colleagues. They always suspected, moreover, that the policies of 1918–21 might return.

These factors are reflected in the agricultural production figures, especially for grain, the most vital crop for the regime. It is true that output recovered rapidly from the catastrophic levels of 1920–1, but it never quite returned to pre-war levels. Compared with 81.6 million tonnes in 1913 (admittedly an unusually good year), grain output never exceeded 76.8 million tonnes in 1926, and fell off thereafter. Livestock production did reach pre-war levels in 1926, but declined subsequently. And there were some 14 million extra mouths to feed: in 1914, grain production had been 584 kg. per head of the population, in 1928–9 it was only 484 kg., while the government was planning for an enormous growth in the number of industrial workers, who would not produce food but would certainly need to consume it. Furthermore, of the amount produced, somewhat less was being marketed than in 1914–though Stalin exaggerated this factor in order to produce the impression that grain was deliberately being hoarded on a large scale. In fact, since official grain prices remained low, many peasants preferred to turn their grain into samogon (unlicensed liquor), or even not to grow it at all.

Of course it had never been the Bolsheviks’ intention to let Russian agriculture stagnate in small and primitively cultivated holdings. They had always envisaged large farms, collectively owned and mechanized. Their 1917 Land Decree had been a tactical diversion from this strategy, and they intended now to return to the main highway. In the last years of his life Lenin on the whole thought that this ‘collectivization’ of agriculture should take place gradually, with the party encouraging the creation of model collectives whose high productivity and prosperity would in time persuade the rest of the peasantry to join them.

A certain number of collective farms did already exist, some of which had started during the civil war, with party encouragement and help. Broadly speaking, these were of three types: (i) the kommuna, in which all property was held in common, sometimes with communal living quarters and childrearing; (ii) the artel in which each household owned its own dwelling and small plot of land, together with such tools as were needed to cultivate it, but all other land and resources were shared; (iii) the TOZ, or ‘association for common cultivation’, in which some or all of the fields were cultivated collectively. The last category might be barely distinguishable from the traditional village community, with its custom of pomochi, or mutual aid at busy times of year. It is no surprise, then, to find that the majority of collectives were of the TOZ variety, and there is evidence to show that some of them at least were ordinary village communes relabelled to draw the tax advantages of ‘collective’ status.

In addition, there were some state farms (sovkhozy), in which the labourers were paid a regular wage, like industrial workers. Even taken together, however, all state and collective farms accounted in 1927 for less than 2 per cent of cultivated land. It is significant, though, that their share of marketed produce was much higher: about 7.5 per cent in 1927. In view of this, one might have expected that the party would have begun a programme of ‘collectivization’ much earlier. In fact, however, the party was remarkably dilatory during most of the 1920s about pursuing its own official policy.

In part this was because of the weakness of the village soviets. In theory the soviets were supposed to take over local administration, leaving the peasant mir (renamed ‘land society’) to cope with questions of land tenure and cultivation. In practice, however, the mir continued to collect local taxes and to perform administrative functions, as before the revolution. A study published by Izvestiya in 1927 showed that the mir, not the soviet, was still the basic unit of local government in most villages, and that this was creating problems in the relations with the next tier above, the volost soviet.

Nor was the party any more successful than the soviets in rooting itself in the countryside. The Communists were townspeople by mentality and inclination, and most of them regarded village life with indifference or distaste. It is true that the revolution and civil war did bring an influx of rural members into the party, mostly Red Army soldiers. Yet these were often the first to be expelled in purges against the corrupt or insufficiently active, and in any case they constituted a negligible proportion of the rural population. The 1922 party census reported that party members formed a mere 0.13 per cent of the villages’ inhabitants, and many of these were teachers, doctors, agronomists and officials of volost soviets. By 1928 this proportion had only doubled: out of an estimated rural population of 120 million, about 300,000 (0.25 per cent) were Communists, and of that number only some 170,000 were actual peasants.

By and large, the weakness of the party meant domination of the village by the traditional notables. While all adults, including women, enjoyed a vote for the soviet, the commune was, by custom, a gathering of the heads of household, almost invariably male. Younger men, women and the landless were usually excluded. This meant that, in spite of the equalizing tendencies of the revolution, a degree of stratification soon reappeared in the villages. Indeed, it had never entirely disappeared. Since the commune had usually controlled the process of redistribution in 1917–18, the village notables had typically tried to ensure that some elements of greater wealth–whether in the form of acreage, livestock, or tools–remained in their own hands, or with the families whom they trusted. The former landless were better off than before, but they never became the equals of their ‘betters’.

This stratification is greatly emphasized in the Soviet studies of the subject, both contemporary and subsequent. They divide peasants into so-called ‘kulaks’ (‘fists’ or moneylenders, by nineteenth-century usage, but a term now loosely applied to better-off peasants), middle peasants, poor peasants and landless labourers. The definitions of these terms fluctuated, and they were used by the party on the whole for political rather than scientific purposes. Their use was intended to suggest that class war was brewing in the countryside between the richer and poorer strata. However, Teodor Shanin’s examination of the Soviet data tends to invalidate this hypothesis. He shows that the incomes of kulak households were only marginally higher than those of the ‘middle peasants’: they might own two horses, hire labour at busy times of year and have more produce left over for the market, but they were in no sense a separate, capitalist stratum. As for the ‘poor peasants’, while clearly a real category, their poverty was typically due to circumstances that were temporary–illness, natural disaster, military service of the breadwinner, shortage of working hands. ‘The chance of a hard core of poor peasants showing lasting cohesion and ability for political action emerging was very limited, therefore.’ Nevertheless, this was the layer which the party was to try once more to organize, from 1927, in the form of ‘committees of poor peasants’.

Nor is there much evidence of systematic conflict between different classes of rural dwellers. What Soviet sources call ‘kulak outrages’ usually turn out, when one can look more closely at the sources, to have involved more than just the wealthier peasants, and often the whole village. It would be much closer to the truth, in fact, to say that the great dividing line was not that between classes of the peasantry, but that between peasants and the rest of society, in particular anything that smelt of the towns. Gorky, writing of his conversations with peasants in 1922, reports that they felt ‘suspicious and distrustful … not of the clergy, not of authority, but simply of the town as a complex organization of cunning people who live on the labour and grain of the countryside and make many things useless to the peasant whom they strive in every way to deceive, and skilfully do so.’ There was much in recent peasant experience to substantiate this view. Since 1914 the town had called up the peasant’s sons to fight in a war for aims quite irrelevant to the village, it had requisitioned his horse for the cavalry, it had taxed him extra and offered him derisory sums for his grain; then, after a paltry land allotment in 1917, it had called up his sons yet again and also extorted his produce by force, paying him nothing for it. Quite often, furthermore, the town had closed down his church, sometimes destroying it in the process, and arrested his village priest.

The peasants’ distrust, in fact, was wholly understandable, indeed rational. And although they found the products of the town useful, most peasants were still at a sufficiently primitive economic level to be able to fall back on their own resources if they had to. It was very convenient to buy candles, kerosene, matches, nails and vodka in the town, but if really up against it, a peasant could devise his own substitutes for most of these things, and cottage industry was still lively enough to satisfy many of the needs which in more ‘advanced’ societies are supplied from the town. If they found market conditions not to their liking, in other words, peasants could react, not by working harder and trying to make more money, but by withdrawing from the market altogether. That had been demonstrated in 1918–21, and the threat of a repeat performance always hung over Bolshevik calculations.

Altogether, then, NEP was the party’s creation, but it also faced the party with unforeseen and bewildering dilemmas. During the last couple of years of his life, Lenin began to reflect on these. He suffered a stroke in May 1922, which left him partly paralysed, and another in March 1923, which deprived him of speech, but he did not die till January 1924. Between the first two strokes, at least, he remained politically partly active. For the first time since October 1917 he was able to stand back to some extent from the immediate pressures of decision-making and come to some conclusions about what he and his party had done. His reflections were ambivalent, and his writings of these months sometimes betray a note of uncertainty which had never been present earlier.

On the credit side was the fact that the Bolsheviks had seized power and held it, in spite of grave emergencies. In almost all respects, however, the premises on which Lenin had urged an uprising in October 1917 had proved false. No international revolution had taken place: on the contrary, the revolution had remained confined to Russia, which as a result was now surrounded by suspicious or hostile states and was rapidly resuming the outward forms of the old tsarist empire. The proletariat and poorer peasantry had not proved capable of exercising any kind of class dictatorship: the proletariat was dispersed and impoverished, and the poorer peasants, as a result of the Land Decree, had more or less merged with the rest of the peasantry. Ordinary working people had never had a chance to try their hand at administration: in their place, a growing host of appointed officials (some of them inherited from the old regime) was running the country, especially in the localities. The Bolsheviks had seized power with few definite ideas about how they would govern, and such ideas as they had possessed had been swept away by civil war, deindustrialization and famine. Lenin spent the rest of his life grappling with these unintended consequences of his own revolution, and after his death his successors quarrelled and then split over the heritage. Utopia had failed. The party now divided between those who wanted to restore utopia by coercion (the left), and those who were inclined tacitly to recognize its failure and try to come to terms with the new reality (the right).

For all that he might talk of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, Lenin recognized the actual situation and was deeply worried by it. ‘Those who get jobs in factories now’, he commented at the Eleventh Party Congress in March 1922, ‘are usually not real proletarians, but just people who happen to turn up [vsyachesky sluchainy element].’ ‘Marx’, he added, ‘was not writing about present-day Russia.’ Alexander Shlyapnikov, a leader of the Workers’ Opposition, taunted him from his seat: ‘Permit me to congratulate you on being the vanguard of a non-existent class.’ This put the matter in a nutshell. Lacking a secure social base, the party could not direct NEP as it wanted to. The economy was like a car not being driven by the man who thought he was at the steering wheel: ‘Speculators, private capitalists, goodness knows who is actually driving the car … but it often goes not at all in the direction imagined by the person at the wheel.’

This feeling of being out of control was shared by many at the congress. Lenin attributed it partly to what he called cultural factors. Since the Communists would now have to play a more active role than they had envisaged in the construction of a new economy, it was vital that they should possess the basic skills to do this. In practice, he warned, that was not at all the case. Capitalists and private traders were usually more competent. Communist officials often lacked ‘culture’–by which he meant education, tact, honesty, public spirit and efficiency–and so, faute de mieux, they were being swamped by the bad old ways of the pre-revolutionary regime. ‘If we take Moscow–4700 responsible Communists–and then take the whole contraption of bureaucracy there. Who is directing whom? I very much doubt whether one can say that the Communists are doing the directing. … The culture [of the bureaucrats] is wretched and contemptible, but still it is higher than ours.’

Although he could see some problems clearly enough, Lenin was unable to devise any solutions to them. In some ways, he thought the most important thing to do was to ensure that the best individuals were in charge–people of proven ability and probity. In his Testament he reflected on the characteristics of his possible successors from that point of view–and, significantly, he found them all wanting. He expressed particular misgivings about Stalin, on the grounds that he might not be able to use his ‘unlimited authority’ as party General Secretary ‘with sufficient caution’. He later added in an appendix: ‘Stalin is too rude, and this defect, though quite tolerable in our midst and in dealings among us Communists, becomes intolerable in a General Secretary. That is why I suggest that the comrades think about a way to remove Stalin from that post …’ He also proposed administrative reorganizations: enlarging the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate (which had inherited the powers of the tsarist auditor-general) and merging it with the Party Control Commission (a kind of party inspectorate), so that the more capable and trustworthy people at the top could better monitor what was going on lower down. Actually that was a recipe for compounding the problems of overcentralized control, especially in view of the fact that the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate was headed by Stalin.

Lenin died before he was able to try to effect any of the changes he proposed, and the party leaders kept his unflattering personal comments secret from the rank and file. With Lenin’s death, the nature of politics and public life changed quite considerably. Lenin had always been confident that he was right in his ideas, but he acted by persuasion: until 1921 he had never tried to silence debate within the party, and even thereafter he often tolerated it in practice. Certainly he had never demanded consecrated status for his own ideas. Now, however, a very real change began to take place. Perhaps it is significant that two members of the commission in charge of Lenin’s funeral ceremony, Anatoly Lunacharsky and Leonid Krasin; were past adherents of ‘God-building’, the pre-revolutionary intellectual tendency which had claimed to be a ‘socialist religion of humanity’, indeed ‘the most religious of all religions’. Its main tenet had been that the proletariat, in creating a new and more humane kind of society, were building a new man, who would cease to alienate himself in illusions about a transcendental God, but instead would fulfil a more genuine earthly religious mission. Lenin had been scathing in his denunciation of this tendency, but, as far as is known, Lunacharsky had never abjured it, while Krasin had been a sympathizer of Bogdanov, who as the philosopher of Proletkult (see below, page 180) tried to revive God-building in a new form after the revolution.

At any rate, the form of ceremony chosen for Lenin had strong traditional religious overtones, especially the decision to embalm his body and preserve it for public display in a mausoleum on Red Square, in the middle of Moscow. This was comparable with the Orthodox cult of ‘relics’ of saints. But it was also different: Orthodoxy had never preserved a whole body. This was, in fact, a religious gesture of a new kind. Stalin approved of the decision to embalm Lenin–indeed he may have initiated it–and although he was never a God-builder, he had a shrewd idea of the value of religious symbolism to the state, derived perhaps from his youthful study in the Tiflis seminary. In accord with the new spirit, at a session of the Congress of Soviets on the eve of the funeral, he carefully enumerated Lenin’s ‘commandments’ and pledged himself to fulfil them, as if consciously assuming the mantle of disciple and heir.

During 1924–5 he continued this work by assembling a doctrine, drawn selectively from the dead man’s writings, which he published as The Foundations of Leninism. Two special institutes were set up, the Marx-Engels Institute and the Lenin Institute, to gather and study the heritage of the founding fathers of the new ideology, and a journal, Bolshevik, was founded to publish the results. Claiming for himself the home ground of these ideological temples, Stalin could assail the ideas of opponents of the new orthodoxy, not just as misguided, but as somehow illegitimate. Traditional religions would have used the term ‘heresy’; Stalin called them ‘deviations’.

The first issue on which Stalin tried thus to isolate and discredit his opponents was the fundamental question of the nature of the revolutionary state and the nation it claimed to represent. NEP had initially been launched in the expectation that it constituted a ‘retreat’, a temporary concession to capitalism in order to restore the economy until such time as socialist revolutions could break out elsewhere and backward, war-torn Soviet Russia receive fraternal help from outside. By the autumn of 1923, however, with the failure of yet another attempt at a Communist coup in Germany, it was becoming clear that, for the foreseeable future, Russia was going to be on its own. Did that mean that the Soviet state should indefinitely prolong a ‘provisional’ economic system, or did it mean that the Russians should abandon hope of external help, and buckle down to build socialism on their own?

Almost ever since the October revolution, some Bolsheviks had tacitly accepted the proposition that, for the moment at least, proletarian internationalism must mean Soviet (and even Russian?) patriotism, since Russia was the only country in which a ‘proletarian’ state had been established. We have seen this at the time of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty and during the Soviet-Polish war. At the same time many non-Bolsheviks took a partly compatible view: that the Bolsheviks had succeeded in holding on to power because, in circumstances which threatened the disintegration of the Russian Empire, they had proved themselves to be the party best able to hold that empire together. This stream of thought crystallized in 1920 in the form of smenovekhovstvo (from the collection of essays, Change of Landmarks, which appeared in that year). Nikolai Ustryalov, its leading exponent, now in emigration in Kharbin, argued that the defeat of the Whites had demonstrated that the Bolsheviks were now the only truly Russian national force: they had succeeded in holding Russia together against all the attempts of foreigners and non-Russian nationalities to dismember her. His case was strengthened by the reincorporation of the remaining non-Russian nations into the new Soviet Union, and by the introduction of NEP, which seemed to show that, in social and economic terms as well, the new Russian state was becoming more like the old one. In a famous image, Ustryalov likened Soviet Russia to a radish–‘red outside and white inside’.

This point of view found some support among émigrés, but even more perhaps inside Russia itself. It was close to the outlook of probably the majority of former Imperial Army officers who had joined the Red Army. Many of the ‘bourgeois specialists’ would also have sympathized with it: indeed, Jeremy Azrael, the historian of the managerial stratum in Soviet society, goes so far as to call smenovekhovstvo ‘the ideology of the specialists’. Some writers (especially the ‘fellow travellers’) and clergy took a similar view. At a time when émigré books were still published inside Russia, and links between Soviet citizens and émigrés were strong, these ideas, while not universally accepted (especially in emigration) did play a part in reconciling the traditional professional classes to the new system.

Obviously the Soviet leadership could not simply take over smenovekhovstvo, since it was avowedly non-socialist and anti-internationalist. But there were good reasons why they should evolve their own version of Russian patriotism. First, because they needed to appeal to the specialists on whom they still depended so much: and it was cheaper and more effective to gain their willing compliance than to rely on compulsion alone. Secondly, even the party apparatus itself, now growing so fast under the guidance of Stalin’s card-indexers, could not be expected indefinitely to work enthusiastically for a system that was only provisional. They too needed to feel that they were doing something constructive, ‘building socialism’, even if only in Russia, and not just marking time till the world revolution, now apparently receding, should at last break out.

It was with them above all in mind that Stalin began in 1924 to reconsider the party’s theoretically absolute commitment to international revolution. In an article entitled ‘October and Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution’, published in the newspapers in December 1924, he first raised the possibility that socialism might be achieved in one country alone, even if that country were less developed economically than its neighbours which had remained capitalist. Such a victory he deemed ‘perfectly possible and even probable’.

It is significant that this idea, backed with scanty but authentic quotations from Lenin, was directed against Trotsky. Stalin’s article was in fact a salvo in the power struggle for Lenin’s succession. The theoretical differences between Stalin and Trotsky were mainly ones of emphasis: even Stalin conceded that the ‘final victory’, as distinct from just the ‘victory’, of socialism required an international proletarian community. But Stalin depicted Trotsky as someone who lacked confidence in Soviet Russia, and in the ‘alliance of the proletariat and the toiling peasantry’, which had brought about the socialist revolution in Russia, and could, according to Stalin, now make possible the construction of a socialist society. This was a classic example of a weapon Stalin was to use increasingly: exaggerating and distorting the views of his opponents, and applying crude labels to them, as though from a position of unique and guaranteed rectitude. ‘Trotskyism’, ‘the left deviation’, ‘the right deviation’–these gradually became equivalent in Stalin’s rhetoric to ‘non-Leninism’, and hence to ‘anti-Leninism’, which ‘objectively’ meant supporting the imperialists. By stages, in fact, Stalin was able to insinuate that all his opponents were nothing less than enemies of the soviet system.

At any rate, as far as ‘socialism in one country’ was concerned, there was at least as much justification in Lenin’s writings for Trotsky’s assertions that primacy should be given to international revolution. But it was Stalin who managed to occupy the temple, to represent his interpretation as the only truly Leninist one, and to gain the institutional backing for it. The Fourteenth Party Conference, in April 1925, resolved that ‘in general the victory of socialism (not in the sense of final victory) is unconditionally possible in one country’.

Thereby ‘socialism in one country’ became official party doctrine, and its implications had to be absorbed. The economic ones were the most pressing. It was generally assumed that ‘building socialism’ meant developing Russia’s industry. Lenin had hoped to do this by attracting foreign concessions to the country, recognizing frankly that Russia needed help from abroad, even from capitalists. But, although a few significant deals were concluded, foreign concessions still accounted for only 0.6 per cent of industrial output in 1928. This was scarcely surprising, in view of the fact that the Bolsheviks had deliberately defaulted on all past Russian debts: it took them many years to regain a reputation for financial probity.

At any rate, it looked as if economic development would have to come out of Russia’s own resources. The Opposition, which was beginning to crystallize around Trotsky, felt this could only be done through rigorous state planning and the diversion of resources from the private sector to feed heavy industry. The manufactured products thus created would feed into all sectors of the economy, including consumer industry and agriculture, and would ultimately make them all more productive. Admittedly, there would probably be some years of austerity, while consumption was cut in order to concentrate resources on industrial investment. The Opposition’s main economic spokesman, Evgeny Preobrazhensky, even called this process ‘primitive socialist accumulation’, and likened it to the ‘primitive capitalist accumulation’, which Marx had described in Capital. He argued, however, that it would be far less objectionable than the capitalist variety, since (a) it would bear mostly on the ‘bourgeois’ sector of the economy, and (b) the surplus value generated would be used for the ultimate benefit of everyone, not just for the conspicuous consumption of the few.

The Oppositionists were moved by a dislike of NEP which was widely shared in the party. They were repelled by the raucous, untidy, money-grabbing peasant markets, by the debauchery of the nightclubs, by the furs and silk dresses at the theatre, all to be seen again just as if the revolution had never taken place. Even prostitutes had reappeared on the streets. Preobrazhensky warned, with Trotsky’s support, that if the socialist sector of the economy were not given deliberate advantages, then the country was in danger of being dominated by kulaks and nepmen (as the traders, retailers and small manufacturers were contemptuously known). Fast industrialization, on the other hand, would enable agriculture to be mechanized, and this in turn would draw the peasants into collective farms, as Lenin had recommended. ‘Only a powerful socialized industry can help the peasants transform agriculture along collectivist lines,’ Trotsky argued in the Opposition’s platform of September 1927.

Spokesmen for NEP were quick to point out the drawbacks in the Opposition programme. ‘Squeezing the private economy’ meant above all squeezing the peasantry: might the result not be the same as during the civil war–severe shortages and the revival of the black market? If Russia was now really on its own, could the nation afford a policy which would endanger the relatively smooth trading arrangements between town and country created by NEP? Or, to put it in Leninist terms, was it prudent to jeopardize the ‘alliance between the proletariat and peasantry’ which had made the October revolution possible? In his Testament Lenin had warned: ‘Our party rests upon two classes, and for that reason its instability is possible, and if there cannot exist an agreement between those classes its fall is inevitable.’