The New Economic Policy of the 1920s. Capitalism with a touch of socialism

This is a complex of economic measures of the Bolshevik Party to bring the USSR out of the crisis in the 20s of the 20th century. If we talk about NEP briefly, then this is a kind of revival of private initiative.

Reasons for NEP

It led to a complete rupture of economic ties between the city and the countryside. It was very difficult for urban residents in the sense that they did not receive the proper amount of food from the village. The traditional economic exchange was disrupted, when the city bought food in the village for money. In addition, the peasants began a series of uprisings against the policy of expropriating food.

Cases were repeatedly recorded when military corrals drove into villages and took away all stocks of grain. As you know, in 1921 there was a very strong famine, so the protest movement of the peasants was caused by objective reasons.

The country was completely destroyed by the First World War and the Civil War, all economic ties with foreign countries were destroyed. The same can be said about diplomatic relations. The leadership of the USSR understood that at this stage it would be very difficult for the country without reestablishing ties with foreign states.

Another reason for the rejection of communism was the understanding by the leadership that a sudden transition to communism was impossible.

What is the essence of NEP?

The first economic transformations, which can be described as a manifestation of the NEP, began in 1922-1923. The main activities of the NEP (briefly) are actions aimed at improving people's lives.

First, it was necessary to restore the country by intensifying trade in food and manufactured goods. The Bolsheviks had to make an unprecedented retreat from the planned program in order to bring the economic situation in the country out of a stupor.

To understand the essence of the NEP, let us compare it with the policy of war communism.

Options	war communism	New economic policy
Goals in the economy	urgent construction of communist relations; abolition of the monetary system; overcoming the consequences of the war	recovery of cash flow; permission of private initiative in a limited amount
Agriculture	surplus appropriation; the establishment of consumer communes that distributed food in a regulated manner; appeared as class bodies to fight the kulaks	replacing the surplus with a tax that could be paid in cash; the opportunity to trade their products; the first common farms appeared in countryside who had a voluntary principle of education
Industry	complete nationalization of all enterprises; objects are directly managed by the main departments (in different years there were from 20 to 50)	partial cancellation of nationalization; free trade; opportunity to attract investments from foreign companies

The main feature of the economic policy during the Civil War was the expropriation of products from the peasants. talking plain language, the army or representatives of state bodies could pick up food free of charge. The party leadership understood the need to introduce the NEP, a table comparing the periods 1918-1921 and 1922-1929 will show this clearly.

NEP events

As part of the new economic policy, the state carried out some reforms. Let us consider what is the essence of NEP in the financial sector.

As is known, for several years commodity-money relations in the country were practically frozen. In 1922, a monetary reform was carried out. New currency(Chervonets) was recognized by Western countries, so it became possible to carry out. Over time, trade was resumed both within the country and with foreign partners.

NEP in agriculture

Important changes have affected agriculture. The peasants finally felt relieved from the burden of war communism, because in 1921 the surplus appraisal was canceled. Of course, they were not completely exempted from taxes. A food tax was introduced, but it was 2 times less than the surplus allowance. It was allowed to pay this tax in cash. The poorest peasants were exempted from paying taxes. The peasants immediately understood the essence of NEP. This form of relationship suited them, so many did not want to go to the collective farms in 1930-1932.

Industry development

In industry, the NEP measures were also drastic. Private capital again got the opportunity to work in different spheres of production. In those areas where the state did not want to weaken its influence, there were cases of mixed capital in enterprises. Control over the activities of enterprises has decreased, so it has become easier to conduct economic activities. Such changes in the course of the state were immediately felt by foreign investors, who began to invest in the creation of new enterprises.

The results of the NEP in the USSR

The NEP policy, the table with the results of which is before your eyes, in addition to positive ones, had some negative results.

But still, the importance of the period of the new economic policy is difficult to overestimate. The country was able to recover after the difficult events of the 10s of the 20th century.

NEP is an abbreviation made up of the first letters of the phrase "New Economic Policy". The NEP was introduced in Soviet Russia on March 14, 1921 by the decision of the Tenth Congress of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks instead of politics.

"Shut up. And listen! - Izya said that he had just entered the printing house of the Odessa Provincial Committee and saw there ... (Izya choked with excitement) .. a set of a speech recently delivered by Lenin in Moscow on the new economic policy. A vague rumor about this speech had been wandering around Odessa for three days now. But no one really knew anything. “We must print this speech,” said Izya ... The operation of kidnapping the set was done quickly and silently. Together and imperceptibly, we carried out the heavy lead typed speech, put it on a cab and drove to our printing house. The set was placed in the car. The machine rumbled softly and rustled as it typed out the historic speech. We eagerly read it by the light of a kitchen kerosene lamp, agitated and realizing that history stands next to us in this dark printing house and we also participate in it to some extent ... And on the morning of April 16, 1921, the old Odessa newspaper sellers - skeptics, misanthropes and sclerotics - went hastily shuffling along the streets with pieces of wood and shouting in hoarse voices: - Newspaper " Morak! Comrade Lenin's speech! Read everything! Only in Morak, you won't read it anywhere else! Morak Newspaper! The number of "Sailor" with a speech sold out in a few minutes. (K. Paustovsky "Time of great expectations")

Causes of the NEP

From 1914 to 1921, the volume of gross output of Russian industry decreased by 7 times
Stocks of raw materials and materials by 1920 were exhausted
Marketability of agriculture fell by 2.5 times
In 1920, traffic railways amounted to a fifth in relation to 1914.
The area under crops, grain yields, and the production of livestock products have been reduced.
Commodity-money relations were destroyed
A "black market" was formed, speculation flourished
The standard of living of workers has plummeted.
As a result of the closure of many enterprises, the process of declassing the proletariat began.
IN political sphere the undivided dictatorship of the RCP (b) was established
Workers' strikes, uprisings of peasants and sailors began

The essence of the NEP

Revival of commodity-money relations
Granting freedom of management to small commodity producers
Replacing the surplus tax with a tax in kind, the size of the tax has almost halved compared to the surplus appraisal
Creation of trusts in industry - associations of enterprises that themselves decided what to produce and where to sell products.
Creation of syndicates - associations of trusts for the wholesale distribution of products, lending and regulation of trade operations in the market.
Reduction of the bureaucracy
Introduction of cost accounting
Creation of the State Bank, savings banks
Restoration of the system of direct and indirect taxes.
Holding monetary reform

Results of the NEP

The success of the NEP was the restoration of the destroyed Russian economy and overcoming hunger

Legally, the new economic policy was curtailed on October 11, 1931 by a party resolution on the complete ban on private trade in the USSR. But in fact, it ended in 1928 with the adoption of the first five-year plan and the announcement of a course towards accelerated industrialization and collectivization of the USSR.

New economic policy- the economic policy pursued in Soviet Russia since 1921. It was adopted on March 21, 1921 by the X Congress of the RCP (b), replacing the policy of "war communism", which was carried out during the Civil War. The new economic policy was aimed at restoring National economy and the subsequent transition to socialism. The main content of the NEP is the replacement of the surplus appropriation tax in the countryside (up to 70% of grain was confiscated during the surplus appraisal, and about 30% with the food tax), the use of the market and various forms of ownership, the attraction of foreign capital in the form of concessions, the implementation of the monetary reform (1922-1924), as a result of which the ruble became a convertible currency.

The Soviet state faced the problem of stabilizing money, and, therefore, deflation and achieving a balanced state budget. The strategy of the state, aimed at surviving in the conditions of a credit blockade, determined the primacy of the USSR in compiling production balances and distributing products. The New Economic Policy assumed state regulation mixed economy using planned and market mechanisms. The state, which retained commanding heights in the economy, used directive and indirect methods of state regulation, based on the need to implement the priorities of the forerunner of the strategic plan - GOELRO. The NEP was based on the ideas of the works of V. I. Lenin, discussions about the theory of reproduction and money, the principles of pricing, finance and credit. The NEP made it possible to quickly restore the national economy, destroyed by the First World War and the Civil War.

In the second half of the 1920s, the first attempts to curtail the NEP began. Syndicates in industry were liquidated, from which private capital was administratively ousted, and a rigid centralized system of economic management (economic people's commissariats) was created. Stalin and his entourage headed for the collectivization of the countryside. Repressions were carried out against managerial personnel (the Shakhty case, the process of the Industrial Party, etc.). By the beginning of the 1930s, the NEP was effectively curtailed.

Prerequisites for the NEP

By 1921, Russia was literally in ruins. The territories of Poland, Finland, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Western Belarus, Western Ukraine, the Kars region of Armenia and Bessarabia departed from the former Russian Empire. According to experts, the population in the remaining territories barely reached 135 million. Losses in these territories as a result of wars, epidemics, emigration, and a reduction in the birth rate amounted to at least 25 million people since 1914.

During the hostilities, the Donbass, the Baku oil region, the Urals and Siberia were especially affected, many mines and mines were destroyed. Factories stopped due to lack of fuel and raw materials. The workers were forced to leave the cities and go to the countryside. Overall volume industrial production decreased by 5 times. The equipment has not been updated for a long time. Metallurgy produced as much metal as it was smelted under Peter I.

The volume of agricultural production decreased by 40% due to the depreciation of money and the shortage of manufactured goods.

Society has degraded, its intellectual potential has significantly weakened. Most of the Russian intelligentsia was destroyed or left the country.

Thus, the main task domestic policy The RCP(b) and the Soviet state consisted in restoring the destroyed economy, creating a material, technical and socio-cultural basis for building socialism, which the Bolsheviks promised to the people.

The peasants, outraged by the actions of the food detachments, not only refused to hand over their bread, but also rose up in armed struggle. The uprisings swept the Tambov region, Ukraine, Don, Kuban, the Volga region and Siberia. The peasants demanded a change in agrarian policy, the elimination of the dictates of the RCP (b), the convening of the Constituent Assembly on the basis of universal equal suffrage. Units of the Red Army were thrown into the suppression of these speeches.

Discontent spread to the army. On March 1, 1921, the sailors and Red Army soldiers of the Kronstadt garrison under the slogan "For Soviets without Communists!" demanded the release from prison of all representatives of the socialist parties, the holding of re-elections of the Soviets and, as follows from the slogan, the exclusion of all communists from them, the granting of freedom of speech, meetings and unions to all parties, ensuring freedom of trade, allowing the peasants to freely use their land and dispose of the products of their economy, that is, the elimination of surplus appropriation. Convinced of the impossibility of reaching an agreement with the rebels, the authorities stormed Kronstadt. By alternating artillery shelling and infantry actions, Kronstadt was taken by March 18; some of the rebels died, the rest went to Finland or surrendered.

From the appeal of the Provisional Revolutionary Committee of the city of Kronstadt:

Comrades and citizens! Our country is going through a difficult moment. Hunger, cold, economic ruin have been holding us in an iron grip for three years now. The Communist Party, ruling the country, broke away from the masses and proved unable to lead it out of the state of general ruin. It did not take into account the unrest that had recently taken place in Petrograd and Moscow, and which showed quite clearly that the Party had lost the confidence of the working masses. Nor did they take into account the demands made by the workers. She considers them the intrigues of the counter-revolution. She is deeply mistaken. These unrest, these demands are the voice of the entire people, of all working people. All the workers, sailors and Red Army men clearly see at the present moment that only by joint efforts, by the common will of the working people, can bread, firewood, coal be provided to the country, to clothe the barefooted and undressed, and lead the republic out of the impasse...

Already in 1920, calls were made to abandon the surplus appropriation: for example, in February 1920, Trotsky submitted a corresponding proposal to the Central Committee, but received only 4 votes out of 15; at about the same time, independently of Trotsky, Rykov raised the same question in the Supreme Council of National Economy.

The course of development of the NEP

Proclamation of the NEP

By a decree of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of March 23, 1921, adopted on the basis of decisions of the X Congress of the RCP (b), the surplus appraisal was canceled and replaced by a tax in kind, which was about half as much. Such a significant indulgence gave a certain incentive to the development of production to the war-weary peasantry.

Lenin himself pointed out that concessions to the peasantry were subordinated to only one goal - the struggle for power: “We openly, honestly, without any deceit, declare to the peasants: in order to hold the path to socialism, we, comrade peasants, will do whole line concessions, but only within such and such limits and to such and such a measure, and, of course, we ourselves will judge what measure and what limits it is” (Poln. Sobr. Works, vol. 42 p. 192).

The introduction of the tax in kind did not become a single measure. The 10th Congress proclaimed the New Economic Policy. Its essence is the assumption of market relations. The NEP was seen as a temporary policy aimed at creating the conditions for socialism - temporary, but not short-lived: Lenin himself emphasized that "NEP is serious and for a long time!". Thus, he agreed with the Mensheviks that Russia at that time was not ready for socialism, but in order to create the prerequisites for socialism, he did not at all consider it necessary to give power to the bourgeoisie.

The main political goal of the NEP is to relieve social tension, to strengthen the social base of Soviet power in the form of an alliance of workers and peasants. The economic goal is to prevent further aggravation of the devastation, to get out of the crisis and restore the economy. The social goal is to provide favorable conditions for building a socialist society without waiting for the world revolution. In addition, the NEP was aimed at restoring normal foreign policy ties, at overcoming international isolation.

NEP in the financial sector

The task of the first stage of the monetary reform, implemented within the framework of one of the directions of the economic policy of the state, was the stabilization of the monetary and credit relations of the USSR with other countries. After two denominations, as a result of which 1 million rubles. former banknotes was equated to 1 p. new state marks, a parallel circulation of depreciating state marks was introduced to serve small trade and hard gold pieces backed by precious metals, stable foreign currency and easily sold goods. Chervonets was equated to the old 10-ruble gold coin containing 7.74 g of pure gold.

The issue of depreciating Sovznaks was used to finance the state budget deficit caused by economic difficulties. Their specific gravity in the money supply was steadily declining from 94% in February 1923 to 20% in February 1924. From the depreciation of the Soviet signs, the peasantry suffered great losses, striving to delay the sale of their products, and the working class, who received wages in owls. To compensate for the losses of the working class, a budgetary policy was used to increase the taxation of the private sector and reduce the taxation of the public sector. Excises were increased on luxury goods and reduced or completely canceled on essentials. A big role in maintaining stability national currency during the entire period of the NEP played state loans. However, the threat to the trade link between the city and the countryside required the elimination of the parallel monetary circulation and stabilization of the ruble in the domestic market.

A skillful combination of planned and market instruments for regulating the economy, which ensured the growth of the national economy, a sharp decline budget deficit, an increase in the reserves of gold and foreign currency, as well as an active foreign trade balance, made it possible during 1924 to carry out the second stage of the monetary reform in the transition to one stable currency. Canceled Soviet signs were subject to redemption with treasury notes at a fixed ratio within a month and a half. A fixed ratio was established between the treasury ruble and bank chervonets, equating 1 chervonets to 10 rubles. Bank and treasury notes were in circulation, and gold chervonets were used, as a rule, in international settlements. Their rate in 1924 became higher than the official gold parity against the pound sterling and the dollar.

In the 20s. commercial credit was widely used, serving approximately 85% of the volume of transactions for the sale of goods. Banks exercised control over mutual lending to economic organizations and, with the help of accounting and collateral operations, regulated the size of a commercial loan, its direction, terms and conditions. interest rate. However, its use created an opportunity for an unscheduled redistribution of funds in the national economy and hampered banking control.

Financing of capital investments and long-term lending developed. After the Civil War, capital investments were financed irrevocably or in the form of long-term loans. In order to invest in industry in 1922, the Electrocredit joint-stock company and Industrial Bank, then transformed into Electrobank and the Commercial and Industrial Bank of the USSR. Long-term lending to the local economy was carried out by local communal banks, transformed since 1926 into the Central Communal Bank (Tsekombank). Agriculture was provided with long-term loans by state credit institutions, credit cooperation, formed in 1924 by the Central Agricultural Bank, cooperative banks - Vsekobank and Ukrainbank. At the same time, Vneshtorgbank was established, which provided credit and settlement services. foreign trade, purchase and sale of foreign currency.

NEP in agriculture

... By the decision of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and the Council of People's Commissars, the apportionment is canceled, and instead a tax on agricultural products is introduced. This tax should be less than the grain allocation. It should be appointed even before the spring sowing, so that each peasant can take into account in advance what share of the crop he must give to the state and how much will remain at his full disposal. The tax should be levied without mutual responsibility, that is, it should fall on an individual householder, so that a diligent and industrious owner does not have to pay for a sloppy fellow villager. When the tax is paid, the remaining surplus of the peasant is placed at his full disposal. He has the right to exchange them for food and implements, which the state will deliver to the countryside from abroad and from its own factories and factories; he can use them to exchange for the products he needs through cooperatives and in local markets and bazaars ...

The tax in kind was initially set at about 20% of the net product of peasant labor (that is, to pay it, it was necessary to turn in almost half as much bread as with food appropriation), and subsequently it was planned to be reduced to 10% of the crop and converted into cash.

On October 30, 1922, the Land Code of the RSFSR was issued, which repealed the law on the socialization of land and declared its nationalization. At the same time, the peasants were free to choose the form of land use - communal, individual or collective. The ban on the use of hired workers was also lifted.

It is necessary, however, to note the fact that wealthy peasants were taxed at higher rates. Thus, on the one hand, an opportunity was given to improve well-being, but on the other, there was no point in expanding the economy too much. All this taken together led to the "average" of the village. The well-being of the peasants as a whole has increased in comparison with the pre-war level, the number of poor and rich has decreased, and the proportion of middle peasants has increased.

However, even such a half-hearted reform gave certain results, and by 1926 the food supply had improved significantly.

In general, the NEP had a beneficial effect on the state of the countryside. First, the peasants had an incentive to work. Secondly (compared to pre-revolutionary times), many have increased land allotment - the main means of production.

The country needed money - to maintain the army, to restore industry, to support the world revolutionary movement. In a country where 80% of the population was peasantry, the main burden of the tax burden fell on him. But the peasantry was not rich enough to provide all the needs of the state, the necessary tax revenues. Increased taxation on especially wealthy peasants also did not help, so from the mid-1920s other, non-tax methods of replenishing the treasury began to be actively used, such as forced loans and understated grain prices and overpriced industrial goods. As a result, industrial goods, if we calculate their value in poods of wheat, turned out to be several times more expensive than before the war, despite their lower quality. A phenomenon was formed, which, with the light hand of Trotsky, began to be called "price scissors." The peasants reacted simply - they stopped selling grain in excess of what they needed to pay taxes. The first crisis in the sale of manufactured goods arose in the autumn of 1923. Peasants needed plows and other industrial products, but refused to buy them at inflated prices. The next crisis arose in the financial year 1924-25 (that is, in the autumn of 1924 - in the spring of 1925). The crisis was called "procurement" because the procurement amounted to only two-thirds of the expected level. Finally, in the financial year 1927-28, there was a new crisis: it was not possible to collect even the most necessary things.

So, by 1925, it became clear that the national economy had come to a contradiction: political and ideological factors, the fear of the “degeneration” of power, prevented further progress towards the market; the return to the military-communist type of economy was hampered by memories of the peasant war of 1920 and mass famine, the fear of anti-Soviet speeches.

So, in 1925, Bukharin called on the peasants: “Get rich, accumulate, develop your economy!”, but after a few weeks he actually retracted his words. Others, led by E.A. Preobrazhensky, demanded an intensification of the fight against the “kulak” (which, as they claimed, took into their own hands not only economic, but also political power in the countryside), without thinking, however, of either “liquidating the kulaks as a class”, or violent “complete collectivization”, or curtailing the NEP (unlike Bukharin, who from 1930 was engaged in the theoretical justification of the new Stalinist policy, and in 1937 In his letter to the future leaders of the party, he swore that for 8 years now he had no disagreements with Stalin, E.A. Preobrazhensky condemned Stalin's policy at the Lubyanka in 1936). However, the contradictions of the NEP strengthened the anti-NEP sentiments of the lower and middle part of the party leadership.

NEP in industry

From the resolution of the XII Congress of the RCP (b), April 1923:

The revival of state industry, given the general economic structure of our country, will necessarily be in the closest dependence on the development of agriculture, the necessary working capital must be formed in agriculture as a surplus of agricultural products over the consumption of the countryside before industry can take a decisive step forward. But it is equally important for state industry not to lag behind agriculture, otherwise a private industry would be created on the basis of the latter, which, in the end, would absorb or dissolve the state industry. Only an industry that gives more than it absorbs can be victorious. An industry living off the budget, that is, on agriculture, could not create a stable and lasting support for the proletarian dictatorship. The question of creating surplus value in state industry is the question of the fate of Soviet power, that is, the fate of the proletariat.

Radical transformations also took place in industry. Glavki were abolished, and trusts were created instead - associations of homogeneous or interconnected enterprises that received complete economic and financial independence, up to the right to issue long-term bonded loans. By the end of 1922, about 90% of industrial enterprises were united in 421 trusts, 40% of which were centralized, and 60% were local subordination. The trusts themselves decided what to produce and where to sell their products. The enterprises that were part of the trust were removed from the state supply and switched to purchasing resources on the market. The law provided that "the state treasury is not responsible for the debts of trusts."

The Supreme Council of National Economy, having lost the right to interfere in the current activities of enterprises and trusts, turned into a coordinating center. His apparatus was drastically reduced. It was at that time that economic accounting appeared, in which the enterprise (after mandatory fixed contributions to the state budget) has the right to manage the income from the sale of products, is itself responsible for the results of its economic activity, independently uses profits and covers losses. Under the NEP, Lenin wrote, "state enterprises are transferred to the so-called economic accounting, that is, in fact, to a large extent on commercial and capitalist principles."

At least 20% of the profits of the trusts were to be directed to the formation of reserve capital until it reached a value equal to half authorized capital(soon this standard was reduced to 10% of profit until it reached a third initial capital). And the reserve capital was used to finance the expansion of production and compensate for losses in economic activity. The bonuses received by members of the board and workers of the trust depended on the amount of profit.

In the decree of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and the Council of People's Commissars of 1923, the following was written:

Syndicates began to emerge - voluntary associations of trusts on the basis of cooperation, engaged in marketing, supply, lending, and foreign trade operations. By the end of 1922, 80% of the trusted industry was syndicated, and by the beginning of 1928, there were 23 syndicates operating in almost all branches of industry, concentrating the bulk of wholesale trade in their hands. The board of syndicates was elected at a meeting of representatives of the trusts, and each trust could, at its own discretion, transfer a greater or lesser part of its supply and sales to the syndicate.

Implementation finished products, the purchase of raw materials, materials, equipment was carried out on a full-fledged market, through wholesale trade channels. A wide network has emerged commodity exchanges, fairs, trade enterprises.

In industry and other sectors, wages in cash were restored, tariffs and wages were introduced that excluded equalization, and restrictions were lifted to increase wages with an increase in output. Labor armies were liquidated, compulsory labor service and basic restrictions on changing jobs were abolished. The organization of labor was based on the principles of material incentives, which replaced the non-economic coercion of "war communism". The absolute number of unemployed registered by labor exchanges increased during the NEP period (from 1.2 million people at the beginning of 1924 to 1.7 million people at the beginning of 1929), but the expansion of the labor market was even more significant (the number of workers and employees in all branches of the national economy increased from 5.8 million in 1924 to 12.4 million in 1929), so that in fact the unemployment rate decreased.

A private sector emerged in industry and commerce: some state-owned enterprises were denationalized, others were leased out; private individuals with no more than 20 employees were allowed to create their own industrial enterprises (later this “ceiling” was raised). Among the factories rented by "private traders" there were those that numbered 200-300 people, and in general, the share of the private sector during the NEP period accounted for about a fifth of industrial products, 40-80% retail and a small part of wholesale.

A number of enterprises have been leased to foreign firms in the form of concessions. In 1926-27. there were 117 existing agreements of this kind. They covered enterprises that employed 18,000 people and produced just over 1% of industrial output. In some industries, however, the share of concession enterprises and mixed joint-stock companies, in which foreigners owned part of the share, was significant: in the extraction of lead and silver - 60%; manganese ore - 85%; gold - 30%; in the production of clothing and toilet articles - 22%.

In addition to capital, a stream of immigrant workers from all over the world was sent to the USSR. In 1922, the American trade union of garment workers and the Soviet government created the Russian-American Industrial Corporation (RAIK), which received six textile and clothing factories in Petrograd and four in Moscow.

Cooperation of all forms and types developed rapidly. The role of production cooperatives in agriculture was insignificant (in 1927 they provided only 2% of all agricultural products and 7% of marketable products), but by the end of the 1920s, more than half of all peasant farms were covered by the simplest primary forms - marketing, supply and credit cooperation. By the end of 1928, non-production cooperatives of various types, primarily peasant cooperatives, included 28 million people (13 times more than in 1913). In the socialized retail trade, 60-80% accounted for the cooperative and only 20-40% - for the state proper, in industry in 1928, 13% of all products were produced by cooperatives. There was cooperative legislation, lending, insurance.

Instead of depreciated and actually already rejected by the turnover of the Soviet signs, in 1922 the production of a new monetary unit- chervonets, which had a gold content and exchange rate in gold (1 chervonets = 10 pre-revolutionary gold rubles = 7.74 g of pure gold). In 1924, the Soviet signs, which were quickly supplanted by the chervonets, ceased to be printed altogether and were withdrawn from circulation; in the same year the budget was balanced and the use of money issue to cover state expenses; new treasury notes were issued - rubles (10 rubles = 1 gold piece). On foreign exchange market both within the country and abroad, chervonets were freely exchanged for gold and basic foreign currencies at the pre-war rate of the tsarist ruble (1 U.S. $= 1.94 rubles).

The credit system has revived. In 1921, the State Bank of the USSR was recreated, which began lending to industry and trade on a commercial basis. In 1922-1925. a number of specialized banks were created: joint-stock, in which the State Bank, syndicates, cooperatives, private and even at one time foreign, were shareholders, for lending to certain sectors of the economy and regions of the country; cooperative - for lending to consumer cooperation; organized on the shares of the agricultural credit society, closed on the republican and central agricultural banks; mutual credit societies - for lending to private industry and trade; savings banks - to mobilize the savings of the population. As of October 1, 1923, there were 17 independent banks operating in the country, and the share of the State Bank in the total credit investments of the entire banking system was 2/3. By October 1, 1926, the number of banks increased to 61, and the share of the State Bank in lending to the national economy decreased to 48%.

Commodity-money relations, which were previously tried to be banished from production and exchange, in the 1920s penetrated into all the pores of the economic organism, became the main link between its individual parts.

In just 5 years, from 1921 to 1926, the index of industrial production more than tripled; agricultural production doubled and exceeded the level of 1913 by 18%. But even after the end of the recovery period, economic growth continued at a rapid pace: the increase in industrial production amounted to 13 and 19%, respectively. In general, for the period 1921-1928. the average annual growth rate of national income was 18%.

The most important result of the NEP was that impressive economic successes were achieved on the basis of fundamentally new, hitherto unknown to the history of social relations. In industry, key positions were occupied by state trusts, in the credit and financial sphere - by state and cooperative banks, in agriculture - by small peasant farms covered by the simplest types of cooperation. In the conditions of NEP, the economic functions of the state turned out to be completely new; the goals, principles and methods of government economic policy have changed radically. If earlier the center directly established natural, technological proportions of reproduction by order, now it has switched to price regulation, trying to ensure balanced growth by indirect, economic methods.

The state put pressure on producers, forced them to find internal reserves to increase profits, to mobilize efforts to increase the efficiency of production, which alone could now ensure profit growth.

A broad campaign to reduce prices was launched by the government as early as the end of 1923, but a truly comprehensive regulation of price proportions began in 1924, when circulation completely switched to a stable red currency, and the functions of the Internal Trade Commission were transferred to the People's Commissariat of Internal Trade with broad rights in the field of price regulation. The measures taken then were successful: wholesale prices for manufactured goods fell by 26% from October 1923 to May 1, 1924 and continued to decline further.

Throughout the subsequent period until the end of the NEP, the question of prices continued to be the core of state economic policy: raising them by trusts and syndicates threatened to repeat the sales crisis, while lowering them beyond measure, in the presence of the state-owned private sector, inevitably led to the enrichment of the private owner at the expense of state industry, to the transfer of resources from state enterprises to private industry and trade. The private market, where prices were not standardized, but were set as a result of the free play of supply and demand, served as a sensitive “barometer”, the “arrow” of which, as soon as the state made miscalculations in pricing policy, immediately “pointed to bad weather”.

But the regulation of prices was carried out by the bureaucracy, which was not controlled sufficiently by the direct producers. The lack of democracy in the decision-making process regarding pricing became the "Achilles' heel" of the market socialist economy and played a fatal role in the fate of the NEP.

Brilliant as the economic advances were, their recovery was limited by hard limits. It was not easy to reach the pre-war level, but even this meant a new clash with the backwardness of yesterday's Russia, now already isolated and surrounded by a hostile world. Moreover, the most powerful and wealthy capitalist powers began to strengthen again. American economists have calculated that the per capita national income in the late 1920s in the USSR was less than 19% of the American one.

The political struggle of the NEP

Economic processes during the period of the NEP were superimposed on political development and were largely determined by the latter. These processes throughout the entire period of Soviet power were characterized by an inclination towards dictatorship and authoritarianism. As long as Lenin was at the helm, one could speak of a "collective dictatorship"; he was a leader solely due to authority, but since 1917 he had to share this role with L. Trotsky: the supreme ruler at that time was called “Lenin and Trotsky”, both portraits adorned not only state institutions, but sometimes peasant huts. However, with the beginning of the internal party struggle at the end of 1922, Trotsky's rivals - Zinoviev, Kamenev and Stalin - not possessing his authority, opposed Lenin's authority to him and in a short time inflated him to a real cult - in order to gain the opportunity to proudly be called "faithful Leninists" and "defenders of Leninism".

This was especially dangerous when combined with the dictatorship of the Communist Party. As Mikhail Tomsky, one of the top Soviet leaders, said in April 1922, “We have several parties. But, unlike abroad, we have one party in power, and the rest are in prison.” As if to confirm his words, in the summer of that year an open trial of the Right SRs took place. All more or less major representatives of this party who remained in the country were tried - and more than a dozen sentences were handed down to capital punishment (later the convicts were pardoned). In the same 1922, more than two hundred of the largest representatives of Russian philosophical thought were sent abroad just because they did not hide their disagreement with the Soviet system - this measure went down in history under the name "Philosophical steamboat".

Discipline within the Communist Party itself was also tightened. At the end of 1920, an opposition group appeared in the party - the "workers' opposition", which demanded the transfer of all power in production to the trade unions. In order to stop such attempts, the X Congress of the RCP (b) in 1921 adopted a resolution on the unity of the party. According to this resolution, the decisions taken by the majority must be carried out by all members of the party, including those who do not agree with them.

The consequence of the one-party system was the merging of the party and the government. The same people occupied the main positions in the party (Politburo) and in government bodies(SNK, All-Russian Central Executive Committee, etc.). At the same time, the personal authority of the people's commissars and the need to take urgent, urgent decisions in the conditions of the Civil War led to the fact that the center of power was concentrated not in legislature(VTsIK), and in the government - the Council of People's Commissars.

All these processes led to the fact that the actual position of a person, his authority played a greater role in the 20s than his place in the formal structure of state power. That is why, speaking about the figures of the 20s, we first of all name not positions, but surnames.

In parallel with the change in the position of the party in the country, the rebirth of the party itself took place. It is obvious that there will always be many more people wishing to join the ruling party than an underground party, membership in which cannot give other privileges than iron bunks or a noose around the neck. At the same time, the party, having become the ruling one, began to need to increase its membership in order to fill government posts at all levels. This led to a rapid growth in the size of the Communist Party after the revolution. On the one hand, periodic "purges" were carried out, designed to free the party from a huge number of "adhering" pseudo-communists, on the other hand, the growth of the party was from time to time spurred on by mass recruitments, the most significant of which was the "Lenin appeal" in 1924, after the death of Lenin. The inevitable consequence of this process was the dissolution of the old, ideological, Bolsheviks among the young party members and not at all young neophytes. In 1927, out of 1,300,000 people who were members of the party, only 8,000 had pre-revolutionary experience; most of the rest did not know the communist theory at all.

Not only the intellectual and educational, but also the moral level of the party went down. Indicative in this regard are the results of the party purge carried out in the second half of 1921 with the aim of removing "kulak-proprietary and petty-bourgeois elements" from the party. Of the 732,000 members, only 410,000 members remained in the party (slightly more than half!). At the same time, a third of those expelled were expelled for passivity, another quarter - for "discrediting the Soviet government", "selfishness", "careerism", "bourgeois lifestyle", "decomposition in everyday life".

In connection with the growth of the party, the initially inconspicuous post of secretary began to acquire more and more importance. Any secretary is a secondary position by definition. This is a person who, during official events, monitors compliance with the necessary formalities. Since April 1922, the Bolshevik Party had the post of general secretary. He connected the leadership of the secretariat of the Central Committee and the accounting and distribution department, which distributed lower-level party members to various positions. This position was given to Stalin.

Soon the expansion of the privileges of the upper stratum of party members began. Since 1926, this layer has received a special name - "nomenclature". So they began to call the party and state posts included in the list of posts, the appointment to which was subject to approval in the Accounting and Distribution Department of the Central Committee.

The processes of bureaucratization of the party and the centralization of power took place against the backdrop of a sharp deterioration in Lenin's health. Actually, the year of the introduction of the NEP was for him the last year of a full life. In May 1922, he was struck by the first blow - his brain was damaged, so that the almost helpless Lenin was given a very sparing work schedule. In March 1923, there was a second attack, after which Lenin fell out of life for half a year, almost learning to pronounce words again. As soon as he began to recover from the second attack, in January 1924 the third and last happened. As the autopsy showed, for the last almost two years of his life, only one hemisphere of the brain was active in Lenin.

But between the first and second attacks, he still tried to participate in political life. Realizing that his days were numbered, he tried to draw the attention of the congress delegates to the most dangerous trend - the degeneration of the party. In his letters to the congress, known as his "political testament" (December 1922 - January 1923), Lenin proposes to expand the Central Committee at the expense of the workers, to elect a new Central Control Commission (Central Control Commission) from the proletarians, to cut down the excessively swollen and therefore incapacitated RCI (Workers 'and Peasants' Inspectorate).

In the note "Letter to the Congress" (known as "Lenin's Testament") there was another component - the personal characteristics of the largest party leaders (Trotsky, Stalin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, Pyatakov). Often this part of the Letter is interpreted as a search for a successor (heir), but Lenin, unlike Stalin, was never a sole dictator, he could not make a single fundamental decision without the Central Committee, and not so fundamental - without the Politburo, despite the fact that both the Central Committee, and even more so the Politburo at that time were independent people who often disagreed with Lenin in their views. Therefore, there could be no question of any "heir" (and it was not Lenin who called the Letter to the Congress a "testament"). Assuming that after him the party would continue to have a collective leadership, Lenin characterized the alleged members of this leadership, for the most part ambiguous. Only one definite indication was in his Letter: the post of general secretary gives Stalin too much power, dangerous in his rudeness (this was dangerous, according to Lenin, only in the relationship between Stalin and Trotsky, and not in general). Some modern researchers believe, however, that "Lenin's testament" was based more on the psychological state of the patient than on political motives.

But the letters to the congress reached its rank-and-file participants only in fragments, and the letter, in which comrades-in-arms were given personal characteristics, was not shown to the party at all by the inner circle. We agreed among ourselves that Stalin promised to improve, and that was the end of the matter.

Even before the physical death of Lenin, at the end of 1922, a struggle began between his "heirs", more precisely, the pushing of Trotsky from the helm. In the autumn of 1923, the struggle took on an open character. In October, Trotsky addressed a letter to the Central Committee, in which he pointed out the formation of a bureaucratic intra-party regime. A week later, an open letter in support of Trotsky was written by a group of 46 old Bolsheviks ("Statement 46"). The Central Committee, of course, responded with a decisive refutation. The leading role in this was played by Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev. It was not for the first time that sharp disputes arose in the Bolshevik Party. But unlike previous discussions, this time the ruling faction actively used labeling. Trotsky was not refuted by reasonable arguments - he was simply accused of Menshevism, deviationism and other mortal sins. The substitution of labeling for a real dispute is a new phenomenon: it did not exist before, but it will become more and more common as the political process develops in the 1920s.

Trotsky was defeated fairly easily. The next party conference, held in January 1924, promulgated a resolution on the unity of the party (previously kept secret), and Trotsky was forced to silence. Until autumn. In the autumn of 1924, however, he published the book Lessons of October, in which he unequivocally stated that he made the revolution with Lenin. Then Zinoviev and Kamenev "suddenly" remembered that before the VI Congress of the RSDLP (b) in July 1917, Trotsky had been a Menshevik. In December 1924, Trotsky was removed from the post of People's Commissar of the Navy, but left in the Politburo.

Curtailment of the NEP

In October 1928, the implementation of the first five-year plan for the development of the national economy began. At the same time, not a project developed by the USSR State Planning Committee was adopted as a plan for the first five years, but an overestimated version, drawn up by the Supreme Council of National Economy not so much taking into account objective possibilities, but under pressure from party slogans. In June 1929, mass collectivization began (contradicting even the plan of the Supreme Council of National Economy) - it was carried out with the widespread use of coercive measures. In autumn, it was supplemented by forced grain procurements.

As a result of these measures, the unification into collective farms really acquired a mass character, which gave Stalin reason in November of the same 1929 to make a statement that the middle peasant went to the collective farms. Stalin's article was called "The Great Break". Immediately after this article, the next plenum of the Central Committee approved new, increased and accelerated plans for collectivization and industrialization.

Findings and Conclusions

The undoubted success of the NEP was the restoration of the destroyed economy, and, given that after the revolution, Russia lost highly qualified personnel (economists, managers, production workers), the success of the new government becomes a "victory over devastation." At the same time, the lack of those same highly qualified personnel has become the cause of miscalculations and errors.

Significant growth rates of the economy, however, were achieved only due to the return to operation of pre-war capacities, because Russia only by 1926/1927 reached economic indicators pre-war years. The potential for further economic growth turned out to be extremely low. The private sector was not allowed to "command heights in the economy", foreign investment was not welcomed, and investors themselves were not particularly in a hurry to Russia because of the ongoing instability and the threat of nationalization of capital. The state, on the other hand, was unable to make long-term capital-intensive investments only from its own funds.

The situation in the village was also contradictory, where the "fists" - the most decisive and effective owners - were clearly oppressed. They had no incentive to work better.

NEP and culture

It is impossible not to mention the very important influence of the NEP, the impact on culture. The wealthy Nepmen - private merchants, shopkeepers and artisans, not preoccupied with the romantic revolutionary spirit of universal happiness or opportunistic considerations about the successful service of the new government, turned out to be in the first roles during this period.

The new rich had little interest in classical art - they did not have enough education to understand it. They remembered their hungry childhood and there was no force that could stop the satisfaction of that childhood hunger. They set their fashion.

The main entertainment was cabarets and restaurants - a pan-European trend of that time. The Berlin cabarets were especially famous in the 1920s. One of the most famous couplet artists of the time was Mikhail Savoyarov.

In the cabaret, couplet artists performed simple song plots and simple rhymes and rhythms, performers of funny feuilletons, sketches, and entreprise. The artistic value of those works is very controversial, and many of them have long been forgotten. Nevertheless, simple unpretentious words and light musical motives of some songs entered the history of the country's culture. And they not only entered, but began to be passed on from generation to generation, acquiring new rhymes, changing some words, merging with folk art. It was then that such popular songs as "Bablis", "Lemons", "Murka", "Lanterns", "The blue ball is spinning and spinning" ...

These songs were repeatedly criticized and ridiculed for being apolitical, lack of ideas, petty-bourgeois taste, even outright vulgarity. But the longevity of these verses proved their originality and talent. The author of the texts for the songs "Babliki" and "Lemons" was the disgraced poet Yakov Yadov. Yes, and many other of these songs carry the same style: at the same time ironic, lyrical, poignant, with simple rhymes and rhythms - they are similar in style to Bagels and Lemons. But the exact authorship has not yet been established. And all that is known about Yadov is that he composed a huge number of uncomplicated and very talented couplet songs of that period.

Light genres also reigned in drama theatres. And here not everything was kept within the required boundaries. Moscow Vakhtangov Studio, the future theater named after. Vakhtangov, in 1922 turned to the production of Carlo Gozzi's fairy tale "Princess Turandot". It would seem that a fairy tale is such a simple and unpretentious material. The actors laughed and joked while rehearsing. So, with jokes, sometimes very sharp, a performance appeared that was destined to become a symbol of the theater, a pamphlet performance, concealing wisdom and a smile at the same time behind the lightness of the genre. Since then, there have been three different productions of this performance. A somewhat similar story happened with another performance of the same theater - in 1926, Mikhail Bulgakov's play "Zoyka's Apartment" was staged there. The theater itself turned to the writer with a request to write a light vaudeville on a modern NEP theme. The vaudeville merry, seemingly unprincipled play hid serious social satire behind its outward lightness, and the performance was banned by decision of the People's Commissariat of Education on March 17, 1929, with the wording: "For distorting Soviet reality."

In the 1920s, a real magazine boom began in Moscow. In 1922, several satirical humorous magazines began to be published at once: Krokodil, Satirikon, Smekhach, Splinter, a little later, in 1923, Searchlight (with the newspaper Pravda); in the 1921/22 season, the Ekran magazine appeared, among the authors of which are A. Sidorov, P. Kogan, G. Yakulov, J. Tugendhold, M. Koltsov, N. Foregger, V. Mass, E. Zozulya and many others. In 1925, the famous publisher V. A. Reginin and the poet V. I. Narbut founded the monthly "30 days". All this press, in addition to news from working life, constantly publishes humoresques, funny unpretentious stories, parody poems, caricatures. But with the end of the NEP, their publication ends. Since 1930, Krokodil has remained the only all-Union satirical magazine. The era of the New Economic Policy ended tragically, but the trace of this rampant time has been preserved forever.

NEP (reasons, goals, content, results) New economic policy- economic policy pursued in Soviet Russia and the USSR in the 1920s. It was adopted on March 15, 1921 by the X Congress of the RCP (b), replacing the policy of "war communism", which was carried out during the Civil War. The New Economic Policy had goal restoration of the national economy and the subsequent transition to socialism. The main content of the NEP is the replacement of surplus appropriation with food tax in the countryside (up to 70% of grain was confiscated during surplus appropriation, and about 30% with food tax), the use of the market and various forms of ownership, the attraction of foreign capital in the form of concessions, the implementation of the monetary reform (1922-1924), as a result of which the ruble became a convertible currency.

NEP: goals, objectives and main contradictions. Results of the NEP

Reasons for the transition to the NEP. During the years of civil war, the policy of “military communism." While the civil war, the peasants put up with the policy of the surplus appraisal, but when the war began to come to an end, the peasants began to express dissatisfaction with the surplus appraisal. It was necessary to immediately abolish the policy of "war communism". The peasants, outraged by the actions of the food detachments, not only refused to hand over their bread, but also rose up in armed struggle. Uprisings swept Tambov region, Ukraine, Don, Kuban, Volga and Siberia. The peasants demanded a change in the agrarian black policy, the elimination of the dictate of the RCP (b), the convening of the Constituent Assembly on the basis of universal equal suffrage [ source not specified 1970 days] . Units of the Red Army were thrown into the suppression of these speeches.

Discontent spread to the army. On March 1, 1921, the sailors and Red Army soldiers of the Kronstadt garrison under the slogan " BehindAdviсewithoutcommunists! "demanded the release from prison of all representatives of the socialist parties, the holding of re-elections of the Soviets and, as follows from the slogan, the exclusion of all communists from them, the granting of freedom of speech, assembly and unions to all parties, ensuring freedom of trade, allowing peasants to freely use their land and dispose of the products of their economy, that is, the liquidation

surplus.

From the appeal of the Provisional Revolutionary Committee of the city of Kronstadt:

Convinced of the impossibility of reaching an agreement with the rebels, the authorities stormed Kronstadt. By alternating artillery shelling and infantry actions, Kronstadt was taken by March 18; some of the rebels died, the rest went to Finland or surrendered.

In March 1921, at the 10th Congress of the Bolshevik Party (RKP (b)) the transition to the NEP was proclaimed. NEP - new economy. politics is a transitional period from capitalism to socialism. The main political goal of the NEP is to relieve social tensions, to strengthen the social base of Soviet power in the form of an alliance of workers and peasants - "the bonds of the city and the countryside." The economic goal is to prevent further aggravation of the devastation, to get out of the crisis and restore the economy. The social goal is to provide favorable conditions for building a socialist society without waiting for the world revolution. In addition, the NEP was aimed at restoring normal foreign policy ties, at overcoming international isolation.

For many years, this Leninist program was interpreted in our country as a timely transitional period between the Civil War and the forcing of industrialization and collectivization, as a tactical maneuver of the leader, which became a salvation for the young Soviet republic and the even younger Union.

And then they began to pray at the NEP. How the NEP was idealized during the years of perestroika!

Then the new economic policy was presented as a brilliant Leninist plan, the pinnacle in the creative heritage of the leader. They clung with a stranglehold to the phrase “Seriously and for a long time!”, which was uttered in 1921 by the People's Commissar of Agriculture Valerian Osinsky, who predicted a quarter-century term for the NEP - to the horror of his comrades. Lenin then replied: "I am not such a pessimist." By that time, he was accustomed to monthly sharp tactical maneuvers, according to Lenin's rhythms, three years is already "for a long time."

For the theorists of perestroika, it turned out that the private owner with his initiative was almost the main goal of the proletarian revolution. A screaming contradiction, but in those years few people were embarrassed by it. Society, weary of the shortage of goods, saw salvation in the reissue of the NEP... The "defeat of the NEP" was interpreted as a crime of Stalinism.

At the same time, many were cunning: they wanted to beat the “command-administrative system” with the NEP, with Lenin - Stalin and Brezhnev, so that, having shaken the situation, they then scrapped both Lenin and the NEP.

But some people did believe in the NEP as a "norm of life" to strive for. For example, the writer Anatoly Rybakov, who, unlike others, sang perestroika, never abandoned Lenin and October, did not accept Gaidar's reforms, and always recalled the NEP idyllically: “In two years, everything has changed unrecognizably. For two years! Food cards have been cancelled. Private shops opened on the Arbat. Everything was there! .. The country, destroyed in the seven years of the war by whites, reds, greens - whatever you want, recovered in a matter of months, restored, rose.

But why did the word "Nepman" quickly turn into a dirty word? Has the propaganda gone too far?

The most objective participants in the events of those years sometimes treated the NEP as a necessary evil, but never as a blessing. The NEP did not give way to those who believed in the ideals of socialism, who prepared themselves for selfless work, for self-improvement, for heroic deeds.

The NEP evoked emotions that were most easily expressed in the well-known rhetorical question: “What did you fight for?” When Leonid Utyosov sang: “What did we fight for, what did we suffer for? .. They are fattening there, they are walking there ...” - everyone understood that it was about Nepmen.

Is the NEP worth a kind word?

The First World War, which was called the Second Patriotic War, two revolutions, the Civil War, intervention and emigration. As a result, there is a shortage of specialists, clear ideas about the strategic goal and vague ideas about the immediate tactics and practice. In the early 20s, the state did not have the resources to exist without private traders. Without them, devastation and famine would not have been defeated. Enthusiasm and violence are reliable tools, with their help they built the foundation of the Soviet state. But without compromise with the elements of the old order, without the Nepmen, it was impossible to restore the economy, to clothe and feed the impoverished country.

The state cannot exist in peacetime in a state of emergency - and therefore such phenomena as surplus appropriation had to be canceled. The Civil War proved that the Bolsheviks are a force, an iron fist. But the economic tasks are electrification, restoration and expansion of production. This had to be dealt with by the whole world, by the state effort. But in trade, in small-scale production, in the service market, it was impossible to do without a private trader. In addition, the USSR in the 1920s was a peasant country. The surplus showed that the community of "official" proletarians and peasant proprietors is an illusion. The authorities had to retreat, pacifying Marxist radicalism.

Under the NEP, a painful split was felt in the life of the country. At one time, the cruel reality of serfdom was not combined with the ideology of the Orthodox brotherhood, and this led to an explosion. Stalin allowed deceit as a means of struggle, as a means of propaganda. But he understood that a big lie in politics is unacceptable, disastrous. It is unlikely that the front and rear would have unitedly met the enemy in 1941 if the country was teeming with proprietors with their own private interests.

During the heyday and abolition of the NEP, the Soviet order underwent a serious test of strength. It turned out that the Bolshevik regime could be flexible, that it was capable of whimsical dance steps: jumps, turns, compromises. Like the "obscene" Brest peace, the NEP was needed for a respite, for a regrouping of forces.

If the Bolsheviks had turned out to be impenetrable dogmatists, the "world's first state of workers and peasants" would not have existed even for several months in peacetime.

In working, engineering, officer families there was such a nostalgic concept: "Before the war." Many have preserved memories: before the war, shortly before the invasion, life began to improve. Stable earnings, work, on the screen - Chapaev and girls with character ... Of course, there was no idyll then, just after the war, peaceful life involuntarily appeared in a rosy light. But the carbon monoxide years of the NEP were remembered as a dangerous and dirty time. Such is the memory of the people.

The era of "merry theft"

Yuri
EMELYANOV,
historian:

Yuri Vasilyevich, was there an alternative to the NEP after the Civil War?

The ruin of the country then reached extreme limits. Industrial production fell to 4-20 percent of pre-war levels. The village could not get the most necessary household equipment and the simplest goods for its products ...

Speaking at the Tenth Congress of the RCP(b), Tsyurupa, the People's Commissar of Food, responsible for the surplus appropriation throughout Russia, reported: "Because of the sharp decrease in the production of bread, everything that we have to get for the needs and to meet the needs of the proletarian centers and starving Russia, everything must be taken from the usual consumption rate of the peasants ... From this follows the conclusion that no one will allow, without resistance, active or passive, to tear a piece out of his mouth." Therefore, the people's commissar reported, "everywhere there is demoralization, disorganization and direct extermination of our apparatus... 1,700 purveyors perished on the Ukrainian food front alone."

As early as February 1921, the Central Committee recognized the need to replace surplus appropriation with a tax in kind and restore market relations. Speaking at the X Party Congress, V.I. Lenin declared: “We have gone too far along the path of nationalizing trade and industry, on the path of closing down local trade. Was it a mistake? Undoubtedly."

A decree of May 24, 1921, allowed private trade, as well as various forms of state capitalism in the form of concessions, leases and mixed companies. Partial restoration of market relations gave a powerful impetus to the development of the country's economy.

However, the new economic policy, which seemed the only possible one for the country's leadership and even for representatives of all opposition platforms, was not unequivocally welcomed by many ordinary members of the party. The sacrifices and hardships they had endured during the "last and decisive battle" against the world bourgeoisie now seemed unnecessary. Many committed suicide in desperation. Tens of thousands of party members left its ranks in protest against "surrender to the bourgeoisie."

Were they openly opposed to the NEP?

The management treated it as a temporary retreat. Trotsky spoke especially often about the temporary nature of the NEP. He and Zinoviev, Kamenev and their supporters, who joined him, turned the struggle against the NEP and the Nepmen into a slogan directed against the majority in the party leadership. Thus, in its letter dated May 25, 1927, to the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, signed by 83 oppositionists headed by Trotsky and Zinoviev, the “wrong policy” of the leadership was condemned, which allegedly “accelerates the growth of forces hostile to the proletarian dictatorship: the kulak, the NEP man, the bureaucrat.”

However, many young communists were distrustful of Trotsky and Zinoviev as fighters against the NEP. At that time, the protocol of the meeting of the candidate group of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks in the village of Sokhondo, Chita District, was widely known. It captured the explanations of the nature of the oppositionists, which were offered by group member Ivan Rusak: “Trotsky began to lead a splitting line a long time ago ... Zinoviev at one time, I remember, upset Trotsky at the plenum, but, apparently, Zinoviev and Trotsky made a fuss.”

And what about Stalin?

He supported the transition to the NEP. But already in the 26th year he announced that the second stage of the development of the NEP had begun. According to Stalin, the first stage was associated with the restoration of agriculture, which made it possible to create an internal market in the country, establish the production of agricultural raw materials for industry and provide the population with food. The second stage of the NEP is "the direct deployment of industrialization," Stalin declared.
As long as the NEP provided a way out of devastation, it suited many of the country's working people. However, in the late 1920s, it became clear to Stalin and his supporters that the interests of the rapidly growing working class were in conflict with the New Economic Policy. There were good reasons for such conclusions.

Economic or social?

Judge for yourself. Food shortages in many cities in 1927 increased the dissatisfaction with the NEP on the part of the working class. Remembering his youth, the Soviet leader K.T. Mazurov noted: “The NEP brought prosperity to trade and small business, the peasants began to live better. And the workers were still very hard. They often had no bread on the table. Their discontent grew ... The workers thought: let them crush those who hide the bread, and we will have it.

As historians G. Bordyugov and V. Kozlov noted: “The working class did not become the social force that held on and fought for the principles of the NEP ... When social problems worsened in 1927, food difficulties arose, when in 1928 “fence books” (card system for supplying products) were introduced, nothing tied workers to the NEP.”

However, even among a significant part of the peasantry there was no support for the NEP and the market relations it recreated. Bordyugov and Kozlov wrote that “35% of the peasants exempted from paying agricultural tax, the proletarian, semi-proletarian and poor elements of the village - were they interested in maintaining the NEP? Those benefits, class guarantees, which the rural poor enjoyed in the 1920s, were guaranteed to them by direct state intervention in the economy.

The transition of the party leadership from defending the NEP in the struggle against the Trotskyites and later the Zinovievists to abandoning the NEP was received positively by the majority of the country's working class as the NEP crisis began.

And what can be said about the atmosphere of the NEP, about its ideology?

The contradictions intensified. The writer Lev Sheinin wrote: “It was an amazing time, and that Moscow was amazing ... In the Komsomol clubs they sang “We are the young guard of workers and peasants”, studied Esperanto for the maximum acceleration of the world revolution by creating a single language for the proletarians of all countries, stubbornly gnawed at science and fiercely hated the Nepmen, who had to be admitted temporarily ... professional swindlers and arrogant cocottes, speculators, bandits and just crooks of all shades, scales and varieties ... Gentlemen, concessionaires, all kinds of Gummers, Petersons and Van Bergs, settled firmly in Moscow, acquired young kept women, secretly bought up furs and currency, Rublev icons and Vologda lace, precious paintings and crystal, and slowly alloyed sent it abroad.

Organized crime has taken on rampant proportions. One example of the uncontrolled actions of gangs was cited by V. Molotov in his speech at the 15th Party Congress, talking about the events in the Boretskaya volost of the Ryazhsky district of the Ryazan province, where “for five years a gang of bandits, robbers and robbers ran like at home ... This hooliganism intimidated, intimidated, robbed and set fire to local peasants.” Appeals from the local population to the authorities for protection did not lead to anything. “And now banditry has not yet emerged in the Boretsky volost ... They still say about this volost:“ A wrestler is the father of all thieves, ”Molotov reported.

One to one - the village of Kushchevskaya in our time!

The ineffectiveness of the fight against the bandits was largely due to their connections with the authorities. Molotov acknowledged that the criminals “revealed connections not only in the committee and the district executive committee, but through some people they managed to influence individual members of the provincial committee, lips. KK and the Gubernia Court ... Criminal elements from the Boretsky volost managed to find weak points even among individual workers provincial party and Soviet apparatus, where they found some threads of connections ... "This is the atmosphere of the NEP.

The decline of morality was manifested in forgiveness for criminal acts. In his speech on April 13, 1926, Stalin said with irony: “There is theft that is bashful, hidden, and there is theft that is bold, “fun”, as they say about it in the press. I recently read an article in Komsomolskaya Pravda about "jolly" theft. There was, it turns out, a kind of fertik, a young man with a mustache, who merrily stole in one of our institutions, he stole systematically, tirelessly, and always stole successfully. What deserves attention here is not so much the thief himself, but the fact that the surrounding public, knowing about the thief, not only did not fight him, but, on the contrary, was not averse to slapping him on the shoulder and praising him for his dexterity, as a result of which the thief became a kind of hero in the eyes of the public ... When a spy or a traitor is caught, the indignation of the public knows no bounds, it demands execution. And when a thief is operating in front of everyone, plundering state property, the surrounding public is limited to chuckles and a pat on the back. Meanwhile, it is clear that a thief who plunders the people's property and undermines the interests of the national economy is the same spy and traitor, if not worse... We have hundreds and thousands of such thieves. You can't get everyone out with the help of the GPU."

Stalin was also indignant at the squandering of state funds: “We now have rampage, an orgy of all kinds of festivities, solemn meetings, anniversaries, the opening of monuments, etc. Tens and hundreds of thousands of rubles are squandered on these "cases".

And again as if about our days!

At the same time, Stalin remarked: “Most significant of all is that the non-Party people sometimes show a more careful attitude towards the means of our state than the Party ones. The communist acts in such cases more boldly and resolutely... Perhaps this is explained by the fact that the communist sometimes considers laws, the state, etc. things are family business. That is why it is not difficult for a different communist to step over like a pig (I apologize, comrades, for the expression) into the garden of the state and grab it there or show his generosity at the expense of the state. Stalin called for "a systematic struggle against the so-called" cheerful "theft in the organs of our state, in cooperation, in trade unions."

Valentin KATASONOV,
economist:

Valentin Yurievich! And where does the NEP begin in economic logic?

I think that the NEP was due to the fact that the party-state elite was not ready to solve large-scale tasks. There was no experience, there was no trust in the "bourgeois" specialists. Power has been lost. She was especially frightened by the Kronstadt rebellion. So we decided to let everything go. It is a bit like the current situation, when the authorities are not able to solve large-scale tasks and give everything at the mercy of the “market”, carrying out mass privatizations of state assets. But, as it seems to me, under the guise of general "liberalization" the interests of foreign capital were advancing. Then Trotsky was on the “horse”, he and his like-minded people, despite the leftist demagoguery, especially “pushed through” such directions of the NEP as attracting foreign capital into the country in the form of concessions and switching to gold currency (chervonets), which would provide great opportunities to export wealth from the country abroad.

How did the NEP affect the objective indicators of the economy - starting with the gold reserves?

In 1920, according to generally accepted estimates, the level of industrial production in our country was 7 times lower than in Russia in 1913. According to the then statistical data, by 1924 the country reached the pre-war level in terms of industrial production. More serious sources give estimates and calculations, from which it follows that the pre-war level of industry was reached only by 1927.

The situation with food and agriculture has somewhat normalized. During the NEP period, we were unable to reach pre-war levels of agricultural production. However, grain exports decreased compared to pre-revolutionary times, more grain and other agricultural products began to remain in the countryside, which made it possible to alleviate the acute food problem. But Agriculture remained backward, the yield was at pre-war level, the development proceeded according to the extensive variant. It is clear that such agriculture could not ensure the rapid economic development of the country. The peasant hardly fed the city, in which a small part of the country's population then lived.

As for the gold reserves, it was at an extremely low level during the NEP period. The country did not have objective opportunities to introduce gold coins.

What can be said about corruption under the NEP? How often did successful Nepmen turn out to be relatives of head clerks?

There are quite a few individual examples - both in terms of corruption, and in terms of family ties, and the use of these ties for personal gain. I had to deal more with family ties between our superiors and their relatives abroad. Such connections were doubly dangerous for our national security. For example, Sverdlov had a younger brother Benjamin in America, he was engaged in the banking business even before the revolution and continued, already in Soviet positions. Trotsky's connections with his relative, the banker Zhivotovsky, are interesting. However, the connections were not only related, but also simply business. Connections that were established before the First World War. Let us remember our future People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs Litvinov, who was the treasurer of the Bolsheviks abroad, lived in London, married an Englishwoman. If we dig up the biographies of the “fiery revolutionaries” who held key party and state posts in the first half of the 1920s, then there are few among them who did not have any relatives, friends or companions abroad. In the general atmosphere of "liberalism" of the NEP era, this was not considered a terrible crime, although no one was engaged in advertising communications. Very similar to today's situation...

Was it possible to carry out industrialization and strengthen the army without curtailing the NEP?

The delay in the NEP was mortally dangerous for our statehood and independence. After all, there were very specific plans of the West to start a new intervention. Or, at least, strangle the RSFSR by means of an economic blockade. Or to decompose the country from the inside with the help of the "fifth column" represented by the Trotskyists and the "new opposition". Such plans were constantly born after the Genoa Conference in 1922, when it became clear to the West that Soviet Russia was not going to dance to their tune. But in order to put a final cross on the NEP, it was necessary to break the "fifth column" inside the country. She fiercely defended the ideology and practice of the then "economic liberalism". Bukharin became the bright ideologist of this liberalism.

How acute was the problem of social inequality, contrasts in the years of the NEP? And did you manage to overcome it in the years after the “great turning point”?
- Nouveau riche speculators loved to live for show! Very similar to the "new Russians" of our time. This was no longer the case in the 1930s. Moreover, rather the opposite happened: excessive “leveling”. However, no one was especially offended, since egalitarian distribution is an important element of the mobilization economy. And the country's authorities did not hide the fact that tomorrow there may be a war, and social restrictions are inevitable.
- During the years of perestroika, the command was sounded: "Alignment with the NEP!" ...

Yes, at the end of Soviet power, a campaign to idealize the NEP really began. So that we once again stepped on the same rake. Almost all the ideologists of this turn occupied fairly prominent positions in the party-Soviet hierarchy and carried out the “social order” that came from A.N. Yakovlev. It was a "social order" for the collapse of the USSR.

The "reforms" of recent years contain almost all the main elements of the NEP of the 1920s. These are just different modifications of the same economic liberalism. Then the NEP was able to slow down already five years after it began (and finally put a bold cross on it ten years later), while our “reforms” have been going on for a quarter of a century. Today we have gone much further than then. First of all, in the 1920s. foreign capital has not managed to gain such control over our economy as it has today.