A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924

But, like the leopard with its spots, the Bolsheviks could not easily erase their innate mistrust of private trade. Even Bukharin, who later became the main defender of the NEP, warmed to it only slowly during the course of 1921— 3. Many of the rank-and-file Bolsheviks, in particular, saw the boom in private trade as a betrayal of the revolution. What, only months ago, had been condemned as a crime against the revolution was now being endorsed and encouraged. Moreover, once the doors had been opened to the market it was difficult to stop the flood of private trade that was almost bound to follow after the shortages of the previous four years. By 1921 the whole population was living in patched-up clothes and shoes, cooking with broken kitchen utensils, drinking from cracked cups. Everyone needed something new. People set up stalls in the streets to sell or exchange their basic household goods, much as they do today in most of Russia's cities; flea-markets boomed; while 'bagging' to and from the countryside once again became a mass phenomenon. Licensed by new laws in 1921—2, private cafes, shops and restaurants, night clubs and

THE REVOLUTIONARY INHERITANCE

96-7 The people reject the Bolsheviks. Above: Red Army troops assault the mutinous Kronstadt Naval Base, 16 March 1921. Below: peasant rebels ('Greens') attack a train of requisitioned grain, February 1921.

98-100 The famine crisis of 1921-2. Above: Bolshevik commissars inspect the harvest failure in the Volga region, 1921. The crisis was largely the result of Bolshevik over-requisitioning. Below, the victims of the crisis; an overcrowded cemetery in the Buzuluk district, 1921. Opposite: cannibals with their victims, Samara province, 1921.

101-3 Orphans of the revolution. Above: street orphans in Saratov hunt for food remains in a rubbish tip, 1921. Opposite above: orphans were ripe for political indoctrination. This young boy, seen here giving a speech from the agit-train October Revolution, was the Secretary of the Tula Komsomol. He was part of the generation which, a decade later, pioneered the Stalinist assault on old Russia. Opposite below: orphans also made good soldiers: a national unit of the Red Army in Turkestan, 1920.

104 The war against religion: Red Army soldiers confiscate valuable items from the Semenov Monastery in Moscow, 1923.

105-6 The revolution expands east. Above: the Red Army arrives in Bukhara and explains the meaning of Soviet power to the former subjects of the Emir, September 1920. Below, two Bolshevik commissars of the Far East.

107 The dying Lenin, with one of his doctors and his younger sister Maria Ul'ianova, during the summer of 1923. By the time this photograph was taken, Stalin's rise to power was virtually assured.

brothels, hospitals and clinics, credit and saving associations, even small-scale manufacturers sprang up like mushrooms after the rain. Foreign observers were amazed by the sudden transformation. Moscow and Petrograd, graveyard cities in the civil war, suddenly burst into life, with noisy traders, busy cabbies and bright shop signs filling the streets just as they had done before the revolution. 'The NEP turned Moscow into a vast market place,' recalled Emma Goldman:

Shops and stores sprang up overnight, mysteriously stacked with delicacies Russia had not seen for years. Large quantities of butter, cheese and meat were displayed for sale; pastry, rare fruit, and sweets of every variety were to be purchased. Men, women and children with pinched faces and hungry eyes stood about gazing into the windows and discussing the great miracle: what was but yesterday considered a heinous offence was now flaunted before them in an open and legal manner.'⁶³