A people's tragedy

No less monumental than the ban on factions was the second historic resolution of the Tenth Party Congress, the replacement of food requisitioning by the tax in kind. This abandoned the central plank of War Communism and laid the foundations of the NEP by allowing the peasants, once the tax had been paid, to sell the rest of their surplus as they liked, including through the free market. It was a clear attempt to stimulate production: the overall burden of the tax was 45 per cent lower than the levy of 1920 (it was later reduced to a standard rate of 10 per cent of the harvest); there were tax rebates for peasants who increased their sowings and productivity; the individual peasant was made responsible for his own share of the tax, thus abolishing the collective responsibility of the commune; and there was to be a special fund of consumer goods and agricultural tools for exchange with the most productive peasants. Lenin, it seems, had been moving towards this ‘new deal’ with the peasants for several weeks. A report on the Antonov uprising, delivered by Bukharin to the Politburo on 2 February after his return from a trip to Tambov, had made it clear that it was impossible to continue with the requisitionings in view of the strength of the peasantry’s resistance to them there and in many other provinces. There can be no doubt that the timing of the introduction of the tax in kind was determined by the urgent need to pacify these peasant wars, which Lenin feared more than the Whites.55

Fearful that the delegates would denounce the tax as a restoration of capitalism, Lenin attempted to limit its discussion by delaying the introduction of the resolution until 15 March, the penultimate day of the Congress, by which time many of the delegates had already left for the Kronstadt Front. Lenin’s own lecture on the NEP monopolized the session, leaving little time for any other speakers. He stressed that the tax in kind was desperately needed to quell the peasant revolts and to build a new alliance — the smychka — with the peasants, based on the market. Soviet power could not survive without it, since the failure of the revolution in the West left the proletariat without other allies. The policies of the civil war had been a utopian dream — it was impossible to create socialism by administrative fiat — and in a backward peasant country such as Russia there was no other way to restore the economy after the devastations of the past few years, let alone to accumulate the capital for the socialist transformation of the country, than through the market. He dismissed fears that restoring private trade would lead Russia back to capitalism: this was to be a socialized market. The capitalist classes in Russia, including the ‘kulaks’, had already been destroyed by the revolution. And as long as it controlled the ‘commanding heights’ of the economy, banking, heavy industry, transport and foreign trade, then the state could regulate the market and use fiscal pressures to encourage the smallholders towards the collective farms and co-operatives. Lenin’s tactics clearly worked. His speech had lasted for nearly three hours and by the time he sat down most of the delegates were either too weary or too intimidated to engage in serious theoretical debate. Whereas on other issues there were up to 250 different speakers, there were only four, other than Lenin himself, on the tax in kind. All of them were chosen by the presidium, were strictly limited to ten minutes each, and none had any serious criticisms to make. Neither Trotsky nor Bukharin expressed a desire to speak on the new tax, although both had espoused contrary policies up until that time, and between them had spoken on no fewer than fourteen occasions during the other sessions of the Congress. Even Shliapnikov, who later condemned the tax as a retreat before the peasantry, remained strangely silent after his bruising of the past few days.56 The defining policy of the 1920s was passed virtually without discussion. The era of the stage-managed Party Congress had arrived.