A people's tragedy

The Mensheviks and SRs were suppressed along with the rebels. It was axiomatic to Bolshevik propaganda that the peasant revolts and workers’ strikes had been organized by these parties. It was certainly true that they had sympathized with them, and in some cases had even supported them. But much more relevant was the fact that, as the popularity of the Bolsheviks had plummeted, so that of the SRs and Mensheviks had grown: they were a threat to the regime. By claiming that the SRs and Mensheviks had organized the strikes and revolts of 1921, the Bolsheviks sought both a pretext to destroy their last political rivals and an explanation for the protests that denied their popular base. The arrest of the ‘counter-revolutionary’ Mensheviks, some 5,000 in all, during 1921, and the grotesque show trial of the SR leaders the following year, when the whole party was in effect convicted as ‘enemies of the people’,62 were last desperate measures by the Bolsheviks to claim a popular legitimacy for their bankrupt revolution.

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The New Economic Policy was originally conceived as a temporary retreat. ‘We are making economic concessions in order to avoid political ones,’ Bukharin told the Comintern in July. ‘The NEP is only a temporary deviation, a tactical retreat, a clearing of the land for a new and decisive attack of labour against the front of international capitalism,’ Zinoviev added in December. Lenin also saw it in these terms. The NEP was ‘a peasant Brest-Litovsk’, taking one step backwards to take two steps forward. But, unlike many of the other party leaders, Lenin accepted that the period of retreat was likely to be long enough — he talked vaguely of ‘not less than a decade and probably more’ — to constitute not just a tactical ploy but a whole recasting of the revolution. The NEP, he reminded the party in May, was to be adopted ‘ “seriously and for a long time” — we must definitely get this into our heads and remember it well, because rumours are spreading that this is a policy only in quotes, in other words a form of political trickery that is only being carried out for the moment. This is not true.’63

As Lenin saw it, the NEP was more than a temporary concession to the market in order to get the country back on its feet. It was a fundamental if rather ill-formulated effort to redefine the role of socialism in a backward peasant country where, largely as a result of his own party’s coup d’étât in 1917, the ‘bourgeois revolution’ had not been completed. Only ‘in countries of developed capitalism’ was it possible to make an ‘immediate transition to socialism’, Lenin had told the Tenth Party Congress. Soviet Russia was thus confronted with the task of ‘building communism with bourgeois hands’, of basing socialism on the market. Lenin of course remained full of doubts: at times he expressed fears that the regime would be drowned in a sea of petty peasant capitalism. But in the main he saw the market — regulated by the state and gradually socialized through co-operatives — as the only way to socialism. Whereas the Bolsheviks up till now had lived by the maxim ‘The less market the more socialism’, Lenin was moving towards the slogan ‘The more market the more socialism’.64

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 cafés, shops and restaurants, night clubs and 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: