A people's tragedy

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.’65

But could those hungry people afford such goods? That was the fear of the Bolshevik rank and file. It seemed to them that the boom in private trade would inevitably lead to a widening gap between rich and poor. ‘We young Communists had all grown up in the belief that money was done away with once and for all,’ recalled one Bolshevik in the 1940s. ‘If money was reappearing, wouldn’t rich people reappear too? Weren’t we on the slippery slope that led back to capitalism? We put these questions to ourselves with feelings of anxiety.’ Such doubts were strengthened by the sudden rise of unemployment in the first two years of the NEP. While these unemployed were living on the bread line the peasants were growing fat and rich. ‘Is this what we made the revolution for?’ one Bolshevik asked Emma Goldman. There was a widespread feeling among the workers, voiced most clearly by the Workers’ Opposition, that the NEP was sacrificing their class interests to the peasantry, that the ‘kulak’ was being rehabilitated and allowed to grow rich at the workers’ expense. In 1921–2 literally tens of thousands of Bolshevik workers tore up their party cards in disgust with the NEP: they dubbed it the New Exploitation of the Proletariat.66

Much of this anger was focused on the ‘Nepmen’, the new and vulgar get-rich-quickly class of private traders who thrived in Russia’s Roaring Twenties. It was perhaps unavoidable that after seven years of war and shortages these wheeler-dealers should step into the void. Witness the ‘spivs’ in Britain after 1945, or, for that matter, the so-called ‘mafias’ in post-Soviet Russia. True, the peasants were encouraged to sell their foodstuffs to the state and the co-operatives by the offer of cheap manufactured goods in return. But until the socialized system began to function properly (and that was not until the mid-1920s) it remained easier and more profitable to sell them to the ‘Nepmen’ instead. If some product was particularly scarce these profiteers were sure to have it — usually because they had bribed some Soviet official. Bootleg liquor, heroin and cocaine — they sold everything. The ‘Nepmen’ were a walking symbol of this new and ugly capitalism. They dressed their wives and mistresses in diamonds and furs, drove around in huge imported cars, snored at the opera, sang in restaurants, and boasted loudly in expensive hotel bars of the dollar fortunes they had wasted at the newly opened race-tracks and casinos. The ostentatious spending of this new and vulgar rich, shamelessly set against the background of the appalling hunger and suffering of these years, gave rise to a widespread and bitter feeling of resentment among all those common people, the workers in particular, who had thought that the revolution should be about ending such inequalities.

This profound sense of plebeian resentment — of the ‘Nepmen’, the ‘bourgeois specialists’, the ‘Jews’ and the ‘kulaks’ — remained deeply buried in the hearts of many people, especially the blue-collar workers and the party rank and file. Here was the basic emotional appeal of Stalin’s ‘revolution from above’, the forcible drive towards industrialization during the first of the Five Year Plans. It was the appeal to a second wave of class war against the ‘bourgeoisie’ of the NEP, the new ‘enemies of the people’, the idea of a return to the harsh but romantic spirit of the civil war, that ‘heroic period’ of the revolution, when the Bolsheviks, or so the legend went, had conquered every fortress and pressed ahead without fear or compromise. Russia in the 1920s remained a society at war with itself — full of unresolved social tensions and resentments just beneath the surface. In this sense, the deepest legacy of the revolution was its failure to eliminate the social inequalities that had brought it about in the first place.

16 Deaths and Departures

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i Orphans of the Revolution