By the beginning of 1921, the Red Army had established complete control over a significant part of the territory of the former Russian Empire, with the exception of Finland, Poland, the Baltic states, and Bessarabia. But the internal situation of the Soviet state forced the Bolshevik leadership to abandon "war communism" and go over to the NEP.

Reasons for the transition to the NEP:

1) The socio-economic crisis caused by the First World War and the Civil War, the policy of "war communism". Industrial production decreased in 1920 compared with 1913 by 7 times, agricultural - by a third. Total population losses for 1914-1920 amounted to more than 20 million people. There was massive unemployment. Major cities were depopulated. The economic ruin was exacerbated by the drought of 1920-1921. Famine covered the most fertile regions - the Volga region, southern Ukraine, Crimea, the North Caucasus, and the Southern Urals. According to various sources, from 1 to 8 million people became victims of hunger.

2) The political crisis, expressed in a decrease in the support of the population of the Bolshevik government. Dissatisfaction with the surplus became the cause of numerous peasant uprisings. The largest was the uprising in the Tambov province under the leadership of A.S. Antonov ("Antonovism") and the uprising in Western Siberia. At the beginning of 1921 there were spontaneous strikes in Petrograd and a number of other cities. Unrest began in the army and navy. In March 1921, an uprising of sailors broke out in Kronstadt, during which political demands were put forward. All these speeches were suppressed, but the threat of losing their social support forced the country's leadership to abandon the policy of "war communism" and look for new ways.

The essence and main features of the NEP.

The 10th Congress of the RCP(b) in March 1921 decided to change the course of domestic policy. V.I. Lenin called it the "new economic policy". Its essence was the partial resolution of the market economy while maintaining control in the hands of the state.

Initially, the NEP was seen by the Bolsheviks as a temporary measure. Then the NEP was already assessed as one of the possible paths to socialism through the coexistence of the socialist and market economy and the gradual displacement of non-socialist economic forms.

The main goal of the NEP is to restore the country's economy and, on this basis, to strengthen the social base of Bolshevik power.

The beginning of the New Economic Policy was initiated by the decision to replace the surplus appropriation with a food tax, adopted at the X Congress of the RCP (b) in March 1921. The tax in kind was 2 times less than the apportionment, since 1924 it took on a monetary form. Its size was announced in advance and could not be increased during the year. The surplus left by the peasants was allowed to be sold at market prices. The lease of land and the hiring of labor were allowed. As a result of the measures taken, agriculture in 1925 restored pre-war indicators.

In industry and trade, private individuals were allowed to open small and rent medium-sized enterprises. Large enterprises united in trusts that worked on the basis of cost accounting and self-sufficiency. To increase labor productivity, the material interest of workers was stimulated. Instead of remuneration in kind, a monetary system based on the tariff scale was introduced. Labor was abolished. Cooperation developed.

In 1922-1924. under the leadership of People's Commissar of Finance G.Ya. Sokolnikov, a monetary reform was carried out, a solid monetary unit appeared - the gold chervonets. Payment for services (communications, transport, utilities) was introduced.

The monetary reform helped to attract foreign investment in the form of concessions - enterprises with the participation of foreign capital. True, the concessions, which were created mainly in the extractive industries, produced about 1% of industrial output.

As a result of the new economic policy in 1926, industry also restored its pre-war level. The living conditions of the urban and rural population have improved.

Contradictions in the implementation of the NEP and its curtailment.

Along with the successes, contradictions were revealed in the implementation of the NEP, due to which in the late 1920s. she was folded:

1) The main thing was the contradiction between politics (socialist) and economics (capitalist). The Bolshevik leadership could not but take into account the mood in the party and society. The attitude towards the NEP was negative, because it was considered a return to the old order (they asked "what did they fight for in the civil war?"). Particularly negative was the attitude towards the Nepmen - the "new bourgeoisie", who earned much more than the workers. The concept of "NEP frenzy" appeared - the desire to flaunt one's wealth, like the behavior of the "new Russians". The NEP reality was very different from the Bolshevik ideology with its idea of ​​equality.

2) The contradiction between industry and agriculture. Agriculture recovered faster than industry. Meanwhile, the Bolsheviks were interested precisely in the accelerated development of industry. For its development, funds were needed, which were withdrawn from agriculture at the expense of "price scissors", i.e. artificial overpricing of manufactured goods, and underpricing of agricultural goods (primarily bread). The peasants did not want to sell grain at low prices and buy low-quality manufactured goods. All this caused constant grain procurement crises, known as the NEP crises.

3) Contradiction between rich and poor. Having proclaimed a classless society, the Bolsheviks tried to equalize everyone. In the system of taxation, the main burden fell on private entrepreneurs in the city and kulaks in the countryside. The poor were exempted from paying taxes, the middle peasants paid half. The kulaks, in order to free themselves from the tax burden, split up their farms. As a result, the marketability of agriculture decreased. In fact, during the years of the NEP, for the first time, peasants were able to eat their fill, supplying only excess amounts of food to the market.

Low marketability led to a decrease in the volume of exports of agricultural products, and, accordingly, imports of equipment for industry. In the late 1920s the international situation escalated, a new world war became apparent. The NEP allowed our country to restore the economy, but could not solve the problem of modernizing the country in a short time. Therefore, Stalin and his entourage went to the curtailment of the NEP, which was replaced by industrialization and collectivization.

Prerequisites

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. The volume of industrial production has significantly decreased, and as a result, agricultural production as well.

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

Thus, the main task of the internal policy of the RCP (b) and the Soviet state was to restore the destroyed economy, create a material, technical and socio-cultural basis for building socialism, promised by the Bolsheviks to the people.

The peasants, outraged by the actions of the food detachments, not only refused to hand over their bread, but also rose to 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 sent to suppress these demonstrations.

Discontent spread to the army as well. 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 peasants to freely use their land and dispose of the products of their economy, that is, the elimination of surplus appropriation.

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

V. I. Lenin

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...

Convinced of the impossibility of reaching an agreement with the rebels, the authorities launched an assault on 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.

The course of development of the NEP

Proclamation of the NEP

In connection with the introduction of the NEP, certain legal guarantees were introduced for private property. So, on May 22, 1922, the All-Russian Central Executive Committee issued a decree “On the Basic Private Property Rights Recognized by the RSFSR, Protected by Its Laws and Protected by the Courts of the RSFSR.” Then, by a decree of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of November 11, 22, from January 1, 23, the Civil Code of the RSFSR was put into effect, which, in particular, provided that every citizen has the right to organize industrial and commercial enterprises.

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 solid chervonets backed by precious metals, stable foreign currency and easily marketable goods. Chervonets was equated to the old 10-ruble gold coin containing 7.74 g of pure gold.

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.

The holding (1921-1929) of the Nizhny Novgorod Fair, the largest in Russia, was resumed.

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, therefore, from the mid-1920s, other non-tax methods of replenishing the treasury began to be actively used, such as forced loans, 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 (that is, in the fall 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, 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.

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 the year, various types of non-production cooperatives, primarily peasant cooperatives, covered 28 million people (13 times more than in the city). 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, the issue of a new monetary unit was launched in the city - chervonets, which had a gold content and a gold exchange rate (1 chervonets = 10 pre-revolutionary gold rubles = 7.74 g of pure gold). In the city, 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 emission to cover state expenses was prohibited; new treasury notes were issued - rubles (10 rubles = 1 gold piece). On the foreign exchange market, both within the country and abroad, chervonets were freely exchanged for gold and major foreign currencies at the pre-war rate of the tsarist ruble (1 US dollar = 1.94 rubles).

The credit system has revived. The State Bank of the RSFSR was created in 1923 (transformed into the State Bank of the USSR in 1923), 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.

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 state bodies (SNK, All-Russian Central Executive Committee, etc.). At the same time, the personal authority of the people's commissars and the need to make urgent, urgent decisions in the conditions of the Civil War led to the fact that the center of power was concentrated not in the legislative body (VTsIK), but 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 party bureaucratization and 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 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).

Even before Lenin's death, 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. This was not the first time that bitter disputes arose within 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 quite easily - the very 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, but not for long. In the autumn of 1924, however, he published the book " October Lessons”, 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 was a Menshevik. In December 1924, Trotsky was removed from the post of People's Commissar of the Navy, but left in the Politburo.

results

The NEP, that is, Lenin's retreat from communism to some free market practice and the emergence of an incentive for free management, led to a rapid improvement in living conditions. Peasants began to sow again, private trade and handicrafts began to bring goods that had long disappeared to the market, the country began to revive. The monetary reform that had begun led to the replacement of worthless billions by a solid and firm red ruble.

Curtailment of the NEP

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 economic growth rates, however, were achieved only by returning pre-war capacities to operation, because Russia reached the economic indicators of the pre-war years only by 1923/1924. 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 “kulaks” were clearly oppressed.

Women's fashion since the NEP

Lenin's opinion

When asked whether Lenin believed that the NEP was the collapse of communist theory, the leader of the world proletariat gave the following answer in a private conversation:

Of course we failed. We thought of bringing about a new communist society at the behest of a pike. Meanwhile, this is a matter of decades and generations. In order for the Party not to lose its soul, faith and will to fight, we must portray before it the return to the exchange economy, to capitalism, as some kind of temporary retreat. But for ourselves, we must clearly see that the attempt failed, that it is impossible to suddenly change the psychology of people, the habits of their age-old life. You can try to drive the population into a new system by force, but the question is whether we would have retained power in this all-Russian meat grinder.

NEP and culture

It is impossible not to say about 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 set their fashion. Cabarets and restaurants became the main entertainment - a pan-European trend of that time (the cabarets of Berlin were especially famous in the 1920s).

In the cabaret, couplet artists performed simple song plots and uncomplicated rhymes and rhythms, performers of funny feuilletons, sketches, and entreprise (one of the most famous couplet artists of the time was Mikhail Savoyarov). The artistic value of such performances was highly controversial, and many of them have long been forgotten. But, nevertheless, simple and unpretentious texts 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 “Bablichki”, “Lemons”, “Murka”, “Lanterns”, “The blue ball is spinning and spinning” ...(The author of the lyrics for the songs "Babliki" and "Lemons" was the disgraced poet Yakov Yadov).

These songs have been repeatedly criticized and ridiculed for being apolitical, unprincipled, petty-bourgeois taste, even outright vulgarity. But the longevity of these verses proved their originality and talent. 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.

NEP postcard

Light genres also reigned in drama theaters. And here not everything was kept within the required boundaries. The Moscow Vakhtangov Studio (the future Vakhtangov Theatre) 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 external 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: "Crocodile", "Satyricon", "Smekhach", "Splinter", a little later, in 1923 - "Projector" (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

How capitalism was temporarily introduced in Soviet Russia

Ninety-five years ago, on March 21, 1921, in pursuance of the decisions of the X Congress of the RCP (b), the All-Russian Central Executive Committee (VTsIK) of the RSFSR adopted the Decree “On the replacement of food and raw materials allocation with a tax in kind”.

Recall that earlier the peasants were forced to give up to 70% of the produced product to the state, but now they had to give only about 30%. With the abolition of the surplus appropriation, in fact, it is necessary to count the beginning of the "New Economic Policy" (NEP), which was a series of reforms aimed at transforming mobilization war communism into market state capitalism.

As a result of the reforms, the peasants received the right to choose the form of land use: they could rent out land and hire workers. There was a decentralization of industrial management, enterprises were transferred to cost accounting. Individuals were allowed to open their own factories or rent them. Enterprises with up to 20 employees were nationalized. Foreign capital began to be attracted to the country, a law on concessions was adopted, in accordance with which joint-stock (foreign and mixed) enterprises began to be created. During the monetary reform, the ruble strengthened, which was facilitated by the issuance of the Soviet chervonets, equal to ten gold rubles.

Necessity or mistake?

Since the NEP meant the rejection of war communism, it is necessary to clarify what this very “communism” was and what it led to. In Soviet times, it was customary to consider it a kind of system of forced measures. Say, the Civil War was blazing in the country, and it was necessary to pursue a policy of tough mobilization of all resources. Sometimes such an excuse can be found today. However, the leaders of the Bolshevik Party themselves argued quite the opposite. So, Lenin at the IX Party Congress (March-April 1920) said that the leadership system that had developed under war communism should also be applied to the "peaceful tasks of economic construction" for which an "iron system" is needed. And in 1921, already in the period of the NEP, Lenin admitted: “We hoped ... by the direct orders of the proletarian state to establish state production and state distribution of products in a communist way in a small-peasant country. Life has shown our mistake” (“On the 4th Anniversary of the October Revolution”). As you can see, Lenin himself considered war communism a mistake, and not some kind of necessity.

At the IX Congress of the RCP(b) (March - April 1920), a bet was made on the final eradication of market relations. The food dictatorship intensified, almost all basic foodstuffs, as well as some types of industrial raw materials, fell into the scope of apportionment.

It is characteristic that the tightening continued after the defeat of P.N. Wrangel, when the direct threat to Soviet power from the Whites had already been eliminated. At the end of 1920 - beginning of 1921, measures were taken to curtail the commodity-money system, which practically meant the abolition of money. The urban population was "exempted" from paying for services for the supply of food and consumer goods, the use of transport, fuel, medicines and housing. Instead of wages, distribution in kind was now introduced. The well-known historian S. Semanov wrote: “In the country as a whole, distributions in kind accounted for the predominant share in the earnings of a worker: in 1919 - 73.3%, and in 1920 - already 92.6% ... Unhappy Russia returned to natural exchange.

They no longer traded in the markets, but “exchanged”: bread - for vodka, nails - for potatoes, a frock coat - for canvas, an awl - for soap, and what's the use of the fact that baths have become free?

In order to take a steam bath, it was necessary to obtain an “order” in the corresponding office ... workers at enterprises also tried, where they could, to pay “in kind”. At the rubber factory "Triangle" - a couple or two galoshes, at weaving factories - several arshins of fabric, etc. And at shipbuilding, metallurgical and military plants - what to give there? And the factory management looked through its fingers at how hard workers sharpened lighters on machine tools or dragged tools from the back rooms to change all this at the flea market for half a loaf of sour bread - you need to eat something. ("Kronstadt rebellion").

In addition, the Supreme Council of the National Economy (VSNKh) nationalized the remnants of small enterprises. A powerful tightening of the surplus appraisal was planned. In December 1920, it was decided to supplement it with a new layout - seed and sowing. For this purpose, they even began to create special sowing committees. As a result of all this “communist construction”, a transport and food crisis began in the country. Russia was engulfed in the fire of numerous peasant uprisings. The Tambov one is considered the most famous of them, but serious resistance was also shown in many other regions. 100 thousand people fought in the rebel detachments of Western Siberia. Here the number of rebels even exceeded the number of Red Army soldiers. But there was also the Volga “Red Army of Truth” by A. Sapozhkov (25 thousand fighters), there were large rebel groups in the Kuban, in Karelia, etc. This is what the “forced” policy of war communism brought the country to. escortcity.ch geneve escort The delegates of the 10th Congress were forced to travel from Siberia to Moscow with battles - railway communication was interrupted for several weeks.

Finally, the army rose up, an anti-Bolshevik rebellion broke out in Kronstadt - under red banners and with the slogan: "Soviets without communists!".

Obviously, at a certain stage of the Civil War, the Bolsheviks were tempted to use wartime mobilization levers in order to move on to the full-scale construction of the foundations of communism. Of course, in part, war communism was really caused by necessity, but very soon this necessity began to be perceived as an opportunity to implement some large-scale transformations.

Criticism of the NEP

The leadership realized the fallacy of the previous course, however, the “mass” of the communists had already managed to imbue the spirit of “war communism”. She was too accustomed to the harsh methods of "communist construction." And for the vast majority, the sharp change in course caused a real shock. In 1922, a member of the Politburo of the Central Committee G.E. Zinoviev admitted that the introduction of the NEP caused almost complete misunderstanding. It resulted in a massive outflow from the RCP (b). In a number of counties in 1921 - early 1922, approximately 10% of its members left the party.

And then it was decided to carry out a large-scale "cleansing of the party ranks." “The purge of the party in 1921 was unprecedented in its results in the entire history of Bolshevism,” writes N.N. Maslov. – As a result of the purges, 159,355 people, or 24.1% of its membership, were expelled from the party; including 83.7% of those expelled from the party were "passive", that is, people who were members of the RCP (b), but did not take any part in party life. The rest were expelled from the party for abusing their position (8.7%), for performing religious rites (3.9%), and as hostile elements "infiltrating the ranks of the party with counter-revolutionary aims" (3.7%). About 3% of the Communists voluntarily left the ranks of the party without waiting for verification. (“RKP (b) - VKP (b) during the years of the NEP (1921–1929) // “Political parties of Russia: history and modernity”).

They started talking about the "economic Brest" of Bolshevism, and fuel was added to the fire of the party protest by N.I. Ustryalov, who effectively used this metaphor. But they also spoke positively about Brest, many believed that there was a temporary retreat - as in 1918, for several months. So, the employees of the People's Commissariat of Food at first almost did not see the difference between the surplus appraisal and the tax in kind. They expected that in autumn the country would return to a food dictatorship.

Mass dissatisfaction with the NEP forced the Central Committee to convene an emergency All-Russian Party Conference in May 1921. At it, Lenin convinced the delegates of the need for new relations, explaining the policy of the leadership. But many party members were irreconcilable, they saw in what was happening a betrayal of the bureaucracy, a logical consequence of the "Soviet" bureaucracy that had developed in the "military-communist" era.

Thus, the "workers' opposition" (A.G. Shlyapnikov, G.I. Myasnikov, S.P. Medvedev and others) actively opposed the NEP. They used a mocking decoding of the NEP abbreviation - "new exploitation of the proletariat."

In their opinion, the economic reforms led to a "bourgeois degeneration" (which, by the way, Ustryalov, a member of the Smeno-Vekhites, really hoped for). Here is an example of anti-NEP "workers'" criticism: "The free market cannot possibly fit into the model of the Soviet State. Supporters of the NEP at first spoke of the presence of some market freedoms, as a temporary concession, as some retreat before a big leap forward, but now it is argued that the Sov. the economy is unthinkable without it. I believe that the emerging class of NEPmen and kulaks is a threat to the power of the Bolsheviks. (S.P. Medvedev).

But there were also much more radical currents operating underground: “The year 1921 gave birth to several small Bolshevik Kronstadts,” writes M. Magid. - In Siberia and the Urals, where the traditions of partisanism were still alive, opponents of the bureaucracy began to create secret workers' unions. In the spring, the Chekists uncovered an underground organization of local communist workers in the Anzhero-Sudzhensky mines. It set as its goal the physical destruction of party officials, as well as specialists (state economic workers), who, even under Kolchak, had proven themselves to be obvious counter-revolutionaries, and then received warm places in state institutions. The core of this organization, numbering 150 people, was a group of old party members: a people's judge with party experience since 1905, the chairman of the mine cell - in the party since 1912, a member of the Soviet executive committee, etc. The organization, which consisted mainly of former anti-Kolchak partisans, was divided into cells. The latter kept a record of the persons to be destroyed during the action scheduled for May 1. In August of the same year, another report of the Cheka repeats that the most acute form of party opposition to the NEP are groups of party activists in Siberia. There the opposition took on the character of "positively dangerous" and "red banditry" arose. Now, at the Kuznetsk mines, a conspiratorial network of communist workers has been uncovered, which has set as its goal the extermination of responsible workers. Another similar organization was found somewhere in Eastern Siberia. The traditions of “red banditry” were also strong in the Donbass. From the closed report of the secretary of the Donetsk provincial committee Kviring for July 1922, it follows that the hostile attitude of the workers towards the specialists reaches outright terror. So, for example, an engineer was blown up in the Dolzhansky district and a foreman was murdered by two communists. ("The Workers' Opposition and the Workers' Insurrection").

Much was said about the danger of “capitalist restoration” on the left flank, where in the mid-1920s a “new opposition” (G.E. Zinoviev, L.B. Kamenev) and a “Trotsky-Zinoviev anti-party bloc” would arise. One of its leaders will be the chairman of the Financial Committee of the Central Committee and the Council of People's Commissars (SNK) E.A. Preobrazhensky, who already in December 1921 raised the alarm about the development of "farmer-kulak" farms. And in March 1922, this unusually vigilant comrade presented his theses to the Central Committee, in which he tried to give a thorough analysis of what was happening in the country. The conclusion was drawn as follows: “The process of smoothing out class contradictions in the countryside has ceased... The process of differentiation has resumed with renewed vigor, and it manifests itself most of all where the restoration of agriculture is most successful and where the area cultivated by the plow is increasing... In the context of the extreme decline of the peasant economy as a whole and the general impoverishment of the countryside, the growth of the rural bourgeoisie continues.”

Preobrazhensky did not confine himself to one statement and presented his own "anti-crisis" program. He proposed to "develop state farms, support and expand proletarian agriculture on the plots given to factories, encourage the development of agricultural collectives and involve them in the orbit of a planned economy as the main form of transforming a peasant economy into a socialist economy."

But the most interesting thing is that, along with all these "ultra-left" proposals, Preobrazhensky called for help in ... the capitalist West. In his opinion, foreign capital had to be widely poured into the country in order to create "large agricultural factories."

Sweet pieces for abroad

It is not surprising that with such love for foreign capital, Preobrazhensky in 1924 became deputy chairman of the Main Concession Committee (GKK) under the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR. A year later, L.D. became the chairman of this committee. Trotsky, closely associated with the countries of the West. It was under him that the extraordinary strengthening of this organization takes place, although the concessions themselves were allowed at the very beginning of the NEP.

Under Trotsky, the GKK included such prominent leaders as Deputy People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs M.M. Litvinov, Plenipotentiary A.A. Ioffe, Deputy Chairman of the Supreme Economic Council of the USSR G.L. Pyatakov, Secretary of the All-Union Council of Trade Unions (AUCCTU) A.I. Dogadov, the largest theorist and propagandist, member of the Central Committee A.I. Stetsky, People's Commissar for Foreign Trade L.B. Krasin and others. A representative assembly, you can't say anything. (It is significant that Krasin put forward a project to create large trusts for the extraction of oil and coal with the participation of foreign capital. He believed that it was necessary to provide parts of the shares of these trusts to the owners of nationalized enterprises. And in general, in his opinion, foreigners should have been actively involved in the management of trusts).

In the GKK, deals were made with foreigners and a lot fell to the functionaries themselves. A.V. Boldyrev writes: “When people talk about the NEP, “Nepmen” or “Nepachs” usually come to mind - these characters stood out brightly with their ostentatious, but vulgar luxury against the backdrop of the devastation and poverty of the “war communism” era. However, a little freedom of entrepreneurship and the emergence of a small stratum of private entrepreneurs who took out hidden gold pieces from caches and put them into circulation are only part of what was happening in the country. By orders of magnitude big money was spinning in concessions. It's like an entrepreneur of the 1990s - the owner of a pair of stalls in a raspberry jacket, with a "purse", on a used, but foreign car, imported from Kazakhstan - to compare with Yukos. Petty speculation and huge funds flowing abroad. (“Did Trotsky change fronts in 1925?”).

The largest and at the same time strange transaction was the agreement with the gold mining company Lena Goldfields. It was owned by a British banking consortium associated with the American banking house Kuhn Leeb. By the way, the infamous execution of Lena workers in 1912 was largely associated with the activities of Lena Goldfields.

The workers protested against exploitation by "domestic" and foreign capitalists, and most of the shares in the mines belonged to the owners of "Lena". And so, in September 1925, this company was given a concession to develop the Lena mines. The GKK was very generous - Western bankers received the territory stretching from Yakutia to the Ural Mountains. The company could mine, in addition to gold, also iron, copper, gold, lead. Many metallurgical enterprises were placed at its disposal - Bisertsky, Seversky, Revdinsky metallurgical plants, Zyuzelsky and Degtyarsky copper deposits, Revdinsky iron mines, etc. The share of the USSR in the extracted metals was only 7%.

Foreigners were given the go-ahead, and they began to manage - in the spirit of their "best" colonial traditions. “This foreign company, headed by the Englishman Herbert Guedal, behaved in the first socialist state in an extremely cheeky and impudent way,” notes N.V. Starikov. - At the conclusion of the concession agreement, she promised "investment", but did not invest a single ruble in the development of mines and enterprises. On the contrary, it came to the point that Lena Goldfields demanded state subsidies for itself and in every possible way evaded payment of all fees and taxes. ("Crisis: how it's done").

This continued until Trotsky was in the USSR - until 1929. The workers of the mines organized a series of strikes, and the Chekists simultaneously conducted a series of searches. After that, the company was deprived of the concession.

Criminal semi-capitalism

For the peasants, the NEP meant almost immediate relief. But for urban workers, even more difficult times have come. “... The workers suffered significantly from the transition to the market,” writes V.G. Sirotkin. - Previously, under "war communism", they were guaranteed a "party maximum" - some bread, cereals, meat, cigarettes, etc. - and everything is free, "distribution". Now the Bolsheviks offered to buy everything with money. But there was no real money, gold chervonets (they will appear only in 1924) - they were still replaced by "sovznaks". In October 1921, the bunglers from the Narkomfin printed so many of them that hyperinflation began - by May 1922 prices had increased 50 times! And no “pay” of the workers could keep up with them, although at that time the wage growth index was already introduced, taking into account the rise in prices. This is what caused the workers' strikes in 1922 (about 200 thousand people) and in 1923 (about 170 thousand). ("Why did Trotsky lose?").

On the other hand, a prosperous stratum of private entrepreneurs, the “Nepmen”, immediately arose. Not only did they manage to profit, they managed to enter into very profitable, and by no means always legal, connections with the administrative apparatus. This was facilitated by the decentralization of industry. Homogeneous and closely related enterprises were united in trusts (with only 40% being centrally subordinated, the rest were subordinated to local authorities). They were transferred to self-financing and provided greater independence. So, they themselves decided what to produce and where to sell their products. The enterprises of the trust had to do without state supplies, purchasing resources on the market. Now they were fully responsible for the results of their activities - they themselves used the proceeds from the sale of their products, but also covered their own losses.

It was then that the Nepachi speculators arrived in time, who tried in every possible way to "help" the management of the trusts. And from their trading and intermediary services, they had very solid profits. It is clear that the economic bureaucracy also fell under the influence of the "new" bourgeoisie - either due to inexperience, or for reasons of a "commercial" nature.

During the three years of the NEP, private traders controlled two-thirds of the entire wholesale and retail trade in the country.

Of course, all this was riddled with desperate corruption. Here are two examples of criminal semi-capitalism. In November 1922, the so-called. "Black Trust". It was created by the head of Mostabak A.V. Spiridonov and director of the Second State Tobacco Factory Ya.I. Circassian. The sale of tobacco products itself was to be carried out, first of all, to state institutions and cooperatives. However, this trust, which consisted of former tobacco wholesalers, received 90% of the total production of the tobacco factory. At the same time, they were provided with the best assortment, and even a 7–10-day loan.

In Petrograd, a private entrepreneur, metal merchant S. Plyatsky founded a supply and sales office, which had an annual turnover of three million rubles. As it turned out later, such solid incomes were possible as a result of close "cooperation" with 30 state institutions.

Researcher S.V. Bogdanov, referring to these and other facts of the “NEP” crime, notes: “Bribery among civil servants of the NEP period was a specific form of adaptation to the radically changed socio-economic realities of society. The salary of Soviet employees who were not included in the nomenclature lists was very low, and, from the point of view of social security, their position was unenviable. There were a lot of temptations to improve their financial situation through semi-legal deals with NEPmen. To this fact, it is necessary to add numerous reorganizations of the state administration apparatus, which were permanently going on throughout the entire period of the existence of the NEP and, of course, not only brought confusion, but also gave rise to the desire of individual officials to protect themselves in case of sudden dismissal. (“NEP: criminal entrepreneurship and power” // Rusarticles.Com).

Thus, the reforms led to the revival of the economy and the rise in living standards. However, it was very difficult and contradictory…

Special for the Centenary

Acceptance on X Congress of the RCP (b) the decision to replace the surplus appropriation with the tax in kind is the starting point in the transition from the policy of “war communism” to a new economic system, to the NEP.

V. I. Lenin and K. E. Voroshilov among the delegates of the X Congress of the RCP (b). 1921

It is quite obvious that the introduction of a tax in kind is not the only characteristic of the NEP, which has become a definite feature for the Soviet country. system of political and economic measures carried out for nearly a decade. But these were the first steps, and taken very carefully. Decree of the Council of People's Commissars of March 29, 1921 No. Was installed grain tax in the amount of 240 million poods (with an average harvest) instead of 423 million poods when apportioned in 1920.

Peasants were able to sell their surplus products on the market.

For V.I. For Lenin, as for all Bolsheviks, this entailed a profound revision of his own ideas about the incompatibility of socialism and private trade. Already in May 1921, 2 months after the Tenth Congress, the Tenth Extraordinary Party Conference was convened to discuss a new course. There could no longer be any doubts - the course, as Lenin clarified, was taken "in earnest and for a long time." It was " reformist” method of action, the rejection of the revolutionary Red Guard attack on capital, this was the “admission” to socialism of the elements of the capitalist economy.

VI Lenin in his office. October 1922

For the formation of a market and the establishment of commodity exchange, it was necessary to revive the industry, to increase the output of its products. There have been radical changes in the management of industry. Trusts were created - 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 trusts.

N.A. Berdyaev.

S.L. Frank, L.P. Karsavin; historians A.A. Kizevetter, S.P. Melgunov, A.V. Florovsky; economist B.D. Brutskus and others.

Particular emphasis is placed on the elimination Menshevik and Socialist-Revolutionary parties, in 1922 arrests became massive. By this time RCP (b) remained the only legal political party in the country.

The New Economic Policy combined two contradictory trends from the very beginning: one is to liberalize the economy, the other is to preserve the communist party's monopoly on power. These contradictions could not but see V.I. Lenin and other party leaders.

Established in the 20s. the NEP system, therefore, was supposed to contribute restoration and development of the national economy, which collapsed during the years of the imperialist and civil wars, but at the same time, this system initially contained internal inconsistency which inevitably led to deep crises directly arising from the nature and essence of NEP.

The first steps in the liberalization of the economy, the introduction of market relations contributed to the solution of the problem restoration of the national economy country devastated by civil war. A clear rise was indicated by the beginning of 1922. The implementation of the plan began GOELRO.

V.I.Lenin at the GOELRO map. VIII All-Russian Congress of Soviets. December 1920 Hood. L. Shmatko. 1957

Railway transport began to emerge from the state of devastation, the movement of trains was restored throughout the country. By 1925, large-scale industry reached the level of 1913. The Nizhegorodskaya, Shaturskaya, Yaroslavskaya, and Volkhovskaya hydroelectric power stations were put into operation.

Start of the 1st stage of the Kashirskaya GRES. 1922

The Putilov machine-building plant in Petrograd, and then the Kharkov and Kolomna plants began to produce tractors, the Moscow AMO plant - trucks.

For the period 1921 - 1924. the gross output of large-scale state industry more than doubled.

Rising in agriculture. In 1921 - 1922. the state received 233 million poods of grain, in 1922-1923 - 429.6 million, in 1923-1924 - 397, in 1925-1926 - 496 million poods. State procurement of butter increased 3.1 times, eggs - 6 times.

The transition to a tax in kind improved the socio-political situation in the countryside. In the information reports of the Central Committee of the RCP (b), relating to the summer of 1921, it was reported: “Peasants everywhere increase the area of ​​​​sowing, armed uprisings have subsided, the attitude of the peasants is changing in favor of the Soviet regime.”

But the first successes were prevented by extreme disasters that hit the main grain regions of the country. 25 provinces of the Volga, Don, North Caucasus and Ukraine were hit by a severe drought, which, in the conditions of the post-war food crisis, led to a famine that claimed about 6% of the population. The fight against hunger was conducted as a broad state campaign with the involvement of enterprises, organizations, the Red Army, international organizations (ARA, Mezhrabpom).

In the famine-stricken areas, martial law was maintained, introduced there during the years of the civil war, there was a real threat of revolts, and banditry intensified.

On first plan a new problem emerges. The peasantry showed its dissatisfaction with the tax rate which turned out to be unbearable.

In the reports of the GPU for 1922 "On the political state of the Russian countryside," the extremely negative impact of the food tax on the financial situation of the peasants was noted. The local authorities took drastic measures against the debtors up to and including reprisals. In some provinces, an inventory of property, arrests and trials were carried out. Such measures met with active resistance from the peasants. So, for example, the inhabitants of one of the villages of the Tver province shot a detachment of Red Army soldiers who arrived to levy a tax.

According to the decree of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and the Council of People's Commissars "On a single tax in kind on agricultural products for 1922 - 1923." dated March 17, 1922, instead of a whole host of product taxes, single tax in kind, which assumed the unity of the salary sheet, pay periods and a common unit of calculation - a pood of rye.

IN May 1922 All-Russian Central Executive Committee accepted Basic Law on Labor Land Use, the content of which later, almost unchanged, formed the basis of the Land Code of the RSFSR, approved on October 30 and entered into force on December 1 of the same year. Within the framework of state ownership of land, confirmed by the code, the peasants were given the freedom to choose forms of land use, up to the organization of individual farms.

The development of individual farms in the countryside led to strengthening class stratification. As a result, small farms found themselves in a difficult situation. In 1922, the Central Committee of the RCP (b) began to receive information about the spread of the system of enslaving transactions in the countryside. This meant that the poor, in order to get a loan or inventory from the kulaks, were forced to pawn their crops “on the vine” for next to nothing. These phenomena are also the face of NEP in the countryside.

In general, the first years of NEP became a serious test of the new course, since the difficulties that arose were due not only to the consequences of a poor harvest in 1921, but also to the complexity of restructuring the entire system of economic relations in the country.

Spring 1922 erupted financial crisis directly related to the introduction of capitalist forms of economy.

Decrees of the Council of People's Commissars of 1921 on freedom of trade, on the denationalization of enterprises marked the rejection of the policy of "communist" distribution. This means that banknotes have returned to life as an integral part of free enterprise and trade. As M. Bulgakov wrote, at the end of 1921, “trillionaires” appeared in Moscow, i.e. people who had trillions of rubles. Astronomical figures became a reality because it became possible to buy goods with them, but this opportunity was limited by the constant depreciation of the ruble, which naturally narrowed the possibilities of free trade and the market.

At this time, a new Nepman entrepreneur, the “Soviet capitalist”, also showed himself, who, in the conditions of a commodity shortage, inevitably became an ordinary dealer and speculator.

Strastnaya (now Pushkinskaya) Square. 1920s

IN AND. Lenin, evaluating the speculation, said that "the car breaks out of the hands, it does not go quite the way the one who sits at the helm of this car imagines."

The communists recognized that the old world had burst in with buying and selling, clerks, speculators - with what they had recently fought against. Problems were added with the state industry, which was removed from the state supply and, in fact, left without working capital. As a result, workers either replenished the army of the unemployed, or did not receive wages for several months.

The situation in the industry has seriously deteriorated. in 1923 - early 1924., when there was a sharp decline in the growth of industrial production, which, in turn, led to the mass closure of enterprises, rising unemployment, the emergence of a strike movement that swept the whole country.

The reasons for the crisis that struck the country's economy in 1923 became the subject of discussion at XII Congress of the RCP (b) held in April 1923. “Price scissor crisis”- so they began to call him according to the famous diagram, which L.D. Trotsky, who spoke about that phenomenon, showed it to the congress delegates. The crisis was associated with a divergence in prices for industrial and agricultural goods (this was called “price scissors”). This happened because during the recovery period, the village was ahead in terms of the scale and pace of recovery. Handicraft and private production grew faster than large-scale industry. By the middle of 1923, agriculture was restored in relation to the pre-war level by 70%, and large-scale industry - by only 39%.

Discussion on the issue scissors” took place on October Plenum of the Central Committee of the RCP (b) in 1923, a decision was made to lower the prices of manufactured goods, which, of course, prevented the deepening of the crisis, which posed a serious threat of a social explosion in the country.

The entire socio-political crisis that hit the USSR in 1923 cannot be limited only by the narrow framework of the “price scissors” problem. Unfortunately, the problem was even more serious than it might seem at first glance. Serious conflict between government and people, who was dissatisfied with the policy of power, the policy of the Communist Party. Both the working class and the peasantry expressed their protest both in the form of passive resistance and active actions against the Soviet regime.

IN 1923. many provinces of the country were covered strike movements. In the reports of the OGPU “On the political state of the USSR”, a whole range of reasons was singled out: these are long-term delays in wages, its low level, increased production rates, staff reductions, and mass layoffs. The most acute disturbances took place at the textile enterprises of Moscow, at the metallurgical enterprises of the Urals, Primorye, Petrograd, at railway and water transport.

The year 1923 was also difficult for the peasantry. The defining moment in the mood of the peasantry was dissatisfaction with the excessively high level of the single tax and the "price scissors". In some areas of the Primorsky and Trans-Baikal provinces, in the Mountainous Republic (Northern Caucasus), the peasants generally refused to pay taxes. Many peasants were forced to sell their livestock and even implements in order to pay the tax. There was a threat of famine. In the Murmansk, Pskov, Arkhangelsk provinces, surrogates have already begun to be eaten: moss, fish bones, straw. Banditry has become a real threat (in Siberia, Transbaikalia, the North Caucasus, Ukraine).

The socio-economic and political crisis could not but affect the position of the party.

On October 8, 1923, Trotsky outlined his point of view on the causes of the crisis and ways out of it. Trotsky's conviction that "chaos comes from above," that the crisis is based on subjective causes, was shared by many heads of economic departments and organizations.

This position of Trotsky was condemned by the majority of the members of the Central Committee of the RCP (b), and then he turned to the masses of the party. December 11, 1923 V " Pravda Trotsky's "Letter to Party Conferences" was published, where he accused the party of bureaucratic transformation. For a whole month from mid-December 1923 to mid-January 1924, 2-3 pages of Pravda were filled with debatable articles and materials.

The difficulties that arose as NEP developed and deepened in the first half of the 1920s inevitably led to internal party disputes. The emerging “ left direction”, defended by Trotsky and his supporters, actually reflected disbelief of a certain part of the communists in the prospects for NEP in the country.

At the VIII All-Union Party Conference, the results of the discussion were summed up and a detailed resolution was adopted condemning Trotsky and his supporters for their petty-bourgeois deviation. The accusations of factionalism, anti-Bolshevism, revisions of Leninism shook his authority, became the beginning of the collapse of his political career.

IN 1923 in connection with Lenin's illness, there is a gradual process of concentration of power in the hands of the main " triplets” Central Committee: Stalin, Kamenev and Zinoviev. In order to rule out opposition within the Party in the future, the seventh point of the resolution "On the Unity of the Party", adopted at the Tenth Congress and until that time kept secret, was promulgated at the conference.

Farewell to V.I. Lenin. January 1924 Hood. S.Boim. 1952

While Lenin actually led the party, his authority in it was indisputable. Therefore, the struggle for power between representatives of the political currents that were emerging in connection with the transition to NEP could only have the character of hidden rivalry.

WITH 1922. when I.V. Stalin took office General Secretary of the RCP(b), he gradually placed his supporters in key positions in the party apparatus.

At the XIII Congress of the RCP (b) on May 23-31, 1924, two trends in the development of Soviet society were clearly noted: “one is capitalist, when capital accumulates at one pole, wage labor and poverty at the other; the other - through the most understandable, accessible forms of cooperation - to socialism.

WITH late 1924. the course starts facing the village”, elected by the party as a result of the increased dissatisfaction of the peasantry with the policy pursued, the emergence of mass demands for the creation of a peasant party (the so-called Peasant Union), which, unlike the RCP (b), would protect the interests of the peasants, resolve tax issues, and contribute to the deepening and expansion of private property in the countryside.

The developer and ideologist of the “village NEP” was N.I. Bukharin, who believed that it was necessary to move from a policy of tactical concessions to the peasantry to a sustainable course of economic reforms, because, as he said, “we have NEP in the city, we have NEP in relations between town and countryside, but we do not have NEP in the countryside itself.”

With the rationale for a new turn in economic policy in the village, Bukharin spoke April 17, 1925. at a meeting of the Moscow party activists, a week later this report in the form of an article was published in Pravda. It was in this report that Bukharin uttered the famous phrase, addressing the entire peasantry with an appeal: “ Get rich!”.

This course was put into practice at the April 1925 Plenum of the Central Committee of the RCP (b), which recorded that “together with the development of market relations in the countryside, as well as the strengthening of trade relations with the city and the foreign market, the strengthening of the bulk of middle-peasant farms is and will continue to grow with simultaneous growth (at least for the next few years) on one side of the wealthy sections of the countryside with the separation of capitalist elements (merchants) and on the other - farm laborers and wood of the poor.”

And in December 1925. took place XIV congress where the course was officially approved for the victory of socialism in the USSR.

The workers' delegations of Moscow and Donbass welcome the XIV Party Congress. Hood. Yu.Tsyganov

K.E. Voroshilov and M.V. Frunze during the parade on Red Square on May 1, 1925

The congress called this “the main task of our party” and emphasized that “there is an economic offensive of the proletariat on the basis of the new economic policy and the advance of the economy of the USSR towards socialism, and the state socialist industry is increasingly becoming the vanguard of the national economy”, therefore, “the task of the victory of socialist economic forms over private capital must be put at the forefront.”

Thus, XIV Congress of the RCP (b) became a kind frontier in the reorientation of the party's policy towards the strengthening of socialist principles in the economy.

Nevertheless, the beginning of the second half of the 1920s still took place under the sign of the preservation and development of NEP principles. But the grain procurement crisis in the winter of 1927-1928 created a real threat to plans for industrial construction, complicating the overall economic situation in the country.

In determining the fate of the NEP in the current economic conditions, two groups of the country's political leadership clashed. The first - Bukharin, Rykov, Pyatakov, Tomsky, Smilga and other supporters of the active growth of agriculture, the deepening of the NEP in the countryside, lost the ideological battle to the other - Stalin and his supporters (Molotov, Voroshilov, Kaganovich and others), who by that time had achieved a majority in the political leadership of the country.

In January 1928, Stalin proposed to expand the construction of collective farms and state farms in order to stabilize grain procurements. Stalin's speech in July 1928, published only a few years later, emphasized that politics NEP has reached an impasse that the bitterness of the class struggle is due to the ever more desperate resistance of the capitalist elements, that the peasantry will have to spend money on the needs of industrialization.

Bukharin, in his own words, was “horrified” by the General Secretary’s conclusions and tried to organize a debate by publishing “Notes of an Economist” in Pravda on September 30, 1928, where he outlined the economic program of the opposition (Bukharin, Rykov, Tomsky constituted the so-called “Right Opposition”). The author of the article explained the crisis by errors in planning, pricing, unpreparedness of agricultural cooperation and advocated a return to economic and financial measures to influence the market under the NEP.

IN November 1928. The Plenum of the Central Committee unanimously condemned right bias”, and Bukharin, and Rykov, and Tomsky dissociated themselves from him, who were guided by the desire to preserve the unity of the party. In the same month, the party and state bodies decide on forcing collectivization processes.

In 1929, emergency measures were legalized in the Ukraine and the RSFSR to restrict the free sale of grain, the priority sale of grain under state obligations was established, and the policy of expropriating the merchant class as a class began to be implemented. The country is entering the first five-year plan, the plans of which provide for accelerated rates of industrialization and collectivization of the country. And in these plans already There is no place.

In the many years of struggle between socialist and market principles, victory was directed from above, the party leadership of the country, who made his final choice in favor of socialism.

However, attaching decisive importance to the subjective factor - the volitional actions of Stalin and his entourage, oriented towards accelerated socialist industrialization, cannot be the only explanation for the "death of NEP" in the USSR.

The actual practice of implementing this policy throughout the 20s. identifies and objective factor— i.e. those contradictions and crises that were inherent in the very nature of NEP. The interweaving of market and administrative command principles of management, maneuvering between the market and the directive economy led to a “turn” 1929. This year has become the end of the New Economic Policy carried out by the party and the government during the recovery period. There were undoubted successes at that time, and losses, and phenomena of stabilization, and internal crises. But the positive, constructive transformations of the 20s. undoubtedly connected with the more flexible strategy and tactics of the NEP compared to the policy of the total regime of the subsequent “Stalinist” decades.

NEP - " new economic policy» Soviet Russia was an economic liberalization under strict political control of the authorities. NEP has replaced war communism» (« old economic policy”- SEP) and had the main task: to overcome the political and economic crises of the spring of 1921. The main idea of ​​the NEP was the restoration of the national economy for the subsequent transition to socialist construction.

By 1921, the Civil War on the territory of the former Russian Empire was generally over. There were still battles with the unfinished White Guards and Japanese invaders in the Far East (in the Far East), and in the RSFSR they were already assessing the losses caused by military revolutionary upheavals:

Loss of territory- Poland, Finland, the Baltic countries (Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia), Western Belarus and Ukraine, Bessarabia and the Kars region of Armenia turned out to be outside Soviet Russia and its allied socialist state entities.

Population loss as a result of wars, emigration, epidemics and a drop in the birth rate, it amounted to approximately 25 million people. Experts calculated that no more than 135 million people lived in the Soviet territories at that time.

Were thoroughly destroyed and fell into disrepair industrial areas: Donbass, Ural and Baku oil complex. There was a catastrophic shortage of raw materials and fuel for somehow working plants and factories.

The volume of industrial production decreased by about 5 times (metal smelting fell to the level of the beginning of the 18th century).

The volume of agricultural production has decreased by about 40%.

Inflation crossed all reasonable limits.

There was a growing shortage of consumer goods.

The intellectual potential of society has degraded. Many scientists, technicians and cultural figures emigrated, some were subjected to repression, up to physical destruction.

The peasants, outraged by the surplus appropriation and the atrocities of the food detachments, not only sabotaged the delivery of bread, but also everywhere raised armed rebellions. The farmers of the Tambov region, Don, Kuban, Ukraine, the Volga region and Siberia revolted. The rebels, often led by ideological SRs, put forward economic (the abolition of the surplus) and political demands:

1. Changes in the agrarian policy of the Soviet authorities.
2. Cancel the one-party dictate of the RCP(b).
3. Elect and convene a Constituent Assembly.

Units and even formations of the Red Army were thrown to suppress the uprisings, but the wave of protests did not subside. In the Red Army, anti-Bolshevik sentiments also matured, which resulted on March 1, 1921 in the large-scale Kronstadt uprising. In the RCP(b) itself and the Supreme Council of National Economy, already since 1920, the voices of individual leaders (Trotsky, Rykov) were heard, calling for the abandonment of the surplus appraisal. The issue of changing the socio-economic course of the Soviet government is ripe.

Factors that influenced the adoption of the new economic policy

The introduction of the NEP in the Soviet state was not someone's whim, on the contrary, the NEP was due to a number of factors:

Political, economic, social and even ideological. The concept of the New Economic Policy was formulated in general terms by VI Lenin at the Tenth Congress of the RCP(b). The leader urged at this stage to change approaches to governing the country.

The concept that the driving force of the socialist revolution is the proletariat is unshakable. But the working peasantry is its ally, and the Soviet government must learn to "get along" with it.

The country should have a built-in system with a unified ideology suppressing any opposition to the existing government.

Only in such a situation could the NEP provide a solution to the economic problems that wars and revolutions confronted the young Soviet state.

General characteristics of the NEP

The NEP in the Soviet country is an ambiguous phenomenon, since it directly contradicted Marxist theory. When the policy of "war communism" failed, the "new economic policy" played the role of an unplanned detour on the road to building socialism. V. I. Lenin constantly emphasized the thesis: "NEP is a temporary phenomenon." Based on this, the NEP can be broadly characterized by the main parameters:

	Characteristics
	Overcome the political and socio-economic crisis in the young Soviet state; finding new ways to build the economic foundation of a socialist society; raising the standard of living in Soviet society and creating an environment of stability in domestic politics.
	The combination of the command-administrative system and the market method in the Soviet economy. commanding heights remained in the hands of representatives of the proletarian party.
	Agriculture; industry (private small enterprises, lease of state enterprises, state-capitalist enterprises, concessions); financial area.
specifics	The surplus appropriation is replaced by a tax in kind (March 21, 1921); the bond between town and country through the restoration of trade and commodity-money relations; admission of private capital into industry; permission to rent land and hire laborers in agriculture; liquidation of the system of distribution by cards; competition between private, cooperative and state trade; introduction of self-management and self-sufficiency of enterprises; the abolition of labor conscription, the elimination of labor armies, the distribution of labor through the stock exchange; financial reform, the transition to wages and the abolition of free services.

The Soviet state allowed private capitalist relations in trade, small-scale and even in some enterprises of medium industry. At the same time, large-scale industry, transport and the financial system were regulated by the state. In relation to private capital, the NEP allowed the application of a formula of three elements: admission, containment and crowding out. What and at what moment to use the Soviet and party organs based on the emerging political expediency.

Chronological framework of the NEP

The New Economic Policy fell within the time frame from 1921 to 1931.

	Action	Course of events
	Starting a process	The gradual curtailment of the system of war communism and the introduction of elements of the NEP.
1923, 1925, 1927	Crises of the New Economic Policy	Emergence and intensification of the causes and signs of the tendency to curtail the NEP.
	Activation of the program termination process.	The actual departure from the NEP, a sharp increase in the critical attitude towards the "kulaks" and "Nepmen".
	Complete collapse of the NEP.	The legal prohibition of private property has been formalized.

In general, the NEP quickly restored and made the economic system of the Soviet Union relatively viable.

Pros and cons of the NEP

One of the most important negative aspects of the new economic policy, according to many analysts, was that during this period the industry (heavy industry) did not develop. This circumstance could have catastrophic consequences in this period of history for a country like the USSR. But besides this, in the NEP, not everything was assessed with the sign “plus”, there were also significant disadvantages.

	"Minuses"
Restoration and development of commodity-money relations.	Mass unemployment (more than 2 million people).
Development of small business in the fields of industry and services.	High prices for manufactured goods. Inflation.
Some rise in the living standards of the industrial proletariat.	Low qualification of the majority of workers.
The prevalence of "middle peasants" in the social structure of the village.	Exacerbation of the housing problem.
Conditions have been created for the industrialization of the country.	Growth in the number of soviet employees (officials). Bureaucracy of the system.

The reasons for many economic troubles that led to crises were the low competence of personnel and the inconsistency of the policy of the party and state structures.

Inevitable Crises

From the very beginning, the NEP showed the unstable economic growth characteristic of capitalist relations, which resulted in three crises:

The marketing crisis of 1923, as a result of the discrepancy between low prices for agricultural products and high prices for industrial consumer goods ("scissors" of prices).

The crisis of grain procurements in 1925, expressed in the preservation of mandatory state purchases at fixed prices, with a decrease in the volume of grain exports.

The acute crisis of grain procurements in 1927-1928, overcome with the help of administrative and legal measures. Closing of the New Economic Policy project.

Reasons for abandoning the NEP

The collapse of the NEP in the Soviet Union had a number of justifications:

1. The New Economic Policy did not have a clear vision of the prospects for the development of the USSR.
2. The instability of economic growth.
3. Socio-economic flaws (property stratification, unemployment, specific crime, theft and drug addiction).
4. The isolation of the Soviet economy from the world economy.
5. Dissatisfaction with the NEP by a significant part of the proletariat.
6. Disbelief in the success of the NEP by a significant part of the communists.
7. The CPSU(b) risked losing its monopoly on power.
8. The predominance of administrative methods of managing the national economy and non-economic coercion.
9. Aggravation of the danger of military aggression against the USSR.

Results of the New Economic Policy

Political	in 1921, the Tenth Congress adopted a resolution "on the unity of the party", thereby putting an end to factionalism and dissent in the ruling party; a trial of prominent socialist-revolutionaries was organized and the AKP itself was liquidated; the Menshevik party was discredited and destroyed as a political force.
Economic	increasing the volume of agricultural production; achievement of the pre-war level of animal husbandry; the level of production of consumer goods did not satisfy demand; rising prices; slow growth in the well-being of the population of the country.
Social	a fivefold increase in the size of the proletariat; the emergence of a layer of Soviet capitalists ("Nepmen" and "Sovburs"); the working class markedly raised the standard of living; aggravated "housing problem"; the apparatus of bureaucratic-democratic management increased.

The New Economic Policy and was not up to the end understood and accepted as a given by the authorities and the people of the country. To some extent, the NEP measures justified themselves, but there were still more negative aspects of the process. The main result was rapid recovery of the economic system to the level of readiness for the next stage in the construction of socialism - a large-scale industrialization.