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 distribution with a tax in kind."
Let's remind, if earlier the peasants were forced to give up to 70% of the produced product to the state, now they had to give only about 30%. Strictly speaking, the beginning of the New Economic Policy (NEP), which was a series of reforms aimed at transforming mobilization war communism into market state capitalism, should be counted from the abolition of the surplus appropriation system.
As a result of the reforms, the peasants received the right to choose the form of land use: they could lease land and hire workers. Decentralization of industrial management took place, enterprises were transferred to economic accounting. Individuals were allowed to open their own production facilities or lease 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. In the course of the monetary reform, the ruble strengthened, which was facilitated by the release 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 considered to be a kind of system of forced measures. Say, a Civil War was raging 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. For example, Lenin at the Ninth Party Congress (March-April 1920) said that the leadership system that 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 during the NEP period, Lenin admitted: “We expected … by 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 Fourth Anniversary of the October Revolution”). As you can see, Lenin himself considered War Communism to be a mistake, and not some kind of necessity.
At the IX Congress of the RCP (b) (March - April 1920), a stake 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 sphere of appropriation.
It is characteristic that the tightening continued after the defeat of P. N. Wrangel, when the immediate threat to Soviet power from the Whites had already been eliminated. In late 1920 - early 1921, measures were taken to curtail the commodity-money system, which practically meant the abolition of money. The urban population was “exempt” from payment for services related to the supply of food and consumer goods, the use of transport, fuel, medicines and housing. Distribution in kind was now introduced instead of wages. The famous historian S. Semanov wrote: “In the country as a whole, payments in kind accounted for the predominant share in a worker's earnings: in 1919 - 73.3%, and in 1920 - already 92.6% … Unhappy Russia returned to natural exchange.
They no longer traded at the markets, but “exchanged”: bread for vodka, nails for potatoes, a coat for canvas, awl for soap, and what's the use of the fact that the baths have become free?
In order to take a steam bath, it was necessary to obtain a "warrant" in the appropriate office … the workers at the enterprises also tried, where they could, to pay "in kind". At the Triangle rubber enterprise - a couple or two of galoshes, at weaving factories - several yards of fabric, etc. And at shipbuilding, metallurgical and military plants - what is there to give? And the factory management turned a blind eye to how the hard workers sharpened lighters on the machines or dragged tools from the back rooms to change all this at the flea market for half a loaf of sour bread - there is something to eat”. ("Kronstadt mutiny").
In addition, the Supreme Council of the National Economy (VSNKh) nationalized the remnants of small enterprises. A powerful tightening of the surplus appropriation system was outlined. 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 seeding committees. As a result of all this "communist construction" a transport and food crisis began in the country. Russia was engulfed in flames of numerous peasant uprisings. The most famous of them is considered the Tambov one, but serious resistance was shown in many other regions. In the rebel detachments of Western Siberia, 100 thousand people fought. Here the number of insurgents even exceeded the number of Red Army soldiers. But there was also the Volga region "Red Army of Truth" A. Sapozhkov (25 thousand soldiers), there were large insurgent detachments in the Kuban, in Karelia, etc. This is what the "forced" policy of military communism brought the country to. The delegates of the X Congress were forced to get from Siberia to Moscow with battles - the railway service was interrupted for several weeks.
Finally, the army rose, an anti-Bolshevik mutiny broke out in Kronstadt - under the red banners and with the slogan: "Soviets without communists!"
Obviously, at a certain stage of the Civil War, the Bolsheviks were tempted to use the mobilization levers of wartime in order to transition to the extensive construction of the foundations of communism. Of course, in part, War Communism was really caused by necessity, but very soon this need began to be perceived as an opportunity to carry out some large-scale transformations.
Criticism of the NEP
The leadership realized the erroneousness of the previous course, however, the “mass” of communists had already managed to imbue with the spirit of “war communism”. She was too accustomed to the harsh methods of "communist construction". And the overwhelming majority of the abrupt change of 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 about 10% of its membership left the party.
And then a decision was made 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, the purges were excluded from the party and 159,355 people dropped out, or 24.1% of its membership; including 83, 7% of those expelled from the party were "passive", that is, people who were in the RCP (b), but did not take any part in party life. The rest were expelled from the party for abuse of their position (8, 7%), for the performance of religious rituals (3, 9%) and as hostile elements that “penetrated the ranks of the party with counterrevolutionary goals” (3, 7%). About 3% of the communists voluntarily left the ranks of the party, without waiting for verification. "(“RCP (b) - VKP (b) during the NEP years (1921-1929) //“Political parties of Russia: history and modernity”).
They started talking about the "economic Brest" of Bolshevism, and the Smenovekhovets 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, at the beginning, the workers of the People's Commissariat for Food hardly saw the difference between the surplus appropriation and the tax in kind. They expected the country to return to a food dictatorship in the fall.
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 took shape in the "war-communist" era.
Thus, the "workers' opposition" actively opposed the NEP (AG Shlyapnikov, GI Myasnikov, SP Medvedev, etc.) They used a mocking decoding of the abbreviation NEP - "new exploitation of the proletariat."
In their opinion, economic reforms led to a "bourgeois degeneration" (which, by the way, was very much hoped for by the Smenovekhovite Ustryalov). Here is a sample of the anti-Napov 'workers' criticism: “The free market cannot in any way fit into the model of the Soviet State. NEP supporters at first spoke of the existence of some market freedoms, as a temporary concession, as a kind of retreat before a big leap forward, but now it is argued that Sov. the economy is unthinkable without it. I believe that the nascent class of Nepmen and kulaks is a threat to the power of the Bolsheviks. " (S. P. Medvedev).
But there were also much more radical movements operating underground: “The year 1921 gave birth to several small Bolshevik Kronstadts,” writes M. Magid. - In Siberia and the Urals, where the traditions of partisans were still alive, the opponents of the bureaucracy began to create secret workers' unions. In the spring, the Chekists uncovered an underground organization of local communist workers at the Anzhero-Sudzhensk mines. It set as its goal the physical destruction of the party bureaucracy, as well as specialists (state economic workers), who, even under Kolchak, had established themselves as clear counter-revolutionaries, and then received warm jobs in state institutions. The nucleus of this organization, which numbered 150 people, was a group of old party members: a people's judge with party experience since 1905, the chairman of the mine's 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 split into cells. The latter kept records of persons subject to destruction during the action scheduled for May 1. In August of the same year, the next report of the Cheka repeats that the most acute form of party opposition to NEP is the group of party activists in Siberia. There the opposition took on a "positively dangerous" character, and "red banditry" arose. Now, at the Kuznetsk mines, a conspiratorial network of communist workers has been uncovered, which has set itself the goal of exterminating responsible workers. Another similar organization was found somewhere in Eastern Siberia. The traditions of "red banditry" were strong in the Donbass as well. From the secret report of the secretary of the Donetsk provincial committee Quiring for July 1922, it follows that the hostile attitude of the workers towards the specialists reaches the level of direct terror. So, for example, an engineer was undermined in the Dolzhansky district and the chief was murdered by two communists. " ("Workers 'Opposition and Workers' Insurrection").
Much was said about the danger of "capitalist restoration" on the left flank, where in the mid-1920s a "new opposition" (GE Zinoviev, LB Kamenev) and the "Trotskyite-Zinoviev anti-party bloc" would emerge. One of its leaders will be the chairman of the Finance 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 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 strongly where the restoration of agriculture is most successful and where the area cultivated by the plow increases … In the conditions of the extreme decline of the peasant economy in general 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, to support and expand proletarian agriculture on the plots assigned to factories, to encourage the development of agricultural collectives and to involve them in the orbit of a planned economy as the main form of transforming a peasant economy into a socialist one."
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, it was necessary to widely attract foreign capital to the country to create "large agricultural factories."
Sweet morsels for overseas
It is not surprising that with such a 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. And the chairman of this committee a year later became L. D. Trotsky, closely associated with the countries of the West. It was under him that an extraordinary strengthening of this organization took place, although the concessions themselves were allowed at the very beginning of the NEP.
Under Trotsky, the GKK included such prominent leaders as the 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, a prominent theoretician and propagandist, member of the Central Committee A. I. Stetsky, People's Commissar for Foreign Trade L. B. Krasin and others. Representative meeting, you will not 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 part of the shares of these trusts to the owners of nationalized enterprises. And in general, in his opinion, foreigners should be actively involved in managing the trusts.).
In the SCC, deals were made with foreigners, and a lot of it fell to the functionaries themselves. A. V. Boldyrev writes: “When people talk about NEP, they usually come to mind“Nepmen”or“Nepachi”- these characters stood out brightly with ostentatious, but vulgar luxury against the background of the devastation and poverty of the era of“war communism”. However, a little freedom of entrepreneurship and the emergence of a small stratum of private entrepreneurs who got the hidden chervonets from their hiding places and put them into circulation are only part of what was happening in the country. By orders of magnitude, a lot of money was spinning in concessions. This is roughly the same as an entrepreneur of the 1990s - the owner of a couple of stalls in a crimson jacket, with a "purse", on a second-hand, but foreign car, driven from Kazakhstan - to compare with "Yukos". Petty speculation and colossal funds flowing abroad. ("In 1925, did Trotsky change the front?").
The most ambitious and at the same time strange deal 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.
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, the concession for the development of the Lena mines was transferred to this company. The GKK was very generous - Western bankers received an area stretching from Yakutia to the Ural Mountains. The company could mine, in addition to gold, also iron, copper, gold, lead. At its disposal many metallurgical enterprises were given - 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%.
The foreigners were given the go-ahead, and they began to manage - in the spirit of the "best" of their colonial traditions. “This foreign company, headed by the Englishman Herbert Guedal, behaved in the first socialist state in an extremely cheeky and impudent manner,” notes N. V. Old people. - At the conclusion of the concession agreement, she promised "investments", but did not invest a single ruble in the development of mines and enterprises. On the contrary, it got to the point that Lena Goldfields demanded government subsidies for itself and in every possible way avoided paying all fees and taxes. " ("The Crisis: How It's Done").
This continued as long as Trotsky was in the USSR - until 1929. Mine workers 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, NEP meant almost immediate relief. Times were even harder for urban workers. “… 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 for money. And there was no real money, gold chervonets (they will appear only in 1924) - they were still replaced by "sovznaki". In October 1921, the bunglers from the People's Commissariat of Finance published so many of them that hyperinflation began - prices by May 1922 had increased 50 times! And no "pay" of the workers could keep up with them, although at that time an index of wage growth was 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 wealthy layer of private entrepreneurs - “Nepmen” - immediately emerged. Not only did they manage to profit, they managed to enter into very profitable, and far from always legal, ties with the administrative apparatus. This was facilitated by the decentralization of industry. Homogeneous and closely related enterprises were united into trusts (while only 40% were under central subordination, the rest were subordinate to local authorities). They were transferred to self-financing and provided with 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 they themselves covered their losses.
It was then that the Nepachi speculators arrived and tried in every possible way to "help" the management of the trusts. And they had very solid profits from their trade and intermediary services. It is clear that it also fell on the economic bureaucracy, which fell under the influence of the "new" bourgeoisie - either due to inexperience or due to considerations of a "commercial" nature.
During the three years of the NEP, private traders controlled two-thirds of the country's total wholesale and retail trade.
Of course, it was all 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 government agencies and cooperatives. However, this trust, which consisted of former tobacco wholesalers, received 90% of all the tobacco factory's production. At the same time, they were provided with the best assortment, and even a 7-10-day loan.
In Petrograd, a private entrepreneur, metal dealer S. Plyatsky founded a supply and sales office, which had an annual turnover of three million rubles. As it turned out later, such substantial incomes were possible as a result of close "cooperation" with 30 government agencies.
Researcher S. V. Bogdanov, referring to these and other facts of “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 salaries of Soviet employees who were not on the nomenklatura lists were very low, and, from the point of view of social protection, their position was unenviable. There were a lot of temptations to improve their financial situation through semi-legal transactions with the 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 NEP's existence and, of course, not only brought confusion, but also gave rise to the desire of individual officials to protect themselves in the event of a 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 happened very difficult and contradictory …
