From the NEP to forced collectivisation

After four years of civil war following three years of devastating world war, by 1921 the Russian proletariat, never more than a few million strong, had almost ceased to exist. Russia’s cities were depopulated and the few factories that remained operational were starved for raw materials. Most of the industrial workers who had backed the October Revolution had either perished in the civil war or been absorbed into the state administrative apparatus; those who remained were forced to choose between trying to eke out an existence by participation in the black market or returning to the countryside. Russia had become a workers’ state without a working class.

During the late stages of the civil war, Leon Trotsky, head of the Red Army, proposed a radical turn to address what he saw as an increasingly dangerous situation:

“In February 1920, before the ninth party congress, at a moment when the civil war already seemed over, Trotsky had proposed in the Politburo to replace requisitioning of surpluses by a tax in kind calculated on a percentage of production, and to put the exchange of goods with the peasantry on an individual rather than a collective basis. But he had been opposed by Lenin, and obtained only four of the fifteen votes….But just a year after Trotsky’s original initiative, on 8 February, 1921, a discussion of agrarian policy in the Politburo prompted Lenin to put forward a recognizably similar project.”
—E. H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, vol II

Lenin’s “New Economic Policy” (NEP) was seen by the vast majority of party members as the only way to revive economic activity and ensure a level of minimal subsistence for the population. Lenin admitted that it represented a “very severe defeat on the economic front”:

“We thought that production and distribution would go on at communist bidding in a country with a declassed proletariat. We must change that now, or we shall be unable to make the proletariat understand this process of transition. No such problems have ever arisen in history before. We tried to solve this problem straight out, by a frontal attack, as it were, but we suffered defeat. Such mistakes occur in every war, and they are not even regarded as mistakes. Since the frontal attack failed, we shall make a flanking movement and also use the method of siege and undermining.”
—Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, The New Economic Policy and the Tasks of the Political Education Departments, 17 October 1921

As Lenin’s political involvement declined in the period leading up to his death in January 1924, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union descended into a protracted factional struggle.  Nikolai Bukharin, previously a leader of the party’s left wing, swung far to the right, and, embracing the restoration of market relations in the countryside, proposed that socialist development required that the wealthier peasants (kulaks) “enrich” themselves. Bukharin argued that poor peasants engaged in subsistence farming could not produce enough to feed the cities, much less generate surplus for export, so there was no choice but to support the kulaks. He hoped that, as their income rose, they would provide a market for consumer goods as well as agricultural machinery and fertilisers which would create the conditions for a revival of state-owned industry.

This pro-kulak orientation, which was supported by Joseph Stalin’s centre faction, was opposed by Trotsky and the Left Opposition, whose leading economist, Evgeny Preobrazhensky, pointed out the obvious flaw in Bukharin’s bet on the kulaks—the inability of Russian industry to produce anything to exchange for the peasants’ produce. (A few years earlier, in 1919, Preobrazhensky and Bukharin had collaborated in writing The ABC of Communism, a widely-read text which helped popularise Marxism during the civil war.)

The Left Opposition, starting from the recognition that Russia’s industrial plants needed wholesale modernisation which would require substantial purchases of modern machinery from abroad, proposed that these essential investments could only be paid for by exporting grain and other agricultural products. Preobrazhensky proposed a turn towards “primitive socialist accumulation” through a progressive taxation of peasant produce and placing restrictions on urban consumption, including allocations for industrial workers. These measures were envisioned as short-term expedients which could be eased as revenue from grain sales abroad funded the acquisition of the modern machinery necessary to gradually expand industrial production. What the opposition insisted on was that without the revival of industry it would be impossible to meet peasant demand domestically—which would inevitably generate enormous pressure to open the economy to foreign capitalist penetration.

Dismissing Trotsky and his supporters as “super industrialisers” innately hostile to the peasantry, the Stalin-Bukharin leadership continued to blindly pursue a policy of accelerated inequality in the countryside, as kulaks began to “enrich” themselves by hiring their impoverished neighbours as labourers. The result, as the Left Opposition had predicted, was that the shortage of manufactured goods from Russia’s decrepit factories dramatically increased prices for the peasantry. The kulaks reacted by withholding grain to enforce their demands for better terms of trade. When the state responded with punitive expeditions and forcible seizures of food stocks, the rich peasants went on strike, agricultural output declined precipitously and, eventually, mass starvation swept the land.

The kulak revolt was the entirely foreseeable result of a policy of reliance on capitalist entrepreneurs to construct a collectivised economy. In 1928, as the crisis long anticipated by the Left Opposition erupted, Stalin provided the following description of what was happening:

“The secret is that this year the kulak was able to take advantage of these difficulties to force up grain prices, launch an attack on the Soviet price policy and thus slow up our procurement operations. And he was able to take advantage of these difficulties for at least two reasons:

firstly, because three years of good harvests had not been without their effect. The kulak grew strong in that period, grain stocks in the countryside in general, and among the kulaks in particular, accumulated during that time, and it became possible for the kulak to attempt to dictate prices; secondly, because the kulak had support from the urban speculators, who speculate on a rise of grain prices and thus force up prices.

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“But what is the consequence of forcing up grain prices by, say, 40-50 per cent, as the kulak speculating elements did? The first consequence is to undermine the real wages of the workers. Let us suppose that we had raised workers’ wages at the time. But in that case we should have had to raise prices of manufactured goods, and that would have hit at the living standards both of the working class and of the poor and middle peasants. And what would have been the effect of this? The effect would undoubtedly have been directly to undermine our whole economic policy.

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“You see that the procurement crisis is the expression of the first serious action, under the conditions of NEP, undertaken by the capitalist elements of the countryside against the Soviet Government in connection with one of the most important questions of our constructive work, that of grain procurements.”
—Joseph Stalin, The Work of the April Joint Plenum of the Central Committee and Central Control Commission, 13 April 1928

Stalin responded by breaking with Bukharin and carrying out an abrupt lurch to the left, liquidating the kulaks through an unplanned forced collectivisation—a measure from which Soviet agriculture never fully recovered.