Stalin was not simply opportunistic: he too was a proponent of heavy industrialization in 1924–5, but in his own way. At that time Stalin was politically aligned with Bukharin, and he allowed Bukharin the main role in articulating their public position against the opposition. It is doubly significant, however, that Stalin’s formula of ‘socialism in one country’ in December 1924 ascribed primary importance to the development of heavy industry. Of even greater importance, before 1925 had ended, Stalin took special care to distance himself publicly from Bukharin’s slogan ‘enrich yourselves’, which opponents of Bukharin denounced as excessively sympathetic to the kulaks.
It is, of course, beyond question that Stalin wanted fervently to become party leader in the 1920s, but this does not mean that he desired only power, free of ideological or policy preferences. Something far more complex guided his behaviour. Stalin adjusted his short-term course of action several times during the decade in response to manifold crises, but the same can be said of all party leaders. More significant is his unwavering commitment to certain ideas—above all, an ongoing preference for heavy industry and an abiding fear that kulaks withholding grain from the market could undermine the state and its programmes. Equally consistent was his antidote of using state power to deal with recalcitrant social elements. Thus, when Stalin attacked the right opposition in late 1927–early 1928, this marked an assault on his remaining political rivals and an intensification of a position he had defined by mid-decade. In early 1928, when he blamed the kulaks for the grain shortage (and, by extension, for jeopardizing the industrialization programme) he certainly brought his ideas more clearly into public view, but they were nothing new. The Stalinist tempo of industrialization and collectivization would later outstrip anything Trotsky and Preobrazhenskii had envisioned, but it was foreshadowed in the positions he established earlier against gradualism in industrialization and against NEP agriculture.
The full scope of economics, however, reached far beyond policy-making at the national level. Local considerations loomed large, for NEP pulled the state and society in contradictory and frequently conflicting directions. It ended outright starvation, but not hard times. It also renewed social antagonisms: most Russians still struggled to subsist, while private traders—the Nepmen—often made exorbitant profits and enjoyed a life-style of conspicuous consumption.
The petulance of lower officials, in combination with a limited enthusiasm at the top, produced an inconsistent implementation of NEP in various regions of the country. Private trade was legal but not secure. Some local officials disobeyed national directives and arrested Nepmen on the basis of laws already repealed, or simply on their own whim. In 1923–4, as Lenin lay dying, the national leadership responded to public resentment against Nepmen by arbitrarily closing 300,000 private enterprises. This proved short-sighted: by late 1924 it was clear that the state itself could not provide many of the services it had eliminated. In some locales, driving out the private traders had closed up all supplies; areas called ‘trade deserts’ sprang up where Nepmen had previously operated. But the period 1925–7—not coincidentally the high point of Bukharin’s influence—brought a policy reversal; it was during these years that the Soviet state showed its greatest tolerance of private enterprise under NEP. Understandably sceptical of resuming business at first, many Nepmen had to be reconvinced of the state’s sincerity, but by the end of 1927 the market was in full swing again.
The following year, however, brought yet another change of course. In early 1928 Stalin’s rhetoric against the ‘right deviation’ began to include talk of a showdown with both kulaks and Nepmen. The state used administrative measures to crack down on private entrepreneurs, and it increased business taxes exponentially. If a Nepman somehow scraped together enough to pay an initial levy the tax-collector doubled the bill on his next visit. The state even applied a retroactive tax to those who had already gone out of business. Those who could not pay had their possessions seized and were thrown into the street; they lost access to ration cards, housing, and other public services. The entire process could take as little as three days.
Their fate as lishentsy aroused scant sympathy. NEP had brought back not only the market, but also prostitution, gambling, drugs, and other affronts to public morality. The fact that many Nepmen flaunted their wealth caused deep anger. Moreover, the preferential treatment the state gave the trained specialists, engineers, and factory managers from the old regime, who were technically not Nepmen per se, did nothing to make NEP more popular with the masses. In a different vein, a large number of Russians distrusted the profit motive and operated from the belief that personal enrichment can come only at the expense of another. The prevailing prices beyond the means of most citizens certainly reinforced this view. In the end, Nepmen became the focus of all these resentments.
The lowest level of the economy experienced additional problems. Stricter cost-accounting in reopened factories and the demobilization of six million Red Army soldiers increased unemployment from 640,000 in 1923 to more than 1.3 million in 1929. In addition, rural poverty drove the desperate into the cities despite the shortage of jobs. Moscow, for example, gained 100,000 new residents per year. Not surprisingly, the major urban centres experienced acute housing problems: not enough spaces and chronic disrepair in overcrowded, occupied units. The homeless population overwhelmed urban social services. Gangs of homeless orphans, the besprizorniki, in combination with the unemployed, contributed to a serious rise in crime as both groups fed an expanding corps of thieves, petty hoodlums, and prostitutes.
The situation, however, was not universally bleak. Workers’ real wages rose steadily, albeit slowly, throughout the decade. By the late 1920s the shortages of goods and services were far less serious than at the beginning of NEP. The Soviet state could point to legitimate improvements in public health, working conditions, and infant mortality rates. And if workers still devoted too much of their income and energy to acquiring housing, food, and clothing, the standard of living stood well above that of 1918–21.
The village underwent its own transformation. By 1921 millions had acquired private holdings from the seizure of land belonging to the nobility, Church, crown, and richer peasants. As a result, the number of farms rose sharply, but the average size fell. In addition, the peasant commune—subjected to a frontal assault in the Stolypin reforms—reappeared. And when the commune reinstituted traditional, collective modes of cultivation, agriculture regressed technologically. Inefficient strip-farming, along with the primitive three-field system of crop rotation, once again predominated. In 1928 more than five million households utilized the traditional wooden plough, the sokha; the scythe and sickle still reaped half the annual harvest. Such backwardness of technique meant a low yield per acre, which in turn aggravated the long-standing peasant ‘land hunger’. With more mouths to feed than such agriculture could support, the village had to push its marginal elements towards the city.