In the politics of the Russian revolution, two poles or tendencies arose because the winners of the Russian Revolution were two classes: the working class and the petty bourgeoisie, chiefly the peasantry. In 1917 the Soviet working class was small, and in the decades after 1917, tens of millions of peasants were the human material that would make up the new, growing Soviet working class. As these two classes persisted so did two political tendencies that more or less reflected their class interests. In the 1920s, both tendencies ostensibly favored building socialism. The working class tendency, however, favored policies that strengthened the working class by rapidly building up industry and weakened the property-owning classes by collectivizing agriculture, and policies that strengthened the role of the Communist Party particularly in centralized economic planning. The petty bourgeois tendency favored building socialism slowly by maintaining or incorporating aspects of capitalism, for example maintaining private property, competitive markets, and profit incentives. Though not all political ideas fell neatly into one or the other category, nonetheless, these categories provided the poles around which the variety often pivoted. This was evident in the early debate over the New Economic Policy (NEP).
In late 1920 and early 1921, with the country freed of foreign invaders, Lenin and other leaders of the revolution turned their attention from war to peace. They needed to replace the policies of “war communism,” particularly the forceful appropriation of surplus grain that had alienated many peasants. They had to grapple with acute shortages of fuel, food, and transportation, to revive industry and food production, and insure the unity between workers and peasants. In March 1921 at the Tenth Congress of the Bolshevik Party, Lenin proposed what became known as the New Economic Policy (NEP).18 It was a “strategic retreat,”19 a chance to regroup and lay the foundations for a future march toward socialism. Under the NEP, a tax in kind replaced the appropriation of peasant grain. Peasants could engage in free trade to sell their surplus, and various other kinds of capitalist enterprises could exist. The idea was that the NEP would encourage the peasants to produce more, and the state could use taxes on peasant produce to revive the state-owned industry. Debate soon arose. The “Lefts” called the NEP a capitulation to capitalism that would doom the Soviet project. On the other end of the spectrum, Leon Trotsky, Grigory Zinoviev, Nikolai Bukharin and others thought the NEP was too tame and advocated even more far-reaching concessions to capitalism. Lenin agreed that the NEP represented a danger. It means “unrestricted trade,” he said, “and that means turning back towards capitalism.”20 Still, he thought the Party could handle the danger by limiting the retreat and keeping it temporary. Lenin prevailed.21
By the time of Lenin’s death in 1924, the revolution had seized state power and consolidated its hold, had defeated invading imperialist armies and the domestic counterrevolution, had nationalized key industries, had distributed land to the peasants, and had revitalized industry and food production. Originally, all leading Communists thought that completing the socialist revolution in a backward, peasant country like Russia would be impossible without revolutions in the West. With the defeat of an uprising of the German workers in 1923, however, it became clear that no European revolution was on the horizon. With no European revolution to count on, what was to be done? Three solutions presented themselves: Leon Trotsky’s, Nikolai Bukharin’s, and Joseph Stalin’s.
Leon Trotsky advocated an attempt to build socialism at home while continuing to press for socialist revolution abroad. Domestically, he urged the development of industry, the collectivization and mechanization of agriculture, and the development of economic planning. Above all, however, and with increasing stridency, Trotsky stressed the need for international revolution as the only hope for Russia to escape from what he called bureaucratic degeneration and the loss of revolutionary fervor. Trotsky and the Left Opposition were decisively defeated at the Fourteenth Party Congress in 1925, which adopted a course of rapid industrialization and self-sufficiency.22
Nikolai Bukharin represented a petty bourgeois or right-wing solution to socialism’s way forward. Barrington Moore pointed out that unlike Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin, Bukharin never held a high administrative post with major organizational responsibilities. As editor of Pravda and an official of the Comintern, he manipulated “symbols rather than men.” Moreover, as a theoretician he moved from the “extreme left to the extreme right of the Communist political spectrum.” By the 1920s, he was firmly on the right. He believed that Russia could not skip the stage of capitalism or even pass through it quickly. As Moore said, Bukharin’s positions “strongly resembled the gradualist views of Western Social Democracy.” He softened the idea of class struggle, to the idea of a peaceful contest between competing interest groups, between state industry and private industry, between cooperative farms and private farms, in which the former would gradually show their superiority. Whereas Lenin, the originator of the New Economic Policy, had frankly viewed it as a retreat, Bukharin viewed the NEP as the road to socialism. He would have continued the New Economic Policy and allowed or even encouraged private enterprise, particularly among the kulaks. Bukharin opposed rapid industrialization, the collectivization of agriculture and any coercion of the peasants. Instead, he said the peasants should be given what they wanted, and he advanced a slogan for the peasants, “Enrich yourselves.” In a kind of pale imitation of Trotsky’s vain hope in socialist revolutions abroad, Bukharin sought to obtain support for the Soviet Union from non-Communist groups abroad, hopes that were dashed by the failure in 1926-27 to win the support of British trade unionists, German Social Democrats, and Chinese nationalists. Bukharin and the Right Opposition were rebuffed by the Fifteenth Party Congress in 1927 that adopted a policy of promoting the collectivization of agriculture.23 (Sixty years later, Gorbachev read a biography of Bukharin by historian Stephen F. Cohen. According to Gorbachev’s close advisor, Anatoly Chernyaev, it was then that Gorbachev decided to rehabilitate Bukharin, and the re-evaluation of Bukharin “opened the sluice gates to reconsidering our whole ideology.”24)
In the course of debates with Trotsky and Bukharin, Stalin developed his own solution to socialism’s way forward. It had four main components. First was the idea that socialism could be built in one country, a reiteration of Lenin’s 1915 idea that “the victory of socialism” was possible “even in one single capitalist country.”25 In the 1920s, Stalin translated this idea into a program. Stalin argued that the Soviet Union could advance toward socialism without a revolution in the West, without help from non-Communist allies abroad, and without passing through developed capitalism, providing that the country industrialized rapidly. This was the second component. Industrialization required financing. Since the self-financing of industry would be slow, and financing by foreign investment was impossible, the growth of industry would have to be financed by increasing agricultural yields. Hence rapid industrialization required the development of large-scale collective farms utilizing mechanized production. This was the third component. The coordination of industrial growth and agricultural production demanded centralized planning, the fourth component.26 British historian, E. H. Carr, called this formulation of the problem and its solution proof of “Stalin’s political genius.” With these ideas, Stalin defeated first Trotsky and then Bukharin. Moreover, as Carr noted, he saved the revolution: “More than ten years after Lenin’s revolution, Stalin made a second revolution without which Lenin’s revolution would have run out into the sand. In this sense, Stalin continued and fulfilled Leninism.”27