In March 1921, at the Tenth Congress of the Communist Party, Lenin spearheaded the move to abandon the razverstka, introducing in its place a progressive tax-in-kind system that would, in principle, be assessed on the basis of actual harvests. While the razverstka had been cancelled in the province of Tambov over one month earlier, the desire at that time had been to limit the knowledge of this concession to the insurgent countryside of that province alone, rather than for it to become policy nationwide. The obvious impossibility of this, however, placed the discontinuation of the razverstka campaign on the national agenda, and Lenin drafted proposals for the introduction of a tax that same month. Then, only days before the party congress was to convene, a mutiny at the Kronstadt naval base near Petrograd added additional urgency to the matter. The sailors taking up arms against the regime protested against the failing food supply policy and the treatment of the farmers, in particular. For them, the mutiny was an act of solidarity with the workers, who themselves demonstrated on the streets of Moscow and Petrograd against the shortages and repressions of the Soviet regime, and with the peasants, whose beleaguered villages were home for many of the mutinying sailors themselves. While the Red Army was storming the naval base at Kronstadt, putting down the mutiny at the cost of thousands of lives, the delegates to the Tenth Party Congress voted to approve Lenin's proposed abandonment of the current food supply policy.
Adopted under popular pressure, at a time when, in Lenin's own words, the party faced a challenge far more dangerous than 'all the Deni- kins, Kolchaks and Yudeniches' of the earlier period of the Civil War, the abandonment of the razverstka was now regarded as a necessity.
'Only agreement with the peasantry can save the socialist revolution in Russia,' Lenin told the delegates to the Tenth Congress.44 Within months, the announcement of the tax-in-kind was reinforced with the decision to begin decriminalising the market, a necessary complement that helped provide agricultural producers with an outlet for the sale of surplus (after-tax) grain and, as Trotsky and others had emphasised, incentives to improve production. Trotsky, as well as other critics of food supply policy before 1921, did not speak openly of the market, nor were they, in truth, 'pro-peasant' in their political outlook. But, Trotsky himself, rather reasonably, pointed out in his autobiography that neither did Lenin consider the possibility of market decriminalisa- tion in March 1921.45 What became the New Economic Policy would take shape over a period of several months and even years, as the logic and consequences of the initial concessions at the Tenth Congress were worked out.46 There is little reason to assume that this path would not have been similarly trodden had the decision to end the razverstka been taken one year earlier.
While Trotsky and Larin were not shy in reminding others of their advocacy of such measures, either at the time of the Tenth Congress or after, neither were as bold as to speak in terms of the costs that would have been avoided, especially in terms of human life, had their earlier advice been acted upon.47 The tax-in-kind, though, was 'sold' to the wider party membership as a concession, as - in the words of the trade union activist, David Riazanov - the 'peasant Brest', a reference to the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which had secured Russia's withdrawal from the First World War in 1918 and had, in Lenin's own words at the time, forced Russia to 'the very bottom of that abyss of defeat, dismemberment, enslavement and humiliation'.48 In the eyes of many, the NEP, from its very beginnings, was a perversion in the course of the socialist revolution. Lenin would devote much of his final months and years to rationalising the path upon which his decision in March 1921 had set the Soviet Republic. Even the advocates of the NEP, which had finally secured peace with the peasantry, defended its continuation in reference to the Civil War and the events of 1920-21. Stalin, at the time one such advocate, scolded his rivals at the Thirteenth Communist Party Conference in January 1924 (only days before Lenin's death) for claiming that the party had been slow to react to events: 'Were we late in abandoning the razverstka? Wasn't it the case that with such facts as the Tambov rebellion and Kronstadt we recognised that it was impossible to live any longer under war communism?'49 Stalin's claim was that the party had saved the revolution with this change of course; his concern with the people who had lost their lives over the many months it had taken the party leadership to actually arrive at this decision was less in evidence.
How would the course of Soviet history have been different had the disaster of 1920-21 been avoided? Leaving aside the humanitarian considerations already discussed - the political violence and famine that would likely have been lessened, rather than avoided entirely - might there have been longer-term ramifications of the earlier adoption of the reforms and concessions that became the New Economic Policy? The short answer to such a question is no. The NEP, with its denationalisation and markets, its cultural pluralism and unsavoury 'Nep-men', proved untenable within the context of the Soviet revolution, and it proved unworkable in the hands of Soviet leaders, who had neither the will nor expertise to manage a mixed economy. A significant part of the drama that constitutes the history of the unravelling and abandonment of the NEP, however, brings us back to the troubled moment of its birth. For many in the wider Communist Party membership, the return of money and markets and the perceived toleration of kulaks and 'bourgeois specialists' under the NEP were inexcusable, and consideration of social and cultural problems, and not just macroeco- nomic ones, almost invariably came back to the 'peasant Brest' as a turning point.50
When Stalin himself changed his line on the sustainability of the NEP in 1927, when he demanded a return to 'extraordinary measures' in confronting the menace of the kulaks and the crime of market speculation, he tapped into that current within the Communist Party that had never reconciled itself to the capitulation of the Civil War and the perceived concessions that had been made to the peasantry.51 While the overall trajectory in the development of Soviet socialism is unsurprising, with the long-term commitments to centralised economic planning and the creation of large-scale collective farms in the place of private, household farmsteads, it is insightful to consider the manner in which this transformation would have been achieved had the brief experiment of the NEP been initiated in different, more favourable, circumstances. At the very least, consideration of this issue highlights the connections that bridge these seemingly discrete eras in the development of Soviet socialism.
THE 'BOLSHEVIK REFORMATION'
February 1922 catriona kelly
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n 16 march 1922, a crowd of more than 10,000 people packed Haymarket Square, at the centre of Dostoevsky's St Petersburg, renamed Petrograd in 1914. The mood was ugly. Shouts and jeers turned into scuffles; a policeman was badly beaten. The protestors were enraged by the attempt to remove from the Church of the Saviour, one of the largest and best loved in the city, items made of precious metals and gemstones that had devotional significance. The unrest was part of a wave of dissatisfaction stirred up by the Decree on the Confiscation of Church Valuables, passed a month earlier1 - a central episode in what might be termed 'the Bolshevik Reformation'.2