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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 10.94: The New Policies

In March, 1921, revolutionary Russia stood at a major crossroads. Years of war coupled with a long winter defined by scarcity, hunger, deprivation, misery, and unemployment had produced a volatile situation that looked a lot like the situation in February 1917. Worker strikes, military mutinies, peasant rebellions — all broke out, in the context of a ruined economy, and directed against an increasingly despotic political regime that enforced unpopular policies with guns and bayonets. The Kronstadt Rebellion that we talked about last week was the most famous of these revolts, but it was far from the only one, and the senior leadership of the Communist Party recognized if they were going to stay in power and achieve the great revolutionary goals they had set for themselves, they were going to have to make a few changes.

And I do think it’s fair to say that Lenin was a bit more flexible than Tsar Nicholas. In a contest between reality and ideology, Lenin was always going to lean towards reality. It’s one of the reasons Lenin died in his bed still in power instead of in a basement after having been overthrown.

The origin of what we now recognize as two momentous changes that define the future of revolutionary Russia was the 10th Congress of the Communist Party, which convened close to 700 delegates in Moscow between March 8th and March 16th, 1921. It was by sheer coincidence that this Congress convened right smack dab in the middle of the Kronstadt Rebellion and all the delegates kept hour by hour tabs on the explosive events in Petrograd. But Kronstadt was a mere kitchen grease fire compared to the great wildfires presently sweeping across Russia, and it was those greater fires that Lenin came to the Congress to address, even if the assembled delegates themselves were not aware of what they were about to approve.

The first of these momentous changes was political in nature, and embedded in a seemingly innocuous resolution on the importance of party unity; the other was economic in nature and was an extremely visible retreat from 20 years of Bolshevik ideology. While Lenin kept the economic reforms close to his chest, the delegates came into the Congress aware that they would be dealing with political controversy swirling inside the Party. With so many problems facing Soviet Russia, it was only natural that conflicts would arise inside the ruling party between competing visions of how to respond to these problems. Over the winter, these conflicts had grown into full blown factional disputes that vexed Lenin greatly.

Lenin worried openly to his comrades over the long winter, “We must have the courage to look the bitter truth in the face. The party is sick. The party is shaking with fever.”

Since they all took it for granted that the Communist Party was the only party with the means determination, commitment, and energy to defend the revolution, if this growing sickness of factionalism killed the party, it would by extension kill the revolution. But Lenin was not the only one who was worried about the health of the party. Plenty of Communists came into the 10th Party Congress having diagnosed an acute case of senior leadership disconnected from the masses — senior leadership, turning themselves into a bureaucratic aristocracy that made Communist Russia little different from tsarist Russia. Hence, the rise of the factional disputes in the first place. The problem was not the fact that the factions existed, but that the leadership had gone completely off the rails.

Now, a few episodes back, we introduced the biggest of these growing factions, the Workers’ Opposition. This was a group led by working class leaders like Alexander Shliapnikov, Sergei Medvedev, and Alexandra Kollontai, who believed the Communist Party was fatally morphing into an institution that no longer represented the character, interests, or worldview of the industrial proletariat they claimed to represent. Over the winter of 1920-1921, they raised major objections to Trotsky’s economic policies: the creation of labor armies, the clear push to militarize economic production, and most especially, his push in late 1920 to formally subsume all the various labor unions under state control, making the unions no different from a government department, with union leaders appointed directly by the state. The Workers’ Opposition wanted to recommit to the proletarian character of the revolution. They wanted to keep the unions free and independent from state control. They wanted to return management to the factory, to worker committees, and even replace the economic planning departments with congresses of workers.

The leadership of the Communist Party had been caught flatfooted by the Workers’ Opposition. All through the pre-revolutionary years, Bolshevik leaders knew they were going to have trouble with the peasants, and so they debated at length the peasant question. But they all took it for granted the industrial proletariat would be forever with them body and soul. And for Trotsky, it was actually incoherent nonsense to speak of the workers needing to maintain organizations and power structures independent of a state controlled by the Communist Party. How could the interests of the proletariat and the Communist Party diverge? The Communist Party was the political manifestation of the proletariat. The Communist Party represented the dictatorship of the proletariat. So how on earth could the proletariat need to be protected from their own dictatorship? It didn’t make any sense.

The obvious rejoinder from the Workers’ Opposition was that this is all fine and good in theory, but look around. Listen to the workers, ask them what they want, ask them how they feel about the Communist Party, and they will give you a list of complaints that was as long as any lists that was ever directed at the tsar. They were just as poor, hungry, and mistreated as ever. After a brief flirtation with worker directed factory life, the Communist Party had brought in bourgeois specialist to come in and manage the factories using the same kind of oppressive techniques they had used before 1917. The bosses were there to give orders, the workers were there to follow orders.

Now, Comrade Trotsky proposed that their labor unions — the organizations that were supposed to protect the workers from abuse, give them a voice, and a right to some kind of self determination — was now going to be co-opted by and subordinated to the Communist state, the very thing that they now believed was oppressing them. This would make the unions little different than the old police unions of the tsarist era. Trotsky could argue til he was blue in the face that it was theoretically impossible for the workers to need protection from the Communist Party, but that didn’t mean it was actually impossible. In fact it was happening right now.

The Workers’ Opposition, though, was not the only faction inside the Communist Party. And the other one we need to talk about is the Democratic Centralists, whose arguments dovetailed nicely with the Workers’ Opposition. Because they too claimed that the senior leaders of the Communist Party had become divorced from the people they were meant to be leading. In their view, the same process of co-opting the Soviets and turning them from open forums that expressed the will of the people from below into closed committees that carried out orders from above was now being reflected inside the Communist Party itself. Major decisions were made behind closed doors in the inner sanctums of the Politburo and the Orgbureau, two subcommittees that technically didn’t even have a statutory existence in the official organizational chart of the Communist Party. So instead of local party rank and file members choosing their own leaders, participating in decision making, and enjoying some measure of freedom of action, the upper echelon committees in Moscow now decree all policies, and assigned and reassigned jobs without bothering to consult anyone else. Their complaint, then, was that the entrenching authoritarian tendencies of the Communist Party with regards to Russia was being mirrored by entrenching authoritarian tendencies of the party leadership with regards to its rank and file. What the Democratic Centralists wanted was for party leaders to serve the rank and file of the party, as opposed to what was clearly solidifying: the rank and file of the party serving the party leaders.

Now, just to be very clear, they were the Democratic Centralists. They were not anarchists, arguing for a completely decentralized party and total local autonomy. They believed in the importance of party discipline and submitting to decisions once they were made. They just wanted to ensure that the process of selecting leaders, debating policies, and reaching decisions remained a free and open process, not a closed and conspiratorial process. But despite what I think are valid criticisms from both the Workers’ Opposition and the Democratic Centralists, Lenin himself was still the major force in the party, both morally and operationally. By habit and disposition, the assembled delegates at the 10th Party Congress took their cues from Lenin above all. And Lenin’s principle preoccupation at the moment was not the specifics of the criticisms, but the way they were voiced. Lenin was in fact volcanic with rage that Communist Party members were out there organizing and building separate political apparatuses inside the Party, with their own committees and newspapers and platforms. He saw here the seeds of the same kind of divisions between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks that had destroyed the unified Social Democratic Labor Party. He wanted to prevent that split at all costs by explicitly banning the right of members to form groups outside the officially sanctioned departments, committees, and subcommittees of the party.

And in many ways, this takes us all the way back to the arguments at the Second Party Congress, particularly with regards to the Bund, who wanted to become kind of a party inside the party, and which Lenin explicitly rejected. Now, he was at pains to insist that criticisms were a vital part of keeping party leadership honest, and he did carry resolutions at the 10th Party Congress that turned away from Trotsky’s more radical economic proposals in order to keep the Workers’ Opposition types mollified. But these critiques had to be made by individual members as individuals. They could never be the collective voice of an organized faction; that could simply not be tolerated.

The result of these controversies was a six point resolution passed by the 10th Party Congress, On Party Unity. The resolution called out the danger of organized opposition factions inside the party, because they would be readily exploited by enemies of the revolution. The statement read:

It is essential that all-class conscious workers clearly realize the harmfulness and inadmissibility of any factionalism whatsoever which inevitably leads, in practice, to less friendly work and to repeated and intensified attempts by enemies of the ruling party who have attached themselves to it under false pretenses, to deepen the divisions and use them for purposes of counter-revolution.

And what this is saying, is that if rival parties like the SRs or the Mensheviks, or God forbid, something more sinister like the Whites caught wind of a dissident faction inside the Communist Party, they might tend to support and encourage that faction not to improve the policies of the Communist Party, but to destroy the party entirely. And since, as I said, it was taken as axiomatic that the Communist Party was synonymous with the revolution, the destruction of the party equaled the destruction of the revolution.

To prevent this kind of opportunistic exploitation and to ensure the permanent unity of the Communist Party, this resolution concluded:

The Congress orders the immediate disillusion, without exception, of all groups that have been formed on the basis of some platform or other, and instructs all organizations to be very strict in ensuring that no manifestations of factionalism of any sort be tolerated. Failure to comply with this resolution of the Congress is to entail unconditional and immediate expulsion from the party.

So this is what we now refer to as the ban on factions.

The ban on factions becomes very important to the future history of Soviet Russia, because there was a secret clause tacked on that laid out how accusations of factionalism would be handled. What activities, conversations, or statements, constituted outlawed factionalism — or more importantly, who decided what constituted outlawed factionalism. This clause read, “In order to ensure strict discipline within the party, and in all Soviet work, and to achieve maximum unity while eliminating all factionalism, the Congress gives the Central Committee full powers to apply all measures of party punishment, up to and including expulsion from the party in cases of violation of discipline or of a revival of toleration of factionalism. And where members of the Central Committee are involved, to go so far as to reduce them to candidate members, and even, as an extreme measure to expel them from the party.”

This becomes the lasting legacy of the resolution on party unity and the ban on factions. It awarded near limitless power to the members of the Central Committee of the Party to decide what counted as heretical factionalism, and who could be expelled from the Party accordingly. And since the Central Committee proper was already taking direction from the much smaller Politburo, composed of just a handful of leaders, from here on out, just three to four people could now dictate who was in and who was out of the party. Who would be promoted and who would be expelled. And if you didn’t like it, or you want it to challenge the decisions of this very small group of leaders, well guess what? You could be accused of factionalism and breaking party unity and immediately expelled with extreme prejudice.

So what is created here in March of 1921 was the mechanism Stalin would use to build his dictatorship, as he was the first to truly understand and skillfully exploit how much power lay in the new mandate to enforce party unity.

If the ban on factions was a time bomb that would not actually go off for several years, the other momentous change that comes out of the 10th Party Congress exploded right then and there. Lenin had taken in everything that we’ve talked about over the past several episodes — the collapse of the Russian economy, the spread of peasant insurrections, and now the Kronstadt rebellion — and he announced that the Communist Party would abandon the policies of war communism that had prevailed since 1918. On the second to last day of the Congress, Lenin unveiled a new economic policy that would be creatively dubbed… the new economic policy.

There were three big issues this new economic policy was designed to address.

First, there was the immediate problem of these peasant insurrections. Nikolai Bukharin had recently returned from the Tambov region and reported to his comrades in the Politburo that it was impossible, impossible, to continue with the forced grain requisitions. The only way to permanently ensure peaceful coexistence with the peasantry was to give up the hated requisitions by the armed food detachments.

This went right alongside the second issue, the total collapse of Russian agricultural production. All that forced requisitioning of surpluses had accomplished was guaranteeing that there would be no surpluses. Famine conditions loomed in the spring of 1921, and the Party had to do whatever it took to immediately boost production.

Third was a more long-term issue: the need to rebuild the Russian economy as a whole, in order to achieve the material conditions necessary to make the transition to communism possible. Lenin’s solution would have been heretical — and probably been punishable by arrest and execution right up until the moment he introduced the idea on March 15th, 1920 — bring back markets.

Now Lenin did not introduce the new economic policy, or as we call it the NEP — as one big coherent package at the 10th Party Congress. It would instead be unveiled over many months by a series of decrees affecting different parts of the economy. But taken in total, the NEP converted Soviet Russia into a mixed economy that combined state ownership and management of large scale industry banking, mining, transportation and foreign trade, with small scale private enterprises, entrepreneurship, and above all the right to profit.

The first major pillar of the NEP introduced here in March 1921 was, obviously, the abandonment of forced grain requisitions and the introduction of a regular tax, a tax that would be calculated as a percentage of the total harvest. The key point is that once the tax was satisfied, the peasants would be allowed to do whatever they wanted with the leftovers They could truck, barter, sell, or trade to their heart’s content and keep the proceeds. The object was to re-incentivize the peasants, to grow as much food as possible by offering them immediate material rewards for their efforts.

Now, this is quite an about face for the Communist Party — I mean encouraging private enterprise and private profit was anathema to Bolshevik ideology. Most party members had in fact been raised to believe that anything resembling private enterprise commercial markets and individual profit was, by definition, counter-revolutionary. Many of them had joined the party because they shared an inbred hostility to private enterprise, commercial markets, and individual profit. If the socialist revolution meant anything, it meant the overthrow of capitalist exploitation and the establishment of a society built on egalitarian solidarity. To just up and abandon that was not going to be an easy pill for them to swallow. But beyond that, many Communists had long defended war communism not just on economic grounds, but political grounds. They believed that allowing private enterprise meant enriching and empowering those who were class enemies of the revolution — industrialists merchants, and above all, the Kulaks, those prosperous peasants who would turn their economic prosperity into political power and no doubt use that political power to overthrow the revolution. These were not inconsiderable objections, and Lenin knew these objections well, because he had made these arguments himself. But reality was reality, and they had to face reality together. The peasants were in revolt, and there was no food to be had.

So later in the year, Lenin delivered a report to the Second All-Russian Congress of political education departments concerning the new economic policy — basically, how the party needed to think about it and explain it. He did not mince words, and right near the very top is a section labeled Our Mistake, which reads:

At the beginning of 1918 we expected a period in which peaceful construction would be possible. When the Brest peace was signed, it seemed that danger had subsided for a time and that it would be possible to start peaceful construction. But we were mistaken, because in 1918, a real military danger overtook us in the shape of the Czechoslovak mutiny and the operate of civil war, which dragged on until 1920. Partly owing to the war problems that overwhelmed us and partly owing to the desperate position in which the Republic found itself when the imperialist war ended — owing to these circumstances and a number of others, we made the mistake of deciding to go over directly to communist production and distribution. We thought that under the surplus food appropriation system the peasants would provide us with the required quantity of grain, which we could distribute among the factories and thus achieve communist production and distribution.

Now, though, Lenin admitted this had been a mistake, he reiterated that the turn to markets would be a temporary expedient, and in fact, the section after our mistake is called A Strategic Retreat.

In substance [he said] our New Economic Policy signifies that, having sustained severe defeat on this point, we have started a strategical retreat. We said in effect: “Before we are completely routed, let us retreat and reorganize everything, but on a firmer basis.”

Lenin defended the policy against more ideological doctrinaire members of the party by saying:

if Communists deliberately examine the question of the New Economic Policy there cannot be the slightest doubt in their minds that we have sustained a very severe defeat on the economic front. […] In attempting to go over straight to communism […] we sustained a more serious defeat on the economic front than any defeat inflicted on us by Kolchak, Denikin or Pilsudski. This defeat was much more serious, significant and dangerous.

What Lenin is saying is that if you are defeated in a battle, you retreat and regroup if you plan on ultimately winning the war. Other senior leaders echoed the sentiment of the NEP as a necessary retreat. They quite simply, had they tried to stand their ground, they would have been defeated in the spring of 1921. Bukharin told the Comintern in July 1921, “We are making economic concessions in order to avoid political ones.”

Zinoviev said, “The NEP is only a temporary deviation, a tactical retreat, a clearing of the land for a new and decisive attack of labor against the front of international capitalism.”

But all that said Lenin himself made it clear that this was not going to be a period measured by months. The party had to commit to the NEP quote “seriously, and for a long time. We must definitely get this into our heads and remember it well, because rumors are spreading that this is a policy only in quotes — in other words, a form of political trickery that is only being carried out for the moment. This is not true.” For Lenin, this was not about simply catching their breath and going back on the offensive. This was going to be a long-term retrenchment in order to fight a very long war.

Lenin’s belief that the NEP had to be a long-term project rather than a short-term feint owed to the third big issue it was meant to address. Because aside from the immediate need to end the peasant rebellions and boost food production, there was this long-term need to rebuild the Russian economy. One of the reasons they had rushed into war communism in the first place was the assumption that the international socialist revolution was right around the corner; that the technological material and economic assistance Russia would need to transition from its semi-medieval state into full communism would be provided by their comrades who were surely about to win control of the great industrial economies or the west like France, Germany, and the UK. Russia itself would not need a prolonged period of internal capitalist growth and centralization and accumulation on the long path of historical materialism because everything they needed could be drawn from external sources. When the international socialist revolution failed to materialize, the Russians realized they had to fend for themselves, growing, centralizing and accumulating the material basis of communism slowly from within, not immediately from without. And though it would have been heresy to say all of this just a few months earlier, this did mean allowing markets and private enterprise to grow the Russian economy.

The impact of this economic liberalization was visible right away. After years of deprivation, suddenly retail commerce was back. But there is a point here we can’t miss: the NEP does not so much reintroduce markets into a place where they had ceased to exist as it did permit the black market economy, which had been existing in the shadows this whole time, to emerge into the full light of day. And emerge it did. In the towns and cities across Russia, private businesses came back — not just retail shops, but cafes and restaurants, nightclubs and casinos. Encouraged with the prospect of profit, people started up local cottage industries to manufacture things that people wanted and needed. The old bag men — the small-time traders who had been outlawed back in 1918 — now traveled the railroads of Russia, carrying manufactured commodities from city to country, and agricultural commodities from country to city. Wheeling dealing, buying, and selling exploded.

Emma Goldman said, “Shops and stores sprang up overnight, mysteriously stacked with delicacies Russia had not seen for years. Large quantities of butter, cheese, and meat were displayed for sale. Pastry, rare fruit, and sweets of every variety were to be purchased. Men, women, and children with pinched faces and hungry eyes stood about gazing into the windows and discussing the great miracle. What was but yesterday considered a heinous offense was now flaunted before them in an open and legal manner.”

Some flaunted it more than others, and the most infamous new class to emerge from this period are known to history as the NEPmen — that is, N-E-Pmen. The NEPmen were a loose category of anyone who took advantage of the sudden liberalizations and economic control and the arrival of profit opportunities, whether traders, merchants, small-time manufacturers, entrepreneurs, or business owners. And the NEPmen didn’t just buy and sell wheat and plows. They would often come bearing liquor, tobacco, and drugs like opium, heroin, and cocaine. Some of them made enormous fortunes in a very short amount of time. They bought fancy cars and clothes. They flaunted their wealth in restaurants and theaters and shops. They represented a very conspicuous consumption that Russia had not seen in years. And as all of this is happening in 1921 and 1922 and 1923, the NEPmen are kind of Russia’s contribution to the post-World War I scene of the roaring twenties — though, in Russia’s case, this was not happening at a time of general prosperity. Scarcity and poverty still reigned, which made the NEPmen a kind of of despised group for profiting off of that scarcity and poverty. The handful who made huge fortunes became hated symbols of greedy exploitation, and it should come as no surprise that a lot of that hatred comes with a heavy dose of antisemitism whenever someone with a Jewish surname was identified.

So to tie together the two momentous things that came out of the 10th Party Congress, we can see the economic component working in tandem with the political component. That is, the loosening of economic controls is going to be matched by a nearly equal tightening of political controls. The enrichment or the peasant kulaks or the NEPmen are businessmen leasing government owned factories for private profit would not be allowed to lead to their political empowerment. NEPmen, for example, were heavily taxed and inspected and scrutinized and interrogated all the time to ensure that they kept their ambitions strictly economic. At the same time, the Communists would not allow rival political parties to gain advantages from the newly prosperous parts of society. So the spring of 1921 marks the end of whatever lingering toleration of rival political parties like the SRs and Mensheviks had been tacitly enjoying over the past several years.

Mensheviks and SRs were accused of suborning and leading the peasant rebellions and the Kronstadt Rebellion, and they would be the ones most likely to try to organize the newly prosperous elements of Russian society against the Communist Party. So, the new modes of economic liberalization were matched by new modes of political repression, and the one party Soviet state truly and permanently entrenched itself. And, as we just discussed, with the ban on factions inside the Communist Party, that meant that one party rule was about to become one committee rule, which was about to become one man rule.

Nowhere was the Communist willingness to mix economic concessions with political repression more acutely felt than in the insurrectionary Tambov region, the region whose insurrection probably convinced the Communists to make their economic concessions in the first place. At its peak, over the winter of 1920-1921, there were upwards of 50,000 rebels under arms, peasant guerrillas operating across a huge area under the general direction of the SR leader Alexander Antonov. But after the 10th Party Congress wrapped up its business and went home, and the Kronstadt Rebellion was well and truly crushed, Communist attention turned to the Tambov region in April 1920, whereupon, they would use brutal tactics to suppress the rebellion and break the peasants before inviting them to enjoy the fruits of the NEP.

So in April 1921, the Red Army flooded something like a hundred thousand troops into the region, and they embarked on a grand counter-insurgency campaign, clearing areas with mobile units and then holding them with infantry garrisons. The utter ruthlessness they deployed was not quite on par with the infernal columns deployed by the Jacobins in the Vendee region during the French Revolution, but it wasn’t far off. As any guerrilla army needs a sympathetic civilian population to sustain them, the Communists targeted both rebels and civilians. Red Army companies and Chekha detachments would roll into a village and pay informants to reveal who the rebels were, where they were, and who supported them, and if paying informants didn’t work, they just tortured people into giving up any usable intelligence. They would then go off and attack the guerrillas with armored cars and machine guns and artillery. They used airplanes to do reconnaissance and drop bombs, and they had no compunctions about using chlorine gas to smoke out rebels, hiding in forests. Against the civilians, they would take hostages and threatened to kill them if the rebels did not surrender, which was not an idle threat. If the rebels didn’t surrender, the hostages were executed. This also applied to physical property like houses and barns, workshops and sometimes entire villages to punish the rebels and the locals who supported them. The Communists also built concentration camps and herded the entire population of villages inside of them, declaring those caught outside the camps fair game to be killed. Sometimes entire villages could be punished as a group and forcibly deported to new settlements way up in the Arctic Circle.

Not that it was clear to the rebels that surrendering was even worth it. At one point, the Communists declared a general amnesty, and when 6,000 or so took them up on the offer, nearly all of them were taken into custody and shot. All of this unfolded through April, May and June 1921, with about 15,000 people being shot — both rebels and civilians — and another hundred thousand imprisoned or deported. The result of all this was the total and brutal repression of the Tambov Rebellion by the summer of 1921. Alexander Antonov himself slipped into hiding and continued to lead a small time guerrilla group until the summer of 1922, when the Chekha finally tracked him down and killed him in a firefight.

The residents of the Tambov region were not coaxed from their rebellion by the promises of the NEP, the details of which were barely known to them. They were instead beaten into submission by the kind of brute force the Communist Party continued to be all too willing to use against their own people to ensure their political supremacy. Because after all, they represented the revolution, and any threat to them was not just about securing their own personal power, but the victory of the revolution. This allowed them to justify a lot.

And unfortunately, the worst was not actually over yet, as the NEP came too late to stave off a looming famine that would spread throughout Russia in 1921 and 1922. But we are going to set that aside and come back to it, because next week we are going to talk about how Soviet Russia tightened its political hold not on their own people, but on the peripheral nationalities of the former Russian empire. Here too there would be conflicts both inside and outside the Communist Party about how to proceed as they forged the building blocks of what they would call the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, or as it is better known in the English speaking world, the Soviet Union.