THE NEW ECONOMIC POLICY (NEP) IN RUSSIA, 1921–1928 Term Paper

By 1921 the Bolshevik Party had triumphed in the Civil War following the Russian Revolution in 1917. But the country still faced severe challenges—a collapsing economy, widespread famine, peasant rebellions, and the revolt of the sailors at the Kronstadt Naval Base. All this indicated a dangerous level of popular dissatisfaction with the Bolshevik government.

At the Tenth Party Congress in March 1921, V. I. Lenin convinced the Bolsheviks to accept the New Economic Policy (NEP). This new approach to the economy called for peasants to pay a percentage of their harvest as a tax instead of having most of it requisitioned by the state. It allowed a return to retail trade and small-scale manufacture as well. The Bolsheviks retained control of the “commanding heights” of the economy: wholesale trade, foreign trade, banking, and insurance. The partial return to capitalism was meant to encourage farmers to produce more food and artisans and small businessmen to make more consumer goods available.

The NEP remained in place until 1928. That year the Russian economy achieved approximately the same levels of production as in 1913, the last full year before World War I. Art, literature, and film flourished during this time, although hampered by lack of funds and shortages of materials. It was also a period of new ideas and radical schemes in areas like education, architecture, design, law, and city planning.

The year 1927 was the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution, and many idealistic revolutionaries worried that the Soviet Union was drifting toward capitalism and that socialism would never be achieved. Stalin, after winning out over his main rivals in the period after Lenin’s death in 1924, appealed to the energy and enthusiasm of many Russians with a call for the fulfillment of the First Five-Year Plan, which was an attempt to use economic planning by the state to achieve an industrialized economy. The stage was set for the transformation of the Soviet Union over the next decade. Suggestions for Term Papers
1. Events at the Tenth Party Congress in 1921 were crucial for the 1920s and beyond. The congress not only produced the New Economic Policy but also a policy against the formation of factions in the Communist Party. Trace the ways in which this policy was used by Stalin in the 1920s.
2. Lenin seemed to adopt a gradualist approach to development in the Soviet Union in the 1920s. Read some of his articles from this period (see The Lenin Anthology in the Suggested Sources) and write about his views in this period.
3. Investigate the lives of the peasantry in the 1920s and assess the impact of NEP on how they lived and farmed.
4. What was life like for women in the Soviet Union in the 1920s? Begin with Richard Stites, The Women’s Liberation Movement in Russia (see Suggested Sources).
5. Soviet cinema quickly became well known in the 1920s among film critics. View a Soviet film from the period by Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, or Aleksandr Dovzhenko and write about the tensions between art and the need to create propaganda for the Soviet state.
6. Compare the novel We by Evgeny Zamyatin (see Suggested Sources) and George Orwell’s novel 1984. What similarities and differences do you find in the two novels?

Research Suggestions

In addition to the boldfaced items, look under the entries for “The 1917 Russian Revolution” (#10) and “Stalin’s First Five-Year Plan, 1928–1932” (#23). Search under Communist International (Comintern), Nepmen, People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment, Aleksandra Kollontai, and Evgeny Zamyatin.

SUGGESTED SOURCES

Primary Sources

Lenin, Vladimir Ilich. The Lenin Anthology. Edited by Robert C. Tucker. New York: W. W. Norton, 1975. The best single-volume collection of Lenin’s writings. Approximately half the book consists of post-1917 material.

Stalin, Joseph. The Essential Stalin: Major Theoretical Writings, 1905–1952. Edited by H. Bruce Franklin. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1972. A convenient source of Stalin’s writings, including some important material from the 1920s.

Trotsky, Leon. The Basic Writings of Trotsky. Edited by Irving Howe. New York: Random House, 1963. Contains a few useful articles from the 1920s.

Zamyatin, Evgeny. We. New York: Bantam Books, 1972. A novel that satirized the new Soviet state. George Orwell’s 1984 was based in part on Zamyatin’s book.

Secondary Sources

Ball, A. M. Russia’s Last Capitalists. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987. An excellent discussion of NEP and the “nepmen,” those retailers and small manufacturers who used NEP to return to capitalism.

Clark, Katerina. Petersburg: Crucible of Cultural Revolution. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995. A very interesting study of Soviet culture in the 1920s as seen from St. Petersburg (later Leningrad).

Deutscher, Isaac. The Prophet Unarmed: Trotsky, 1921–1929. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959. One of three volumes of Deutscher’s biography of Trotsky, this volume traces Trotsky’s fall from power in the Soviet Union.

Kenez, Peter. The Birth of the Propaganda State: Soviet Methods of Mass Mobilization, 1917–1929. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. A thorough study of Bolshevik attempts to reach the masses in the 1920s.

Stites, Richard. Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. A discussion of efforts to create a revolutionary society in the Soviet Union in the 1920s.

———. The Women’s Liberation Movement in Russia: Feminism, Nihilism, and Bolshevism, 1860–1930. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. Part four of this standard source deals with the liberation of women in the Soviet Union in the 1920s.

Tucker, Robert C. Stalin as Revolutionary, 1879–1929. New York: W. W. Norton, 1973. An outstanding study of Stalin’s rise to prominence in this period.

Tumarkin, Nina. Lenin Lives! The Lenin Cult in Russia. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983. An important book on one of the major ways in which Stalin achieved enormous power in the Soviet Union by the end of the 1920s.