European Socialism, Volume II: The Socialist Struggle against Capitalism and Totalitarianism

By Carl Landauer

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1959.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Nov 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520345652

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EUROPEAN SOCIALISM

EUROPEAN

SOCIALISM

A HISTORY OF IDEAS AND MOVEMENTS

FROM THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

TO HITLER’S SEIZURE OF POWER

VOLUME

II

THE SOCIALIST STRUGGLE AGAINST

CAPITALISM AND TOTALITARIANISM

By Carl Landauer

in collaboration with

Elizabeth Kridl Valkenier and Hilde Stein Landauer

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Berkeley and Los Angeles

1959

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles

California

Cambridge University Press

London, England

© ¡959 the Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 59-5744

Printed in the United States of America

Designed by Adrian Wilson

VOLUME I

FROM THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION TO THE

FIRST WORLD WAR AND ITS AFTERMATH

Part I

MODERN SOCIALISM IN ITS PERIOD OF INFANCY (1790-1850)

Part II

KARL MARX

Part III

MODERN SOCIALISM IN ITS PERIOD OF ADOLESCENCE (1850-1870)

Part IV

SOCIALISM IN THE PERIOD OF REPRESSION (1870-1890)

Part V

THE GROWTH OF THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT IN WESTERN EUROPE

AND THE RISE OF REFORMISM (1890-1914)

Part VI

SOCIALISM DURING THE FIRST WORLD WAR (1914-1918)

Part VII

EUROPEAN SOCIALISM AND COMMUNISM DURING THE POSTWAR CRISES

(1919-1924)

Contents

Contents

34 Soviet Russia after the Civil War

ADMINISTRATIVE AND CONSTITUTIONAL REFORM

THE CRISIS IN GEORGIA

ECONOMIC DIFFICULTIES

PERMANENT REVOLUTION OR SOCIALISM IN ONE COUNTRY

PARTY DEMOCRACY AND THE ILLIMITABLE CLASS STRUGGLE

TROTSKY VERSUS THE TRIUMVIRATE, 1923-1925

TROTSKY WITH ZINOVIEV AND KAMENEV AGAINST STALIN, 1925-1927

ANTI-STALINISM IN THE INTERNATIONAL

COMMUNIST DEFEAT IN CHINA

STALIN’S VICTORY

35 Consolidation of the Facist Dictatorship

FASCISM FORTIFIES ITS PARLIAMENTARY POSITION

THE MURDER OF MATTEOTTI

THE ANTI-FASCISTS Miss THEIR OPPORTUNITY

MUSSOLINI RECOVERS LOST GROUND

FASCIST COUNTEROFFENSIVE

FROM MANIPULATED PARLIAMENTARISM TO OPEN DICTATORSHIP

FASCISM AND THE PAPACY

36 French Labor after Monetary Stabilisation

THE SOCIALISTS IN SPLENDID ISOLATION

THE COMMUNISTS AGAINST THE RIGHT DEVIATION

37 The Flowering of the Weimar Republic

ECONOMIC RECOVERY AND POLITICAL CONSOLIDATION

THE SOCIALISTS AND THE BURGERBLOCK

THE INTERNAL CONDITIONS OF THE PROLETARIAN PARTIES

GERMAN COMMUNISM UNDER THE IMPACT OF STALINISM

DISSENSIONS AMONG THE SOCIALISTS

THE SOCIALISTS AND THE ISSUES OF THE DAY

THE REICHSWEHR PROBLEM

SOCIAL WELFARE POLICY

REICHSREFORM

LANDREFORM

NATIONALIZATION

MONOPOLY CONTROL

DANGER SIGN: THE CLASS STRUGGLES IN AUSTRIA

LAST ELECTORAL TRIUMPH OF THE GERMAN SOCIALISTS

38 The USS.R. Starts Comprehensive Planning

MOTIVES AND BASIC DIFFICULTIES OF ECONOMIC PLANNING

INITIATION OF THE FIRST FIVE YEAR PLAN

COLLECTIVIZATION OF AGRICULTURE

THE HARSH CLIMATE IN ECONOMICS AND POLITICS

39 The Decline of the Weimar Republic

THE TROUBLES OF THE MÜLLER CABINET

INCREASING CLASS TENSIONS

GROWING UNEMPLOYMENT

THE YOUNG PLAN AND SCHACHT’S REVOLT

POPULAR UNREST

NAZI STIRRINGS

THE SOCIAL DEMOCRATS FORCED OUT OF OFFICE

THE BRÜNING GOVERNMENT

A NONPARLIAMENTARY CABINET

THE SOCIAL DEMOCRATS AGAINST BRUNING

THE NAZIS WIN AT THE POLLS

THE SOCIAL DEMOCRATS TOLERATE BRUNING

COLLAPSE OF THE CREDIT SYSTEM

RIGHTIST OPPOSITION TO BRUNING

THE HARZBURG FRONT

BRUNING REDUCES WAGES AND PRICES

EFFECTS OF THE TOLERATION POLICY ON THE SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC PARTY

40 The Crisis of Socialist Isolationism in France

41 The Encyclical Quadragesimo Anno

42 The Completion of the First Five Year Plan and the Climax of the Agricultural Crisis in the USSR

43 Hitler’s Victory

FROM BRÜNING TO PAPEN HINDENBURG’S REELECTION

THE CAUSES OF BRÜNING’s FALL

PAPEN’S WORRIES

ELECTIONS AGAIN

ANTICAPITALIST CROSS CURRENTS

SPLITTING THE NAZIS

NEW TROUBLES FOR PAPEN

A SETBACK FOR THE NAZIS

FROM SCHLEICHER TO HITLER

SOCIALIST TOLERATION OF SCHLEICHER?

CHANCELLOR HITLER

COMMUNIST STRATEGY AND UNITED FRONT

NATIONAL REVOLUTION

LEGALITY MIXED WITH REVOLUTION

ELECTIONS AND MORE TERROR

THE SOCIAL DEMOCRATS STRUGGLE FOR THEIR LEGAL EXISTENCE

THE END OF THE STRUGGLE

LESSONS FROM THE CATASTROPHE

44 The Fate of Socialism in Smaller Countries of Europe

SWEDEN

DENMARK

BELGIUM

45 Neo-Marxism

THE NEW THEORY OF MATURE CAPITALISM

ACCUMULATION AND REALIZATION OF SURPLUS VALUE

IMPERIALISM AND THE FALLING RATE OF PROFIT

LENIN’S THEORY OF IMPERIALISM

HAS NEO-MARXISM MADE A CONTRIBUTION?

46 The Revival of the Analysis of the Desirable Society

THE CONSERVATORS OF THE UTOPIAN TRADITION

THE CRITICS AND THEIR CONTRIBUTION

EARLIER ARGUMENT: SOCIALISM IS BOUND BY ECONOMIC LAW

LATER ARGUMENT: SOCIALISM CANNOT EXIST UNDER ECONOMIC LAW

THE SOCIALIST REPLY

FUNCTIONALISTS AND MARXISTS

THE MARKTSOZIALISTEN

ANGLO-AMERICAN THEORY

47 A GLANCE AT THE FUTURE

Notes

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Index of Names

Index of Subjects

34

Soviet Russia after the Civil War

ADMINISTRATIVE AND CONSTITUTIONAL REFORM

In May, 1922, little more than a year after the inauguration of the New Economic Policy, Lenin had a stroke which temporarily removed him from political activity and which initiated a fatal illness. He was to live only two more years, during which he was frequently unable to exercise his leadership.

Would history have taken a different course if Lenin had remained

longer at the helm of the Soviet Union? Lenin was a man of greater all-

round ability than any of his epigones, including Stalin and Trotsky; he

was free of the crude personal ambitions to which all candidates for his

succession were subject; he knew the Western world of which the man

who won the battle for successorship was ignorant, and in Lenin’s writings

there is still a spark from the humanitarian enthusiasm inherent in the

old socialist movement. Although Lenin strongly believed in dictatorship,

this thought did not entirely obscure in his mind, as it did in Stalin’s, the

need for spontaneity, for giving some room to independent thinking at

least where it was not likely to become dangerous, for granting the

masses of the people some active share in the government. He would

have had greater hesitations than his successor to build a pure police

state, and to engage in a world-wide game of power politics. But Lenin

had already committed himself to political methods which could logically

lead only to some such system as Stalinism. It was Lenin who had

preached the doctrine of the illimitable class war, during which all re-

straining moral rules are suspended for the party of the proletariat. He

had made it entirely clear that the duty of the Communist party to wage

that war with all ruthlessness did not end with the seizure of power, or

even with the cessation of active resistance against its rule. He had urged

his followers to interpret international problems, no less than national

1183

issues, in terms of the conflict between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. To sum up, Lenin would probably have chosen the same basic solutions as Stalin did, although he would certainly have tried harder to avoid extreme brutality. In the latter effort, he would have been greatly helped by his unquestioned authority: he who can seal his opponents’ political fate by a few words of condemnation can easily spare them physical death.

Two great issues dominated domestic Soviet policies in the last two years of Lenin’s life: the efficiency and integrity of the Soviet administration and the relationship of the various sections of Soviet territory to the central government. The weeding out of inefficiency and corruption in the government apparatus had been one of Lenin’s most zealously pursued goals ever since the revolution. As early as 1919, a Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate was founded for that purpose.

The Rabkrin, as the Commissariat was called, was set up to control every branch of the administration, from top to bottom. … It was to act as the stern and enlightened auditor of the whole rickety and creaking governmental machine; to expose abuses of power and red tape; and to train an elite of reliable civil servants for every branch of the government. The Commissariat acted through teams of workers and peasants who were free at any time to enter the offices of any Commissariat and watch the work done there … as a result … the Rabkrin was able to keep its eye on every wheel of the governmental machine.¹

As a means of putting every part of the administration under surveillance, the inspectorate served the personal purpose of its first chief, Stalin. Otherwise, however, the institution was a failure. It became almost more bureaucratic than the government agencies which it was supposed to free from red tape, and was probably also not immune to corruption.

The conquest of the Ukraine from the Whites and again from the Poles had made a constitutional reform necessary, because Ukrainian sectionalism required a higher degree of regional self-government—at least in outward form—than had been granted the autonomous republics and autonomous regions within the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. On the other hand, a mere alliance between the R.S.F.S.R. and the Ukraine seemed too great a risk since even the integrating forces of the Communist creed and the close ties among the governing Communist parties might not have always sufficed to overcome the centrifugal tendencies of sectionalism and to prevent the latter from developing into separatism. Conditions still more complex than those in the Ukraine existed in the Caucasus, where mutual hostility among the various nationalities and tribes and the aftermath of the war against the Menshevik Republic of Georgia urgently required at least the semblance of a balance of centralization and decentralization. Therefore, in the summer of 1922, the Russian Communists began to debate the principles and the details of a new constitution.²

It was agreed that the constitution should provide for a union among those sections which historically had the strongest aspirations for selfgovernment, and that other distinct cultural or racial groups should be given autonomy within the republic in whose territory the group was located. A union is a stronger bond than an alliance or confederation: although, in verbiage the states forming a union may each retain its sovereignty, a union establishes common organs and a common citizenship, implying (or even stipulating explicitly) direct allegiance of the individual citizen to the federal government. In the new union of soviet republics, the tie was to be particularly strong, because the division of tasks between the central government and the constituent republics provided the former with great powers which could be turned into so many weapons against centrifugal tendencies. The Soviet constitution of 1923 ³ put the following matters under the exclusive competence, legislative and administrative, of the Soviet Union: international affairs, military affairs, foreign trade, communications, currency and credit, industrial or commercial concessions to foreigners, regulation of migration and citizenship. With regard to domestic economic life, the Union was supposed to lay down the legislative and administrative framework, which the individual republics were then to fill out by their own measures. Applied to the publicly owned industry, this meant that the Union could determine the areas of industrial activity and the plants which it wished to reserve for itself. The constitution provided already for a general plan for the whole national economy of the Union and of course put it under the jurisdiction of the Union, although collaboration of the republics in the formative phase of the plan was contemplated from the outset. In the financial field, the Union had a general right of supervision, since the budgets of the individual republics were incorporated into the Union budget, which had then to be approved by the Union organs. (This provision acquired special importance, extending far beyond the field of fiscal interests, when the unified budget of the Union became the financial column of the Five Year Plan.) Loans and taxes of the republics were made explicitly subject to Union control. In regard to justice, education, and public hygiene, the republics were granted the right to take their own measures as far as these were not inconsistent with the measures of the Union. The fields over which the Union had exclusive power of legislation and administration were each under a People’s Commissariat for the whole Union. These commissariats had their own administrative machinery in all republics, and the head of that administration in a particular area had the right to attend the cabinet meetings of the republic to which he was assigned; whether he had the right to vote at these meetings depended on the decision of the Central Executive Committee of the Republic.⁴

For the affairs on which the Union confined itself to framework legislation, the constitution created unified people’s commissariats—Union ministries supervising and to some extent directing the corresponding ministries in the republics, which administered the laws and the rules of policy laid down by the Union. Aside from these two categories, there were still other fields which technically were left to the republics for policy making as well as for administration, and the outward symbol of this formal right of self-government was the absence of unified people’s commissariats or any other union organs with special jurisdiction over these fields.⁵

The O.G.P.U., the United State Political Administration or political police, was organized along lines similar to those of the unified people’s commissariats, although the head of the O.G.P.U. was not given the right to vote in the Union Council of People’s Commissars which consisted of both types of commissariats. The O.G.P.U. directs the work of the local organs … through its representatives attached to the Councils of People’s Commissars of the federated Republics in accordance with a special regulation to be confirmed by legislative act. In order further to reduce the practical significance of the home-rule rights which the constitution granted to the several republics in the matter of the political police, the control of the legality of O.G.P.U. measures was entrusted to two Union organs: the procurator of the Supreme Court of the Union, who was to supervise the acts of the O.G.P.U., and the Central Executive Committee of the Union, which had to lay down the rules governing this supervision. The centralized character of the political police was supplemented by provisions in the field of criminal law. Although the individual republics were given the right to define crimes and to determine punishment by their own criminal codes, the Presidium of the Central Executive Committee of the Union has the right to notify the Republics, if necessary, of the groups and types of crime on which a common line of penal policy must be pursued. (This provision was not contained in the constitution itself, but in a special law enacted in

1924.

These powers of the central authorities, however, were not considered sufficient to protect the Soviet state against centrifugal tendencies. Therefore it was stipulated that Union organs had the right to suspend or repeal enactments and other decisions by the organs of the republics. The Central Executive Committee of the Union was given this right with regard to the decisions of Soviet congresses, Central Executive committees and other organs of authority of the republics; the Presidium of the Union Central Committee was granted the repealing and suspending power over the Central Executive committees and the Councils of People’s Commissars of the Republics, and the suspending power over Soviet congresses of the Republics.⁶

Over this highly centralized structure, a coat of general provisions representing pretenses to the right of self-determination was thrown by the authors of the Soviet constitution. The rights of the individual republics were declared to be limited only to the extent that the constitution explicitly so provided; in other words, all residual powers rested with the republics. The republics were even assured of the right of secession. Furthermore, they were given a conspicuous place in the legislative and policy making apparatus of the Soviet Union: the Central Executive Committee of the Union was divided into two sections, the Federal Soviet and the Soviet of Nationalities, the latter consisting of delegates from the individual republics and also from the autonomous republics and autonomous regions into which the Russian Soviet Republic (Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic) and some other member republics were subdivided. In the Federal Soviet, representation of the individual districts was on the basis of population figures; in the Soviet of Nationalities, each of the member republics and each of the autonomous republics had five delegates and each of the autonomous regions one delegate. The composition of the Soviet of Nationalities, however, had to be approved by the Soviet Congress.

Even in the experience of democratic nations with federal constitutions, similar provisions have proved incapable of preventing the gradual shift of powers from the member states to the central government—a shift which is so strongly promoted by modern trends in economic life and administrative technique. In the Soviet Union, moreover, the rights of the republics were outbalanced by the powers of supervision and interference which the constitution attributed to the Union government. But these latter provisions formed only a second line of defense for the central administration; they could have been abrogated without affecting the actual government of the Soviet state very much, except perhaps in a severe crisis. In the policy-making centers of the republics the will to self-determination was and is paralyzed by the influence of the Communist party with its highly centralized organization.

It was mere window dressing, for instance, to have given the Ukraine the right to secede from the Soviet Union, when no move in that direction could be undertaken without an initiative from the Ukrainian Council of People’s Commissars and the Ukrainian Soviet Congress which were under the absolute control of the Ukrainian Communist party, and when no organ of that party could take any step disapproved by Moscow. The pretense of regional self-determination which is found in the Soviet constitution has no parallel in the party organization. Some comrades, wrote Kaganovich, referring probably to foreign Communists, imagine that the Russian Communist party must be a federation of parties because the Soviet Union is a federation of republics. But that is by no means the case. The Russian Communist party is a strongly unified party which applies its decisions with one will. ⁷ The rules of the party deprived the party organizations within the individual republics of any will of their own, except on matters of merely local significance. With regard to territorial organization, the party is based on the principle of democratic centralism, and therefore the organization of any territory is considered superior to all party organizations existing on the same territory. ⁸ Since the Ukraine is part of the territory of the U.S.S.R., the Communist party of the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic was and is inferior to the Communist party of the Soviet Union, in which the influence of the Communists of Russia proper is so predominant that it was regarded as superfluous to create a Communist party of the R.S.F.S.R. in addition to the Communist party of the U.S.S.R.⁹

Suppose even that Ukrainian separatists had made their way into the Communist party of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic: they would not be able to come out into the open with their ideas, regardless of how many sympathizers they might find among members of the local party organizations. Even the slightest suspicion of separatist propaganda or of any other attempt to loosen Moscow’s grip on the country would subject the Ukrainian faction to a purge from the party as an introduction to much harsher measures,¹⁰ which would, if necessary, be carried out through the armed might of the central government. How should a group which cannot circulate its ideas outside its own faithful partisans hope to gather a majority in the organs of one of the republics in favor of secession from the Soviet Union? Such a secession could come about only if at the same time the prestige and the military power of the Soviet Union were destroyed—but then it would be just as likely to come if the right to leave the Union had never been written into the Soviet constitution.¹¹ The Communist parties outside the U.S.S.R. have also been held tight to the party line by the Third International. Yet even the small degree of autonomy which the German or French or American Communist parties possessed seemed too much for the Communists in the allegedly sovereign republics of the Ukraine, Byelorussia, and the various other member states of the U.S.S.R.

In contrast to its zeal for political centralization, bolshevism has sincerely and effectively assisted the national minorities in the development of their own cultural techniques—especially their own language. This was entirely in accord with the ideas which Stalin had proposed in his essay Marxism and the National Question back in 1913.12 The Communist leaders, with their strong inclination toward streamlining and uniformity, can hardly have felt any genuine appreciation of cultural diversity, but they were realistic enough to understand that technical education and Communist indoctrination of national minorities would be far more effective if undertaken in the native languages than in the Russian tongue, and that the cultivation of a minority language could not be separated from the promotion of some other aspects of cultural autonomy. Moreover, the Communist leaders may well have felt that the awakening of a native culture in every one of the minorities was inevitable and that for bolshevism it was wise to seize control of the movement in its infancy.¹³ Finally, by satisfying some of the cultural aspirations of nationalities which had been kept in inferior status by the tsars, the Bolsheviks gained valuable sympathies among the colonial peoples struggling for their cultural and political independence against the colonizing powers.

But the kind of cultural autonomy which the Bolsheviks granted the minorities was of limited significance because it did not apply to the content of culture. The minorities were given the right to choose the media for the expression of their thoughts yet were denied the right to form their own thoughts independently, because this right would have had political implications unacceptable to the dictatorship. A fictitious analogy may serve to illustrate what the Bolshevik minority policy granted and what it withheld from the non-Russian races of the U.S.S.R. Suppose before 1948 a British statesman, sincerely opposed to the idea that Western culture was superior and convinced that the people of India had a right to their own language, poetry, and art, had at the same time regarded the maintenance and strengthening of the legal bonds among the different parts of the British Empire as the one consideration of controlling importance: he would presumably have spent a great deal of money on founding schools, colleges, and academies in India, might have encouraged the development of local dialects and of merely spoken tongues into literary languages and perhaps would have made Hindustani the official language to the exclusion of English. But he would certainly have put every conceivable obstacle not only in the way of a political independence movement but also of any movement aiming at greater political autonomy. If, furthermore, this statesman had been convinced that for both Britain and India only one social and political philosophy was in accord with their historic missions and with their continued union, and that this philosophy had important implications in the field of literature, art, and religion, it is easy to see how much chance he would have given India to develop a genuine national culture.

The actual Indian development, to be sure, might provide the Bolsheviks of today with an argument for their policy. If they could afford to speak frankly, they might well point to the historical experience that the considerable liberty of expression which the British, contrary to our fictitious example, granted the peoples of India, provided the latter with instruments to work for political independence. For a variety of reasons, it does not seem likely that true cultural autonomy would have the same ultimate consequences in the minorities within the U.S.S.R., but a dictator who is under no conditions willing to acquiesce in a loosening of the political tie acts consistently and with foresight in granting the minorities no more than the outward techniques of national culture. Of course, such a policy is imperialism, if the term is to have any tangible meaning.

THE CRISIS IN GEORGIA

The most important testing ground for the Soviet policy toward nationalities was Transcaucasia, specifically Georgia. The occupation of Georgia by the Bolshevik troops in 1921 had been followed by merciless persecution of Mensheviks. Even the Bolsheviks in Tiflis, the Georgian capital, objected to the measures which Stalin personally had ordered during a stay in Georgia and which were carried out under the supervision of his friend G. K. Orjonikidze. The majority of local leaders, among whom Budu Mdivani and Ph. Makharadze were the most prominent, was afraid that ruthless anti-Menshevik measures, carried out upon direction from Moscow, were creating precedents for Moscow dictation of Georgian policies. In spite of their opposition to the Republic of Georgia, the experience of local sovereignty had left its trace on the minds of Georgian Communist party members and party leaders: in their overwhelming majority, they did not wish to become part of a centralized Russian state.

Their misgivings were intensified by a plan which was Stalin’s own intellectual property: the idea of a Caucasian federation to consist of Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. The proposal was part of a more general concept, which came to underlie the new constitution of the U.S.S.R. Stalin was opposed to the idea that the union should be formed directly by the constituent republics; and he insisted on the need for intermediate links between the central administration and the individual republican governments. His motive was that central control would be more effective if it were exercised through four main channels¹⁴ than if it were dispersed in a much greater number of direct contacts between Moscow and the local administrations.¹⁵ The federation concept was responsible for the integration of autonomous republics and autonomous regions into the territories of the federated republics, one of which was the Transcaucasian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic. The idea of the regional groupings was accepted without opposition everywhere except in Georgia. Georgian Bolsheviks preferred their country to remain a truly autonomous Soviet republic, loosely associated with a wide all-Russian federation; they were unwilling to resign sovereignty in favor of a much closer, regional, Caucasian organization.¹⁶ But the Caucasian Federation was created in March, 1922.17 Lenin had given his blessing to Stalin’s project and the opponents did not dare to defy the highest authority. The formal act of federation, however, did not terminate the controversy. The group that had opposed the federation continued to accuse Stalin, as commissar of nationalities of the R.S.F.S.R., of Great-Russian chauvinism.

If Stalin’s many statements on the nationality question are taken at face value, he could certainly not be accused of any desire to force the minorities into a Great Russian straight jacket. In practically everyone of his speeches and writings on the national question he took a firm stand against Great-Russian chauvinism as well as against the tendency of the native Communists to exaggerate the importance of national peculiarities in party work and to leave the class interests of the toilers in the background.¹⁸ Usually, the former came in for even sharper condemnation than the latter.¹⁹ In 1923, Stalin complained about utterances on the part of the members of the Central Committee which were not in harmony with communism—utterances entirely alien to internationalism—apparently expressions of a colonizing spirit toward the backward nationalities. All this is a sign of the times, an epidemic. The chief danger arising from this is that, owing to the New Economic Policy,²⁰ Great Power chauvinism is growing in our country daily and hourly—Great Power chauvinism, the rankest kind of nationalism, which strives to obliterate all that is not Russian, to gather all the threads of administration into the hands of Russians and to crush everything that is not Russian. ²¹

Thus Stalin was far from speaking like a Great-Russian chauvinist. But dictatorship, by its nature, finds it impossible to recognize any rights of individuals or groups as valid when they conflict with the dictator’s interest in the maintenance or extension of his power. Stalin, with all his emphasis on the struggle against Great-Russian chauvinism, insisted that the interests of the dictatorship had priority over the rights of the nationalities.

It should be borne in mind that besides the rights of nations to self-determination there is also the right of the working class to consolidate its power, and to the latter the right of self-determination is subordinate. There are occasions when the right of self-determination conflicts with the other, the higher right— the right of the working class that has assumed power, to consolidate its power. In such cases—this must be said bluntly—the right of self-determination cannot and must not serve as an obstacle to the exercise by the working class of its right to dictatorship. The former must give way to the latter. That, for instance, was the case in 1920, when in order to defend the power of the working class we were obliged to march on Warsaw.²²

The right of the working class to dictatorship was, of course, interpreted as the right of the Communist party to dictatorship, and the consolidation of this dictatorship was identical with strengthening the Soviet Union, in which the Great-Russian element was prevalent in numbers and still more in political and cultural influence.²³ The establishment of an unconditional priority for the Communist interest in increasing Soviet power had the inevitable effect of allowing the nationalities no freedom of development, unless such freedom is found in the right to express in the nationality’s own language conformity with the Soviet pattern of politics and culture.

Whenever resistance of some national group to compulsory compliance with the Soviet pattern was coextensive with resistance to some policy on which Stalin insisted for other reasons, he put special pressure behind the inherent tendency of Soviet totalitarianism to operate in favor of Great-Russian hegemony. This was emphatically true in Georgia, where Stalin wished to annihilate his former Menshevik enemies²⁴ and where the regionalist faction within the Communist party opposed him. It was Stalin’s bad luck that on the Georgian question his feelings which were the cause of his repressive policies were not shared by Lenin, who had no reason to treat the Georgian Mensheviks with more severity than other defeated enemies, and rather wished to meet them with leniency.

As early as April, 1921, Lenin had warned the Communists of the Transcaucasian republics to beware of uncritically adopting the methods of terror and repression which had been necessary in Russia proper as a consequence of prolonged civil war. The Transcaucasians, Lenin told them, had quickly passed through their period of struggle, which had now ended, and they were assured of the support of the Russian Soviet Republic, whereas Russia had stood alone. Therefore Lenin urgently recommended more mildness, caution and readiness to make concessions to the petty bourgeoisie, to the intelligentsia, and particularly to the peasantry than had been applied in Russia. A slower, more cautious, more systematic transition to socialism—this is what is possible and necessary for the republics of the Caucasus as distinct from the R.S.F.S.R.25 In another letter, six weeks earlier, Lenin had instructed Orjonikidze to be lenient toward the Georgian intelligentsia and petty traders and had added:.. it is extremely important to seek an acceptable compromise with Jordania and other Georgian Mensheviks who, before the revolt, were not absolutely hostile to the idea of a Soviet order in Georgia under certain circumstances." ²⁶

But Orjonikidze, with the support of Stalin, had disregarded these instructions, as Lenin learned from two documents that were submitted to him in the late fall of 1922. One of Lenin’s sources of information was a memorandum by these Transcaucasian opponents, who thus appealed to Lenin, as the highest authority, against Stalin and Orjonikidze. In the memorandum, the Mdivani-Makharadze group replied to a letter in which Lenin, having temporarily been drawn to Stalin’s side, had scolded them for their recalcitrance.²⁷ Partly under the influence of the opposition memorandum, Lenin changed his mind completely. He wished Orjonikidze to be suspended from membership in the Communist Party, and Stalin became the principal target of Lenin’s wrath.

It seems that in Lenin’s mind the mismanagement of the Georgian affair and the deficiencies in the operation of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate combined to form a strong accusation against Stalin. The two points appeared to be interrelated: the general secretary was regarded as the exponent of a bureaucratic machine, almost indifferent to the needs of the masses, riding roughshod over the national aspirations of the minorities, interested only in the preservation and augmentation of its own power.²⁸ Very probably Lenin saw in Stalin the embodiment of the police state which was the logical consequence of Leninism but which Lenin himself had always tried to avoid with a desperate effort. In any event, from the fall of 1922 to the spring of 1923 when the last phase of his illness began, Lenin became increasingly bitter against Stalin, and strengthened his ties with Trotsky, whom he recognized as Stalin’s antagonist and rival. Whereas in September, 1922, in a letter to Kamenev, Lenin had blamed Stalin only for undue haste in the Georgian matter, on December 30 he wrote Trotsky a note in which he spoke of Stalin’s fatal role in conducting a Great Russian nationalistic campaign and emphasized that it would be necessary to hold Stalin … responsible. ²⁹ Finally, in March, 1923, Lenin broke off all relations with Stalin.³⁰ This decision seems to have been mostly motivated by Lenin’s indignation about the Georgian affair, for approximately at the same time he wrote to Mdivani and Makharadze:

I am working in your behalf with all my heart. I am outraged at the rudeness of Orjonikidze and the connivance of Stalin and Dzerzhinsky. I am preparing for you notes and a speech.³¹

There is little doubt that Lenin, if he had been physically able to appear at the Twelfth Party Congress (April, 1923), would have taken decisive steps against Stalin.

During the winter of 1922-1923, Lenin prepared a document of even greater importance than his other unfavorable comments about Stalin. Aware of the gravity of his illness, he wrote his political testament. It was concerned with the danger of a split in the Communist party, and with the means by which that danger could be averted.

In discussing divisions within the Communist party, Lenin mentioned the possibility that the two classes on which our party rests—urban workers and peasantry—might terminate their alliance. In this event, no measures would prove capable of preventing a split within the party. But Lenin was optimistic enough, or gave himself the appearance of being sufficiently optimistic, to dismiss this possibility as too remote. He turned his attention to personal rivalries as a cause of disruption. He recognized Stalin and Trotsky, the two most able leaders of the present Central Committee, as the potential rivals—an opinion which was hardly general in 1923, since many Bolsheviks still regarded Stalin not as a person of the first rank. The great leader wrote that either of the two men had his weaknesses:

Comrade Stalin, having become General Secretary, has concentrated an enormous power in his hands; and I am not sure that he always knows how to use that power with sufficient caution. On the other hand Comrade Trotsky … is distinguished not merely by his exceptional abilities—personally he is, to be sure, the most able man in the present Central Committee; but also by his too farreaching self-confidence and a disposition to be too much attracted by the purely administrative side of affairs.³²

This was written on December 25, 1922. A few days later, Lenin added a postscript in which he took a far more definite position against Stalin. Stalin, he wrote, "is too rude and this fault, entirely supportable in relations among us Communists, becomes insupportable in the office of Secretary General. Therefore, I propose to the comrades to find a way to remove Stalin from that position and appoint to it another man who in all respects differs from Stalin only in superiority—namely, more patient, more loyal, more polite, and more attentive to comrades, less • •,3 29 capricious etc.

But this advice became politically impracticable long before Lenin’s death, which brought the document to the knowledge of the party leaders. Stalin, although he may not have been fully aware of the growing cordiality between Lenin and Trotsky, knew at least that he was not in Lenin’s good graces, and he looked around for support. With a lack of perspicacity which appears as blindness not merely in hind-sight, Zinoviev and Kamenev lent themselves to this role. These three men represented a powerful combination of talent and influence. Zinoviev was the politician, the orator, the demagogue with popular appeal. Kamenev was the strategist of the group, its solid brain, trained in matters of doctrine, which were to play a paramount part in the contest for power. Stalin was the tactician of the triumvirate and its organizing force. Between them, the three men virtually controlled the whole party, and through it, the government. Kamenev had acted as Lenin’s deputy and presided over the Moscow Soviet. Zinoviev was the chairman of the Soviet of Petersburg, soon to be renamed Leningrad, Stalin controlled most of the provinces. Zinoviev was, in addition, the president of the Communist International, whose moral authority in Russia was then great enough to make any pretender strive for its support. ³⁴ No ideological basis can be found for this alliance; it seems to have rested merely on the common fear of Trotsky.³⁵

ECONOMIC DIFFICULTIES

The transition to the New Economic Policy had been very abrupt. Consequently, considerable difficulties had to be expected. In agriculture, to be sure, the freeing of the producer from the arbitrary requisitioning procedure brought immediate results, as expressed in the favorable harvest of 1922, but in industry painful adjustments had to be made. Under the excessive centralization of war communism, supplies of raw materials were allocated to individual enterprises by administrative fiat, and products had to be delivered to the state administration for distribution; a mechanism for buying supplies and marketing products existed, if at all, only in a rudimentary form. Within a few months after the inauguration of the NEP, the state-owned concerns had to learn to purchase what they needed and to sell what they produced. The first part of the task was made more difficult by a great shortage of raw materials, and the second part by two devaluations of the ruble, which made one new ruble equal to one million old rubles.³⁶ The latter measure confronted Soviet industry with a deflation crisis while it still found itself without an effective marketing organization. Until the fall of 1922, the difficulties of the industrial sector were aggravated by the effects of the famine harvest of 1921: although prices of agricultural products were excessively high, the peasants did not have enough to sell and therefore their incomes were inadequate for the purchase even of the limited amount of industrial commodities (less than a quarter of prewar production) ³⁷ which Soviet industry could turn out. In overcoming this crisis, the managers of Soviet industry achieved a very creditable performance, although they used a device well enough known in capitalistic countries and open to considerable objections: monopolistic organization.

As compared either with Western countries or with the present structure of the Soviet economy, the industrial sector was still very small, and even aside from the many private handicraft shops ³⁸ consisted largely of midget enterprises. The whole nationalized industry, which was supposed to include everything that could be called factory with some degree of justification, employed approximately 1,250,000 workers (out of a population of about 140,000,000). Most enterprises (employing about 50 per cent of the workers) were organized in trusts, semivoluntary organizations which—in contradistinction to the glavfy during war communism—had real autonomy and became the centers of industrial decisions during the NEP period. In the summer of 1923, after a reform which had already removed the smallest trusts, each trust employed, on the average, 2,000 workers. More than half of the 478 trusts employed 360 workers each on the average. The counterpart of this dispersion of industrial forces was the existence of some relatively large trusts, each on the average employing 12,500 workers, with 900 workers per enterprise.³⁹ Thus the NEP restored the prewar picture of Russian industrial production: many small and very small enterprises, accounting for the bulk of the output, with a few distinctly modern factories, although even the latter did not reach the size of the largest units in Western countries.

The trusts helped the individual enterprises by organizing supplies of raw materials but most of all by restoring a high level of prices—and by keeping it high. From the beginning of 1922 to the late summer, the price index with 1913 as a base was higher for agricultural than for industrial products, but from September on the relationship was reversed.⁴⁰ In 1923, the Soviet economy suffered from the so-called scissors crisis: low agricultural prices, high prices for industrial commodities. These terms of trade, unfavorable to the village, threatened the country with a new food crisis, since the peasant was likely to feel that he had no chance to buy enough industrial commodities with the proceeds from his produce to make the raising of a large crop worth his while.

The scissors crisis was overcome in 1924 with the help of a poor crop, which naturally raised the price of farm products. Furthermore, the government resumed grain export, which before 1914 had played so large a role in the Russian balance of payments, and thereby relieved the domestic grain market from the pressure of oversupply.⁴¹ On the industrial side, production was increased through such means as an extension of the scale of production, the carrying out of the most essential repairs, a better managerial organization, the regularization of the supply of fuel and raw materials, an increase in the productivity of labor, ⁴² the latter having been achieved, in all probability, by a combined application of the carrot and the whip: a greater differentiation of wages, as compared with the pre-NEP period, gave the efficient worker the prospect of a higher income, and the rising number of unemployed must have created a fear of dismissal.⁴³ In addition, strong pressure was brought to bear on the trust managers to refrain from too great a use of their monopolistic position, but the proposal to open the gates to foreign merchandise with the purpose of reducing prices by competition was rejected by the Twelfth Party Congress: the state monopoly of foreign trade was kept intact, and the available foreign currency used for the importation of producers’ rather than of consumers’ goods. Although the discrepancy between agricultural and industrial prices was considerably narrowed, it did not entirely disappear, except for a very short time in 1925. During most of the NEP period, the wholesale index of industrial goods remained at about 10 to 25 per cent above parity with agricultural prices, if the prewar ratio is taken for a base.⁴⁴

The stimulating effect of the NEP on Russian agriculture is beyond doubt. Although even during the NEP period some years were not so satisfactory as others, agricultural production in the Soviet Union at no time during that period sank as low as again to produce famine, although the government could never feel free from anxiety, lest the amount of grain available might prove inadequate to feed the cities. The reason for this insecurity, however, was not only a gradual slowing down of the progress of agricultural production after the first great spur of the NEP, but, perhaps even more, the failure of the Russian agriculturist to bring the same percentage of produce to the market as he had done in prewar days. Under the tsar, most of the grain marketed had come from large estates and from the larger peasant holdings. Both had sold a much higher percentage of their produce than had the smaller peasants, as was only natural: where a small area of land must feed a peasant family, little produce will remain for selling. Moreover, the larger holding usually had better methods of production. Even the small peasant, however, was forced through taxes and rent payments to sell so much of his product that frequently his own family could not eat enough. After the revolution, the large estates (except for the few state and collective farms) had disappeared, the larger peasant holdings were reduced both in numbers and size through subdivisions, and the middle and small peasant was unwilling to deny himself, his wife, and children the food they needed. His tax burden, at least in the first phase of the NEP, was not heavy enough to put him under anything like the prewar pressure, since he was now rid of the rent payments to his landlord.⁴⁵

This deficiency in the market supply of grain was deeply resented by the Communists, not merely because it caused economic insecurity but because it was regarded as a limitation upon the hegemony of the working class. Various measures had been taken to make that hegemony, which was supposed to be exercised through the Communist party, more secure: the political representation of the peasantry was kept low through the more limited number of delegates to the higher soviets from the villages as compared with the shops, and through the practice of not admitting peasants as freely as workers to the Communist party.⁴⁶ But in spite of these discriminatory measures, could the workers be really regarded as the ruling class if they could not force the peasants to adapt their living habits to the requirements of the proletarian state and fully to share the privations which the workers themselves had to accept?

The strong economic position of the peasantry in relation to the city population was made even more repugnant to many Communists by the increasing class differentiation in the village. This term, which Communist malcontents used frequently, referred to the unequal advantages which the different classes of the peasantry drew from the NEP. The freedom of the market, naturally, gave a special advantage to those farmers who had enough land and equipment to produce substantial quantities beyond their own needs. An exact appraisal of this effect, however, is made difficult by a gap in our information. We know too little about the differences in property and earning power among the villagers at the moment when the inauguration of the NEP opened up the new marketing opportunities. We do know, of course, that the large estates had disappeared through the agrarian revolution of 1917, but this revolution had produced other changes as well.

After the confiscation of the estates of the great landlords, the whole of the land (including that of the peasants) was thrown, as it were, into the melting pot, and was then redistributed to the individual peasants. In some districts this took place in accordance with the number of agricultural workers, and in others according to the number of members of the families. During the years of the civil war and the corn levies … the Soviet Government … established committees of poor peasants in every village, and with the aid of these committees undertook frequent and demagogic redistribution of the land. Again, the soldiers returning from the Red Army after the close of the civil war, were many of them in favor of a fresh redistribution of the land. In many districts, redistribution took place every two or three years.⁴⁷

Redistribution of land seems to have continued throughout the NEP period right up to the beginning of collectivization. By 1927, it was estimated that two-thirds of the cultivated area of European Russia had been redistributed at least once,⁴⁸ and many acres must have changed hands several times.

Under these circumstances, it is difficult to understand the existence of kulaks in the postwar period. What prevented the poorer peasants from seizing all the excess land in greater-than-average holdings? Or was it seized, and did the kulaks rise again out of a near-equalitarian village society? The continuous complaints about kulakism, even during the civil war, do not necessarily prove the uninterrupted existence of kulaks as a class, for fear and hate images frequently survive the destruction of their real objects. If the kulak class had disappeared and was reborn, this renascence is likely to have occurred early in the NEP period—but we have no reliable information on Russian agricultural history during war communism, and can only guess.

According to all sources, however, differences in the economic status of the villagers were less marked in 1918 or in 1921 than they had been in 1914, and from 1922 to 1927 these differences increased. In the Ukraine, for instance, the number of holdings of more than 16 desyatins (48 acres) grew from 0.35 in 1922 of all farms to 2.2 in 1926, and the group of 10-16 desyatins (30-48 acres) from 1.8 to 6.5 per cent.⁴⁹ These relatively large holdings increased much more than the middle-sized ones, but only the share of the small and midget farms (those of less than 4 desyatins—12 acres) declined. In other regions of Russia the development seems to have been similar, although differentiation was more pronounced in agricultural surplus regions than in those with a deficiency of farm produce. From the point of view of productivity, these changes were undoubtedly beneficial. In the first place, the increase in the number of larger farms seems to have been effected mainly through expansion of undersized holdings by way of extending cultivation to former grassland.⁵⁰ Even to the extent that the more well-to-do peasants enlarged their farms by leasing land from the very small villagers,⁵¹ and sometimes hiring them as laborers, the interests of productivity were undoubtedly well served. In many instances, the leasing of small lots by the cultivators of large holdings was the most effective way to overcome the handicaps of strip agriculture: just as in medieval Europe, the individual peasant holdings in Russia were split up into many lots situated in different places of the village arable, with the same detrimental effects which historians describe as consequences of the open field system. This dispersal could not be remedied by purchases since the sale of land was prohibited by Soviet law. The Soviet government, it is true, had inaugurated a consolidation movement but its progress was very slow.⁵² From a social point of view, the leasing of beggar holdings to richer peasants was certainly preferable to the complete dispossession of the poorest peasants through a sort of enclosure movement after the British model, and yet the gain for productivity was largely the same.

The richer peasants not only rounded out their cultivable areas by renting land, but also acquired new agricultural implements which they hired out to others. The latter practice became, perhaps, an even more effective vehicle of social differentiation, since the owner of machinery had often a monopoly position toward the nonowner, yet the sharing of costly implements by different farmers was in itself a sound idea and must have contributed to productivity even if carried out in a way promoting social inequality. In summary, while the rich in the village undoubtedly grew richer and left the poorer sections of the village community farther behind them, all groups of the agricultural population enjoyed a better life during the NEP than during war communism, and the nation gained greatly through an improvement in the supply of food and raw materials.

The economic difficulties played a great role in the developing struggle over Lenin’s political heritage. As Trotsky came to realize that the triumvirate of Stalin, Zinoviev, and Kamenev deprived him more and more of influence and actually determined the policies of the party and the state, he used the unsatisfactory aspects of the economic situation as so many weapons against the ruling group. But what was the economic program of Trotsky and his friends? This question is difficult to answer: in maneuvering for the best tactical position, both Trotsky and his enemies obscured the issues at stake. The Stalinists have often accused him of a tendency to ignore the peasantry, ⁵³ of a refusal to accept the policy of the alliance of the proletariat and the peasantry. ⁵⁴ This accusation is certainly unjustified and Trotsky always denied it. Convincingly, Max Eastman argued:

It is not likely that Trotsky, who organised the peasants in the Red Army— and he is the only Marxian in the world who ever did organise peasants— would be the one to underestimate them. That he does not underestimate them, is proven by the fact that he advocated the essential features of the concession to the peasants involved in the New Economic Policy a full year before Lenin realised the necessity of it. He was able to do this exactly because of his more immediate and realistic knowledge of the peasants.⁵⁵

But the Stalinist accusation is not without a nucleus of truth. Although Trotsky realized the necessity for the Bolsheviks to continue their alliance with the peasantry, he regarded this necessity as a far more serious handicap for Communist policy than did Stalin. Trotsky took pride in the fact that, as far back as 1905, he had in accordance with Lenin pointed out the ‘unstable’ and ‘treacherous’ role of the peasantry.⁵⁶ He wished to reduce the role of the peasantry in two ways: first by rapid industrialization, and secondly by the promotion, with all means possible, of a Communist world revolution. The growth of the industrial sector would destroy the numerical superiority of the agricultural population and thereby reduce its political importance, in addition to making it easier for the Bolshevik government to bribe the peasants by the offer of industrial commodities. Once the whole world would have adopted the soviet system, other Communist governments might help Russia out with food supplies if the Russian peasantry tried to starve the cities through a strike, and in any event the greater international security of the Russian government would make it easier to defeat recalcitrant peasants by reprisals.⁵⁷ Stalin was probably wrong with regard to Lenin’s views but he was at least partly right with regard to Trotsky’s when he wrote:

According to Lenin, the revolution finds its force first of all among the workers and peasants of Russia itself. Trotsky has it that the necessary forces can be found only in the world revolution of the proletariat.⁵⁸

Trotsky’s bitter feelings about the dependence of the Communist regime on the peasantry were heightened—as were those of other old Bolsheviks—by the rise of the richer peasants. He hated the kulaks, and he imagined that in 1923-1928 the bureaucracy, headed by Stalin, and the petty bourgeoisie, represented by the kulaks, had maintained an alliance.

During that period the kulak was allowed to rent his land from the poor peasant and to hire the poor peasant as his laborer. Stalin was getting ready to lease the land to private owners for a period of forty years. Shortly after Lenin’s death he made a clandestine attempt to transfer the nationalized land as private property to the peasants of his native Georgia under the guise of possession of personal parcels for many years. … The kulak wanted the land, its outright ownership. The kulak wanted to have the right of free disposition of its entire crop. The kulak did his utmost to create his very own counter-agents in the city in the form of the free trader and the free industrialist. The kulak did not want to put up with forced deliveries at fixed prices. The kulak, jointly with the petty industrialist, worked for the complete restoration of capitalism.⁵⁹

It was through the unlimited character of the kulaks’ demands, according to Trotsky’s interpretation, that Stalin was ultimately forced to break the alliance.

The idea of the alliance, and even of a kulak effort at the complete restoration of capitalism, appears imaginary. Stalin used the kulaks as a source of supplies for the cities. Among the reasons why he did not, before 1929, wish to destroy the kulaks was probably the consideration that otherwise the Russian economy would be more unbalanced and that consequently the success of the Soviet government would be more dependent on world revolution. Since the hope for Communist expansion to the west had suffered one blow after the other since 1919, this attitude of Stalin is easily explainable without the assumption that he wished to liquidate the proletarian character of the regime. Trotsky was right in maintaining that Stalin promoted bureaucracy but wrong in ascribing to him Thermidorian tendencies—the desire to change the class character of the Bolshevik form of government. A one-man government is necessarily more bureaucratic than a party government, even a one-party government, for the latter still gives some room to political conflicts and leaves some decisions in the hands of political leaders. Once the political aims are removed from the area of legally permitted controversy by making their determination the monopoly of one dictator, the alternatives which are left open by the supreme ruler must be decided according to administrative expediency—and that is the job of bureaucrats.⁶⁰ A bureaucracy may feel the need for class support, but there is little to show that the Stalin bureaucracy actually did, since on the whole the masses of workers seem to have felt reasonably satisfied during the NEP period; but if such a need had been felt, the kulaks, even under the broadest definition of the term, would have been numerically too weak and politically too vulnerable to provide effective support.

Nor was there any serious sign that the kulaks developed high political ambitions. Up to 1927, they seem to have been meek and tractable. They were probably not, in their hearts, sympathetic to the Communist regime, and here and there they may have transmitted some of their feelings to middle peasants, but the signs of peasant disaffection which had been so dramatically expressed in the previous period were almost entirely absent during the NEP, except in the very last phase; even then these symptoms were limited to a disclination to risk much labor and capital in the intensification of agriculture as long as an arbitrary regime might at any time deprive the risk taker of the fruits.

This is not to say that Trotsky’s dissatisfaction with conditions of the Russian village and with the Russian economy in general was entirely unfounded. Even if the kulaks were not on the point of acquiring any great political influence or of conspiring to subvert the soviet form of government, the growth of the distance between the upper and the lower layer of village society had obviously undesirable aspects from a Communist point of view. Discriminatory taxes imposed on the kulaks did not prove sufficiently effective to stop social differentiation, although they did have the harmful effect of discou raging the upper layer of the middle peasantry from striving to improve its economy further. The middle peasant frequently found it advantageous to stop just short of the point where he would have put himself in the kulak category. In any event, as long as the kulaks were an indispensable source of food supplies for the cities, the Soviet government could not even wish to take any measures which would strike at the roots of their existence, or seriously hinder their further progress. Barring a complete reorganization of Russian agriculture, a reorganization that would make the cities independent of kulak deliveries, the Communists could not go beyond the line laid down by Zinoviev: Not the suppression of the kulaks, but support for the middle and the poor peasants! ⁶¹

In private trading, phenomena perhaps even more repugnant to many old Bolsheviks had appeared as a result of the NEP. The legalization of private trade had been inaugurated in the hope that, within a short period of time, the private entrepreneur would become superfluous through the progress of the state trading organizations and of the cooperatives. But the latter were slow in adapting themselves to the new opportunity; political purges of non-Communists among their functionaries did not contribute to efficiency.62 When it became clear that the private trader would prove superior in competition, all sorts of discriminatory measures were applied against him, from refusal of supplies to arrests under various pretexts, with the effect that, according to official figures, the share of private trade in the whole internal turnover declined during the NEP period from 65 per cent in 1922-1923 to 18 per cent in 1926-1927.63 Although these figures may somewhat overstate the tendency, private trading did gradually