The Bolshevik regime that emerged from the civil war in 1921 was politically intact but economically broken. Industrial production was at about twenty percent of its 1913 level; agricultural production was at about sixty percent. The cities were depopulating as workers returned to their home villages in search of food. Petrograd had lost two-thirds of its 1917 population. The Volga famine of 1921–1922 was killing several million people. The state's grain-requisitioning policy had produced sporadic peasant revolts across Siberia and the central provinces. In March 1921, the naval garrison at the Kronstadt fortress — the soldiers and sailors who had been among the regime's most reliable supporters in 1917 — mutinied against the Bolshevik leadership, demanding fresh soviet elections and an end to grain requisitioning. The mutiny was suppressed at high cost. It was the regime's most serious internal crisis to date.
The New Economic Policy
Lenin's response was the New Economic Policy (NEP), announced at the Tenth Party Congress in March 1921, in the same week that the Kronstadt rebellion was being crushed. The policy was an explicit retreat: grain requisitioning was replaced by a fixed tax in kind that peasants could pay and sell their surplus on the market; small private trade and small-scale private manufacture were re-legalised; foreign investment was, in principle, welcomed (through concessions to selected Western firms). The state retained the "commanding heights" — heavy industry, foreign trade, banking, transport — but allowed a mixed economy in agriculture and consumer goods. The policy worked. Agricultural production recovered to pre-war levels by 1928; industrial production followed by 1927. Urban food supply stabilised. A new merchant class — the "Nepmen" — emerged in the small towns and the cities. The cultural life of the 1920s — the period of Mayakovsky, Eisenstein, Bulgakov, Babel, the Constructivist architects — was, in retrospect, the freest and most varied of any decade of Soviet history.
The NEP was, however, a tactical retreat that the party leadership did not intend as a permanent settlement. The strategic problem — how to industrialise a still-overwhelmingly peasant economy in a hostile international environment, without losing political control to the resurgent rural majority — was the central political question of the 1920s. The factions of the party answered it differently. The right (associated with Nikolai Bukharin) wanted a slow industrialisation through gradual capital accumulation, with the NEP framework continued indefinitely. The left (associated with Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev at various combinations) wanted faster industrialisation financed by squeezing the peasantry through state-set prices, on the analysis that the NEP was producing a politically dangerous rural petty-bourgeoisie. The centre (Stalin, initially) shifted between positions and used the factional dispute to eliminate his political rivals one by one.
Lenin's stroke and death
Vladimir Lenin suffered his first stroke on the 26th of May 1922 and was substantially incapacitated thereafter. A second stroke in December 1922 reduced him to dictation; a third in March 1923 took his ability to speak. He died on the 21st of January 1924, aged fifty-three, of the cumulative cerebrovascular damage. The succession question was, at the moment of his death, formally unresolved. Lenin had no designated successor. His so-called "Testament" — dictated in late 1922 and early 1923 — gave qualified assessments of the six senior figures of the party (Trotsky, Stalin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, Pyatakov) and recommended, in a postscript of January 1923, that Stalin be removed from his post as General Secretary on the explicit grounds that he had concentrated "unlimited authority" and was "too rude." The Testament was suppressed by the Politburo after Lenin's death (Trotsky's wife later reported him as having been bullied into agreeing to its suppression by his peers, who promised concessions in exchange). It was not published in the Soviet Union until 1956.
The succession struggle
Joseph Stalin (born Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili in 1878 in Gori, Georgia; the revolutionary pseudonym "Stalin" means "man of steel" in Russian) had been a senior Bolshevik since 1903 and Commissar of Nationalities from 1917, but had not held the kind of public profile that Trotsky and Zinoviev enjoyed. His appointment as General Secretary of the Party in April 1922 — created as an administrative position, with responsibility for the routine running of the party apparatus, appointment to provincial secretaryships, and the keeping of personnel files — gave him control of the institutional machinery that was, by the late 1920s, the substantive locus of power. The General Secretaryship was the political base from which he eliminated his rivals.
The struggle ran in four phases. In 1923–1924, Stalin allied with Zinoviev and Kamenev (the so-called "triumvirate") against Trotsky, who was politically isolated and demoted from his position as commissar of war in early 1925. In 1925–1926, Stalin allied with Bukharin and the right against the so-called United Opposition (Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev now reconciled); the United Opposition was defeated at the Fifteenth Party Congress in December 1927, and its leaders were expelled from the party. In 1928–1929, Stalin abruptly reversed his position on the NEP and broke with the Bukharin right, accusing them of "right deviation" and removing them from their positions. By the end of 1929, Stalin's personal supporters held every senior position in the party; the term "general line" — meaning the policy currently advocated by Stalin — was in use to describe the party's official position. Trotsky was exiled from the Soviet Union in February 1929, to Turkey, then France, then Norway, then Mexico, where he was assassinated by a Stalin-controlled NKVD agent in August 1940.
The end of the NEP
The political prerequisite for the new policy of forced industrialisation was the consolidation of Stalin's personal power. The substantive policy decision was taken at the Sixteenth Party Conference in April 1929 and the Sixteenth Party Congress in June 1930: the NEP would end, agriculture would be forcibly collectivised, the kulaks (the more prosperous peasants, in the official analysis the rural class enemy) would be liquidated as a class, and heavy industry would be developed on a Five-Year Plan basis. The plan was formally adopted as having begun on the 1st of October 1928 — retroactively, in the standard Soviet planning convention. The new economic policy was over. What replaced it is the subject of the next chapter, and it was the most violent transformation of social and economic structure that any government has attempted in peacetime in any country in the modern period.
"Comrade Stalin, having become Secretary General, has concentrated in his hands unlimited authority, and I am not certain whether he will always be capable of using that authority with sufficient caution." — Lenin's "Testament," dictated 24 December 1922
End of Chapter II