The reasons for the introduction of the NEP briefly. NEP - briefly about the new economic policy in the USSR. NEP in trade and finance

The first attempts to curtail the NEP began. Syndicates in industry were liquidated, from which private capital was administratively ousted, and a rigid centralized system of economic management (economic people's commissariats) was created. Stalin and his entourage headed for the forced seizure of grain and the forcible collectivization of the countryside. Repressions were carried out against managerial personnel (Shakhty case, the process of the Industrial Party, etc.). By the beginning of the 1930s, the NEP was effectively curtailed.

Prerequisites for the NEP

The volume of agricultural production decreased by 40% due to the depreciation of money and the shortage of manufactured goods.

Society has degraded, its intellectual potential has significantly weakened. Most of the Russian intelligentsia was destroyed or left the country.

Thus, the main task of the internal policy of the RCP (b) and the Soviet state was to restore the destroyed economy, create a material, technical and socio-cultural basis for building socialism, promised by the Bolsheviks to the people.

The peasants, outraged by the actions of the food detachments, not only refused to hand over their bread, but also rose to armed struggle. The uprisings swept the Tambov region, Ukraine, Don, Kuban, the Volga region and Siberia. The peasants demanded a change in agrarian policy, the elimination of the dictates of the RCP (b), the convening of the Constituent Assembly on the basis of universal equal suffrage. Units of the Red Army were sent to suppress these demonstrations.

Discontent spread to the army. On March 1, the sailors and Red Army soldiers of the Kronstadt garrison under the slogan "For Soviets without Communists!" demanded the release from prison of all representatives of the socialist parties, the holding of re-elections of the Soviets and, as follows from the slogan, the exclusion of all communists from them, the granting of freedom of speech, meetings and unions to all parties, ensuring freedom of trade, allowing peasants to freely use their land and dispose of the products of their economy , that is, the elimination of surplus appropriation. Convinced of the impossibility of reaching an agreement with the rebels, the authorities stormed Kronstadt. By alternating artillery shelling and infantry actions, Kronstadt was taken by March 18; some of the rebels died, the rest went to Finland or surrendered.

From the appeal of the Provisional Revolutionary Committee of the city of Kronstadt:

Comrades and citizens! Our country is going through a difficult moment. Hunger, cold, economic ruin have been holding us in an iron grip for three years now. The Communist Party, ruling the country, broke away from the masses and proved unable to lead it out of the state of general ruin. It did not take into account the unrest that had recently taken place in Petrograd and Moscow, and which showed quite clearly that the Party had lost the confidence of the working masses. Nor did they take into account the demands made by the workers. She considers them the intrigues of the counter-revolution. She is deeply mistaken. These unrest, these demands are the voice of the entire people, of all working people. All the workers, sailors and Red Army men clearly see at the present moment that only by joint efforts, by the common will of the working people, can bread, firewood, coal be provided to the country, to clothe the barefooted and undressed, and lead the republic out of the impasse...

The uprisings that swept across the country convincingly showed that the Bolsheviks were losing support in society. Already in the year there were calls to abandon the surplus appropriation: for example, in February 1920 Trotsky submitted a corresponding proposal to the Central Committee, but received only 4 votes out of 15; at about the same time, independently of Trotsky, the same question was raised by Rykov in the Supreme Council of National Economy.

The policy of war communism has exhausted itself, but Lenin, in spite of everything, persisted. Moreover - at the turn of 1920 and 1921 he resolutely insisted on strengthening this policy - in particular, plans were made for the complete abolition of the monetary system.

V. I. Lenin

Only by the spring of 1921 it became obvious that the general discontent of the lower classes, their armed pressure could lead to the overthrow of the power of the Soviets, led by the Communists. Therefore, Lenin decided to make a concession in order to maintain power.

The course of development of the NEP

Proclamation of the NEP

Cooperation of all forms and types developed rapidly. The role of production cooperatives in agriculture was insignificant (in 1927 they provided only 2% of all agricultural products and 7% of marketable products), but the simplest primary forms - marketing, supply and credit cooperation - by the end of the 1920s covered more than half of all peasant farms. By the end of the year, various types of non-production cooperatives, primarily peasant cooperatives, covered 28 million people (13 times more than in the city). In the socialized retail trade, 60-80% accounted for the cooperative and only 20-40% - for the state proper, in industry in 1928, 13% of all products were produced by cooperatives. There was cooperative legislation, lending, insurance.

Instead of the depreciated and actually already rejected by the turnover of the Soviet signs, a new monetary unit was launched in the city - chervonets, which had a gold content and a gold exchange rate (1 chervonets \u003d 10 pre-revolutionary gold rubles \u003d 7.74 g of pure gold). In the city, the Soviet signs, which were quickly supplanted by the chervonets, ceased to be printed altogether and were withdrawn from circulation; in the same year, the budget was balanced and the use of money emission to cover state expenses was prohibited; new treasury notes were issued - rubles (10 rubles = 1 gold piece). On the foreign exchange market, both within the country and abroad, chervonets were freely exchanged for gold and major foreign currencies at the pre-war rate of the tsarist ruble (1 US dollar = 1.94 rubles).

The credit system has revived. In the city, the State Bank of the USSR was recreated, which began lending to industry and trade on a commercial basis. In 1922-1925. a number of specialized banks were created: joint-stock, in which the State Bank, syndicates, cooperatives, private and even at one time foreign, were shareholders, for lending to certain sectors of the economy and regions of the country; cooperative - for lending to consumer cooperation; organized on the shares of the agricultural credit society, closed on the republican and central agricultural banks; mutual credit societies - for lending to private industry and trade; savings banks - to mobilize the savings of the population. As of October 1, 1923, there were 17 independent banks operating in the country, and the share of the State Bank in the total credit investments of the entire banking system was 2/3. By October 1, 1926, the number of banks increased to 61, and the share of the State Bank in lending to the national economy decreased to 48%.

The economic mechanism during the NEP period was based on market principles. Commodity-money relations, which were previously tried to be banished from production and exchange, in the 1920s penetrated into all the pores of the economic organism, became the main link between its individual parts.

Discipline within the Communist Party itself was also tightened. At the end of 1920, an opposition group appeared in the party - the "workers' opposition", which demanded the transfer of all power in production to the trade unions. In order to stop such attempts, the X Congress of the RCP (b) in 1921 adopted a resolution on the unity of the party. According to this resolution, the decisions taken by the majority must be carried out by all members of the party, including those who do not agree with them.

The consequence of the one-party system was the merging of the party and the government. The same people occupied the main positions in the party (Politburo) and state bodies (SNK, All-Russian Central Executive Committee, etc.). At the same time, the personal authority of the people's commissars and the need to make urgent, urgent decisions in the conditions of the Civil War led to the fact that the center of power was concentrated not in the legislative body (VTsIK), but in the government - the Council of People's Commissars.

All these processes led to the fact that the actual position of a person, his authority played a greater role in the 1920s than his place in the formal structure of state power. That is why, speaking about the figures of the 1920s, we first of all name not positions, but surnames.

In parallel with the change in the position of the party in the country, the rebirth of the party itself took place. It is obvious that there will always be many more people wishing to join the ruling party than an underground party, membership in which cannot give other privileges than iron bunks or a noose around the neck. At the same time, the party, having become the ruling one, began to need to increase its membership in order to fill government posts at all levels. This led to a rapid growth in the size of the Communist Party after the revolution. From time to time he was spurred on by mass sets, such as the "Lenin Set" after Lenin's death. The inevitable consequence of this process was the dissolution of the old, ideological, Bolsheviks among the young party members. In 1927, out of 1,300,000 people who were members of the party, only 8,000 had pre-revolutionary experience; most of the rest did not know the communist theory at all.

Not only the intellectual and educational, but also the moral level of the party went down. Indicative in this regard are the results of the party purge carried out in the second half of 1921 with the aim of removing "kulak-proprietary and petty-bourgeois elements" from the party. Of the 732,000 members, only 410,000 members remained in the party (slightly more than half!). At the same time, a third of those expelled were expelled for passivity, another quarter - for "discrediting the Soviet government", "selfishness", "careerism", "bourgeois lifestyle", "decomposition in everyday life".

In connection with the growth of the party, the initially inconspicuous post of secretary began to acquire more and more importance. Any secretary is a secondary position by definition. This is a person who, during official events, monitors compliance with the necessary formalities. Since April, the Bolshevik Party has had the post of general secretary. He connected the leadership of the secretariat of the Central Committee and the accounting and distribution department, which distributed lower-level party members to various positions. This position was given to Stalin.

Soon the expansion of the privileges of the upper stratum of party members began. Since 1926, this layer has received a special name - "nomenclature". So they began to call the party and state posts included in the list of posts, the appointment to which was subject to approval in the Accounting and Distribution Department of the Central Committee.

The processes of party bureaucratization and centralization of power took place against the backdrop of a sharp deterioration in Lenin's health. Actually, the year of the introduction of the NEP was for him the last year of a full life. In May of the year, he was struck by the first blow - his brain was damaged, so that the almost helpless Lenin was given a very sparing work schedule. In March of the year, a second attack occurred, after which Lenin fell out of life for half a year, almost learning to pronounce words anew. As soon as he began to recover from the second attack, in January the third and last happened. As the autopsy showed, for the last almost two years of his life, only one hemisphere of the brain was active in Lenin.

But between the first and second attacks, he still tried to participate in political life. Realizing that his days were numbered, he tried to draw the attention of the congress delegates to the most dangerous trend - the degeneration of the party. In his letters to the congress, known as his "political testament" (December 1922 - January 1923), Lenin proposes to expand the Central Committee at the expense of the workers, to elect a new Central Control Commission (Central Control Commission) from among the proletarians, to cut the excessively swollen and therefore incapacitated RCI (Workers - peasant inspection).

There was another component in the "Lenin's Testament" - the personal characteristics of the largest party leaders (Trotsky, Stalin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, Pyatakov). Often this part of the Letter is interpreted as a search for a successor (heir), but Lenin, unlike Stalin, was never a sole dictator, he could not take a single fundamental decision without the Central Committee, and not so fundamental - without the Politburo, despite the fact that in The Central Committee, and even more so the Politburo, at that time was occupied by independent people who often disagreed with Lenin in their views. Therefore, there could be no question of any "heir" (and it was not Lenin who called the Letter to the Congress a "testament"). Assuming that after him the party would continue to have a collective leadership, Lenin characterized the alleged members of this leadership, for the most part ambiguous. Only one definite indication was in his Letter: the post of general secretary gives Stalin too much power, dangerous in his rudeness (this was dangerous, according to Lenin, only in the relationship between Stalin and Trotsky, and not in general). Some modern researchers believe, however, that "Lenin's testament" was based more on the psychological state of the patient than on political motives.

But the letters to the congress reached its rank-and-file participants only in fragments, and the letter, in which comrades-in-arms were given personal characteristics, was not shown to the party at all by the inner circle. We agreed among ourselves that Stalin promised to improve, and that was the end of the matter.

Even before the physical death of Lenin, at the end of the year, a struggle began between his "heirs", more precisely, the pushing of Trotsky from the helm. In the fall of the year, the struggle took on an open character. In October, Trotsky addressed a letter to the Central Committee, in which he pointed out the formation of a bureaucratic intra-party regime. A week later, an open letter in support of Trotsky was written by a group of 46 old Bolsheviks ("Statement 46"). The Central Committee, of course, responded with a decisive refutation. The leading role in this was played by Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev. It was not for the first time that sharp disputes arose in the Bolshevik Party. But unlike previous discussions, this time the ruling faction actively used labeling. Trotsky was not refuted by reasonable arguments - he was simply accused of Menshevism, deviationism and other mortal sins. The substitution of labeling for a real dispute is a new phenomenon: it did not exist before, but it will become more common as the political process develops in the 1920s.

Trotsky was defeated fairly easily. The next party conference, held in January of the year, promulgated a resolution on the unity of the party (previously kept secret), and Trotsky was forced to silence. Until autumn. In the autumn of 1924, however, he published the book Lessons of October, in which he unequivocally stated that he made the revolution with Lenin. Then Zinoviev and Kamenev "suddenly" remembered that before the VI Congress of the RSDLP (b) in July 1917, Trotsky had been a Menshevik. The party was in shock. In December 1924, Trotsky was removed from the post of People's Commissar of the Navy, but left in the Politburo.

Curtailment of the NEP

In October 1928, the implementation of the first five-year plan for the development of the national economy began. At the same time, it was not the project developed by the USSR State Planning Committee that was adopted as a plan for the first five-year plan, but an overestimated version, drawn up by the Supreme Council of National Economy not so much taking into account objective possibilities, but under the pressure of party slogans. In June 1929, mass collectivization began (contradicting even the plan of the Supreme Council of National Economy) - it was carried out with the widespread use of coercive measures. In autumn, it was supplemented by forced grain procurements.

As a result of these measures, the unification into collective farms really acquired a mass character, which gave Stalin reason in November of the same 1929 to make a statement that the middle peasant went to the collective farms. Stalin's article was called that - "The Great Break". Immediately after this article, the next plenum of the Central Committee approved new, increased and accelerated plans for collectivization and industrialization.

Findings and Conclusions

The undoubted success of the NEP was the restoration of the destroyed economy, and, given that after the revolution, Russia lost highly qualified personnel (economists, managers, production workers), the success of the new government becomes a "victory over devastation." At the same time, the lack of those same highly qualified personnel has become the cause of miscalculations and errors.

NEP - " new economic policy» Soviet Russia was an economic liberalization under strict political control of the authorities. NEP has replaced war communism» (« old economic policy”- SEP) and had the main task: to overcome the political and economic crises of the spring of 1921. The main idea of the NEP was the restoration of the national economy for the subsequent transition to socialist construction.

By 1921, the Civil War on the territory of the former Russian Empire was generally over. There were still battles with unfinished White Guards and Japanese invaders in the Far East (in the Far East), and in the RSFSR they were already assessing the losses caused by military revolutionary upheavals:

Loss of territory- Poland, Finland, the Baltic countries (Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia), Western Belarus and Ukraine, Bessarabia and the Kara region of Armenia turned out to be outside Soviet Russia and its allied socialist state entities.

Population loss as a result of wars, emigration, epidemics and a drop in the birth rate, it amounted to approximately 25 million people. Experts calculated that no more than 135 million people lived in the Soviet territories at that time.

Were thoroughly destroyed and fell into disrepair industrial areas: Donbass, Ural and Baku oil complex. There was a catastrophic shortage of raw materials and fuel for somehow working plants and factories.

The volume of industrial production decreased by about 5 times (metal smelting fell to the level of the beginning of the 18th century).

The volume of agricultural production has decreased by about 40%.

Inflation crossed all reasonable limits.

There was a growing shortage of consumer goods.

The intellectual potential of society has degraded. Many scientists, technicians and cultural figures emigrated, some were subjected to repression, up to physical destruction.

The peasants, outraged by the surplus appropriation and the atrocities of the food detachments, not only sabotaged the delivery of bread, but also everywhere raised armed rebellions. The farmers of the Tambov region, Don, Kuban, Ukraine, the Volga region and Siberia revolted. The rebels, often led by ideological SRs, put forward economic (the abolition of the surplus) and political demands:

Changes in the agrarian policy of the Soviet authorities.
Cancel the one-party dictate of the RCP(b).
Elect and convene a Constituent Assembly.

Units and even formations of the Red Army were thrown to suppress the uprisings, but the wave of protests did not subside. In the Red Army, anti-Bolshevik sentiments also matured, which resulted on March 1, 1921 in the large-scale Kronstadt uprising. In the RCP(b) itself and the Supreme Council of National Economy, already since 1920, the voices of individual leaders (Trotsky, Rykov) were heard, calling for the abandonment of the surplus appraisal. The issue of changing the socio-economic course of the Soviet government is ripe.

Factors that influenced the adoption of the new economic policy

The introduction of the NEP in the Soviet state was not someone's whim, on the contrary, the NEP was due to a number of factors:

Political, economic, social and even ideological. The concept of the New Economic Policy was formulated in general terms by VI Lenin at the Tenth Congress of the RCP(b). The leader urged at this stage to change approaches to governing the country.

The concept that the driving force of the socialist revolution is the proletariat is unshakable. But the working peasantry is its ally, and the Soviet government must learn to "get along" with it.

The country should have a built-in system with a unified ideology suppressing any opposition to the existing government.

Only in such a situation could the NEP provide a solution to the economic problems that wars and revolutions confronted the young Soviet state.

General characteristics of the NEP

The NEP in the Soviet country is an ambiguous phenomenon, since it directly contradicted Marxist theory. When the policy of "war communism" failed, the "new economic policy" played the role of an unplanned detour on the road to building socialism. V. I. Lenin constantly emphasized the thesis: "NEP is a temporary phenomenon." Based on this, the NEP can be broadly characterized by the main parameters:

	Specifications
	Overcome the political and socio-economic crisis in the young Soviet state; finding new ways to build the economic foundation of a socialist society; raising the standard of living in Soviet society and creating an environment of stability in domestic politics.
	The combination of the command-administrative system and the market method in the Soviet economy. commanding heights remained in the hands of representatives of the proletarian party.
	Agriculture; industry (private small enterprises, lease of state enterprises, state-capitalist enterprises, concessions); financial area.
specifics	The surplus appropriation is replaced by a tax in kind (March 21, 1921); the bond between town and country through the restoration of trade and commodity-money relations; admission of private capital into industry; permission to rent land and hire laborers in agriculture; liquidation of the system of distribution by cards; competition between private, cooperative and state trade; introduction of self-management and self-sufficiency of enterprises; the abolition of labor conscription, the elimination of labor armies, the distribution of labor through the stock exchange; financial reform, the transition to wages and the abolition of free services.

The Soviet state allowed private capitalist relations in trade, small-scale and even in some enterprises of medium industry. At the same time, large-scale industry, transport and the financial system were regulated by the state. In relation to private capital, the NEP allowed the application of a formula of three elements: admission, containment and crowding out. What and at what moment to use the Soviet and party organs based on the emerging political expediency.

Chronological framework of the NEP

The New Economic Policy fell within the time frame from 1921 to 1931.

	Action	Course of events
	Starting a process	The gradual curtailment of the system of war communism and the introduction of elements of the NEP.
1923, 1925, 1927	Crises of the New Economic Policy	Emergence and intensification of the causes and signs of the tendency to curtail the NEP.
	Activation of the program termination process.	The actual departure from the NEP, a sharp increase in the critical attitude towards the "kulaks" and "Nepmen".
	Complete collapse of the NEP.	The legal prohibition of private property has been formalized.

In general, the NEP quickly restored and made the economic system of the Soviet Union relatively viable.

Pros and cons of the NEP

One of the most important negative aspects of the new economic policy, according to many analysts, was that during this period the industry (heavy industry) did not develop. This circumstance could have catastrophic consequences in this period of history for a country like the USSR. But besides this, in the NEP, not everything was assessed with the sign “plus”, there were also significant disadvantages.

	"Minuses"
Restoration and development of commodity-money relations.	Mass unemployment (more than 2 million people).
Development of small business in the fields of industry and services.	High prices for manufactured goods. Inflation.
Some rise in the living standards of the industrial proletariat.	Low qualification of the majority of workers.
The prevalence of "middle peasants" in the social structure of the village.	Exacerbation of the housing problem.
Conditions have been created for the industrialization of the country.	Growth in the number of soviet employees (officials). Bureaucracy of the system.

The reasons for many economic troubles that led to crises were the low competence of personnel and the inconsistency of the policy of the party and state structures.

Inevitable Crises

From the very beginning, the NEP showed the unstable economic growth characteristic of capitalist relations, which resulted in three crises:

The marketing crisis of 1923, as a result of the discrepancy between low prices for agricultural products and high prices for industrial consumer goods ("scissors" of prices).

The crisis of grain procurements in 1925, expressed in the preservation of mandatory state purchases at fixed prices, with a decrease in the volume of grain exports.

The acute crisis of grain procurements in 1927-1928, overcome with the help of administrative and legal measures. Closing of the New Economic Policy project.

Reasons for abandoning the NEP

The collapse of the NEP in the Soviet Union had a number of justifications:

The New Economic Policy did not have a clear vision of the prospects for the development of the USSR.
The instability of economic growth.
Socio-economic flaws (property stratification, unemployment, specific crime, theft and drug addiction).
The isolation of the Soviet economy from the world economy.
Dissatisfaction with the NEP by a significant part of the proletariat.
Disbelief in the success of the NEP by a significant part of the communists.
The CPSU(b) risked losing its monopoly on power.
The predominance of administrative methods of managing the national economy and non-economic coercion.
Aggravation of the danger of military aggression against the USSR.

Results of the New Economic Policy

Political	in 1921, the Tenth Congress adopted a resolution "on the unity of the party", thereby putting an end to factionalism and dissent in the ruling party; a trial of prominent socialist-revolutionaries was organized and the AKP itself was liquidated; the Menshevik party was discredited and destroyed as a political force.
Economic	increasing the volume of agricultural production; achievement of the pre-war level of animal husbandry; the level of production of consumer goods did not satisfy demand; rising prices; slow growth in the well-being of the population of the country.
Social	a fivefold increase in the size of the proletariat; the emergence of a layer of Soviet capitalists ("Nepmen" and "Sovburs"); the working class markedly raised the standard of living; aggravated "housing problem"; the apparatus of bureaucratic-democratic management increased.

The New Economic Policy and was not up to the end understood and accepted as a given by the authorities and the people of the country. To some extent, the NEP measures justified themselves, but there were still more negative aspects of the process. The main outcome was rapid recovery of the economic system to the level of readiness for the next stage in the construction of socialism - a large-scale industrialization.

The essence and purpose of the NEP. At the X Congress of the RCP (b) in March 1921, V.I. Lenin proposed a new economic policy. It was an anti-crisis program, the essence of which was to recreate a multi-structural economy and use the organizational and technical experience of the capitalists while maintaining the "commanding heights" in the hands of the Bolshevik government. They were understood as political and economic levers of influence: the absolute power of the RCP (b), the state sector in industry, a centralized financial system and a monopoly of foreign trade.

The main political goal of the NEP is to relieve social tension and strengthen the social base of Soviet power in the form of an alliance of workers and peasants. The economic goal is to prevent further aggravation of the devastation, to get out of the crisis and restore the economy. The social goal is to provide favorable conditions for building a socialist society without waiting for the world revolution. In addition, the NEP was aimed at restoring normal foreign policy and foreign economic relations, at overcoming international isolation. The achievement of these goals led to the gradual curtailment of the NEP in the second half of the 1920s.

Implementation of the NEP. The transition to the NEP was legally formalized by decrees of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and the Council of People's Commissars, decisions of the IX All-Russian Congress of Soviets in December 1921. The NEP included a set of economic and socio-political measures. They meant a "retreat" from the principles of "war communism" - the revival of private enterprise, the introduction of freedom of internal trade and the satisfaction of some of the demands of the peasantry.

The introduction of the NEP began with agriculture by replacing the surplus appropriation with a food tax (tax in kind). It was established before the sowing campaign, could not be changed during the year, and was 2 times less than the allocation. After the fulfillment of state deliveries, free trade in the products of their economy was allowed. The lease of land and the hiring of labor were allowed. The forcible planting of communes ceased, which made it possible for the private, small-scale commodity sector to gain a foothold in the countryside. Individual peasants provided 98.5% of agricultural products. The new economic policy in the countryside was aimed at stimulating agricultural production. As a result, by 1925, the gross grain harvest on the restored sown areas exceeded the average annual level of pre-war Russia by 20.7%. The supply of agricultural raw materials to industry has improved.

In production and trade, private individuals were allowed to open small and rent medium-sized enterprises. The decree on general nationalization was repealed. Large domestic and foreign capital was granted concessions, the right to create joint-stock and joint ventures with the state. Thus, a new state-capitalist sector emerged for the Russian economy. Strict centralization was canceled in the supply of enterprises with raw materials and the distribution of finished products. The activities of state enterprises aimed at greater independence, self-sufficiency and self-financing. Instead of a sectoral system of industrial management, a territorial-sectoral system was introduced. After the reorganization of the Supreme Council of National Economy, the leadership was carried out by its central boards through local economic councils (sovnarkhozes) and sectoral economic trusts.

In the financial sector, in addition to the single State Bank, private and cooperative banks and insurance companies appeared. Payments were made for the use of transport, communication systems and utilities. State loans were issued, which were forcibly distributed among the population in order to pump out personal funds for the development of industry. In 1922, a monetary reform was carried out: the issue of paper money was reduced, and the Soviet chervonets (10 rubles) was introduced into circulation, which was highly valued on the world currency market. This made it possible to strengthen the national currency and put an end to inflation. Evidence of the stabilization of the financial situation was the replacement of the tax in kind with its monetary equivalent.

As a result of the new economic policy in 1926, the main types of industrial products reached the pre-war level. Light industry developed faster than heavy industry, which required significant capital investments. The living conditions of the urban and rural population have improved. The abolition of the food distribution rationing system has begun. Thus, one of the tasks of the NEP - overcoming the devastation - was solved.

The NEP brought about some changes in social policy. In 1922, a new Code of Labor Laws was adopted, which abolished general labor service and introduced free employment of labor. Labor mobilization has stopped. To stimulate the material interest of workers in increasing labor productivity, a reform of the wage system was carried out. Instead of remuneration in kind, a monetary system based on the tariff scale was introduced. However, social policy had a pronounced class orientation. In the election of deputies to government bodies, the workers still had the advantage. Part of the population, as before, was deprived of voting rights ("disenfranchised"). In the system of taxation, the main burden fell on private entrepreneurs in the city and kulaks in the countryside. The poor were exempted from paying taxes, the middle peasants paid half.

New trends in domestic politics have not changed the methods of political leadership of the country. State issues were still decided by the party apparatus. However, the socio-political crisis of 1920-1921. and the introduction of the NEP did not go unnoticed for the Bolsheviks. Among them, discussions began about the role and place of trade unions in the state, about the essence and political significance of the NEP. Factions appeared with their own platforms that opposed the position of V. I. Lenin. Some insisted on the democratization of the management system, granting trade unions broad economic rights (the "workers' opposition"). Others proposed to further centralize management and virtually eliminate trade unions (L.D. Trotsky). Many communists left the RCP(b), believing that the introduction of the NEP meant the restoration of capitalism and a betrayal of socialist principles. The ruling party was threatened with a split, which, from the point of view of V.I. Lenin, absolutely unacceptable. At the Tenth Congress of the RCP(b) resolutions were adopted condemning the "anti-Marxist" views of the "workers' opposition" and forbidding the creation of factions and groups. After the congress, a check was made on the ideological stability of the party members (“purge”), which reduced its membership by a quarter. All this made it possible to strengthen unanimity in the party and its unity as the most important link in the system of government.

The second link in the political system of Soviet power continued to be the apparatus of violence - the Cheka, renamed in 1922 into the Main Political Directorate. The GPU monitored the mood of all sectors of society, identified dissidents, sent them to prisons and concentration camps. Particular attention was paid to the political opponents of the Bolshevik regime. In 1922, the GPU accused 47 previously arrested leaders of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party of counter-revolutionary activities. The first major political process under Soviet rule took place. The tribunal of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee sentenced 12 defendants to death, the rest to various terms of imprisonment. In the autumn of 1922, 160 scientists and cultural figures were expelled from Russia, who did not share the Bolshevik doctrine (“philosophical ship”). The ideological confrontation was over.

By implanting the Bolshevik ideology in society, the Soviet government dealt a blow to the Russian Orthodox Church and brought it under its control, despite the decree on the separation of church and state. In 1922, under the pretext of raising funds to fight the famine, a significant part of church property was confiscated. Anti-religious propaganda intensified, temples and cathedrals were destroyed. Priests began to be persecuted. Patriarch Tikhon was placed under house arrest. In order to undermine intra-church unity, the government provided material and moral support to the "renovationist" currents that called on the laity to obey the authorities. After Tikhon's death in 1925, the government prevented the election of a new patriarch. The locum tenens of the patriarchal throne, Metropolitan Peter, was arrested. His successor, Metropolitan Sergius, and 8 bishops were forced to show loyalty to the Soviet government. In 1927, they signed a Declaration in which they obliged priests who did not recognize the new government to withdraw from church affairs.

Strengthening the unity of the party, the defeat of political and ideological opponents made it possible to strengthen the one-party political system, in which the so-called "dictatorship of the proletariat in alliance with the peasantry" in fact meant the dictatorship of the Central Committee of the RCP (b). This political system, with minor changes, continued to exist throughout the years of Soviet power.

Results of the domestic policy of the early 20s. NEP ensured the stabilization and restoration of the economy. However, soon after its introduction, the first successes gave way to new difficulties. Their occurrence was due to three reasons: the imbalance of industry and agriculture; purposefully class orientation of the internal policy of the government; strengthening contradictions between the diversity of social interests of different strata of society and the authoritarianism of the Bolshevik leadership.

The need to ensure the independence and defense of the country required the further development of the economy, primarily heavy industry. The priority of industry over agriculture resulted in the transfer of funds from the countryside to the city through price and tax policies. Sales prices for manufactured goods were artificially raised, and purchase prices for raw materials and products were lowered (“price scissors”). The difficulty of establishing a normal exchange of goods between the city and the countryside also gave rise to the unsatisfactory quality of industrial products. In the autumn of 1923, a sales crisis broke out, overstocking with expensive and poor manufactured goods, which the population refused to buy. In 1924, a price crisis was added to it, when the peasants, who had gathered a good harvest, refused to give grain to the state at fixed prices, deciding to sell it on the market. Attempts to force the peasants to hand over their grain at the tax in kind caused mass uprisings (in the Amur region, Georgia and other regions). In the mid-1920s, the volume of state procurements of grain and raw materials fell. This reduced the ability to export agricultural products and therefore reduced the foreign exchange earnings needed to buy industrial equipment from abroad.

To overcome the crisis, the government has taken a number of administrative measures. The centralized management of the economy was strengthened, the independence of enterprises was limited, prices for manufactured goods were increased, taxes were increased for private entrepreneurs, merchants and kulaks. This meant the beginning of the collapse of the NEP. The new direction of domestic policy was caused by the desire of the party leadership to accelerate the destruction of elements of capitalism by administrative methods, to resolve all economic and social difficulties in one blow, without developing a mechanism for interaction between the state, cooperative and private sectors of the economy. Its inability to overcome the crisis phenomena; The Stalinist leadership of the party explained economic methods and the use of command and directive methods by the activities of the class “enemies of the people” (Nepmen, kulaks, agronomists, engineers and other specialists). This served as the basis for the deployment of repressions and the organization of new political processes.

Intra-party struggle for power. The economic and socio-political difficulties that manifested themselves already in the first years of the NEP, the desire to build socialism in the absence of experience in realizing this goal gave rise to an ideological crisis. All the fundamental questions of the country's development provoked sharp inner-party discussions.

IN AND. Lenin, the author of the NEP, who in 1921 assumed that this would be a policy “in earnest and for a long time”, a year later at the 11th Party Congress declared that it was time to stop the “retreat” towards capitalism and it was necessary to move on to building socialism. He wrote a number of works called by Soviet historians V.I. Lenin. In them, he formulated the main directions of the party's activities: industrialization (technical re-equipment of industry), broad cooperation (primarily in agriculture) and cultural revolution (elimination of illiteracy, raising the cultural and educational level of the population). At the same time, V.I. Lenin insisted on maintaining the unity and leading role of the party in the state. In his “Letter to the Congress”, he gave very unflattering political and personal characteristics to six members of the Politburo (L.D. Trotsky, L.B. Kamenev, G.E. Zinoviev, N.I. Bukharin, G.L. Pyatakov, I. V. Stalin). IN AND. Lenin also warned the party against its bureaucratization and the possibility of a factional struggle, considered the main danger of the political ambitions and rivalry of L.D. Trotsky and I.V. Stalin.

The illness of V. I. Lenin, as a result of which he was removed from solving state-party affairs, and then his death in January 1924, complicated the situation in the party. Back in the spring of 1922, the post of General Secretary of the Central Committee of the RCP(b) was established. They became I.V. Stalin. He unified the structure of party committees at different levels, which led to the strengthening of not only intra-party centralization, but also the entire administrative-state system. I.V. Stalin concentrated enormous power in his hands, placing cadres loyal to him in the center and in the localities.

Different understanding of the principles and methods of socialist construction, personal ambitions (L.D. Trotsky, L.B. Kamenev, G.E. Zinoviev and other representatives of the “old guard”, who had significant Bolshevik pre-October experience), their rejection of Stalinist methods of leadership - all this caused opposition speeches in the Politburo of the party, in a number of local party committees, and in the press. Theoretical disagreements about the possibility of building socialism either in one country (V.I. Lenin, I.V. Stalin), or only on a global scale (L.D. Trotsky) were combined with the desire to occupy a leading position in the party and state. Pushing political opponents and skillfully interpreting their statements as anti-Leninist, I.V. Stalin consistently eliminated his opponents. L.D. Trotsky was expelled from the USSR in 1929. L.B. Kamenev, G.E. Zinoviev and their supporters were repressed in the 30s. The first stone in the foundation of the cult of personality I.V. Stalin was laid in the course of internal party discussions of the 20s under the slogan of choosing the right, Leninist path of building socialism and establishing ideological unity.

New economic policy(abbr. NEP or NEP) - economic policy pursued in the 1920s in Soviet Russia.

It was adopted on March 14, 1921 by the X Congress RKP(b), replacing the policy of "military communism" carried out during the Civil War, which led Russia to economic decline. The new economic policy was aimed at introducing private enterprise and reviving market relations, with the restoration of the national economy. The NEP was a forced measure and largely an improvisation. However, over the seven years of its existence, it has become one of the most successful economic projects of the Soviet period. The main content of the NEP is the replacement of the surplus appropriation tax in the countryside (up to 70% of grain was confiscated during the surplus tax, and about 30% with the food tax), the use of the market and various forms of ownership, the attraction of foreign capital in the form of concessions, the implementation of monetary reform (1922-1924), in as a result of which the ruble became a convertible currency.

The Soviet state faced the problems of financial stabilization, and, therefore, the suppression of inflation and the achievement of a balanced state budget. The strategy of the state, aimed at surviving in conditions of a credit blockade, determined the primacy of the USSR in compiling production balances and distributing products. The new economic policy assumed state regulation of a mixed economy using planned and market mechanisms. The NEP was based on the ideas of the works of V. I. Lenin, discussions about the theory of reproduction and money, the principles of pricing, finance and credit.

The New Economic Policy made it possible to quickly restore the national economy, which had been destroyed by the First World War and the Civil War.

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✪ USSR during the NEP. Video lesson on the history of Russia Grade 11

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✪ 053. History of Russia. XX century. NEP

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Prerequisites

By 1921, the RSFSR was literally in ruins. From the former Russian Empire came the territories of Poland, Finland, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Western Belarus, Western Ukraine, and Bessarabia. According to experts, the population in the remaining territories barely reached 135 million. During the hostilities, the Donbass, the Baku oil region, the Urals and Siberia were especially affected, many mines and mines were destroyed. Factories stopped due to lack of fuel and raw materials. The workers were forced to leave the cities and go to the countryside. The volume of industrial production has significantly decreased, and as a result, agricultural production as well.

Society has degraded, its intellectual potential has significantly weakened. Most of the Russian intelligentsia was destroyed or left the country.

The peasants, outraged by the actions of the food detachments, not only refused to hand over grain, but also rose to armed struggle. The uprisings swept the Tambov region, Ukraine, Don, Kuban, the Volga region and Siberia. Units of the Red Army were sent to suppress these demonstrations.

Discontent spread to the army as well. On March 1, 1921, the sailors and Red Army soldiers of the Kronstadt garrison under the slogan " For Soviets without communists!"demanded the release from prison of all representatives of the socialist parties, the holding of re-elections of the Soviets and, as follows from the slogan, the exclusion of all communists from them, the granting of freedom speech, assembly and unions to all parties, ensuring freedom of trade, allowing peasants to freely use their land and dispose of the products of their economy, that is, the elimination of surplus appropriation.

From the appeal of the Provisional Revolutionary Committee of Kronstadt:

Comrades and citizens! Our country is going through a difficult moment. Hunger, cold, economic ruin have been holding us in an iron grip for three years now. The Communist Party, ruling the country, broke away from the masses and proved unable to lead it out of the state of general ruin. It did not take into account the unrest that had recently taken place in Petrograd and Moscow, and which showed quite clearly that the Party had lost the confidence of the working masses. Nor did they take into account the demands made by the workers. She considers them the intrigues of the counter-revolution. She is deeply mistaken. These unrest, these demands are the voice of the entire people, of all working people. All the workers, sailors and Red Army men clearly see at the present moment that only by joint efforts, by the common will of the working people, can bread, firewood, coal be provided to the country, to clothe the barefooted and undressed, and lead the republic out of the impasse...

Convinced of the impossibility of reaching an agreement with the rebels, the authorities launched an assault on Kronstadt. By alternating artillery shelling and infantry actions, Kronstadt was taken by March 18; some of the rebels died, the rest went to Finland or surrendered.

The course of development of the NEP

NEP proclamation

In connection with the introduction of the New Economic Policy, certain legal guarantees were introduced for private property. So, on May 22, 1922, the All-Russian Central Executive Committee issued a decree "On the basic private property rights recognized by the RSFSR, protected by its laws and protected by the courts of the RSFSR". Then, by a decree of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of November 11, 1922, from January 1, 1923, the Civil Code of the RSFSR was put into effect, which, in particular, provided that every citizen has the right to organize industrial and commercial enterprises.

NEP in the financial sector

The task of the first stage of the monetary reform, implemented within the framework of one of the directions of the economic policy of the state, was the stabilization of the monetary and credit relations of the USSR with other countries. After two denominations were carried out, as a result of which 1 million rubles in the old banknotes was equated to 1 ruble in new state marks, a parallel circulation of depreciating state marks was introduced to serve small trade and hard chervonets, backed by precious metals, stable foreign currency and easily sold goods. Chervonets was equal to the old 10-ruble gold coin containing 7.74 grams of pure gold.

It is necessary, however, to note the fact that wealthy peasants were taxed at higher rates. Thus, on the one hand, an opportunity was given to improve well-being, but on the other, there was no point in expanding the economy too much. All this taken together led to the "average" of the village. The well-being of the peasants as a whole has increased in comparison with the pre-war level, the number of poor and rich has decreased, and the proportion of middle peasants has increased.

However, even such a half-hearted reform gave certain results, and by 1926 the food supply had improved significantly.

The holding (1921-1929) of the Nizhny Novgorod Fair, the largest in Russia, was resumed.

In general, the New Economic Policy had a beneficial effect on the state of the countryside. First, the peasants had an incentive to work. Secondly (compared to pre-revolutionary times), many have increased land allotment - the main means of production.

The country needed money - to maintain the army, to restore industry, to support the world revolutionary movement. In a country where 80% of the population was peasantry, the main burden of the tax burden fell on him. But the peasantry was not rich enough to provide all the needs of the state, the necessary tax revenues. Increased taxation on especially prosperous peasants also did not help, so from the mid-1920s other, non-tax methods of replenishing the treasury began to be actively used, such as forced loans and underpriced grain and overpriced industrial goods. As a result, industrial goods, if we calculate their value in poods of wheat, turned out to be several times more expensive than before the war, despite their lower quality. A phenomenon was formed, which, with the light hand of Trotsky, began to be called "price scissors". The peasants reacted simply - they stopped selling grain in excess of what they needed to pay taxes. The first crisis in the sale of manufactured goods arose in the autumn of 1923. Peasants needed plows and other industrial products, but refused to buy them at inflated prices. The next crisis arose in the financial year 1924-1925 (that is, in the autumn of 1924 - in the spring of 1925). The crisis was called "procurement" because the procurement amounted to only two-thirds of the expected level. Finally, in the financial year 1927-1928, there was a new crisis: it was not possible to collect even the most necessary things.

So, by 1925, it became clear that the national economy had come to a contradiction: political and ideological factors, the fear of the “degeneration” of power, prevented further progress towards the market; the return to the military-communist type of economy was hampered by memories of the peasant war of 1920 and mass famine, the fear of anti-Soviet speeches.

Cooperation of all forms and types developed rapidly. The role of production cooperatives in agriculture was insignificant (in 1927 they provided only 2% of all agricultural products and 7% of marketable products), but the simplest primary forms - marketing, supply and credit cooperation - by the end of the 1920s covered more than half of all peasant farms. By the end of 1928. 28 million people were involved in non-production cooperation of various types, primarily peasant, (13 times more than in 1913). In the socialized retail trade, 60-80% accounted for the cooperative and only 20-40% - for the state proper, in industry in 1928, 13% of all products were produced by cooperatives. There was cooperative legislation, lending, insurance.

Instead of depreciated and actually already rejected by the turnover of the Soviet signs, in 1922, the release of a new monetary unit was launched - chervonets, which had a gold content and a gold exchange rate (1 chervonets = 10 pre-revolutionary gold rubles = 7.74 grams of pure gold). In 1924, the Soviet signs, which were quickly replaced by the chervonets, ceased to be printed altogether and were withdrawn from circulation; in the same year, the budget was balanced and the use of money emission to cover state expenses was prohibited; new treasury notes were issued - rubles (10 rubles = 1 gold piece). On the foreign exchange market, both within the country and abroad, chervonets were freely exchanged for gold and major foreign currencies at the pre-war rate of the tsarist ruble (1 US dollar = 1.94 rubles).

The credit system has revived. In 1921, the State Bank of the RSFSR was established (transformed in 1923 into the State Bank of the USSR), which began lending to industry and trade on a commercial basis. In 1922-1925, a number of specialized banks were created: joint stock, in which the State Bank, syndicates, cooperatives, private and even at one time foreign, were shareholders, for lending to certain sectors of the economy and regions of the country; cooperative - for lending to consumer cooperation; organized on the shares of the agricultural credit society, closed on the republican and central agricultural banks; societies mutual credit - for lending to private industry and trade; savings banks - to mobilize the savings of the population. As of October 1, 1923, there were 17 independent banks operating in the country, and the share of the State Bank in the total credit investments of the entire banking system was 2/3. By October 1, 1926, the number of banks increased to 61, and the share of the State Bank in lending to the national economy decreased to 48%.

Commodity-money relations, which were previously tried to be banished from production and exchange, in the 1920s penetrated into all the pores of the economic organism, became the main link between its individual parts.

In just 5 years, from 1921 to 1926, the index industrial production increased by more than 3 times; agricultural production doubled and exceeded the level of 1913 by 18%. But even after the end of the recovery period, economic growth continued at a rapid pace: in 1927 and 1928, the growth in industrial production amounted to 13 and 19%, respectively. In general, for the period 1921-1928, the average annual growth rate of the national income was 18%.

The most important result of the NEP was that impressive economic successes were achieved on the basis of fundamentally new, hitherto unknown to the history of social relations. In industry, key positions were occupied by state trusts, in the credit and financial sphere - by state and cooperative banks, in agriculture - by small peasant farms covered by the simplest types of cooperation. The economic functions of the state turned out to be completely new under the conditions of NEP; the goals, principles and methods of government economic policy have changed radically. If earlier the center directly established natural, technological proportions of reproduction by order, now it has switched to price regulation, trying to ensure balanced growth by indirect, economic methods.

The state put pressure on producers, forced them to find internal reserves to increase profits, to mobilize efforts to increase the efficiency of production, which alone could now ensure profit growth.

A broad campaign to reduce prices was launched by the government as early as the end of 1923, but a truly comprehensive regulation of price proportions began in 1924, when circulation completely switched to a stable red currency, and the functions of the Internal Trade Commission were transferred to the People's Commissariat of Internal Trade with broad rights in the field of rationing prices. The measures taken then were successful: wholesale prices for manufactured goods fell by 26% from October 1923 to May 1, 1924 and continued to decline further.

Throughout the subsequent period until the end of the NEP, the question of prices continued to be the core of state economic policy: raising them by trusts and syndicates threatened with a repeat of the sales crisis, while lowering them beyond measure when existing along with the state-owned private sector inevitably led to the enrichment of the private owner at the expense of state industry, to the transfer of resources from state enterprises to private industry and trade. The private market, where prices were not standardized, but were set as a result of the free play of supply and demand, served as a sensitive “barometer”, the “arrow” of which, as soon as the state made miscalculations in pricing policy, immediately “pointed to bad weather”.

But the regulation of prices was carried out by the bureaucracy, which was not controlled sufficiently by the direct producers. The lack of democracy in the process of making decisions regarding pricing became the "Achilles' heel" of the market socialist economy and played a fatal role in the fate of the NEP.

Brilliant as the economic successes were, their recovery was limited by hard limits. It was not easy to reach the pre-war level, but even this meant a new clash with the backwardness of yesterday's Russia, now already isolated and surrounded by a hostile world. At the end of 1917, the US government terminated trade relations with Soviet Russia, and in 1918, the governments of England and France. In October 1919, the Supreme Council of the Entente announced a complete ban on all forms of economic ties with Soviet Russia. As a result of the failure of the intervention against the Soviet Republic and the growth of contradictions in the economies of the imperialist countries themselves, the Entente states were forced to lift the blockade (January 1920). Foreign states tried to organize the so-called. a gold blockade, refusing to accept Soviet gold as a means of payment, and a little later - a credit blockade, refusing to provide loans to the USSR.

The political struggle of the NEP

Economic processes during the NEP period were superimposed on political development and were largely determined by the latter. These processes throughout the entire period of Soviet power were characterized by an inclination towards dictatorship and authoritarianism. As long as Lenin was at the helm, one could speak of a "collective dictatorship"; he was a leader solely due to authority, but since 1917 he had to share this role with L. Trotsky: the supreme ruler at that time was called “Lenin and Trotsky”, both portraits adorned not only state institutions, but sometimes peasant huts. However, with the beginning of the intra-party struggle at the end of 1922, Trotsky's rivals - Zinoviev, Kamenev and Stalin - not having his authority, opposed Lenin's authority to him and in a short time inflated him to a real cult - in order to gain the opportunity to proudly be called "faithful Leninists" and " defenders of Leninism.

This was especially dangerous when combined with the dictatorship of the Communist Party. As Mikhail Tomsky, one of the top Soviet leaders, said in April 1922, “We have several parties. But, unlike abroad, we have one party in power, and the rest are in prison.” As if to confirm his words, in the summer of that year an open trial of the Right Socialist-Revolutionaries took place. All more or less major representatives of this party who remained in the country were tried - and more than a dozen sentences were handed down to capital punishment (later the convicts were pardoned). In the same 1922, more than two hundred of the largest representatives of Russian philosophical thought were sent abroad just because they did not hide their disagreement with the Soviet system - this measure went down in history under the name "Philosophical steamboat".

The consequence of the one-party system was the merging of the party and the government. The same people occupied the main positions in the party (Politburo) and state bodies (SNK, All-Russian Central Executive Committee, etc.). At the same time, the personal authority of the people's commissars and the need to take urgent, urgent decisions in the conditions of the Civil War led to the fact that the center of power was concentrated not in the legislative body (All-Russian Central Executive Committee), but in the government - the Council of People's Commissars.

In parallel with the change in the position of the party in the country, the rebirth of the party itself took place. It is obvious that there will always be many more people wishing to join the ruling party than an underground party, membership in which cannot give other privileges than iron bunks or a noose around the neck. At the same time, the party, having become the ruling one, began to need to increase its membership in order to fill government posts at all levels. This led to a rapid growth in the size of the Communist Party after the revolution. On the one hand, periodic "purges" were carried out, designed to free the party from a huge number of "adhering" pseudo-communists, on the other hand, the growth of the party was from time to time spurred on by mass recruitments, the most significant of which was the "Lenin appeal" in 1924, after the death of Lenin. The inevitable consequence of this process was the dissolution of the old, ideological, Bolsheviks among the young party members and not at all young neophytes. In 1927, out of 1 million 300 thousand people who were members of the party, only 8 thousand had pre-revolutionary experience.

Not only the intellectual and educational, but also the moral level of the party went down. Indicative in this regard are the results of the party purge carried out in the second half of 1921 with the aim of removing "kulak-proprietary and petty-bourgeois elements" from the party. Out of 732,000 members, only 410,000 members were left in the party (slightly more than half!). At the same time, a third of those expelled were expelled for passivity, another quarter - for "discrediting the Soviet government", "selfishness", "careerism", "bourgeois lifestyle", "decomposition in everyday life".

In connection with the growth of the party, the initially inconspicuous post of secretary began to acquire more and more importance. Any secretary is a secondary position by definition. This is a person who, during official events, monitors compliance with the necessary formalities. Since April 1922, the Bolshevik Party had the post of general secretary. He connected the leadership of the secretariat of the Central Committee and the accounting and distribution department, which distributed lower-level party members to various positions. This position was given to Stalin.

The processes of bureaucratization of the party and the centralization of power took place against the backdrop of a sharp deterioration in Lenin's health. Actually, the year of the introduction of the NEP was for him the last year of a full-fledged life. In May 1922, he was struck by the first blow - his brain was damaged, so that the almost helpless Lenin was given a very sparing work schedule. In March 1923, there was a second attack, after which Lenin fell out of life for half a year, almost learning to pronounce words again. As soon as he began to recover from the second attack, in January 1924 there was a third and last one. As the autopsy showed, for the last almost two years of his life, only one hemisphere of the brain was active in Lenin.

But between the first and second attacks, he still tried to participate in political life. Realizing that his days were numbered, he tried to draw the attention of the congress delegates to the most dangerous trend - the degeneration of the party. In his letters to the congress, known as his "political testament" (December 1922 - January 1923), Lenin proposes to expand the Central Committee at the expense of the workers, to elect a new Central Control Commission from the proletarians, to cut down the excessively swollen and therefore incapacitated RCI ( Workers' and Peasants' Inspectorate).

In the note “Letter to the Congress” (known as “Lenin’s Testament”) there was another component - the personal characteristics of the largest party leaders (Trotsky, Stalin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, Pyatakov). Often this part of the Letter is interpreted as a search for a successor (heir), but Lenin, unlike Stalin, was never a sole dictator, he could not take a single fundamental decision without the Central Committee, and not so fundamental - without the Politburo, despite the fact that in The Central Committee, and even more so the Politburo, at that time was occupied by independent people who often disagreed with Lenin in their views. Therefore, there could be no question of any "heir" (and it was not Lenin who called the Letter to the Congress a "testament"). Assuming that after him the party would continue to have a collective leadership, Lenin characterized the alleged members of this leadership, for the most part ambiguous. Only one definite indication was in his Letter: the post of general secretary gives Stalin too much power, dangerous in his rudeness (this was dangerous, according to Lenin, only in the relationship between Stalin and Trotsky, and not in general). Some modern researchers believe, however, that "Lenin's testament" was based more on the psychological state of the patient than on political motives.

Even before the death of Lenin, at the end of 1922, a struggle began between his "heirs", more precisely, the pushing of Trotsky from the helm. In the autumn of 1923, the struggle took on an open character. In October, Trotsky addressed a letter to the Central Committee, in which he pointed out the formation of a bureaucratic intra-party regime. A week later, an open letter in support of Trotsky was written by a group of 46 old Bolsheviks ("Statement No. 46"). The Central Committee, of course, responded with a decisive refutation. The leading role in this was played by Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev. This was not the first time that bitter disputes arose within the Bolshevik Party, but, unlike previous discussions, this time the ruling faction actively used labeling. Trotsky was not refuted by reasonable arguments - he was simply accused of Menshevism, deviationism and other mortal sins. The substitution of labeling for a real dispute is a new phenomenon: it did not exist before, but it will become more common as the political process develops in the 1920s.

NEP (New Economic Policy) was carried out by the Soviet government in the period from 1921 to 1928. It was an attempt to bring the country out of the crisis and give impetus to the development of the economy and agriculture. But the results of the NEP turned out to be terrible, and in the end, Stalin had to hastily interrupt this process in order to create industrialization, since the NEP policy almost completely killed heavy industry.

Reasons for the introduction of the NEP

With the beginning of the winter of 1920, the RSFSR plunged into a terrible crisis. In many ways, it was due to the fact that in 1921-1922 there was a famine in the country. The Volga region was mainly affected (we all remember the infamous phrase " Starving Volga region"). To this was added the economic crisis, as well as popular uprisings against the Soviet regime. No matter how many textbooks told us that people met the power of the Soviets with applause, this was not so. For example, uprisings took place in Siberia, on the Don, in the Kuban, and the largest - in Tambov. It went down in history under the name of the Antonov uprising or "Antonovshchina". In the spring of 21, about 200 thousand people were involved in the uprisings. Considering that the Red Army was extremely weak by that time, it was a very serious threat for the regime. Then the Kronstadt rebellion was born. At the cost of efforts, but all these revolutionary elements were suppressed, but it became obvious that it was necessary to change the approach to managing the country. And the conclusions were correct. Lenin formulated them as follows:

the driving force of socialism is the prolitariat, which means the peasants. Therefore, the Soviet government must learn to get along with them.
it is necessary to create a single party system in the country and destroy any dissent.

This is the whole essence of the NEP - "Economic liberalization under tight political control."

In general, all the reasons for the introduction of the NEP can be divided into ECONOMIC (the country needed an impetus to develop the economy), SOCIAL (social division was still extremely acute) and POLITICAL (the new economic policy became a means of managing power).

Beginning of the NEP

The main stages of the introduction of the NEP in the USSR:

Decision of the 10th Congress of the Bolshevik Party of 1921.
Replacing the apportionment with a tax (in fact, this was the introduction of the NEP). Decree of March 21, 1921.
Permission for free exchange of agricultural products. Decree of March 28, 1921.
Creation of cooperatives, which were destroyed in 1917. Decree April 7, 1921.
The transfer of some industry from the hands of the state to private hands. Decree of May 17, 1921.
Creation of conditions for the development of private trade. Decree May 24, 1921.
Permission to TEMPORARILY allow private owners to lease state-owned enterprises. Decree 5 July 1921.
Permission for private capital to create any enterprises (including industrial ones) with a staff of up to 20 people. If the enterprise is mechanized - no more than 10. Decree July 7, 1921.
Adoption of a "liberal" Land Code. He allowed not only the lease of land, but also hired labor on it. Decree of October 1922.

The ideological beginning of the NEP was laid at the 10th Congress of the RCP (b), which met in 1921 (if you remember its participants, right from this congress of delegates, went to suppress the Kronstadt rebellion), adopted the NEP and introduced a ban on "dissent" in the RCP (b). The fact is that until 1921 there were different factions in the RCP (b). It was allowed. Logically, and this logic is absolutely correct, if economic concessions are introduced, then inside the party should be a monolith. Therefore, no factions and divisions.

The ideological concept of the NEP was first given by V.I. Lenin. This happened at a speech at the tenth and eleventh congresses of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, which took place in 1921 and 1922, respectively. Also, the rationale for the New Economic Policy was voiced at the third and fourth congresses of the Comintern, which were also held in 1921 and 1922. In addition, Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin played an important role in formulating the tasks of the NEP. It is important to remember that for a long time Bukharin and Lenin acted as opposition to each other on the issues of the NEP. Lenin proceeded from the fact that the moment had come to ease the pressure on the peasants and "make peace" with them. But Lenin was not going to get along with the peasants forever, but for 5-10 years. Therefore, most members of the Bolshevik Party were sure that the NEP, as a forced measure, was introduced only for one grain procurement company, as a trick for the peasantry. But Lenin especially stressed that the course of the NEP was taken for a longer period. And then Lenin said a phrase that showed that the Bolsheviks keep their word - "but we will return to terror, including economic terror." If we recall the events of 1929, then this is exactly what the Bolsheviks did. The name of this terror is Collectivization.

The New Economic Policy was designed for 5, maximum 10 years. And she certainly fulfilled her task, although at some point she threatened the existence of the Soviet Union.

Briefly, according to Lenin, the NEP is a bond between the peasantry and the proletariat. This is what formed the basis of the events of those days - if you are against the bond between the peasantry and the proletariat, then you are against the workers' power, the Soviets and the USSR. The problems of this bond became a problem for the survival of the Bolshevik regime, because the regime simply had neither the army nor the equipment to crush the peasant riots if they started massively and in an organized manner. That is, some historians say - the NEP is the Brest peace of the Bolsheviks with their own people. That is, what kind of Bolsheviks - International Socialists who wanted a world revolution. Let me remind you that this idea was promoted by Trotsky. First, Lenin, who was not a very great theoretician (he was a good practitioner), he defined the NEP as state capitalism. And immediately for this he received a full portion of criticism from Bukharin and Trotsky. And after that, Lenin began to interpret the NEP as a mixture of socialist and capitalist forms. I repeat - Lenin was not a theorist, but a practitioner. He lived according to the principle - it is important for us to take power, but it does not matter what it will be called.

Lenin, in fact, accepted the Bukharin version of the NEP with the wording and other attributes ..

The NEP is a socialist dictatorship based on socialist production relations and regulating the broad petty-bourgeois organization of the economy.
Lenin

According to the logic of this definition, the main task facing the leadership of the USSR was the destruction of the petty-bourgeois economy. Let me remind you that the Bolsheviks called the peasant economy petty-bourgeois. It must be understood that by 1922 the building of socialism had reached a dead end, and Lenin realized that this movement could be continued only through the NEP. It is clear that this is not the main way, and it was contrary to Marxism, but as a workaround, it fit perfectly. And Lenin constantly emphasized that the new policy was a temporary phenomenon.

General characteristics of the NEP

The totality of the NEP:

rejection of labor mobilization and equal pay system for all.
transfer (partial, of course) of industry into private hands from the state (denationalization).
creation of new economic associations - trusts and syndicates. The widespread introduction of cost accounting
the formation of enterprises in the country at the expense of capitalism and the bourgeoisie, including the Western one.

Looking ahead, I will say that the NEP led to the fact that many idealistic Bolsheviks put a bullet in their foreheads. They believed that capitalism was being restored, and they shed their blood in vain during the Civil War. But the non-idealistic Bolsheviks used the NEP very well, because during the NEP it was easy to launder what was stolen during the Civil War. Because, as we will see, the NEP is a triangle: it is the head of a separate link in the Central Committee of the party, the head of a syndicator or trust, as well as NEPman as a "huckster", in modern terms, through which this whole process goes. It was generally a corruption scheme from the very beginning, but the NEP was a forced measure - the Bolsheviks would not have retained power without it.

NEP in trade and finance

Development of the credit system. In 1921, a state bank was created.
Reforming the financial and monetary system of the USSR. It was achieved through the reform of 1922 (monetary) and the replacement of money in 1922-1924.
The emphasis is on private (retail) trade and the development of various markets, including the All-Russian one.

If we try to briefly characterize the NEP, then this design was extremely unreliable. It took ugly forms of merging the personal interests of the country's leadership and everyone who was involved in the "Triangle". Each of them played a role. The black work was done by the Nepman speculator. And this was especially emphasized in Soviet textbooks, they say, it was all the private traders who spoiled the NEP, and we fought them as best we could. But in fact - the NEP led to a colossal corruption of the party. This was one of the reasons for the abolition of the NEP, because if it had been preserved further, the party would simply have completely disintegrated.

Beginning in 1921, the Soviet leadership took a course towards weakening centralization. In addition, much attention was paid to the element of reforming the economic systems in the country. Labor mobilizations were replaced by the labor exchange (unemployment was high). Equalization was abolished, the rationing system was abolished (but for some, the rationing system was a salvation). It is logical that the results of the NEP almost immediately had a positive effect on trade. Naturally in the retail trade. Already at the end of 1921, the NEPmen controlled 75% of the retail trade turnover and 18% in the wholesale trade. NEPmanship became a profitable form of money laundering, especially for those who looted heavily during the civil war. The loot from them lay idle, and now it could be sold through the NEPmen. And a lot of people have laundered their money this way.

NEP in agriculture

Adoption of the Land Code. (22nd year). The transformation of the tax in kind into a single agricultural tax since 1923 (since 1926, completely in cash).
Agricultural cooperation cooperation.
Equal (fair) exchange between agriculture and industry. But this was not achieved, as a result of which the so-called "price scissors" appeared.

At the bottom of society, the turn of the party leadership towards the NEP did not find much support. Many members of the Bolshevik Party were sure that this was a mistake and a transition from socialism to capitalism. Someone simply sabotaged the decision of the NEP, and especially ideological ones, and completely committed suicide. In October 1922, the New Economic Policy affected agriculture - the Bolsheviks began to implement the Land Code with new amendments. Its difference was that it legalized hired labor in the countryside (it would seem that the Soviet government fought precisely against this, but it did the same thing itself). The next step took place in 1923. This year, something happened that many have been waiting for and demanding for so long - the tax in kind has been replaced by the agricultural tax. In 1926, this tax began to be collected entirely in cash.

In general, the NEP was not an absolute triumph of economic methods, as was sometimes written in Soviet textbooks. It was only outwardly a triumph of economic methods. In fact, there were a lot of other things. And I mean not only the so-called excesses of local authorities. The fact is that a significant part of the peasant product was alienated in the form of taxes, and taxation was excessive. Another thing is that the peasant got the opportunity to breathe freely, and this solved some problems. And here, an absolutely unfair exchange between agriculture and industry, the formation of so-called "price scissors" came to the fore. The regime inflated the prices of industrial products and lowered the prices of agricultural products. As a result, in 1923-1924 the peasants worked practically for nothing! The laws were such that about 70% of everything that the village produced, the peasants were forced to sell for next to nothing. 30% of the product they produced was taken by the state at market value, and 70% at a lower price. Then this figure decreased, and it became about 50 to 50. But in any case, this is a lot. 50% of products at a price below the market.

As a result, the worst happened - the market ceased to carry out its direct functions as a means of buying and selling goods. Now it has become an effective means of exploiting the peasants. Only half of the peasant goods were purchased for money, and the other half was collected in the form of tribute (this is the most accurate definition of what happened in those years). The NEP can be characterized as follows: corruption, the apparatus swelled, mass theft of state property. The result was a situation where the products of the production of the peasant economy were used irrationally, and often the peasants themselves were not interested in high yields. This was a logical consequence of what was happening, because the NEP was originally an ugly construct.

NEP in industry

The main features that characterize the New Economic Policy in terms of industry are the almost complete lack of development of this industry and the huge level of unemployment among ordinary people.

The NEP was originally supposed to establish interaction between the city and the countryside, between workers and peasants. But this was not possible. The reason is that the industry was almost completely destroyed as a result of the Civil War, and it was not able to offer something significant to the peasantry. The peasantry did not sell their grain, because why sell it if you can't buy anything with money anyway. They just piled grain and didn't buy anything. Therefore, there was no incentive for the development of industry. It turned out such a "vicious circle". And in 1927-1928, everyone already understood that the NEP had outlived itself, that it did not give an incentive for the development of industry, but, on the contrary, destroyed it even more.

At the same time, it became clear that sooner or later a new war was coming in Europe. Here is what Stalin said about this in 1931:

If in the next 10 years we do not run the path that the West has traveled in 100 years, we will be destroyed and crushed.
Stalin

To put it in simple terms - in 10 years it was necessary to raise the industry from the ruins and put it on a par with the most developed countries. The NEP did not allow this, because it was focused on light industry, and on the fact that Russia was a raw material appendage of the West. That is, in this regard, the implementation of the NEP was a ballast that slowly but surely dragged Russia to the bottom, and if it held this course for another 5 years, it is not known how World War II would end.

The slow rate of industrial growth in the 1920s caused a sharp rise in unemployment. If in 1923-1924 there were 1 million unemployed in the city, then in 1927-1928 there were already 2 million unemployed. The logical consequence of this phenomenon is a huge increase in crime and discontent in cities. For those who worked, of course, the situation was normal. But in general the position of the working class was very difficult.

The development of the USSR economy during the NEP

Economic booms alternated with crises. Everyone knows the crises of 1923, 1925 and 1928, which led, among other things, to famine in the country.
Lack of a unified system for the development of the country's economy. The NEP crippled the economy. It did not allow the development of industry, but agriculture could not develop under such conditions. These 2 spheres slowed down each other, although the opposite was planned.
The crisis of grain procurements in 1927-28 28 and as a result - the course towards the curtailment of the NEP.

The most important part of the NEP, by the way, one of the few positive features of this policy, is the "raising from its knees" of the financial system. Do not forget that the Civil War has just died down, which almost completely destroyed the financial system of Russia. Prices in 1921 compared with 1913 increased 200 thousand times. Just think about this number. For 8 years, 200 thousand times ... Naturally, it was necessary to introduce other money. Reform was needed. The reform was carried out by People's Commissar for Finance Sokolnikov, who was assisted by a group of old specialists. In October 1921, the State Bank began its work. As a result of his work, in the period from 1922 to 1924, depreciated Soviet money was replaced by Chervonets

Chervonets was backed by gold, the content of which corresponded to the pre-revolutionary ten-ruble coin, and cost 6 US dollars. Chervonets was backed by our gold and foreign currency.
History reference

Soviet signs were withdrawn and exchanged at the rate of 1 new ruble for 50,000 old signs. This money was called "Sovznaki". During the NEP, cooperation actively developed and economic liberalization was accompanied by the strengthening of communist power. The repressive apparatus was also strengthened. And how did it happen? For example, on June 6, 22, GlavLit was created. This is censorship and establishing control over censorship. A year later, GlavRepedKom appeared, which was in charge of the theater's repertoire. In 1922, more than 100 people, active cultural figures, were deported from the USSR by decision of this body. Others were less fortunate, they were sent to Siberia. The teaching of bourgeois disciplines was banned in schools: philosophy, logic, history. Everything was restored in 1936. Also, the Bolsheviks and the church did not bypass their "attention". In October 1922, the Bolsheviks confiscated jewelry from the church, allegedly to fight hunger. In June 1923, Patriarch Tikhon recognized the legitimacy of Soviet power, and in 1925 he was arrested and died. A new patriarch was no longer elected. The patriarchate was then restored by Stalin in 1943.

On February 6, 1922, the Cheka was transformed into the state political department of the GPU. From emergency, these bodies have turned into state, regular ones.

The culmination of the NEP was 1925. Bukharin appealed to the peasantry (primarily to the prosperous peasant).

Get rich, accumulate, develop your economy.
Bukharin

Bukharin's plan was adopted at the 14th party conference. Stalin actively supported him, and Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev acted as critics. Economic development during the NEP period was uneven: now a crisis, now an upswing. And this was due to the fact that the necessary balance between the development of agriculture and the development of industry was not found. The grain procurement crisis of 1925 was the first bell toll on the NEP. It became clear that the NEP would soon end, but due to inertia, he drove for a few more years.

Cancellation of the NEP - reasons for the cancellation

July and November Plenum of the Central Committee of 1928. Plenum of the Central Committee of the Party and the Central Control Commission (to which one could complain about the Central Committee) April 1929.
reasons for the abolition of the NEP (economic, social, political).
was the NEP an alternative to real communism.

In 1926, the 15th party conference of the CPSU (b) met. It condemned the Trotskyist-Zinoviev opposition. Let me remind you that this opposition actually called for a war with the peasantry - to take away from them what the authorities need, and what the peasants hide. Stalin sharply criticized this idea, and also directly voiced the position that the current policy has become obsolete, and the country needs a new approach to development, an approach that will allow the restoration of industry, without which the USSR cannot exist.

Since 1926, a trend towards the abolition of the NEP began to gradually emerge. In 1926-27, grain stocks for the first time exceeded pre-war levels and amounted to 160 million tons. But the peasants still did not sell bread, and the industry was suffocating from overexertion. The left opposition (its ideological leader was Trotsky) proposed to withdraw 150 million poods of grain from the wealthy peasants, who made up 10% of the population, but the leadership of the CPSU (b) did not agree to this, because this would mean a concession to the left opposition.

Throughout 1927, the Stalinist leadership conducted maneuvers for the final elimination of the Left Opposition, because without this it was impossible to solve the peasant question. Any attempt to put pressure on the peasants would mean that the party has taken the path of which the "Left Wing" speaks. At the 15th Congress, Zinoviev, Trotsky and other left oppositionists were expelled from the Central Committee. However, after they repented (this was called in the party language "disarm before the party") they were returned, because the Stalinist center needed them for the future struggle with the Bucharest team.

The struggle to abolish the NEP unfolded as a struggle for industrialization. This was logical, because industrialization was the number 1 task for the self-preservation of the Soviet state. Therefore, the results of the NEP can be briefly summarized as follows - the ugly system of the economy created many problems that could only be solved thanks to industrialization.

Prerequisites for the NEP

The course of development of the NEP

Proclamation of the NEP

Curtailment of the NEP

Findings and Conclusions

Factors that influenced the adoption of the new economic policy

General characteristics of the NEP

Chronological framework of the NEP

Pros and cons of the NEP

Inevitable Crises

Reasons for abandoning the NEP

Results of the New Economic Policy

Encyclopedic YouTube

Subtitles

Prerequisites

The course of development of the NEP

NEP proclamation

NEP in the financial sector

The political struggle of the NEP

Reasons for the introduction of the NEP

Beginning of the NEP

General characteristics of the NEP

NEP in trade and finance

NEP in agriculture

NEP in industry

The development of the USSR economy during the NEP

Cancellation of the NEP - reasons for the cancellation

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