When did the NEP end?

One of the problems in the history of the NEP, which is invariably in the field of view of domestic and foreign authors, is the question of its chronological boundaries. The conclusions that economists and historians reach on this issue are far from clear-cut.

Almost all domestic and foreign experts associate the beginning of the NEP with the X Congress of the RCP (b), held in March 1921. However, in Lately one can detect attempts to clarify the initial boundary of the NEP. In particular, it is proposed to consider that “Lenin’s speech in March 1921 was a tactical step to get bread and reduce the intensity of the insurrectionary war. This policy will become new only with the beginning of the introduction of self-financing in industry and especially after the complete legalization of trade.” Therefore, “the milestone of the NEP was not the 10th Party Congress, as traditionally stated in historiography, but reforms in the commercial and industrial sector. In the village, previously unrealized... ideas were implemented, only refined in March 1921.”

IN Soviet period In domestic historiography and in economic literature, the position was postulated that the new economic policy continued until the complete victory of socialism. This point of view was formulated by I.V. Stalin. The “History of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks)” stated that “the new economic policy was designed for the complete victory of socialist forms of economy,” and “the USSR entered a new period of development, the period of completion of the construction of a socialist society and a gradual transition to a communist society.” adoption of the Constitution of the USSR in 1936. This interpretation of the chronological boundaries of the NEP was reflected in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, which, in full accordance with the “Short Course,” stated that the new economic policy “ended in the 2nd half of the 30s.” victory of socialism in the USSR." This problem was interpreted in a similar way by Soviet political economists.

In the second half of the 1980s. In our country, conditions have arisen for a comprehensive discussion of this problem and clarification of the chronological boundaries of the NEP. Some Russian researchers drew attention to the fact that the NEP was not frozen economic policy that it evolved and went through a number of stages in its development, characterized important features and at the same time preserving common essential features.

So, V.P. Dmitrenko identifies the following stages of the NEP:

1) spring 1921 - spring 1922 (transition to NEP); 2) 1922-1923 (“ensuring close interaction of NEP management methods” as a result of the monetary reform to overcome the “price scissors”); 3) 1924-1925 (expansion and streamlining of market relations while strengthening the planning principle in the management of state-owned enterprises); 4) 1926-1928 (“ensuring the intensive expansion of the socialist sector and its complete victory over capitalism within the country”); 5) 1929-1932 (the final stage of the NEP, when the tasks of building the economic foundation of socialism were solved in the shortest possible time). M.P. Kim also adheres to the point of view according to which “NEP exhausts itself... in the early 30s - 1932-1933.” G.G. Bogomazov and V.M. Shav-shukov believe that the attack on capitalist elements in the late 1920s. “did not cancel the new economic policy; on the contrary, it was carried out within the framework of the latter.” From their point of view, 1928-1936. - “the second stage of the NEP”, “the stage of the extensive construction of socialism”.

This point of view has well-known grounds, especially since J.V. Stalin at the 16th Congress of the Communist Party (b) (1930) said: “By going on the offensive along the entire front, we are not yet canceling the NEP, because private trade and capitalist elements still remain, “free” trade turnover still remains, but we will certainly cancel the initial stage of the NEP, deploying its subsequent stage, the current stage of the NEP, which is the last stage of the NEP.”

Many Western, and currently a number of Russian researchers, adhere to the point of view, originally formed in foreign historiography, according to which the NEP lasted only until the first five-year plan, and was canceled with the beginning of industrialization and collectivization.

So, in the early 1960s. American Sovietologist N. Yasny, referring to the opinion of the Polish economist O. Lange, linked the end of the NEP with the 15th century Congress of the All-Union Communist Party(b) (December 1927).

N. Vert states that the grain procurement crisis of 1927/28 prompted I.V. Stalin “to shift the emphasis from cooperation... to the creation of “pillars of socialism” in the countryside - giant collective farms and machine and tractor stations (MTS).” According to this historian, “in the summer of 1928, Stalin no longer believed in the NEP, but had not yet finally come to the idea of ​​general collectivization.” However, the November (1929) plenum of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, which supported the postulate of I.V. Stalin about a radical change in the attitude of the peasantry towards collective farms and approved the course towards the accelerated development of industry, meant, according to N. Werth, “the end of the NEP”.

R. Munting also writes that “in April 1929, the party formally approved the first five-year plan, which... was implemented from October 1928. The plan meant the real end of the NEP; the market has been replaced." J. Boffa dates the process of “convulsive extinction” of the NEP to 1928-1929. The same conclusion is drawn in the works of A. Ball (USA), R.V. Davis (Great Britain), M. Mirsky, M. Harrison (Great Britain) and other authors.

Russian historians in their works of recent decades are inclined to a similar point of view. So, according to V.P. Danilov, the “breakdown” of the NEP took place in 1928-1929. E.G. Gimpelson states that “by the end of 1929, the NEP was finished.” V.A. Shestakov is one of the authors of the Russian history course recently published by the Institute Russian history RAS, also states that “the departure from the NEP began already in the mid-20s,” and “the choice of forced industrialization meant the end of the NEP...”.

Russian economists also agree with this position. So, O.R. Latsis believes that the economic policy towards the peasantry, which was based on Leninist principles, was carried out “until the end of 1927.” V.E. Manevich also comes to the conclusion that “the credit reform of 1930 (together with the reorganization of industrial management and tax reform) meant the final liquidation of the NEP, including its credit system, which was the core economic regulation in the 20s. Of course, the NEP was not eliminated overnight; it was dismantled gradually in 1926-1929.” . According to G.G. Bogomazov and I.A. Blagikh, “the curtailment and abandonment of the New Economic Policy” refers to the late 1920s - early 1930s, when the complex economic reforms, which ensured the formation of an administrative-command management system.

Obviously, the problem of periodization of the NEP continues to be controversial. But it is already clear that the conclusion of Western researchers about the “cancellation” of the NEP in the late 1920s. with the transition to five-year planning and collectivization of the peasantry is not without reason.

At the same time, it should be borne in mind that planning itself is not the antithesis of NEP. The State Planning Committee, as you know, was created in 1921. During the “classical” period of the NEP, the first long-term plan was implemented in our country - the GOELRO plan, and since 1925 unified national economic plans (control figures) have been developed.

We should not forget that even in 1932, collective farms covered only 61.5% of peasant farms. This means that the problem of the economic bond between the working class and the non-cooperative peasantry, ensured through the market, remains relevant. However, on relations between city and village, as well as on other areas economic life, in the early 1930s. The influence of the administrative-command system was increasingly exerted.

• URL: htpp: www.sgu.ru/files/nodes/9B19/03.pdf
• Cm.: Stalin I.V. Essays. T. 12. P. 306-307; It's him. Questions of Leninism. M., 1953. P. 547.
• History of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks)... P. 306.
• Right there. P. 331.
• Great Soviet Encyclopedia. Article "New Economic Policy".
• For example, the authors of the Course political economy» state that transition period from capitalism to socialism, which corresponded to an economic policy such as the NEP, “ends... with the complete victory of socialism” (Course of Political Economy / Edited by N.A. Tsagolov... P. 8).
• Economic policy of the Soviet state... P. 25-26.
• The main stages of the development of Soviet society // Communist. 1987. No. 12. P. 70.
• Bogomazov G.G., Shavshukov V.M. Anti-scientific character of Sovietological interpretations of the new economic policy // Bulletin of Leningrad University. Series 5. Economics. 1988. Vol. 2 (No. 12). pp. 99, 100.

New Economic Policy- economic policy pursued in Soviet Russia since 1921. It was adopted on March 21, 1921 by the X Congress of the RCP (b), replacing the policy of “war communism” pursued during the Civil War. The New Economic Policy aimed at restoring the national economy and the subsequent transition to socialism. The main content of the NEP is the replacement of surplus appropriation with a tax in kind in the countryside (up to 70% of grain was confiscated during surplus appropriation, and about 30% with a tax in kind), the use of the market and various forms property, attracting foreign capital in the form of concessions, carrying out a monetary reform (1922-1924), as a result of which the ruble became a convertible currency.

The Soviet state faced the problem of stabilizing money, and, therefore, deflation and achieving a balanced state budget. The state's strategy, aimed at surviving under the credit blockade, determined the USSR's primacy in compiling production balances and distributing products. The New Economic Policy assumed government regulation mixed economy using planned and market mechanisms. The state, which retained commanding heights in the economy, applied directive and indirect methods government regulation, based on the need to implement the priorities of the forerunner of the strategic plan - GOELRO. 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 NEP made it possible to quickly restore the national economy destroyed by the First World War and the Civil War.

In the second half of the 1920s, the first attempts to curtail the NEP began. Syndicates in industry were liquidated, from which they were administratively forced out private capital, a rigid centralized system of economic management was created (economic commissariats). Stalin and his entourage set a course for collectivization of the countryside. Repressions were carried out against management personnel (the Shakhty case, the Industrial Party trial, etc.). By the beginning of the 1930s, the NEP was actually curtailed.

Prerequisites for the NEP

By 1921, Russia was literally in ruins. From an ex Russian Empire the territories of Poland, Finland, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Western Belarus, Western Ukraine, the Kara region of Armenia and Bessarabia were ceded. According to experts, the population in the remaining territories barely reached 135 million. Losses in these territories as a result of wars, epidemics, emigration, and a decline in the birth rate have amounted to at least 25 million people since 1914.

During the hostilities, the Donbass, the Baku oil region, the Urals and Siberia were especially damaged; many mines and mines were destroyed. Factories shut down due to a lack of fuel and raw materials. Workers were forced to leave the cities and go to the countryside. Overall volume industrial production decreased by 5 times. The equipment has not been updated for a long time. Metallurgy produced as much metal as it was smelted under Peter I.

Agricultural production fell by 40% due to the depreciation of money and a shortage of industrial goods.

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

Thus, the main task domestic policy The RCP(b) and the Soviet state consisted of restoring the destroyed economy, creating the material, technical and socio-cultural basis for building the socialism promised by the Bolsheviks to the people.

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

Discontent spread to the army. On March 1, 1921, 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 socialist parties, re-election of the Soviets and, as follows from the slogan, the expulsion of all communists from them, granting 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 farms , that is, the elimination of surplus appropriation. 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 captured by March 18; Some of the rebels died, the rest went to Finland or surrendered.

From the appeal of the Provisional Revolutionary Committee of Kronstadt:

Comrades and citizens! Our country is going through a difficult moment. Hunger, cold, and economic devastation have been holding us in an iron grip for three years now. The Communist Party, which rules the country, has become disconnected from the masses and has been unable to bring it out of the state of general devastation. It did not take into account the unrest that had recently occurred in Petrograd and Moscow and which quite clearly indicated that the party had lost the trust of the working masses. It also did not take into account the demands made by the workers. She considers them the machinations of counter-revolution. She is deeply mistaken. These unrest, these demands are the voice of all the people, all the working people. All workers, sailors and Red Army soldiers clearly see at the moment that only through common efforts, the common will of the working people, can we give the country bread, firewood, coal, clothe the shoeless and undressed, and lead the republic out of the dead end...

Already in 1920, there were calls to abandon the food appropriation system: 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, Rykov raised the same question at the Supreme Economic Council.

Progress of development of NEP

Proclamation of the NEP

By the decree of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of March 23, 1921, adopted on the basis of the decisions of the X Congress of the RCP (b), the surplus appropriation system was abolished and replaced by a tax in kind, which was approximately half as much. Such a significant relaxation gave a certain incentive to the war-weary peasantry to develop production.

Lenin himself pointed out that concessions to the peasantry were subordinated to only one goal - the struggle for power: “We openly, honestly, without any deception, declare to the peasants: in order to maintain the path to socialism, we, comrade peasants, will make a whole series of concessions, but only within such and such limits and to such and such a degree, and, of course, we ourselves will judge what measure this is and what limits” (Complete Collection of Works, vol. 42 p. 192).

The introduction of a tax in kind was not an isolated measure. The 10th Congress proclaimed the New Economic Policy. Its essence is the assumption of market relations. The NEP was viewed as a temporary policy aimed at creating conditions for socialism - temporary, but not short-term: Lenin himself emphasized that “NEP is serious and for the long haul!” Thus, he agreed with the Mensheviks that Russia at that time was not ready for socialism, but in order to create the preconditions for socialism, he did not at all consider it necessary to give power to the bourgeoisie.

The main political goal of the NEP is to relieve social tensions and strengthen the social base of Soviet power in the form of an alliance of workers and peasants. Economic goal- prevent further deterioration, overcome 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 relations and overcoming international isolation.

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 state’s economic policy, was to stabilize the monetary and credit relations of the USSR with other countries. After two denominations, which resulted in 1 million rubles. previous banknotes was equal to 1 rub. new sovznak, parallel circulation of depreciating sovznak was introduced to service small trade turnover and hard chervonets secured precious metals, stable foreign exchange and easily traded goods. The Chervonets was equal to the old 10-ruble gold coin, which contained 7.74 g of pure gold.

The issue of depreciating Soviet notes was used to finance the state budget deficit caused by economic difficulties. Their share in money supply steadily decreased from 94% in February 1923 to 20% in February 1924. The peasantry, who sought to delay the sale of their products, and the working class, who received wages in Sovznakh. To compensate for the losses of the working class, it was used fiscal policy, aimed at increasing taxes on the private sector and reducing taxes on the public sector. Excise taxes on luxury goods were increased and reduced or even eliminated on essential goods. Greater role in supporting stability national currency During the entire period of the NEP, government loans played a role. However, the threat to the trade link between city and countryside required the elimination of parallel monetary circulation and stabilization of the ruble on the domestic market.

A skillful combination of planned and market instruments for regulating the economy, which ensured the growth of the national economy, a sharp reduction in the budget deficit, an increase in gold reserves and foreign currency, as well as an active foreign trade balance, made it possible during 1924 to carry out the second stage of monetary reform to transition to one stable currency. Canceled Sovznak were subject to redemption with treasury notes at a fixed ratio within one and a half months. A fixed ratio was established between the treasury ruble and the bank chervonets, equating 1 chervonets to 10 rubles. Bank and treasury notes were in circulation, and gold chervonets were used, as a rule, in international payments. Their rate in 1924 became higher than the official gold parity against the pound sterling and the dollar.

In the 20s Commercial credit was widely used, servicing approximately 85% of the volume of transactions for the sale of goods. Banks exercised control over mutual lending economic organizations and with the help of accounting and collateral operations they regulated the size of a commercial loan, its direction, terms and interest rate. However, its use created the opportunity for unplanned redistribution of funds in the national economy and complicated banking control.

Financing of capital investments and long-term lending developed. After the Civil War capital investments financed irrevocably or in the form of long-term loans. To invest in industry, the joint-stock company “Electrocredit” and the Industrial Bank were created in 1922, later transformed into the Electric Bank and the Commercial and Industrial Bank of the USSR. Long-term lending to the local economy was carried out by local communal banks, transformed in 1926 into the Central Communal Bank (Tsekombank). Agriculture was provided long-term loans state credit institutions, credit cooperation, formed in 1924. Central Agricultural Bank, cooperative banks - Vsekobank and Ukrainbank. At the same time, Vneshtorgbank was created, which provided credit and settlement services foreign trade, purchase and sale of foreign currency.

NEP in agriculture

... By the resolution of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and the Council of People's Commissars, the appropriation is canceled and a tax on products is introduced instead Agriculture. This tax should be less than grain appropriation. It should be appointed even before the spring sowing, so that each peasant can take into account in advance what share of the harvest he must give to the state and how much will remain at his full disposal. The tax should be levied without mutual responsibility, that is, it should fall on an individual householder, so that a diligent and hardworking owner does not have to pay for a sloppy fellow villager. Upon completion of the tax, the surplus remaining with the peasant comes to his full disposal. He has the right to exchange them for products and equipment that the state will deliver to the village from abroad and from its factories and factories; he can use them to exchange for the products he needs through cooperatives and in local markets and bazaars...

The tax in kind was initially set at approximately 20% of the net product of peasant labor (that is, to pay it it was necessary to hand over almost half as much grain as during the surplus appropriation system), and subsequently it was planned to be reduced to 10% of the harvest and converted into cash.

On October 30, 1922, the Land Code of the RSFSR was issued, which repealed the law on the socialization of land and declared its nationalization. At the same time, peasants were free to choose their own form of land use - communal, individual or collective. The ban on the use of hired workers was also lifted.

It is necessary, however, to note the fact that wealthy peasants were taxed at higher rates. Thus, on the one hand, the opportunity was provided 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 “middleization” of the village. The well-being of peasants as a whole has increased compared to the pre-war level, the number of poor and rich has decreased, and the share of middle peasants has increased.

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

In general, the NEP had a beneficial effect on the condition of the village. Firstly, the peasants had an incentive to work. Secondly (compared to pre-revolutionary times) many people 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 the peasantry, the main burden of the tax burden fell on them. But the peasantry was not rich enough to provide all the needs of the state and the necessary tax revenues. Increased taxation on especially wealthy peasants also did not help, therefore, from the mid-1920s, other, non-tax methods of replenishing the treasury, such as forced loans and reduced prices for grain and inflated prices for industrial goods, began to be actively used. As a result, industrial goods, if we calculate their cost in pounds of wheat, turned out to be several times more expensive than before the war, despite their lower quality. A phenomenon emerged that, thanks to Trotsky’s light hand, began to be called “price scissors.” The peasants reacted simply - they stopped selling grain beyond what they needed to pay taxes. The first crisis in the sales of industrial goods arose in the fall of 1923. The peasants needed plows and other industrial products, but refused to buy them at inflated prices. The next crisis arose in the 1924-25 business year (that is, in the fall of 1924 - spring of 1925). The crisis was called the “procurement” crisis, since procurement amounted to only two-thirds of the expected level. Finally, in the 1927-28 business year 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: further progress towards the market was hampered by political and ideological factors, the fear of the “degeneration” of power; a return to the military-communist type of economy was hampered by memories of the peasant war of 1920 and mass famine, and fear of anti-Soviet protests.

Thus, in 1925, Bukharin called on the peasants: “Get rich, accumulate, develop your farm!”, but after a few weeks he actually retracted his words. Others, led by E.A. Preobrazhensky, demanded an intensification of the fight against the “kulaks” (who, as they claimed, were taking into their own hands not only economic, but also political power in the countryside) - without, however, thinking about either the “liquidation of the kulaks as a class” or the violent “ complete collectivization,” nor about the curtailment of the NEP (unlike Bukharin, who from 1930 began to theoretically substantiate Stalin’s new policy, and in 1937, in his letter to future party leaders, swore that for 8 years he had no disagreements with Stalin , E. A. Preobrazhensky condemned Stalin’s policies at the Lubyanka in 1936). However, the contradictions of the NEP strengthened the anti-NEP sentiments of the lower and middle sections of the party leadership.

NEP in industry

From the resolution of the XII Congress of the RCP (b), April 1923:

Renaissance state industry Given the general economic structure of our country, it will necessarily be in close dependence on the development of agriculture, the necessary working capital must arise in agriculture as a surplus of agricultural products over rural consumption before industry can take a decisive step forward. But it is equally important for state industry not to lag behind agriculture, otherwise, on the basis of the latter, a private industry would be created, which would ultimately absorb or dissolve the state one. Only an industry that gives more than it absorbs can be victorious. Industry living off the budget, that is, from agriculture, could not create a stable and long-term support for the proletarian dictatorship. The question of creating surplus value in state industry is a question of fate Soviet power, that is, about the fate of the proletariat.

Radical changes also took place in industry. The chapters were abolished, and in their place trusts were created - associations of homogeneous or interconnected enterprises that received full economic and financial independence, up to the right to issue long-term bond issues. By the end of 1922, about 90% of industrial enterprises were united into 421 trusts, with 40% of them being centralized and 60% of local subordination. The trusts themselves decided what to produce and where to sell the products. The enterprises that were part of the trust were withdrawn from state supplies and began purchasing resources on the market. The law provided that “the state treasury is not responsible for the debts of trusts.”

VSNKh, which lost the right to intervene in current activities enterprises and trusts, has become a focal point. His staff was sharply reduced. It was at that time that economic accounting appeared, in which an enterprise (after mandatory fixed contributions V the state budget) has the right to independently dispose of income from the sale of products, is itself responsible for the results of its economic activity, independently uses profits and covers losses. Under the conditions of the NEP, Lenin wrote, “state enterprises are transferred to the so-called economic accounting, that is, in fact, to a large extent to commercial and capitalist principles.”

Trusts had to allocate at least 20% of profits to the formation of reserve capital until it reached a value equal to half authorized capital(soon this standard was reduced to 10% of profits until it reached a third initial capital). And the reserve capital was used to finance the expansion of production and compensation for losses in economic activity. The bonuses received by members of the board and workers of the trust depended on the size of the profit.

The decree of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and the Council of People's Commissars of 1923 stated the following:

Syndicates began to emerge - voluntary associations of trusts on the basis of cooperation, engaged in sales, supply, lending, and foreign trade operations. By the end of 1922, 80% of the trust industry was syndicated, and by the beginning of 1928 there were 23 syndicates that operated in almost all industries, concentrating in their hands the bulk of wholesale trade. The board of syndicates was elected at a meeting of representatives of the trusts, and each trust could, at its discretion, transfer a greater or lesser part of its supply and sales to the management of the syndicate.

Implementation finished products, the purchase of raw materials, supplies, and equipment was carried out on a full-fledged market, through wholesale trade channels. A wide network has emerged commodity exchanges, fairs, trade enterprises.

In industry and other sectors, cash wages were restored, tariffs and wages were introduced, excluding equalization, and restrictions were lifted to increase wages with increased output. Labor armies were liquidated, compulsory labor service and the main restrictions on changing jobs were abolished. The organization of labor was built on the principles of material incentives, which replaced the non-economic coercion of “war communism.” The absolute number of unemployed people registered by labor exchanges increased during the NEP period (from 1.2 million people at the beginning of 1924 to 1.7 million people at the beginning of 1929), but the expansion of the labor market was even more significant (the number of workers and employees in all sectors of the national economy increased from 5.8 million in 1924 to 12.4 million in 1929), so that in fact the unemployment rate decreased.

A private sector emerged in industry and trade: some state-owned enterprises were denationalized, others were leased out; private individuals with no more than 20 employees were allowed to create their own industrial enterprises (later this “ceiling” was raised). Among the factories rented by “private owners” there were those that employed 200-300 people, and in general the private sector during the NEP period accounted for about a fifth of industrial production, 40-80% of retail trade and a small part of wholesale trade.

A number of enterprises were leased to foreign firms in the form of concessions. In 1926-27 There were 117 existing agreements of this kind. They covered enterprises that employed 18 thousand people and produced just over 1% of industrial output. In some industries, however, the share of concession enterprises and mixed joint stock companies, in which foreigners owned part of the share, was significant: in the mining of lead and silver - 60%; manganese ore - 85%; gold - 30%; in the production of clothing and toiletries - 22%.

In addition to capital, a flow of immigrant workers from all over the world was sent to the USSR. In 1922, the American garment workers' union and the Soviet government created the Russian-American Industrial Corporation (RAIK), to which six textile and clothing factories were transferred in Petrograd, four in Moscow.

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- sales, supply and credit cooperation - by the end of the 1920s, more than half of all peasant farms were covered. By the end of 1928, non-production cooperation various types, primarily peasant, covered 28 million people (13 times more than in 1913). In a socialized retail trade 60-80% came from cooperatives and only 20-40% from the state itself; in industry in 1928, 13% of all production came from cooperatives. There was cooperative legislation, lending, and insurance.

To replace the depreciated and actually already rejected by the turnover of Sovznak in 1922, the issue of a new monetary unit was started - chervonets, which had a gold content and exchange rate in gold (1 chervonets = 10 pre-revolutionary gold rubles = 7.74 g of pure gold). In 1924, the sovznaki, which were quickly being replaced by chervonets, stopped printing altogether and were withdrawn from circulation; that same year the budget was balanced and the use of money issue to cover government expenses; new treasury notes were issued - rubles (10 rubles = 1 chervonets). On foreign exchange market both within the country and abroad, chervonets were freely exchanged for gold and major foreign currencies at the pre-war exchange rate of the tsarist ruble (1 U.S. $= 1.94 rubles).

Reborn credit system. In 1921, the State Bank of the USSR was recreated and began lending to industry and trade on a commercial basis. In 1922-1925. a number of specialized banks were created: joint-stock banks, in which the shareholders were the State Bank, syndicates, cooperatives, private and even at one time foreign, for lending to certain sectors of the economy and regions of the country; cooperative - for lending to consumer cooperation; agricultural credit societies organized on shares, linked to the republican and central agricultural banks; mutual credit societies - for lending to private industry and trade; savings banks - to mobilize the population's savings. As of October 1, 1923, there were 17 independent banks operating in the country, and the State Bank’s share 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 State Bank's share in lending to the national economy decreased to 48%.

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

In just 5 years, from 1921 to 1926, the index of industrial production increased 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 increase in industrial production was 13 and 19%, respectively. In general, for the period 1921-1928. the average annual growth rate of 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 history of social relations. In industry, key positions were occupied by state trusts, in credit financial sector- state and cooperative banks, in agriculture - small peasant farms covered by the simplest types of cooperation. They turned out to be completely new under the conditions of NEP and economic functions states; The goals, principles and methods of government economic policy have changed radically. If previously the center directly established natural, technological proportions of reproduction by order, now it has moved on to regulating prices, trying to indirectly economic methods ensure balanced growth.

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

A broad campaign to reduce prices was launched by the government at the end of 1923, but 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 sphere of price regulation. The measures taken then turned out to be successful: wholesale prices for industrial goods decreased from October 1923 to May 1, 1924 by 26% and continued to decline further.

Throughout the subsequent period until the end of the NEP, the issue of prices continued to remain the core of state economic policy: raising them by trusts and syndicates threatened to repeat the sales crisis, while their excessive reduction, given the existence of a private sector along with the state sector, inevitably led to the enrichment of the private owner at the expense of state industry, to transfer of resources state enterprises into 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 mistakes in pricing policy, immediately “pointed to bad weather.”

But price regulation was carried out by a bureaucratic apparatus that was not sufficiently controlled by direct producers. The lack of democracy in the decision-making process regarding pricing became the “Achilles heel” of a market socialist economy and played a fatal role in the fate of the NEP.

No matter how brilliant the successes in the economy were, its rise was limited by strict limits. Reaching the pre-war level was not easy, but this also meant a new clash with the backwardness of yesterday's Russia, now isolated and surrounded by a world hostile to it. Moreover, the most powerful and wealthy capitalist powers began to strengthen again. American economists calculated that the national income per capita in the late 1920s in the USSR was less than 19% of the American one.

Political struggle during the NEP

Economic processes during the NEP period were imposed on political development and were largely determined by the latter. These processes throughout the entire period of Soviet power were characterized by a tendency toward dictatorship and authoritarianism. While Lenin was at the helm, one could speak of a “collective dictatorship”; he was a leader solely due to his 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 government agencies, but sometimes also peasant huts. However, with the beginning of the internal party struggle at the end of 1922, Trotsky’s rivals - Zinoviev, Kamenev and Stalin - not possessing his authority, contrasted him with the authority of Lenin and in a short time inflated him into a real cult - in order to gain the opportunity to proudly call themselves “faithful Leninists” and "Defenders of Leninism."

This was especially dangerous in combination with the dictatorship of the Communist Party. As Mikhail Tomsky, a senior Soviet leader, 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 the same 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 (the convicts were later pardoned). In the same year, 1922, more than two hundred of the largest representatives of Russian philosophical thought were sent abroad simply because they did not hide their disagreement with the Soviet system - this measure went down in history under the name “Philosophical Steamship.”

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 trade unions. In order to stop such attempts, the X Congress of the RCP (b) in 1921 adopted a resolution on party unity. According to this resolution, decisions made by the majority must be implemented by all party members, including those who disagree with them.

The consequence of one-party rule was the merging of the party and the government. The same people occupied the main positions in both the party (Politburo) and government agencies(SNK, All-Russian Central Executive Committee, etc.). At the same time, the personal authority of the people's commissars and the need in the conditions of the Civil War to make urgent, urgent decisions led to the fact that the center of power was concentrated not in the legislative body (the All-Russian Central Executive Committee), 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 20s than his place in the formal structure of state power. That is why, when speaking about figures of the 20s, we first of all name not their positions, but their surnames.

In parallel with the change in the position of the party in the country, the degeneration of the party itself took place. It is obvious that there will always be much more people willing to join the ruling party than to join the underground party, membership in which cannot provide any other privileges than iron bunks or a noose around the neck. At the same time, the party, having become the ruling party, began to need to increase its numbers in order to fill government posts at all levels. This led to the rapid growth 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 “co-opted” pseudo-communists, on the other, the growth of the party was spurred from time to time by mass recruitment, the most significant of which was the “Lenin Call” in 1924, after the death of Lenin. The inevitable consequence of this process was the dissolution of old, ideological Bolsheviks among young party members and not at all young neophytes. In 1927, out of 1,300 thousand people who were members of the party, only 8 thousand had pre-revolutionary experience; Most of the rest did not know communist theory at all.

Not only the intellectual and educational level, but also the moral level of the party decreased. In this regard, 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 are indicative. Out of 732 thousand, only 410 thousand members were retained 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 regime,” “selfishness,” “careerism,” “bourgeois lifestyle,” “decay in everyday life.”

In connection with the growth of the party, the initially inconspicuous position of secretary began to acquire increasing importance. Any secretary is a secondary position by definition. This is a person who ensures that the necessary formalities are observed during official events. Since April 1922, the Bolshevik Party had the position 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 according to various positions. Stalin received this position.

Soon the privileges of the upper layer of party members began to expand. Since 1926, this layer has received a special name - “nomenklatura”. This is how they began to call party-state positions included in the list of positions, the appointment to which was subject to approval in the Accounting and Distribution Department of the Central Committee.

The processes of bureaucratization of the party 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 became for him last year a full life. In May 1922, he was struck by the first blow - his brain was damaged, so the almost helpless Lenin was given a very gentle work schedule. In March 1923, a second attack occurred, after which Lenin dropped out of life altogether for six months, almost learning to pronounce words all over again. He had barely begun to recover from the second attack when the third and last one occurred in January 1924. As the autopsy showed, for the last almost two years of Lenin’s life, only one hemisphere of his brain was active.

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 letters to the congress, known as his “political testament” (December 1922 - January 1923), Lenin proposed expanding the Central Committee at the expense of the workers, choosing a new Central Control Commission (Central Control Commission) - from the proletarians, cutting back the enormously swollen and therefore ineffective RKI (Workers' -peasant inspection).

The note “Letter to the Congress” (known as “Lenin’s Testament”) had one more component - personal characteristics of the largest party leaders (Trotsky, Stalin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, Pyatakov). This part of the Letter is often interpreted as a search for a successor (heir), but Lenin, unlike Stalin, was never a sole dictator, he could not make 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, contained independent people who often disagreed with Lenin in their views. Therefore, there could be no question about any “heir” (and it was not Lenin who called the Letter to the Congress a “testament”). Assuming that the party would retain its collective leadership after him, Lenin gave mostly ambivalent characteristics to the prospective members of this leadership. There was only one definite indication in his Letter: the post of General Secretary gives Stalin too much power, which is dangerous given 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 the rank-and-file participants only in fragments, and the letter in which personal characteristics were given to the comrades-in-arms was not shown to the party by those closest to them at all. We agreed among ourselves that Stalin would promise to improve, and that was the end of the matter.

Even before Lenin’s physical death, at the end of 1922, a struggle began between his “heirs,” or rather, pushing Trotsky away from the helm. In the fall of 1923, the struggle took on an open character. In October, Trotsky addressed the Central Committee with a letter in which he pointed out the formation of a bureaucratic intra-party regime. A week later, a group of 46 old Bolsheviks wrote an open letter in support of Trotsky (“Statement 46”). The Central Committee, of course, responded with a decisive denial. The leading role in this was played by Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev. This was not the first time that heated disputes arose within the Bolshevik Party. But unlike previous discussions, this time the ruling faction actively used labeling. Trotsky was not refuted with reasonable arguments - he was simply accused of Menshevism, deviationism and other mortal sins. The substitution of labels for a real dispute is a new phenomenon: it did not exist before, but it will become increasingly common as the political process develops in the 20s.

Trotsky was defeated quite easily. The next party conference, held in January 1924, published a resolution on party unity (previously kept secret), and Trotsky was forced to remain silent. Until autumn. In the fall of 1924, however, he published the book “Lessons of October,” in which he unequivocally stated that he and Lenin made the revolution. Then Zinoviev and Kamenev “suddenly” remembered that before the VI Congress of the RSDLP(b) in July 1917, Trotsky was a Menshevik. In December 1924, Trotsky was removed from his post as People's Commissar of Military Affairs, but remained 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 the plan for the first five-year plan, but an inflated version drawn up by the Supreme Economic Council, not so much taking into account objective possibilities, but under the pressure of party slogans. In June 1929, mass collectivization began (which contradicted even the plan of the Supreme Economic Council) - it was carried out with widespread use coercive measures. In the autumn it was supplemented by forced grain procurements.

As a result of these measures, unification into collective farms really became widespread, which gave Stalin reason in November of the same 1929 to make a statement that the middle peasants joined collective farms. Stalin’s article was called “The Great Turning Point.” Immediately after this article, the next plenum of the Central Committee approved new, increased and accelerated plans for collectivization and industrialization..

Conclusions and Conclusions

The undoubted success of the NEP was the restoration of the destroyed economy, and if we take into account that after the revolution Russia lost highly qualified personnel (economists, managers, production workers), then the success of the new government becomes a “victory over devastation.” At the same time, the lack of those highly qualified personnel became the cause of miscalculations and mistakes.

Significant rates of economic growth, however, were achieved only due to the return to operation of pre-war capacities, because Russia only reached economic indicators pre-war years. The potential for further economic growth turned out to be extremely low. Private sector was not allowed to “commanding heights in the economy”, foreign investment was not welcomed, and investors themselves were in no particular hurry to come to Russia due to ongoing instability and the threat of nationalization of capital. The state was unable to make long-term capital-intensive investments using its own funds alone.

The situation in the village was also contradictory, where the “kulaks”, the most decisive and effective owners, were clearly oppressed. They had no incentive to do better.

NEP and culture

One cannot fail to mention the very important influence of the NEP, its influence on culture. The wealthy Nepmen - private traders, shopkeepers and artisans, not concerned with the romantic revolutionary spirit of universal happiness or opportunistic considerations about successfully serving the new government, found themselves in the leading roles during this period.

The new rich were of little interest in classical art - they lacked the education to understand it. They remembered their hungry childhood and there was no force that could stop the satisfaction of that childhood hunger. They set their own fashion.

Cabarets and restaurants became the main entertainment - a pan-European trend of that time. The Berlin cabarets were especially famous in the 1920s. One of the most famous couplet artists of the time was Mikhail Savoyarov.

The cabaret featured artists-couplets with simple song plots and simple rhymes and rhythms, performers of funny feuilletons, sketches, and entertainment. The artistic value of those works is highly controversial, and many of them have long been forgotten. But nevertheless, simple, unpretentious words and light musical motifs of some songs entered the cultural history of the country. And they not only entered, but began to be passed on from generation to generation, acquiring new rhymes, changing some words, merging with folk art. It was then that such popular songs as “Bagels”, “Lemons”, “Murka”, “Lanterns”, “The blue ball is spinning and spinning”...

These songs were repeatedly criticized and ridiculed for being apolitical, lacking ideas, bourgeois taste, and even outright vulgarity. But the longevity of these couplets proved their originality and talent. The author of the lyrics to the songs “Babliki” and “Lemonchiki” was the disgraced poet Yakov Yadov. And many other of these songs carry the same style: at the same time ironic, lyrical, poignant, with simple rhymes and rhythms - they are similar in style to “Bagels” and “Lemonchiki”. But the exact authorship has not yet been established. And all that is known about Yadov is that he composed a huge number of simple and very talented couplet songs of that period.

Light genres also reigned in dramatic theaters. And here not everything was kept within the required boundaries. Moscow Vakhtangov Studio, future theater named after. Vakhtangov, in 1922 turned to the production of Carlo Gozzi’s fairy tale “Princess Turandot”. It would seem that a fairy tale is such a simple and unpretentious material. The actors laughed and joked while they rehearsed. So, with jokes, sometimes very sharp, a performance appeared that was destined to become a symbol of the theater, a pamphlet performance, concealing within itself, behind the lightness of the genre, wisdom and a smile at the same time. Since then, there have been three different productions of this play. A somewhat similar story happened with another performance of the same theater - in 1926, Mikhail Bulgakov’s play “Zoyka’s Apartment” was staged there. The theater itself turned to the writer with a request to write a light vaudeville on a modern NEP theme. The vaudeville cheerful, seemingly unprincipled play hid serious social satire behind its external lightness, and the performance was banned by decision of the People's Commissariat of Education on March 17, 1929 with the wording: “For distortion of Soviet reality.”

In the 1920s, a real magazine boom began in Moscow. In 1922, several satirical humor magazines began to be published at once: “Crocodile”, “Satyricon”, “Smekhach”, “Splinter”, a little later, in 1923 - “Prozhektor” (under the newspaper “Pravda”); in the 1921/22 season, the magazine “Ekran” appeared, among the authors of which were A. Sidorov, P. Kogan, G. Yakulov, J. Tugendhold, M. Koltsov, N. Foregger, V. Mass, E. Zozulya and many others . In 1925, the famous publisher V. A. Reginin and poet V. I. Narbut founded the monthly “30 Days”. This entire press, in addition to news from working life, constantly publishes humoresques, funny, unpretentious stories, parody poems, and caricatures. But with the end of the NEP, their publication ends. Since 1930, Krokodil remained the only all-Union satirical magazine. The era of the NEP ended tragically, but the traces of this riotous time remained forever.

NEP

NEP is an economic policy that replaced the policy of “war communism” in Soviet Russia.

This abbreviation stands for "new economic policy". Surprisingly, the NEP became an entire era, although all stages of its existence fit into one decade: the new economic policy was adopted by the Tenth Congress of the RCP (b) in 1921.

The main goal of the proclamation of the NEP was the restoration of the national economy, destroyed by two fierce wars (First World War and Civil War).

Prerequisites for the emergence of the NEP

The state of Soviet Russia in 1921 was very unstable. The young country lay in ruins.

Immediately after the Great October Revolution, at the end of 1917, the US government stopped relations with Russia, and in 1918 the governments of England and France followed its example. Soon (in October 1919), the Supreme Council of the military alliance of the leading capitalist states - the Entente - announced the complete cessation of all economic ties with Soviet Russia. The attempted economic blockade was accompanied by military intervention. The blockade was lifted only in January 1920. Then an attempt was made by Western states to organize the so-called gold blockade: they refused to accept Soviet gold as means of payment in international payments.

The ideology of the Bolsheviks demanded a course towards socialism, but in order to implement this project it was necessary to first create a material, technical and socio-cultural basis for it.

The policy of war communism, carried out until 1921, turned the peasants against the new government, which was embodied for them mainly in the form of food detachments taking away grain. The food appropriation system caused the most discontent. It was time to restore the economy and change a lot. All this was the prerequisite for the emergence of the NEP.

The transition from the policy of war communism to the NEP

To relieve social tension, the Tenth Congress of the RCP(b) adopted a number of measures, the most important of which were:

Cancellation of surplus appropriation and replacing it with tax in kind;

Resolution of market relations and denationalization of small enterprises;

Abolition of a number of state monopolies and the introduction of legal guarantees for private property.

Allowing concession agreements with foreign companies (to improve the international situation).

The essence of the NEP

In general, the new economic policy was to establish a balance between planned and market instruments for regulating the country's economy.

The set of principles underlying the new economic policy allowed:

To ensure significant growth rates of the national economy in Soviet Russia,

Reduce the budget deficit;

Increase reserves of gold and foreign currency through active communication with foreign countries;

As a result, by 1924, the gold chervonets began to cost more than the pound sterling and the dollar.

Activities and contradictions of the NEP

Thanks to the NEP, in the 1920s. Commercial credit became widely used. Banks controlled mutual lending to business organizations and also regulated the size of commercial loans, which at the heyday of the NEP served at least 80% of the volume of all sales of goods.

Long-term lending also developed. The recovering industry required investment, and for this the first Soviet banks were created - the Commercial and Industrial Bank of the USSR and Electrobank.

For agricultural investment, long-term loans were provided by state credit institutions and credit cooperatives.

However, quite quickly the use of commercial credit created opportunities for unplanned redistribution of funds in areas of the national economy. This was a negative consequence of the measures taken.

The Land Code abolished the right of private ownership of land and subsoil in Soviet Russia, but regulated the leasing of land. The use of hired labor in agriculture was also allowed, however, with reservations: all able-bodied members of the farm had to work on an equal basis with hired workers, and if the farm itself was able to perform this work, then hiring hired labor was not allowed.

These measures in agriculture led to an increase in the proportion of “middle peasants” compared to the pre-war level, while the number of poor and rich decreased.

There were also contradictions in the implementation of these measures: on the one hand, the peasants had the opportunity to improve their well-being, but on the other hand, there was no point in developing the economy beyond a certain limit.

Trusts were created in the industrial sector. A trust is an association of enterprises that has complete economic and financial independence. Enterprises that were part of the trust stopped receiving government supplies and purchased resources on the market. The trusts were given the opportunity to decide for themselves what products to produce and where to sell them.

On the basis of the voluntary association of trusts, syndicates began to emerge - organizations engaged in sales, supply and lending on a cooperative basis.

The following peculiarities in the life of the country that remained from those times were completely eliminated:

Equalization (under the NEP, restrictions on increasing wages with productivity growth were lifted);

Labor armies (compulsory labor service was abolished during the NEP);

Restrictions on changing jobs.

The complex of these measures led to a dual effect: on the one hand, the number of unemployed increased, and on the other, the labor market expanded significantly.

Curtailment of the NEP

Already in the second half of the 1920s. the first symptoms of NEP coagulation appeared. Syndicates began to be liquidated in industry, and private capital began to be squeezed out of the main sectors of the economy. The creation of economic people's commissariats served as the beginning of the establishment of a rigid centralized system of economic management.

In principle, even at the stages of development and prosperity of the NEP (until the mid-1920s), the implementation of the new economic policy was quite contradictory, not without regard to the legacy of the era of war communism.

Traditional Soviet historiography determines the reasons for the collapse of the NEP complex economic factors. But a more careful analysis of the contradictions of the new economic policy allows us to assert that, first of all, the reasons for the collapse of the NEP were the contradictions between the requirements for the natural functioning of the economy and the political course of the top party leadership.

So, from the mid-1920s. measures are beginning to be actively taken to limit, and soon completely oust, private producers.

Finally, since 1928, the economy finally became planned: the development of the national economy began to take effect.

The new course, which put economics at the forefront, meant that the era of the NEP was becoming a thing of the past.

Legally, the new economic policy was completed on October 11, 1931, with the adoption of a resolution banning private trade.

Results of the NEP

The implementation of the new economic policy achieved its intended goal: the destroyed economy was restored. Taking into account the fact that highly qualified personnel were either oppressed or forced to leave the country because of their social origin, the emergence of a new generation of economists, managers and production workers can also be considered a significant success of the new government.

Impressive successes in the restoration and development of the national economy during the NEP era were achieved in the context of fundamentally new social relations. This makes the country's economic recovery environment truly unique.

During the NEP era, key positions in industry belonged to state trusts, in the credit and financial sphere - primarily to state banks, in agriculture, small peasant farms were the basis.

The meaning of NEP

Paradoxically, from the height of history, the NEP seems rather a short step, retreating from the socio-economic development programmed by the revolution, and therefore, without denying its achievements, one cannot help but say that other measures could lead to the same results.

And the uniqueness of the era of new economic policy lies primarily in its influence on culture.

As mentioned above, after the Great October Revolution, Russia lost most of the intellectual elite of society. The general cultural and spiritual level of the population fell sharply.

The new era puts forward new heroes - among the Nepmen who rose to the highest social levels, the lion's share are made up of wealthy private traders, former shopkeepers and handicraftsmen, who were absolutely not touched by the romance of revolutionary trends.

These “heroes of modern times” did not have enough education to understand classical art, but they became trendsetters. In accordance with this, cabarets and restaurants became the main entertainment of the NEP. However, one can make a reservation that this was a pan-European trend of those years, but it was in Soviet Russia, sandwiched between war communism that was reluctantly receding into the past and the approaching dark era of repression, that it made a special impression.

The artistic value of performances by verse artists in cabarets with simple song plots and primitive rhymes, of course, is more than debatable. However, it was precisely these unpretentious texts and motifs that entered the cultural history of the young country, and then began to be passed on from generation to generation, merging with folk art in their best examples.

The general lightness of the era was reflected even in the genres of dramatic theaters. In 1922, the Moscow Vakhtangov Studio (now the Vakhtangov Theater) staged the fairy tale “Princess Turandot” by the Italian Carlo Gozzi. And in the dual atmosphere of reigning lightness and forebodings of the future, a performance was born that became a symbol of the theater.

The 1920s also became the time of a real magazine boom in the new capital new country- in Moscow. Since 1922, several satirical and humorous magazines began to be published that immediately gained popularity (“Splinter”, “Satyricon”, “Smekhach”). All these magazines were aimed at publishing not only news from the life of workers and peasants, but primarily published humoresques, parodies, and caricatures.

However, their publication ends with the end of the NEP. In 1930, the only satirical magazine remained “Crocodile”. The era of the NEP is over, but the traces of that time are forever preserved in the history of the great country.

By the beginning of 1921, the Red Army had established complete control over a significant part of the territory of the former Russian Empire, with the exception of Finland, Poland, the Baltic states, and Bessarabia. But the internal situation of the Soviet state forced the Bolshevik leadership to abandon “war communism” and move to the NEP.

Reasons for the transition to the NEP:

1) The socio-economic crisis caused by the First World War and the Civil War, the policy of “war communism”. Industrial production decreased in 1920 compared to 1913 by 7 times, agricultural production by a third. Total population losses for 1914-1920 amounted to more than 20 million people. There was massive unemployment. Big cities depopulated. The economic devastation was aggravated by the drought of 1920-1921. Famine gripped the most fertile regions - the Volga region, southern Ukraine, Crimea, the North Caucasus, and the Southern Urals. According to various sources, from 1 to 8 million people became victims of famine.

2) Political crisis, expressed in a decrease in popular support for the Bolshevik government. Dissatisfaction with surplus appropriation became the cause of numerous peasant uprisings. The most widespread uprising was in the Tambov province under the leadership of A.S. Antonov (“Antonovschina”) and the uprising in Western Siberia. At the beginning of 1921, spontaneous strikes took place in Petrograd and a number of other cities. Unrest began in the army and navy. In March 1921, a sailors' uprising broke out in Kronstadt, during which political demands were put forward. All these protests were suppressed, but the threat of losing their social support forced the country's leadership to abandon the policy of “war communism” and look for new ways.

The essence and main features of the NEP.

The X Congress of the RCP(b) in March 1921 decided to change the course of domestic policy. The developer of this course, V.I. Lenin called it the “new economic policy.” Its essence was a partial resolution market economy while maintaining control in the hands of the state.

Initially, the NEP was considered by the Bolsheviks as a temporary measure. Then the NEP was assessed as one of the possible paths to socialism through the coexistence of socialist and market economies and the gradual displacement of non-socialist economic forms.

The main goal of the NEP is to restore the country's economy and strengthen the social base of Bolshevik power on this basis.

The NEP began with the decision to replace surplus appropriation with a food tax, adopted at the X Congress of the RCP(b) in March 1921. The food tax was 2 times less than appropriation; from 1924 it took monetary form. Its size was announced in advance and could not be increased during the year. The surplus remaining with the peasants was allowed to be sold at market prices. Land lease and rental were allowed work force. As a result of the measures taken, agriculture in 1925 restored its pre-war levels.

In industry and trade, individuals were allowed to open small and lease medium-sized enterprises. Large enterprises united into trusts that operated on the basis of self-financing and self-sufficiency. To increase labor productivity, the material interest of workers was stimulated. Instead of in-kind rewards, monetary system, based on tariff schedule. Labor conscription was abolished. Cooperation developed.

In 1922-1924. under the leadership of People's Commissar of Finance G.Ya. Sokolnikova was held currency reform, a solid appeared currency unit- golden chervonets. Payments for services (communications, transport, utilities) were introduced.

Monetary reform helped attract foreign investment in the form of concessions - enterprises with foreign capital. True, concessions, which were created mainly in the extractive industries, produced about 1% of industrial output.

As a result of the new economic policy in 1926, industry also restored to pre-war levels. Living conditions of urban and rural population have improved.

Contradictions in the implementation of the NEP and its collapse.

Along with the successes, contradictions emerged in the implementation of the NEP, due to which in the late 1920s. it was folded:

1) The main thing was the contradiction between politics (socialist) and economics (capitalist). The Bolshevik leadership could not ignore the mood in the party and society. The attitude towards the NEP was negative, because it was considered a return to the old order (they asked “what did they fight for in the civil war?”). The attitude towards the Nepmen was especially negative - the “new bourgeoisie”, which earned much more than the working people. The concept of “NEP frenzy” appeared - the desire to flaunt one’s wealth, similar to the behavior of the “new Russians”. The NEP reality was very different from the Bolshevik ideology with its idea of ​​equality.

2) The contradiction between industry and agriculture. Agriculture recovered faster than industry. Meanwhile, the Bolsheviks were interested precisely in the accelerated development of industry. For its development, funds were needed that were withdrawn from agriculture through “price scissors”, i.e. artificially inflating prices for manufactured goods, and understating prices for agricultural goods (primarily bread). The peasants did not want to sell grain at low prices and buy low-quality manufactured goods. All this caused constant grain procurement crises, known as NEP crises.

3) Contradiction between rich and poor. Having proclaimed a classless society, the Bolsheviks tried to equalize everyone. In the taxation system, the main burden fell on private entrepreneurs in the city and kulaks in the countryside. The poor were exempt from paying taxes, the middle peasants paid half. The kulaks, in order to free themselves from the tax burden, split up their farms. Thus, the marketability of agriculture decreased. In fact, during the NEP years, peasants for the first time were able to eat to their fill, supplying only excess amounts of food to the market.

Low marketability led to a decrease in the volume of exports of agricultural products, and, accordingly, the import of equipment for industry. At the end of the 1920s. the international situation has worsened, a new World War became obvious. The NEP allowed our country to restore its economy, but could not solve the problem of modernizing the country in a short time. Therefore, Stalin and his entourage decided to curtail the NEP, which was replaced by industrialization and collectivization.

After seven years of the First World War and the Civil War, the country's situation was catastrophic. It has lost more than a quarter of its national wealth. There was a shortage of basic food products.

According to some reports, human losses since the beginning of the First World War from combat, hunger and disease, “red” and “white” terror amounted to 19 million people. About 2 million people emigrated from the country, and among them were almost all representatives of the political, financial and industrial elite of pre-revolutionary Russia.

Until the fall of 1918, huge supplies of raw materials and food were carried out, according to peace terms, to Germany and Austria-Hungary. Retreating from Russia, the interventionists took with them furs, wool, timber, oil, manganese, grain, and industrial equipment worth many millions of gold rubles.

Dissatisfaction with the policy of “war communism” became more and more evident in the villages. In 1920, one of the most massive peasant insurgent movements unfolded under the leadership of Antonov - “Antonovshchina”.

Dissatisfaction with the Bolshevik policies also spread in the army. Kronstadt, the largest naval base of the Baltic Fleet, “the key to Petrograd,” rose up in arms. The Bolsheviks took emergency and brutal measures to eliminate the Kronstadt rebellion. A state of siege was introduced in Petrograd. An ultimatum was sent to the Kronstadters, in which those who were ready to surrender were promised to spare their lives. Army units were sent to the walls of the fortress. However, the attack on Kronstadt launched on March 8 ended in failure. On the night of March 16-17 on already thin ice Gulf of Finland The 7th Army (45 thousand people) under the command of M.N. moved to storm the fortress. Tukhachevsky. Delegates from the Tenth Congress of the RCP(b), sent from Moscow, also took part in the offensive. By the morning of March 18, the performance in Kronstadt was suppressed.

The Soviet government responded to all these challenges with the NEP. It was an unexpected and strong move.

History.RF: NEP, infographic video

HOW MANY YEARS LENIN GAVE NEP

The expression “Seriously and for a long time.” From the speech of the Soviet People's Commissar of Agriculture Valerian Valerianovich Osinsky (pseudonym of V.V. Obolensky, 1887-1938) at the X Conference of the RCP (b) on May 26, 1921. This is how he defined the prospects for the new economic policy - NEP.

The words and position of V.V. Osinsky are known only from the reviews of V.I. Lenin, who in his final speech (May 27, 1921) said: “Osinsky gave three conclusions. The first conclusion is “seriously and for a long time.” And; “seriously and for a long time - 25 years.” I'm not such a pessimist."

Later, speaking with a report “On the internal and foreign policy Republic" at the IX All-Russian Congress of Soviets, V.I. Lenin said about the NEP (December 23, 1921): “We are pursuing this policy seriously and for a long time, but, of course, as has already been correctly noted, not forever.”

It is usually used in the literal sense - thoroughly, fundamentally, firmly.

ABOUT REPLACEMENT OF PRODRAZAPERSTERY

The decree of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee “On replacing food and raw material allocation with a tax in kind”, adopted on the basis of the decision of the Tenth Congress of the RCP (b) “On replacing appropriation with a tax in kind” (March 1921), marked the beginning of the transition to a new economic policy.

1. To ensure correct and calm farming based on freer disposal of the farmer with the products of his labor and his economic means, to strengthen peasant farm and raising its productivity, as well as in order to accurately establish the state obligations falling on farmers, appropriation, as a method of state procurement of food, raw materials and fodder, is replaced by a tax in kind.

2. This tax should be less than that imposed hitherto through appropriation. The amount of the tax should be calculated so as to cover the most necessary needs of the army, urban workers and the non-agricultural population. total amount the tax should be constantly reduced as the restoration of transport and industry allows the Soviet government to receive agricultural products in exchange for factory and handicraft products.

3. The tax is levied in the form of a percentage or share of the products produced on the farm, based on the harvest, the number of eaters on the farm and the presence of livestock on it.

4. The tax must be progressive; the percentage of deductions for farms of middle peasants, low-income owners and for farms of urban workers should be reduced. The farms of the poorest peasants may be exempt from some, and in exceptional cases from all types of taxes in kind.

Diligent peasant owners who increase the sowing area on their farms, as well as increase the productivity of farms as a whole, receive benefits for the implementation of the tax in kind. (...)

7. Responsibility for fulfilling the tax is assigned to each individual owner, and the bodies of Soviet power are instructed to impose penalties on everyone who has not complied with the tax. Circular liability is abolished.

To control the application and implementation of the tax, organizations of local peasants are formed according to groups of payers different sizes tax

8. All supplies of food, raw materials and fodder remaining with farmers after they have fulfilled the tax are at their full disposal and can be used by them to improve and strengthen their economy, to increase personal consumption and for exchange for products of factory and handicraft industries and agricultural production. Exchange is allowed within the limits of local economic turnover, both through cooperative organizations and in markets and bazaars.

9. Those farmers who wish to hand over the surplus remaining to them after completing the tax to the state, in exchange for these voluntarily surrendered surpluses, should be provided with consumer goods and agricultural implements. For this purpose, a state permanent stock of agricultural implements and consumer goods is created, both from domestically produced products and from products purchased abroad. For the latter purpose, part of the state gold fund and part of the harvested raw materials are allocated.

10. Supply of the poorest rural population is carried out in state order according to special rules. (...)

Directives of the CPSU and the Soviet government on economic issues. Sat. documents. M.. 1957. T. 1

LIMITED FREEDOM

The transition from “war communism” to the NEP was proclaimed by the Tenth Congress of the Russian Communist Party on March 8-16, 1921.

In the agricultural sector, surplus appropriation was replaced by a lower tax in kind. In 1923‑1924 it was allowed to pay tax in kind in food and money. Private trade in surplus was allowed. The legalization of market relations entailed a restructuring of the entire economic mechanism. The hiring of labor in the village was facilitated, and land rental was allowed. However tax policy(how more farming, the higher the tax) led to the fragmentation of farms. The kulaks and middle peasants, dividing farms, tried to get rid of high taxes.

The denationalization of small and medium-sized industry was carried out (transfer of enterprises from state ownership to private lease). Limited freedom of private capital in industry and trade was allowed. The use of hired labor was allowed, and the possibility of creating private enterprises became possible. The largest and most technically developed factories and plants united into state trusts that operated on self-support and self-sufficiency (“Khimugol”, “State Trust of Machine-Building Plants”, etc.). Metallurgy, the fuel and energy complex, and partly transport were initially supplied by the state. Cooperation developed: consumer agricultural, cultural and commercial.

Equal wages, characteristic of the Civil War, were replaced by a new incentive tariff policy that took into account the qualifications of workers, the quality and quantity of products produced. The card system for distributing food and goods was abolished. The “ration” system has been replaced by a monetary form of wages. Universal labor conscription and labor mobilizations were abolished. Large fairs were restored: Nizhny Novgorod, Baku, Irbit, Kiev, etc. Trade exchanges opened.

In 1921-1924 financial reform was carried out. Created banking system: National Bank, a network of cooperative banks, a commercial and industrial bank, a bank for foreign trade, a network of local communal banks, etc. Direct and indirect taxes(commercial, income, agricultural, excise taxes on consumer goods, local taxes), as well as fees for services (transport, communications, public utilities and etc.).

In 1921, monetary reform began. At the end of 1922, a stable currency was released into circulation - the Soviet chervonets, which was used for short-term lending in industry and trade. Chervonets was provided with gold and other easily sold valuables and goods. One chervonets was equivalent to 10 pre-revolutionary gold rubles, and on the world market it cost about 6 dollars. To cover the budget deficit, the old currency continued to be issued - depreciating Soviet notes, which were soon replaced by the chervonets. In 1924, instead of Sovznak, copper and silver coins and treasury notes were issued. During the reform, it was possible to eliminate the budget deficit.

The NEP led to a rapid economic recovery. The economic interest that appeared among peasants in the production of agricultural products made it possible to quickly saturate the market with food and overcome the consequences of the hungry years of “war communism.”

However, already at the early stage of the NEP, recognition of the role of the market was combined with measures to abolish it. Most Communist Party leaders viewed the NEP as a “necessary evil,” fearing that it would lead to the restoration of capitalism.

Fearful of the NEP, the party and state leaders took measures to discredit it. Official propaganda treated the private trader in every possible way, and the image of the “NEPman” as an exploiter, a class enemy, was formed in the public consciousness. Since the mid-1920s. measures to curb the development of the NEP gave way to a course towards its curtailment.

NEPMANS

So what was he like, a NEP man of the 20s? This social group was formed at the expense of former employees of commercial and industrial private enterprises, millers, clerks - people who had certain skills in commercial activities, as well as employees of government offices at various levels, who initially combined their official service with illegal commercial activities. The ranks of the Nepmen were also replenished by housewives, demobilized Red Army soldiers, workers who found themselves on the street after the closure of industrial enterprises, and “downsized” employees.

In its political, social and economic situation representatives of this layer differed sharply from the rest of the population. According to the legislation in force in the 1920s, they were deprived of voting rights, the opportunity to teach their children in the same schools with children of other social groups, could not legally publish their own newspapers or promote their views in any other way, and were not conscripted into military service. army, were not members of trade unions and did not hold positions in the state apparatus...

The group of entrepreneurs who used hired labor both in Siberia and in the USSR as a whole was extremely small - 0.7 percent of total number urban population(1). Their incomes were tens of times higher than those of ordinary citizens...

Entrepreneurs of the 20s were distinguished by amazing mobility. M. Shaginyan wrote: “The Nepmen are leaving. They magnetize vast Russian spaces, moving around them at courier speed, now to the extreme south (Transcaucasia), now to the far north (Murmansk, Yeniseisk), often back and forth without respite” (2).

In terms of culture and education, the social group of “new” entrepreneurs differed little from the rest of the population and included a wide variety of types and characters. The majority were “nepmen-democrats,” as described by one of the authors of the 20s, “nimble, greedy, strong-minded and strong-headed guys” for whom “the air of the bazaar was more useful and profitable than the atmosphere of a cafe.” In the event of a successful deal, the “bazaar Nepman” “grunts joyfully,” and when the deal falls through, “from his lips comes a juicy, strong, like himself, Russian “word.” Here “mother” sounds in the air often and naturally.” “The well-bred Nepmen,” as described by the same author, “in American bowler hats and boots with mother-of-pearl buttons, made the same billion-dollar transactions in the twilight of a cafe, where subtle conversation was conducted on subtle delicacy.”

E. Demchik. “New Russians”, 1920s. Homeland. 2000, No. 5