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Bukharin countered in 1925. He argued that the Preobrazhenskii plan risked alienating the peasants, and he reiterated the logic of the smychka. Not exploiting but taxing a prosperous peasantry made more economic and political sense. For Bukharin, industrialization would best result from a healthy economy that was reinvigorating itself in stages from the bottom upward. In this spirit he borrowed a phrase attributed to François Guizot that would haunt him politically: hoping to drive home the importance of grass-roots prosperity for long-term economic growth, Bukharin encouraged the peasants to ‘enrich yourselves’. He warned that investment in heavy industry, as Preobrazhenskii proposed, was suicidal: such ventures required several years to produce a return, and in the interim the Soviet economy would collapse. Investment in the production of consumer goods, he reasoned, was more rational in an impoverished country that needed a rapid return on its limited capital. Preobrazhenskii replied that Bukharin’s more gradual tempo posed the larger danger. What was left of the national economy would erode while implementing it.

Stalin was not simply opportunistic: he too was a proponent of heavy industrialization in 1924–5, but in his own way. At that time Stalin was politically aligned with Bukharin, and he allowed Bukharin the main role in articulating their public position against the opposition. It is doubly significant, however, that Stalin’s formula of ‘socialism in one country’ in December 1924 ascribed primary importance to the development of heavy industry. Of even greater importance, before 1925 had ended, Stalin took special care to distance himself publicly from Bukharin’s slogan ‘enrich yourselves’, which opponents of Bukharin denounced as excessively sympathetic to the kulaks.

It is, of course, beyond question that Stalin wanted fervently to become party leader in the 1920s, but this does not mean that he desired only power, free of ideological or policy preferences. Something far more complex guided his behaviour. Stalin adjusted his short-term course of action several times during the decade in response to manifold crises, but the same can be said of all party leaders. More significant is his unwavering commitment to certain ideas—above all, an ongoing preference for heavy industry and an abiding fear that kulaks withholding grain from the market could undermine the state and its programmes. Equally consistent was his antidote of using state power to deal with recalcitrant social elements. Thus, when Stalin attacked the right opposition in late 1927–early 1928, this marked an assault on his remaining political rivals and an intensification of a position he had defined by mid-decade. In early 1928, when he blamed the kulaks for the grain shortage (and, by extension, for jeopardizing the industrialization programme) he certainly brought his ideas more clearly into public view, but they were nothing new. The Stalinist tempo of industrialization and collectivization would later outstrip anything Trotsky and Preobrazhenskii had envisioned, but it was foreshadowed in the positions he established earlier against gradualism in industrialization and against NEP agriculture.

The full scope of economics, however, reached far beyond policy-making at the national level. Local considerations loomed large, for NEP pulled the state and society in contradictory and frequently conflicting directions. It ended outright starvation, but not hard times. It also renewed social antagonisms: most Russians still struggled to subsist, while private traders—the Nepmen—often made exorbitant profits and enjoyed a life-style of conspicuous consumption.

The petulance of lower officials, in combination with a limited enthusiasm at the top, produced an inconsistent implementation of NEP in various regions of the country. Private trade was legal but not secure. Some local officials disobeyed national directives and arrested Nepmen on the basis of laws already repealed, or simply on their own whim. In 1923–4, as Lenin lay dying, the national leadership responded to public resentment against Nepmen by arbitrarily closing 300,000 private enterprises. This proved short-sighted: by late 1924 it was clear that the state itself could not provide many of the services it had eliminated. In some locales, driving out the private traders had closed up all supplies; areas called ‘trade deserts’ sprang up where Nepmen had previously operated. But the period 1925–7—not coincidentally the high point of Bukharin’s influence—brought a policy reversal; it was during these years that the Soviet state showed its greatest tolerance of private enterprise under NEP. Understandably sceptical of resuming business at first, many Nepmen had to be reconvinced of the state’s sincerity, but by the end of 1927 the market was in full swing again.