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The following year, however, brought yet another change of course. In early 1928 Stalin’s rhetoric against the ‘right deviation’ began to include talk of a showdown with both kulaks and Nepmen. The state used administrative measures to crack down on private entrepreneurs, and it increased business taxes exponentially. If a Nepman somehow scraped together enough to pay an initial levy the tax-collector doubled the bill on his next visit. The state even applied a retroactive tax to those who had already gone out of business. Those who could not pay had their possessions seized and were thrown into the street; they lost access to ration cards, housing, and other public services. The entire process could take as little as three days.

Their fate as lishentsy aroused scant sympathy. NEP had brought back not only the market, but also prostitution, gambling, drugs, and other affronts to public morality. The fact that many Nepmen flaunted their wealth caused deep anger. Moreover, the preferential treatment the state gave the trained specialists, engineers, and factory managers from the old regime, who were technically not Nepmen per se, did nothing to make NEP more popular with the masses. In a different vein, a large number of Russians distrusted the profit motive and operated from the belief that personal enrichment can come only at the expense of another. The prevailing prices beyond the means of most citizens certainly reinforced this view. In the end, Nepmen became the focus of all these resentments.

The lowest level of the economy experienced additional problems. Stricter cost-accounting in reopened factories and the demobilization of six million Red Army soldiers increased unemployment from 640,000 in 1923 to more than 1.3 million in 1929. In addition, rural poverty drove the desperate into the cities despite the shortage of jobs. Moscow, for example, gained 100,000 new residents per year. Not surprisingly, the major urban centres experienced acute housing problems: not enough spaces and chronic disrepair in overcrowded, occupied units. The homeless population overwhelmed urban social services. Gangs of homeless orphans, the besprizorniki, in combination with the unemployed, contributed to a serious rise in crime as both groups fed an expanding corps of thieves, petty hoodlums, and prostitutes.

The situation, however, was not universally bleak. Workers’ real wages rose steadily, albeit slowly, throughout the decade. By the late 1920s the shortages of goods and services were far less serious than at the beginning of NEP. The Soviet state could point to legitimate improvements in public health, working conditions, and infant mortality rates. And if workers still devoted too much of their income and energy to acquiring housing, food, and clothing, the standard of living stood well above that of 1918–21.

The village underwent its own transformation. By 1921 millions had acquired private holdings from the seizure of land belonging to the nobility, Church, crown, and richer peasants. As a result, the number of farms rose sharply, but the average size fell. In addition, the peasant commune—subjected to a frontal assault in the Stolypin reforms—reappeared. And when the commune reinstituted traditional, collective modes of cultivation, agriculture regressed technologically. Inefficient strip-farming, along with the primitive three-field system of crop rotation, once again predominated. In 1928 more than five million households utilized the traditional wooden plough, the sokha; the scythe and sickle still reaped half the annual harvest. Such backwardness of technique meant a low yield per acre, which in turn aggravated the long-standing peasant ‘land hunger’. With more mouths to feed than such agriculture could support, the village had to push its marginal elements towards the city.

This village economics both influenced and was influenced by other realities. Social differentiation in the rural areas narrowed;as extremes of income closed, categories such as kulak, middle peasant, and poor peasant became blurred. Moreover, the Soviet state had only a minimal administrative presence in the countryside. After grain requisitioning ended in 1921, the villages had recouped much of their pre-revolutionary insularity and control over internal affairs. Although rural soviets formally held power, the peasant commune actually exercised the principal authority over day-to-day economics and law. And it was not until 1925 that the Communist Party made a serious attempt to increase membership in its rural organizations. In short, the Russian village—historically separated from and suspicious of the towns—closed ranks. In 1921–9, it identified with its own past and its own interests, not with Bolshevik visions of a revolutionary transformation.

‘The New Soviet Man’