New Economic Policy

New Economic Policy

1. 1: Aims

   • Meet urgent need for food
   • To have some capitalism to keep communism alive
   • Pacify the workers and sailors and peasants
   • Increase industrial output

2. 2: Impact on industry

   • "The NEP turned Moscow into a vast market place" Emma Goldman 1924
   • Nepmen-a class of many classes that gained from NEP-hated.
     • Had 75% share of retail trade, whilst the state had 15%, co-op has 10% by 1923
       • Shows that they are much more efficient and effective- damning for state government
         • Despite much smaller proportion of workforce....
   • Still held commanding heights of the economy
     • Proportion of industrial workforce
       • 12% private enterprise
         • 2
       • 85% state enterprises
         • avg 155 workers in each factor
       • Co-op 3%
         • 15
   • High unemployment in urban areas
   • Factory output almost doubles from 2004m roubles in 1921 to 4005m in 1923

3. 3: Impact on agriculture

   • "NEP as a necessary concession to the peasants to save the smychka- the worker-peasant alliance on which the revolution would depend"
   • Bumper harvests of 1922 and 1923
   • Trotsky, scissors crisis
     • Widening gap between deflated agricultural prices and rising prices for consumer goods
       • As price of manufactures rose, peasantry reduced grain sales to state depots
       • Affects workers too
   • Grain harvest boosted from 37.6m 1921 to 56.6m in 1923
   • Half of peasants farms belonged to agricultural co-op by 1927
     • or TOZes
   • 10% of grain tax in kind
     • Allows grain surplus to be sold on market

4. 4: Marxist features

   • The return of private trade was a betrayal of the revolution: the "slippery slope that led back to capitalism"
   • Communists clung to power and so preserved the revolution
   • Peasants were encouraged to join co-operatives or collective farms via agronomic aid
   • "First sign of the degeneration of Bolshevism" Trotsky
   • Bukharin and Zinoviev agree with NEP
   • Ban on factions 1921
     • More central, less criticism
       • Dictatorship

5. Key features

   • More local economic decisions
   • Public markets
   • Money
   • Peasant tax in kind