6 - Building a new state and society: NEP, 1921–1928

Summary

As 1921 dawned, the Bolsheviks could proclaim themselves victors in the civil war and celebrate an accomplishment that would stand as one of the great triumphs in official lore for the rest of the Soviet era. At the same time they presided over a nation whose borders were uncertain and whose peasantry protested ever more aggressively against grain requisitioning and other measures of the civil war that continued beyond the conflict itself. In fact, growing opposition to these exactions was the principal development that convinced Lenin to change course in the direction of what soon became known as the New Economic Policy. By February, in Tambov province alone, tens of thousands of peasant fighters faced Bolshevik commanders who could not be certain of the loyalty of their own troops. Similar peasant violence gripped many other regions, and some areas, notably the lower Volga provinces and Siberia, were not pacified until the summer of 1922. In Moscow, Petrograd and other principal cities, diminishing food rations in the winter of 1920–1 sparked strikes among workers who had backed the Bolsheviks during the civil war. Mutiny at the Kronstadt naval base in March 1921 may have delivered the severest shock, given that the sailors’ support for the Bolsheviks reached back to 1917. But the inflamed countryside had already convinced Lenin that a new approach was required, and he made this clear in March to delegates at the Tenth Party Congress who approved what turned out to be the first major plank of the New Economic Policy.