This was in fact what the government did during 1921, while keeping heavy industry, banking and foreign trade in the hands of the state. Taken together, these measures became known as the New Economic Policy (NEP). In the urban markets the results were apparent immediately. When a hero of the novelist Andrei Platonov returned to his native town in 1921:
At first he thought the Whites must be in town. At the station was a café where they were selling white rolls without ration cards or queuing.... In the shop he came across all the normal equipment of trade, once seen in his long forgotten youth: counters under glass, shelves along the walls, proper scales instead of steelyards, courteous assistants instead of supply officials, a lively crowd of purchasers, and stocks of food which breathed an air of well-being.
Although some private trade recovered remarkably quickly, in general the economy was still in deep crisis. Years of war, conscription and food requisitioning had devastated agriculture, particularly in the most fertile regions. On top of this, the Volga basin experienced drought in 1920 and 1921. Unprotected by any reserves, peasant households faced two very poor harvests in succession. The result was famine on a scale that the government simply could not meet. For the one and only time, it allowed direct foreign aid inside Soviet Russia. An international relief committee was formed, which included prominent Russian non-Communists (who were all arrested once the emergency was over). But in spite of its efforts, probably about 5 million people died.
Industry, too, was in a desperate state. In the major branches of manufacture, output in 1921 was a fifth or less of the 1913 level: in the case of iron and steel it was actually below 5 per cent. The number of workers employed to generate this output did not fall below 40 per cent of the 1913 level, and here lay one of the major problems of the new era. For these underemployed workers were soon joined by a flood of new job-seekers, heading in from the countryside as soon as there was any prospect of a job, and also by millions of former soldiers demobilized from the Red Army. They joined the labour market at the very time when industrial concerns were having to adjust to the new conditions. Whether they were nationalized or private firms made no difference: henceforth there were to be no direct state subsidies. That meant the expenditure for fuel, raw materials, wages and further investment had to be met out of sales revenue. Firms had to balance their books, or they could well go out of business. This was a reality which workers, party and trade unions had to recognize.
The industrial recovery thus started on a very shaky basis. Initially this led to an imbalance in the terms of trade with agriculture. In spite of the famine, the ploughing and sowing of underused fields proved to be a much faster process than the re-equipment of damaged and dilapidated factories. By the summer of 1923 the shortage of industrial products in relation to agricultural ones had reached such a pitch that the ratio of industrial to agricultural prices stood at more than three times its 1913 level. What this meant in practice was that peasants who sold their produce on the market were not thereby raising enough revenue to buy the industrial goods they wanted. The danger was that repeated experiences of this kind would induce them to cut back their sowings–as they had done during the civil war–and food shortages would resume. Industrial products would then remain unsold, to everyone’s mutual disadvantage. Although the fact was not immediately recognized, this ‘scissors crisis’ (as it was called in reference to the divergent parabolas of industrial and agricultural prices) proved to pose a fundamental threat to NEP. The disputes generated by it formed the first stage in the long-term debate on the economic development strategy of the Soviet government (see below, pages 136–40).
Another result of the uncertain industrial recovery was that the workers, who were theoretically the inheritors of the new society, in practice found it very difficult to understand their place within it. The large reserve of unemployed ensured that their wages remained low: in 1925, Sokolnikov, people’s commissar for finance, admitted that the pay of miners, metal workers and engine drivers was still lower than it had been before 1914. This in turn meant that workers’ housing and nourishment was often inadequate. The factory committee of a cement works in Smolensk reported, for example, in 1929: ‘Every day there are many complaints about apartments: many workers have families of six and seven people, and live in one room.... [We] have about 500 applications from workers who do not have apartments.’ Food supplies, though far better than before 1922, fluctuated and so prices were unstable: again from Smolensk it was reported that wheat flour doubled in price and rye flour trebled between the end of 1926 and early 1929. ‘Workers are being inadequately supplied by consumers’ cooperatives [run by the soviets to cushion the workers from the worst effects of price fluctuation] … , and as a result, private traders virtually occupy a dominant position in the market.’ It is understandable that workers consequently felt resentment about the peasants, who charged them such high prices, and about the specialists and officials, who were paid so much better. How was this possible in a society allegedly ‘moving towards socialism’ under the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’?
The structure of industrial enterprises was also a disappointment to workers who recalled the heady days of October. All remnants of ‘workers’ control’ had now finally disappeared. Factory administration was once more hierarchical, with clearly identifiable individual managers in charge (sometimes drawn from pre-revolutionary managerial staff, for their expertise and experience), while technical specialists and foremen enjoyed unambiguous authority over the ordinary operatives. Since efficiency and productivity were paramount, some enterprises (though not enough for Lenin) were experimenting with ‘Taylorite’ schemes for time-and-motion rationalization and conveyor-belt mass production. Lenin had once regarded such schemes as the quintessence of capitalist exploitation, but now favoured them for the higher output they generated. As a further incentive, most workers were paid on a piece-rate system, which tied their income directly to productivity.
Before 1917 the workers would have expected the trade union or indeed the party to act on their behalf. But both these organizations were now explicitly part of the state economic mechanism, and hence tended only to support workers in conflict with private employers. In 1925 the trade union newspaper Trud (Labour) itself complained that unions seemed to be ‘occupied in dismissing and fining workers, instead of defending their interests’. The mood on the shop floor seems to have been volatile (though research on worker attitudes in this period is still embryonic), and quite a lot of labour disputes and strikes did break out, typically over housing, supplies, late or inadequate pay, or conflicts with specific administrators. The unions hardly ever supported the workers in such disputes.
Although further research on this needs to be done, there appears to be no link between industrial protests and any of the opposition groups within the party. Most workers, in fact, seem to have regarded the party as ‘them’, a part of the structure of authority with which they had to deal. Political and production meetings were shunned as ‘boring’, unless they dealt with something of immediate interest to the workman, such as pay or housing. Some workers, of course, looked on the party as a way to get on in life, seeking training, promotion, and ultimately perhaps escape from the shop floor. Party workers, for their part, often complained that the workers were ‘contaminated by bourgeois tendencies’ and ‘petty bourgeois individualism’.
Mutual relationships between the party and the class they claimed to represent were, in fact, by the late 1920s, rather cool. For a ‘working-class’ party about to embark on a major industrialization programme, that was a discouraging, not to say dangerous, situation.
Relations with the peasants were even worse. In the peasantry the Bolsheviks faced the only social class which had survived the revolution in substantially its previous form. Indeed revolution and civil war had actually strengthened the more traditional and underproductive aspects