himself that it was necessary to replace the revo-
lution with a one-party state. But as he conceived
it there was flexibility; especially after 1921 ‘non-
party’ specialists were encouraged. The bureau-
cracy was an inevitable outcome of the centralised
state, though it deeply worried Lenin during the
last months of his life. He began to alter course
in 1921–2 and simultaneously government em-
ployees were drastically reduced. It was also
Lenin who urged the use of force and terror
where other means failed to achieve the desired
ends. However much he criticised the conse-
quences of the direction of state policy, the foun-
dations of the Soviet state had been laid by Lenin.
While it is true that Lenin permitted debate
within and outside the higher echelon of the party
as in newspapers, men of the old guard, such as
Lev Kamenev, Grigori Zinoviev, Aleksei Rykov,
Nikolai Bukharin and Leon Trotsky, who differed
on the right policies to be followed, ultimately
had to obey the party line once Lenin had reached
a decision. On the issue whether there could be
any but a one-party state no debate was possible.
The Tenth Party Congress, held in March 1921,
passed the resolution ‘On Party Unity’, which
though it did not stifle all debate and criticism
forbade the formation within the party of any
political groups ‘with separate platforms, striving
to a certain degree to segregate and create their
own group discipline’ and then to publish views
not authorised by the party. The infamous
Paragraph Seven of this resolution empowered
the Central Committee by two-thirds majority to
expel from the party members of the Central
Committee who diverged, and so to banish them
into political exile. The weapon for stifling any
dissident view not favouring the leader or group
of leaders in power had been forged. Stalin later
made full use of it to eliminate anyone he chose
to accuse of factionalism.
In March 1921, simultaneously with the reso-
lution on party unity, came the about-turn of
Lenin’s policy – the inauguration of the slogan
New Economic Policy (NEP), coined to cover the
dramatic reversal. The conviction that ever-
increasing ruthlessness, especially in extracting
food from the peasantry, was threatening the
whole country’s coherence must have been taking
shape for some time. It was a mutiny of the sailors
in the fortress of Kronstadt early in March 1921,
bloodily repressed, which Lenin claimed ‘was the
flash which lit up reality better than anything
else’. But the decision had already been taken by
him following peasant riots and workers’ strikes
in the previous months.
The NEP began when the Tenth Party Con-
gress passed a resolution replacing the seizure of
surplus food with a less onerous and a properly
regulated ‘tax in kind’. Any further surplus the
peasant could market freely. Three years later in
1924 the tax in kind became a money payment.
Free trading and, with it, a money economy
revived. Small-scale production by not more than
twenty workers was allowed once again. Large
industries continued under state ownership with
few exceptions. The vast majority of production
was by state enterprises or by individual artisans.
Between 1921 and 1926, the mixed industrial
economy, part private part state, recovered so
that by 1926 the level of production of 1913 had
been reached. In agriculture, individual peasants
farmed more than 98 per cent of the land sown.
Agriculture recovered from the low levels of 1921
and 1922, but the amount left over from peasant
consumption was less than in 1913; yet the need
for grain to feed the expanding urban popula-
tion and for export to provide capital grew much
faster than the traditional peasant agriculture sup-
plied. Nor were the peasants imbued with enthu-
siasm for socialism despite attempts to arouse a
sense of common solidarity against the better-off
peasants, the kulaks. A peasant farming his land
traditionally, and encouraged to improve his stan-
dard of living by having stimulated in him a desire
for profit, was not likely to accept the ideals of
communism. The more successful a peasant, the
less socialist he became. NEP on the land helped
to save Russia from starvation, but did not
provide the surplus to allow the economy to
advance rapidly.
A complementary element of the more liberal
economic approach of NEP in the 1920s was the
tightening of party discipline and centralism.
Cultural concessions, for instance, were made to
the non-Russian nationalities, but not at the
expense of centralised party and military control.