Historiography of the NEP

When Lenin introduced the NEP, he presented it in terms of a ‘retreat’ – an economic breathing space … like that of Brest[-Litovsk]” when a strong Bolshevik government would be freed to educate the population in the ways of true Communism. 

Bukharin (whom Lenin praised as a “major theorist” of the Revolution) went further.  For Bukharin, the NEP was not a retreat from the struggle, but a new way of waging the struggle and the best way to win it – he saw the NEP as a smychka (alliance) with the peasantry, during which the state would outcompete the Nepmen and beat them at their own game. 

What the opponents of the NEP – and indeed, ordinary Russians – saw, however, was hypocrisy and an abandoning of the principles of 1917: the state in its words and propaganda was denouncing capitalism and the Nepmen, but in its actions allowing, even supporting, capitalism and the Nepmen.  It was a dangerous game and, as we know, in 1929 Stalin declared Bukharin a ‘Right-deviationist’, and that was the end of him. 

The historian RW Davies remarked ruefully that, ever since, historians in their debates “echo, repeat and enlarge upon these debates of the 1920s, and dress themselves in the clothes of the rival schools”. 

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Western Historiography

Many Western historians, not unexpectedly, have seen the NEP as a ‘golden age’ … “a Soviet variant of reform socialism and Russia’s last chance to avoid the terrors of Stalinism” (Mark Hagen, 1996). 

The short summary in my own GCSE textbook (2006) was typical: the Kronstadt Rebellion scared Lenin into a retreat which relaxed war communism and allowed limited capitalism; the Kulaks and the Nepmen prospered; this was seen by some Old Bolsheviks as a betrayal of the revolution, but (by choosing the dates carefully) the NEP is presented as an economic success:

Indeed, most of the school books you will read for your GCSE will probably follow a broadly similar approach. 

Thus: 

• “By 1923, the Russian economy was in the process of rapid recovery.” [SW Page, Selected Readings in Russian Domestic History, University series, 1965] 

• “The 1923 Russian harvest was good and the famine ended.  The New Economic Policy began to show results… Soon there was food for nearly everyone.  Factories produced more too...  At the same time the Bolsheviks tried to make Russia less backward by opening thousands of new schools and providing improved health services.” [Canadian writer Ira Peck, 1968.] 

• “After 1921 the improvements in the economy were rapid….  Russia soon recovered from the terrible experiences of war communism.” [John Laver, Russia and the USSR, a GCSE textbook, 1997.]

• “From Lenin's point of view, the NEP was a success both politically and economically.  Politically it took the steam out of peasant discontent.  Economically it brought about recovery.” [Alan White, Lenin’s Russia, an A-level textbook, 1998.] 

The NEP, wrote the American professor of English, Dr Katherine Eaton in 2004:

“was an island of relative calm and prosperity in a sea of troubles that stormed over Russia and the Soviet Union from the beginning of one World War to the end of another (1914-1945).”

Neither is this praise just over-simplification in school textbooks.  For the American political scientist Robert Tucker (1973) the NEP was “a period of civil peace … which lasted through most of the twenties”.  For the influential American historian Stephen Cohen (1974) it was the only acceptable solution to the grain crisis.  For Polish/French scholar Moshe Lewin (1985), it ushed in “the tide of robust peasant fertility that made it possible for the country to recover from the war wounds”. 

These ‘optimistic’/Bukharinist portrayals of the NEP, suggested the cultural historian Mark Hagen (1996), may well have influenced Western historiography of the NEP but: “if the Bukharinist program was so viable or attractive, then why did it fail?”

So, although the general orthodoxy has been and still is to praise the NEP, there have been (arguably growing) criticisms of it by Western historians: 

• British historian EH Carr (1979) argued that the world was (and is) evolving from private capitalism to state-planned economies, and that the NEP was a therefore backward step. 

• British historians Kochan and Abraham (1983) suggested that a tightly-controlled industry but an unregulated agriculture was “an inherently unstable mixture, as was shown by the wild fluctuations in prices”. 

• A number of historians, including the socialist writer Samuel Farber (1990), have noticed that the economic concessions were accompanied by a political oppression and loss of democracy; “The NEP epoch was a more generous political era than the Stalin era,” commented British historian Robert Service, “but its politics were grim”. 

• An increasing number of scholars have listed the failings of the NEP, for instance the British historian Mark Mazower (1998):

  “Class and regional disparities grew – between richer peasants, wandering tradesmen, and an impoverished and restless urban labour force – and these threatened the always fragile cohesion of the entire economy.  The NEP in fact made Soviet growth rates dependent upon the market behaviour of workers and peasants, not the party or the state.  Worst of all perhaps for the Moscow elite, it made it harder and harder to control the regions.” 

• The Czech historian Michal Reiman (1979) saw the NEP as worse – as a period of chronic crisis in both agriculture and industry, when farming lagged behind an industrial development which itself was never impressive. 

• And the British historian RW Davies (1998), weighing both sides of the equation, came to the conclusion that – whilst the NEP allowed “a moderate rate of expansion … we do not believe that the NEP was capable of sustaining much higher rates of industrialisation than those achieved on the eve of the First World War” – certainly not rates sufficient for a country preparing for a Second World War. 

Robert Service even asked whether we are being unfair to Stalin when we criticise him for abandoning the NEP after 1929.

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Soviet historiography

Meanwhile, what have Soviet/Russian historians been saying about the NEP? 

Almost nothing was written about the NEP in the USSR until Stalin died.  Stalin had criticised and overturned the NEP as not fit for purpose and its supporters as ‘Right-deviationists’.  Also, as Bukharin was a non-person, perhaps they were wise to let it lie. 

There was a surge of interest in the NEP in the 1960s, with debates between ‘marketeers’ and anti-marketeers’, but the USSR was still under Soviet control, so “almost the entire Soviet historiography of NEP, for obvious reasons, fits into the Leninist interpretation of a temporary forced retreat to state capitalism, which was required for tactical reasons, as an intermediate stage in building a socialist society” (Mukhin, 2022). 

Thus Yu Kukushkin, History of the USSR (1981):

“The anti-Soviet revolts ceased...  There were initial signs of recovery in industry...  The New Economic Policy strengthened the alliance between the workers and peasants and secured the victory of the socialist elements over the capitalist ones.  And yet to this day many bourgeois historians continue to portray the New Economic Policy as a departure of the Communist Party and Soviet power from the ‘direct road leading to communism’.”

In the late 1980s, however, the NEP suddenly became centre stage, not just in Soviet historiography, but in Soviet politics.  As the USSR began to fall apart, President Gorbachev declared glasnost (openness) and economic perestroika (freeing up the economy).  He couched his reforms as a return to NEP-like policies, and he and his supporters spoke of the NEP as a missed opportunity, a creative policy that should not have been brought to an end.  Russian historians of this period highlighted not just the economic successes of the NEP, but also its pluralism and cultural renaissance.

By contrast, as one Russian biographer declared:

“Rejection of NEP and the transition to a command economy [by Stalin] hastened the creation of a totalitarian regime that doomed the people to inhuman suffering and more than once put the country on the brink of disaster.”

and in this way the history of the NEP thus became a key contributor to the collapse of the USSR in 1991. 

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Recent interpretations

Tbh, recent histories do not seem to have added very much to the existing interpretations of the NEP, except for James Heinzen’s book, Inventing a Soviet Countryside (2004), which is a study of the People's Commissariat of Agriculture (Narkomzen) – the vast Soviet organisation (70,000 employees) tasked with educating farmers about modern techniques, providing them with new equipment, and starting the change towards large state and collective farms.  Although his book has been criticised, its interesting comment is that:

“the difficulties facing the agency that inserted itself between the Communist Party and the country's villages … cast glaring light on both the strengths and the weaknesses of the new economic policy, while raising grave doubts about its prospects”

and he ascribed those difficulties to “the clash between two central Bolshevik ideals: overcoming rural backwardness and building socialism”.