Concern for Bolshevik Ideological Predominance at the Start of NEP

Abstract

It has frequently been maintained that NEP entailed a climate of general relaxation in all spheres-political, economic and social as well as cultural. However, when one comes to examine high-level Bolshevik ideological thinking in 1922, it is clear that already an urgent need was felt that cultural weapons must be manufactured and prepared for action precisely because the regime would soon find itself like a besieged fortress surrounded by economic and social unorthodoxy. Nowhere is is this trend more easily discernible than in the sudden efflorescence of the official cultural journals that sprang up in 1922, many of them in Petrograd. We can proceed from general Bolshevik theories to organizational particulars by looking first at Pod znamenem marksizma, which was set up to clarify the Marxist attitude to friends and foe alike. Pechat' i revoliutsiia laid down the more detailed rules by which the new orthodox press media would be guided. The first editorial of Pod znamenem marksizma claimed that the journal had arisen from the legitimate desire of the young proletarian intelligentsia to reflect on the present time, and was to act as a tribune for the broad working masses. A letter of 27 February 1922 from Trotskii is cited, in which he stresses that younger workers would have to acquire through books and governmental work the kind of experience that had been actually lived out by older generations.' Subsequently the editor of the Moscow journal Rabochaia Moskva wrote to his fellow editor asking for regular annotated lists of recently published Marxist literature which would be of more use to factory workers than