NEP: The First Steps

Abstract

The initial and cardinal measure of the New Economic Policy — the substitution of the tax in kind for the requisitioning of surpluses — was no new conception. The tax in kind had been first introduced in the autumn of 1918; but the requisitions had continued, and the tax been abandoned.1 In February 1920, before the ninth party congress, at a moment when the civil war already seemed over, Trotsky had proposed in the Politburo to replace requisitioning of surpluses by a tax in kind calculated on a percentage of production, and to put the exchange of goods with the peasantry on an individual rather than a collective basis. But he had been opposed by Lenin, and obtained only 4 of the 15 votes.2 Such projects were once more in the air after the final defeat of Wrangel, and had been ventilated by SR and Menshevik delegates at the tenth All-Russian Congress of Soviets in December 1920.3 Hitherto they had been dismissed as an inadmissible and impracticable derogation from Bolshevik principles — a return to “free trade” and petty bourgeois capitalism. But just a year after Trotsky’s original initiative, on February 8, 1921, a discussion of agrarian policy in the Politburo prompted Lenin himself to put forward a recognizably similar project.