The Night of ‘Long Debts’ in the Urals: Organising the 1929 Campaign to Collect Arrears from Private Entrepreneurs

Abstract

This article aims to study the process of organising a campaign with the purpose of collecting arrears from private entrepreneurs and for clearing of tax bureaucracy. The source of the research is the instructions of the Central Headquarters of the working team for the patronage over the USSR People’s Commissariat for Finance and the administration of Sverdlovsk Regional Financial Administration concerning the Sverdlovsk Regional Financial Department (SRFD). The author studies the problems of adequacy of private sector taxation under the SRFD policy. This policy was one of the reasons for organising a tax campaign. The analysis of documents allows the author to conclude that the methods and means of the campaign planned testify to a radicalisation of the policy of a total and final exclusion of private sector from the country’s economy, and to the abolition of the NEP mixed economy. Apart from fiscal aims proper, the authorities purposed political ones too; their goal was to demonstrate the determination of the government and to conduct a cleaning up of the financial body which was ‘littered’ with petty-bourgeois elements. To maintain the class equality of the campaign, factory workers were actively involved which led to several legal and organisational problems and caused various instances of abuse. Rapid and unexpected mass confiscations at night which happened without prior notice and on a wide scale, with arrears collected even from relatives and acquaintances of an entrepreneur were similar to a war campaign, resembling an act of intimidation targeted at political opponents. Some points of instructions contradicted the legislature of the time in question; however, this fact was not viewed as a flaw considering the political character of this campaign. The rightful desire of the government to collect arrears under the dictatorship of proletariat and under the final stages of the NEP was transformed into a force operation accompanied by the deprivation of property of the conquered class in the spirit of the theory of ‘primary socialist accumulation’.