Okay a brief recap of Soviet economic policy in the 1920s.
By 1921, the Soviet economy was in the toilet. Workers were going hungry, peasants were rising up in the countryside, and life pretty much sucked. The government's policy of confiscating grain from peasants, justified as "war communism", meant that peasants produced the bare minimum, and in the Party's Leadership, being relatively practical, recognized everyone would shortly starve to death unless something changed.
The NEP was a compromise between the party and the state, in which peasants were allowed to keep any grain beyond what the government collected as a tax.
The problem was that while agriculture recovered quickly, industry did not. This meant that the price of grain and other goods remained low, while the price of manufactured goods remained high.Rather than producing more grain, peasants simply did without; they can make a candle, after all, instead of buying a lantern. And while grain production quickly reached prewar levels, the amount of grain being sold on the market did not. Peasants had broken up the large estates of noblemen and so the USSR now had many subsistence farmer who produced for themselves and not for the market. Moreover, the implication of the statistics is that while the peasants may have been producng as much as before the war, they were eating better; while the urban workers ate worse.
This problem troubled the NEP for its duration; the peasants simply didn't want to buy industrial goods at the prices the NEP and the sate of Soviet industry set.
Thoughts?
By 1921, the Soviet economy was in the toilet. Workers were going hungry, peasants were rising up in the countryside, and life pretty much sucked. The government's policy of confiscating grain from peasants, justified as "war communism", meant that peasants produced the bare minimum, and in the Party's Leadership, being relatively practical, recognized everyone would shortly starve to death unless something changed.
The NEP was a compromise between the party and the state, in which peasants were allowed to keep any grain beyond what the government collected as a tax.
The problem was that while agriculture recovered quickly, industry did not. This meant that the price of grain and other goods remained low, while the price of manufactured goods remained high.Rather than producing more grain, peasants simply did without; they can make a candle, after all, instead of buying a lantern. And while grain production quickly reached prewar levels, the amount of grain being sold on the market did not. Peasants had broken up the large estates of noblemen and so the USSR now had many subsistence farmer who produced for themselves and not for the market. Moreover, the implication of the statistics is that while the peasants may have been producng as much as before the war, they were eating better; while the urban workers ate worse.
This problem troubled the NEP for its duration; the peasants simply didn't want to buy industrial goods at the prices the NEP and the sate of Soviet industry set.
Thoughts?