WI: New Economic Policy Continues Past 1928?

ED: F$#@ this should go in the AFTER 1900 forum.

From what I understand the Soviet NEP gave a lot more private ownership to small businesses and individual farmers while controlling the larger aspects of the economy like finance etc. From the Wiki:

POLICIES:
The laws sanctioned the coexistence of private and public sectors, which were incorporated in the NEP, which on the other hand was a state oriented "mixed economy".

Rather than repossess all goods produced, the Soviet government took only a small percentage of goods. This left the peasants with a marketable surplus which could be sold privately.

The state, after starting to use the NEP, moved away from Communist ideals and started the modernizing of the economy, but this time, with a more free-minded way of doing things. The Soviet stopped upholding the obsolete idea of nationalizing certain parts of industries. Some kinds of abroad investments were expected by the Soviet Union under the NEP, in order to fund industrial and developmental projects.

The move towards modernization rested on one main issue, transforming the Soviet Union into a modern industrialized society, but to do so the Soviet Union had to reshape its preexisting structures, namely its agricultural system and the class structure that surrounded it.

The NEP was primarily a new agricultural policy. The Bolsheviks’ attitude towards village life was dismal. The old way of village life was reminiscent of the Tsarist Russia that had supposedly been thrown out with the October Revolution. With the NEP, which sought to repudiate the “old ways,” methods were put in place which promoted the pursuit by peasants of their self-interests. However, the state only allowed private landholdings because the idea of collectivized farming had met with much opposition.

RESULTS:
Agricultural production increased greatly. Instead of the government taking all agricultural surpluses with no compensation, the farmers now had the option to sell their surplus yields, and therefore had an incentive to produce more grain. This incentive coupled with the break up of the quasi-feudal landed estates not only brought agricultural production to pre-Revolution levels but surpassed them. While the agricultural sector became increasingly reliant on small family farms, the heavy industries, banks and financial institutions remained owned and run by the state. Since the Soviet government did not yet pursue any policy of industrialization, this created an imbalance in the economy where the agricultural sector was growing much faster than heavy industry. To keep their income high, the factories began to sell their products at higher prices. Due to the rising cost of manufactured goods, peasants had to produce much more wheat to purchase these consumer goods. This fall in prices of agricultural goods and sharp rise in prices of industrial products was known as the Scissor crisis (from the shape of the graph of relative prices to a reference date). Peasants began withholding their surpluses to wait for higher prices, or sold them to "NEPmen" (traders and middle-men) who then sold them on at high prices, which was opposed by many members of the Communist Party who considered it an exploitation of urban consumers. To combat the price of consumer goods the state took measures to decrease inflation and enact reforms on the internal practices of the factories. The government also fixed prices to halt the scissor effect. Some people, mainly the 'old Bolsheviks' within the party saw the NEP as a betrayal of Communism and Marxism.

The NEP succeeded in creating an economic recovery after the devastating effects of the First World War, the Russian Revolution and the Russian civil war. By 1925, in the wake of Lenin's NEP, a "...major transformation was occurring politically, economically, culturally and spiritually." Small-scale and light industries were largely in the hands of private entrepreneurs or cooperatives. By 1928, agricultural and industrial production had been restored to the 1913 (pre-WWI) level. However, unemployment skyrocketed under the NEP and a wider gap was created between classes.
Now after Lenin moved on, Bukharin I think, continued to champion NEP but Stalin of course won out. According to the stuff I've read Lenin saw NEP as an accommodation with capitalism to prepare the Russian economy and people for the change to industrialization and then once you had the urban proletariat, you would begin to move along the road to communism.

So my question is, what if Bukharin or more specifically the NEP philosophy win out and it is continued after 1928? What will be the effects on the Russians economy and how does this effect the Depression? Wiki says industrialization could have been achieved by taxing the farmers more heavily as they became more prosperous and funded industrialization that way giving examples of Bismark's Germany, Meiji Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. I don't know about that, but what do people think?
 
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Basically Russia isn't completely fucked in the long run and moderates will probably dominate the country, with those ideological pureists being restricted to the backround - can't really think of a moderate who could take on from Lenin, it would also need to be established that the NEP was Lenins end goal and not a means to an end; which I don't think was true.

This wont be enough to butterfly Hitlers appointment as Chancellor, how an ecconomically superior USSR handles FP in those years and whether more radical thought takes over in the event of the USSR being invaded
 
While the NEP was quite successful in staving immediate complete collapse of Soviet economy off, it wasn't completely successful. Agriculture recovered to pre-1914 levels very quickly, but industry (especially heavy industry) lagged. However, state (that posed as industrial workers' own state) needed to ensure that real incomes of city proletariat were growing at least as fast as peasants' incomes. That created 'Price Scissors crisis', mentioned in your quote. Any increase of food prices badly hit budgets of urban workers, while every decrease was met with anger by peasantry.
Moreover, even pre-1914 levels weren't that high, and the NEP era USSR experienced local famines, sometimes worsened by government taxes. Population grew fast (with expansion of healthcare financed by the government), and pressure on arable land increased year by year. Government policies (abolition of private property (peasants were only hereditary landholders, not landowners), progressive taxation of more productive farms and enterprises in general, support of rural poor against better-off peasants, etc.) exacerbated problems.
Add to this dismal situation genuine fears of Bolshevik leadership (they honestly expected the West to try and invade the USSR as soon as conditions would be right enough) which prompted them to build military-oriented heavy industries as fast as possible (human costs notwithstanding), and anti-foreigner attitudes of those people (the government breached contracts with foreign investors as soon as they saw short-term benefits from doing so).
Above-described problems meant that any continuation of the NEP as we know it would be impossible. The USSR stood before necessity to choose the way of development: to support larger, more productive businesses (including foreign-owned ones) and become 'normal' authoritarian dictatorship without real leftist policies (something like Mussolini's Italy or Den's China) - or, on the contrary, to build state-controlled economy with corresponding totalitarian political structures. The first choice would require reconciliation with the Western powers (including partial repayment of the Russian debt, dissolution of the Communist International, etc.). Majority of the Soviet leadership of the time were real believers in Communist ideas, so they couldn't choose first way.
If they did so... well, we could very well to have world without World War II, the Holocaust, the Holodomor, and so on. The USSR would never become superpower (and the British Empire would survive for much longer, while the US would remain isolationist for quite long time). Class structure would remain more rigid, racism would be quite acceptable ideology even in the 21th century.
 
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