Talk:New Economic Policy

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Contents 1 silly sovietophobic bias 2 Response to "Silly Sovietophobic Bias" 3 "...tried to regain alliances with foreign countries." 4 Heavy Stalin-centric Bias 5 What about the Great Depression?

[edit] silly sovietophobic bias

"Howeveytdsyatryetu vb u 3oov7 t wvuv iluavui lhfr... restored only to the 1913 level" Those deprecating pis me off. It was a hrough devastating WWI, Rusty Revolution, Civil War914-1922). Total chaos. And all recovered in only 6 years! ("only to 1909 level").

A related thing, an urban legend that bolsheviks destroyed Russia. Yes, they screwed it up, but later. In the beginning it was Tsar, who by entering WWI disrupted the economy immensely:

• 1. removed frn for several years
  2. neveretheless had to be fed
• The economy turned into was gears, i.e., useless for population.

Food riots started without any bolshevik help. mikka (t) 9 July 2005 06:27 (UTC ů Èω

[edit] Response to "Silly Sovietophobic Bias"

It would be nice if you could find sources to backup your claims. It would be even nicer for you to spell words more correctly too. AWDRacer 18:20, 5 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] "...tried to regain alliances with foreign countries."

I have not found this as one of the motives in any of my research. I am not saying this is untrue, I just wish to know if anyone has a source for this.

[edit] Heavy Stalin-centric Bias

"[the NEP] highly unpopular with the strong Marxists in the Bolshevik"

Blatently untrue. Even the left of the party supported the new economic policy. Even Preobrezhenskii's law of primitive socialist accumulation was based around the free market of the NEP, the same law which Stalin later plagerized and exaggerated when he spoke of demanding "tribute" from peasants because Russia had not any colonies.

"We are taking one step backward to later take two steps forward", suggesting that Stalin's five year plan was a fulfillment of Lenin's testament."

This completely ignores the body of work in Lenin's later years that stressed the fundimental importance of the smychka (on which the NEP was based) between the peasantry and the non-rural sector.

I took the liberty of removing the emphasis on the Stalinist myth of the nepmen as an explanation of the grain shortage.

Glaucon 20:35, 23 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] What about the Great Depression?

Did the Great Depression outside the Soviet Union force central planning from the inside. Former Soviet dissident Boris Kagarlitsky had this to say:

"Then in 1928-29, around the time when the great depression was starting, something happened that was not really noticed by historians for quite some time. In both Russian and western writing of history it was very difficult to consider that the fact that these two things were happening simultaneously was not simply an accident. They were not. I spent quite a lot of time studying the archives of the Soviet economy, which is now referred to as the Russian Government Archives of Economy (previously the People’s Economy Archives).

I discovered that the great depression was a huge setback for the whole Soviet industrialisation project, which was based on exporting grain and importing technologies in order to develop. This plan was destroyed by the great depression.

Secondly, the global crisis rapidly brought to the surface the many contradictions that were built into NEP, including the price gap between industrial and agricultural products. In this new situation, peasants simply stopped producing products that were least profitable within this price gap. For example, they started shifting from corn to potatoes, because corn was being sold on the international market and, although its price collapsed, the Bolshevik government was trying to get as much corn at the cheapest price possible as a way of compensating for the loss of the global market. The peasants simply shifted to potatoes which were not being sold internationally and this led to the famous ‘crisis of bread supply’, which saw not only insufficient bread production for export, but also for domestic consumption.

Reading the archives, it is clear how afraid the Soviet leadership was of the whole system falling apart. There was a real possibility of a complete decomposition of the Soviet state in the period of the great depression."

(http://www.aglob.ru/en/analysis/?id=596) Darth Sidious 09:42, 2 December 2006 (UTC)