When the Soviet leadership moved to kill, how long did it take to eliminate a class?
In the 20s of the last century, a special group of people was active in Soviet society, who had a certain sense of "privileges", worked for the authorities, and the authorities were happy to give them the green light in some things.
In 1927, the total number of this class reached 3.211 million, accounting for about 2.2% of the total population of the Soviet Union that year. The official Russian acronym for the term "NEP" plus a compound word for "fanatics" forms a new noun (Нэпман) to describe this group of people, transliterated as "Nepman".
This was the highlight of the Nepman class, which became more and more blatant on their merits to Soviet power. No one expected that it would take the authorities only about 3 years to wipe out the Nepmans.
At the beginning of 1921, the difficult situation at home and abroad made Lenin realize the current situation: the realization of communism must be based on the great material wealth of society, in other words, you have to have money to play capitalism, and you have to have a lot of money to play communism, and Russia obviously does not have such capital at present.
Moreover, at a time when the civil war is in a fever-hot stage, fighting a war is a money-burning job, and many of the central envoys sent to collect grain did not hesitate to use tough measures in order to achieve the target, making trouble with the peasants very unpleasantly, and alienating the masses from the authorities. If it continues like this, there is a danger that the Soviet power will overturn.
The emergence of the "New Economic Policy" solved everything in an instant, and some of the humanized regulations were immediately supported by the grassroots people, such as farmers can no longer pay grain to the government, but replace it with a "food tax"; When the people obtain the means of subsistence, they do not have to go through the government, and everyone can barter and exchange their surplus for urgently needed materials.
It can be said that for the Soviet proletarian revolution, the significance of the introduction of the "New Economic Policy" was very great, but at that time, many people regarded it as a "scourge". In their view, this policy is not well-rooted, and there is even a tendency to help revival capitalism, which has been largely eliminated in Russia.
In fact, if it weren't for that, the problem wouldn't be too big.
In March 1921, the authorities issued a decree that private business regained its legal status in Russia. Just one quarter after the policy was issued, nearly 190,000 people applied for business licenses; In 1923, private commerce accounted for more than three-quarters of the total retail turnover in the Soviet Union, and there were as many as 370,000 private stores in the country.
In industry, in 1922, the authorities announced that industrial enterprises could lease their plants and equipment, allowing private individuals to start and operate small businesses.
The Soviet government explained it this way: at the moment the government was not able to operate all the factories. How is it not a kind of "communism" to subcontract out the parts that are incapable of operation, let them shine in the hands of private enterprise operators, and let the whole society make the best use of their talents and resources?
By 1925, there were as many as 1,786 newly established private industrial enterprises, nearly 5,000 "rental enterprises" relying on factory equipment leased by state-owned industrial enterprises, and the number of employees was 2.8 million, and the output value of small industries in the Soviet Union had almost returned to the scale before the "October Revolution".
The "New Economic Policy" gave Soviet society a long-lost vitality, and the country's strength and social wealth continued to increase at a speed visible to the naked eye. But just as all was going well, new problems arose.
The "Nepman" class helps the authorities to collect social wealth, turn materials into banknotes, and become veritable "money printers", although the role is great, but they are fundamentally capitalist in nature, contrary to the doctrine pursued by the authorities. Moreover, the emergence and growth of the Nepman class may not have a greater positive impact than a negative effect.
First of all, it is important to note that the so-called "wool is out of the sheep", and the wealth harvested by the Nepmans did not appear out of thin air.
From the official statistics, in 1926~1927, the per capita income of the non-agricultural population in the Soviet Union was about 315.3 rubles, of which the income of employees and workers of state-owned enterprises with relatively stable income was about 327~389 rubles; The per capita income of the Nepman class is as high as 2079.5 rubles, a difference of only 6 times.
Among the Naipman class, the gap between the rich and the poor is even more terrifying: the income of small traders and craftsmen at the bottom of this class is generally between 257~303 rubles, even inferior to the workers of state-owned enterprises, but the average income of small industrial enterprise operators exceeds 2600 rubles.
What is even more unacceptable is that brokers and speculators who rely on the "middleman's cut" earn a fraction higher than the business owner, amounting to 4125 rubles. Longitudinally, the Nepman class widened the gap between rich and poor in the Soviet Union to more than tenfold, and these people first filled their wallets before filling the treasury.
Not only that, according to the Soviet government's report on September 1, 1922, the Nepman class has a certain threshold, everyone knows that there is money to earn, but not everyone has the opportunity to become one of them, and the group of this class is relatively fixed.
The data points out that the proportion of people who have not had a relevant background or experience before and become Nepman is very small, and the vast majority are what we often call "rich people". Since the introduction of the new policy, the Soviet government has returned to their original owners a number of previously confiscated small businesses, which make up 26% of the total Nepman class.
These people use their sufficient funds to expand their operations in the industrial or commercial field and reap profits; Some Nepman, even those associated with Soviet industrial and commercial policy, took advantage of their position to enrich themselves. To sum up, it is a sentence: the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer.
It is well known that when the wealth of society is concentrated in a very small minority or individual, the nature of the state changes, which the Soviet government could not tolerate. Lenin explicitly characterized the Nepman class as the "new bourgeoisie", but now the authorities can use them, and the role of the latter can not be replaced. Therefore, the authorities weighed the pros and cons and decided to acquiesce in its existence for the time being, as Bukharin wrote in a 1925 article: "We allow Nepmann to carry out his own business." ”
Helplessly, human greed knows no bounds, and the Nepman class misinterprets the tolerance and exploitation of the authorities as connivance. After 1925, they had accumulated considerable wealth in their hands and tried to encroach on the country's lifeline industry.
They used covert terms to undermine the eight-hour workday's limits on workers' working hours, looting gold, grain, and industrial raw materials and using them as bargaining chips to expand their operations. Some of the "big guys" at the top of the class are even trying to accumulate political capital for themselves.
For example, the American chaebol Adman Hamer, known as the "oil king", saw the huge market in Russia and wanted to invest in the construction of hospitals in Soviet Russia to help the people treat epidemics. But when he came to Soviet Russia in 1921 to see the current situation, he immediately changed his mind and exchanged all the $1 million prepared in advance for grain, shipped it from the United States to Soviet Russia, and sold it at cost.
Lenin was very moved by this "good intention", not only honored Hammer as a guest, but also expressed his willingness to cooperate on behalf of the Soviet Russian government: "We need American technology and methods, as well as American engineers and technicians, and we can learn from each other's strengths." ”
After that, Hamer's position in the Soviet Union soared, becoming the "general agent" of the Soviet Union's foreign trade. Even Henry Ford, the head of Ford at the time, a die-hard anti-Soviet element, had to sell Hammer a face, bringing valuable car and tractor technology to the Soviet Union.
Hammer never spared the "privileges" he had secured: in 1922, when one of his trains was stopped at a station, the station manager demanded a few hundred kilograms of grain as a "favor fee," and the latter complained directly to Lenin. At that time, Lenin was recuperating in a private villa, and when he learned of this, he immediately came forward, ordered the station to give the green light, and simply executed the station manager.
Hammer is still standing on the bright side, and it is not difficult to imagine how many bottomless things the Nepman class will do for profit in private.
Stalin saw both the benefits and disadvantages of the NEP, and for this reason that after Lenin's death, he took over the top spot and began to eliminate the negative effects of the policy.
In 1927, the Soviet leadership passed a resolution to "collectivize agriculture" and passed drastic reforms that brought the country to a complete takeover of industry. Stalin's operation greatly enhanced the comprehensive national strength of the Soviet Union, and a complete set of operating modes was basically formed, and the Nepman class lost its role. The Neppmans were either forced to change careers or expelled, and by the early 30s this class had largely disappeared in the Soviet Union.