Entrepreneurs of the NEP era: a socio-cultural portrait
More than a hundred years ago, the destructive practice of war communism ended with the beginning of the transition to the New Economic Policy in March 1921. On May 17, 1921, the Council of People's Commissars suspended the nationalization of small and medium-sized industry, on July 5 it permitted the leasing of state industrial enterprises, and by decree of July 7 it permitted the creation of private enterprises. By the end of 1921, provincial economic councils had leased 4,860 small and medium-sized industrial facilities, producing only 6.3% of output. Private owners did not show much interest, and usually did not have the financial means to invest even in small factories and plants [30. pp. 125-126, 147].
The first months of the NEP coincided with the summer drought of 1921 in the Volga region and the beginning of mass famine in European Russia. The food situation improved only after the harvest of 1922.
With the transition to the NEP, joint-stock companies (Exportkhleb, etc.), financial and credit institutions (for example, the Industrial and Trade Bank of the USSR), state trade and cooperative shops, as well as private shops, small and medium enterprises in the light and food industries, and foreign concessions were created. The first Soviet commodity exchanges were registered as early as 1921 in Saratov, Vyatka and Nizhny Novgorod, and by 1923, 54 commodity and raw material exchanges operated on the principles of self-government; at the beginning of 1924, there were already 96 of them. The largest was the Moscow Exchange, whose turnover in 1923 was 3.5 times greater than the turnover of all the others. At exchange trades, prices for similar raw materials (bread, meat, leather, etc.) were publicly determined, and their seasonal fluctuations were leveled out. They played an important role in regulating the exchange of goods, insuring against price fluctuations, preventing shortages and regulating stocks [28. Pp. 382–383].
In May 1924, the People's Commissariat of Internal Trade was created, and the following year, internal trade reached 98% of the pre-war 1913 level (foreign trade, which the state retained a monopoly on, was only half the pre-war level in 1926).
At the beginning of the NEP, they also remembered the pre-revolutionary patents for first- and second-class trading enterprises. In the second half of 1922, in Voronezh, 2,631 of the 2,721 registered trading patents were chosen by private individuals, 54 by the state, and 36 by cooperatives [2. P. 138].
In 1923, NEPmen already controlled 75% of retail and 18% of wholesale trade. Traders, like small producers, were required to buy patents and pay a progressive tax. Depending on the nature of their activity (selling from hands, in stalls and kiosks, shops, retail or wholesale trade, the number of hired workers), they were initially divided into three and then into five categories. The Soviet authorities attached great importance to the use or absence of hired labor. In statistical reports, by social criterion, the following were distinguished: owners with hired workers; owners with helping family members; single owners; helping family members; rentiers. However, the official gradation of private entrepreneurs was not clear-cut, therefore, in the works of different historians, the number of NEPmen both in the country as a whole and in the regions varies greatly.
In accordance with the Civil Code of the RSFSR, during the NEP, any Soviet citizen who had reached the age of 16 could obtain a license to trade in shops, public places, markets and bazaars with any items and products (except weapons and drugs), to open shops, cafes, restaurants, consumer services enterprises, to rent buildings and utility rooms, production equipment, and means of transport. Owners of licenses for trade and entrepreneurial activity had to provide all accounts and reporting documentation at the first request of the authorities.
Liberalism extended only to the economy (especially trade), but not to the political foundations of the Soviet state. It is enough to recall the expulsion of representatives of the intelligentsia who were objectionable to the authorities on the "philosophers'" steamship in 1922, and the political trials against the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries.
The most enterprising and resourceful representatives of various socio-professional groups rushed into the market sphere: peasants, artisans, employees, housewives, former “bagmen” from the times of “war communism”, and some former Red Army soldiers and partisans.
The new entrepreneurs were most often called NEPmen (people of the NEP), the Soviet bourgeoisie (Sovburs), and less often - Red merchants. According to the memoirs of the actress Lunacharskaya-Rozenel (wife of the first Soviet People's Commissar of Education A.V. Lunacharsky), the word "NEPman" was first heard in the variety review "Olympians in Moscow" [author - feuilletonist R. Mech (Mendelevich)] of the Petrograd theater of miniatures "Korobochka" and immediately entered into colloquial and political language. This term was not used at first by Pravda, which preferred to use the phrase "presumptuous owner" from the end of 1921 [24. P. 104; 44. P. 77].
But in the new magazine Ogonyok it was encountered frequently from 1923, and sometimes in an even more derogatory form - "nepach" (with the stress on the last syllable). Nepmen (nepachi) and their wives ("fat nepachikha", "fat nepman-fashionistas") immediately acquired a caricatured image in the Soviet press [3. Pp. 308-316]. But the workers and peasants called Soviet bourgeois not only the Nepmen, but also the communists who occupied privileged nomenklatura positions.
The Bolshevik publicist and economic leader of the 1920s, Yuri Larin (M.A. Lurye), considered all NEPmen to be exploiters who came from the ranks of pre-revolutionary large traders and factory owners, and emphasized their fraudulent methods, selfish connections with the state apparatus and cooperatives [21].
The private entrepreneurs of the NEP era themselves emphasized their difference from the representatives of the old merchant class. As A.M. Sverdlov, a member of the Irkutsk Mutual Credit Society, stated, “the new merchant class is not the merchant class that provided a lot of material like Ostrovsky’s immortal comedies, but little for the benefit of society.” One of the Irkutsk entrepreneurs wrote: “The merchant class has the right to dream that from outcast pariahs… they will turn into citizens of their republic, that our children will not be ashamed of their fathers’ occupations and, when entering educational institutions, will not dream of a ‘machine dad’” [12. P. 38; 13. P. 149–175].
As of September 1, 1921, former owners made up 26% of all industrial enterprise tenants [30. p. 126; 48. p. 287].
In early 1924, a closed report was submitted to the People's Commissariat of Workers' and Peasants' Inspection, which stated: "Not only are the former trading firms absent from the private trade market, but the old trading class as a whole. The old merchants represent an insignificant percentage... of the mass of modern merchants" [25. P. 83; 43. P. 62]. A similar observation was made by A.M. Ball [53. P. 91]. The reasons are clear: the real estate, valuables and capital of pre-revolutionary merchant entrepreneurs were nationalized, plundered, destroyed or taken away, and those who remained in Soviet Russia were often afraid to take up business again for fear of new repressions and confiscations. Thus, in the early 1920s, the owners of Rostov-on-Don bakeries, sensing the increased demand for their products, sharply increased their selling prices. After the warning went unanswered, local authorities requisitioned private bakeries, handing them over to cooperatives, and imprisoned their former owners [20. p. 53].
As early as July 1921, the Petrograd Provincial Committee of the RCP(b) approved the first lease agreements for four previously nationalized enterprises: the gelatin plant, the Bagrov dyeing plant, the Trikosvyaz factory, and a small chemical plant. They were leased by the former owners or specialists of these enterprises, who were obliged to transfer 10 to 20% of their output to the state [14. P. 67; 36. L. 45-51]. In 1922, only 26.2% of the owners of private trading establishments in Petrograd were former businessmen [46. P. 432].
It is difficult to say what proportion of NEPmen were representatives of the pre-revolutionary guild merchants in other cities of the country, since it is necessary to take into account the presence of figureheads ("sitz-chairmen"), behind whom the real bigwigs of the NEPman business were hiding, including from among the "former". Only small and medium-sized merchants, coming from the trading environment, managed to feel market freedom again for a time.
According to the observations of a former employee of the shipping company, Muscovite memoirist N.P. Okunev, among the businessmen of that time two categories stood out: 1) NEPmen of the old formation: former businessmen who had passed through the cells of Butyrka and became consultants to the main departments of the Supreme Council of the National Economy and Soviet trusts; 2) NEPmen of the new formation – petty predators, people of various professions who took up trade in order to get rich quickly. The latter, uniting in companies of 3-5 people, traded in everything that came to hand (from textiles and nails to chemicals and buckwheat). Without their own capital, with the help of loans from the State Bank, they made billions in trade turnover. “Whizzing through” their lives, they lost billions at the roulette table, and became regulars at horse racing and betting. Others on Ilyinka in front of the Moscow Stock Exchange building bought and resold gold [29. Book 2. P. 248].
In 1924, in a letter to the newspaper Sovetskaya Sibir, an unknown author characterized the composition of the new Soviet bourgeoisie as follows: “Our bourgeoisie is divided into three classes: the Nepman-shark, the average Nepman, and the Nepman-hipster. The Nepman-shark is a species that is comparatively weaker than the others, found in Siberia. And if it were not for the hospitable wing of our trade, there would be no talk of it. The Nepman-hipster is more interesting to criminal investigation agents than to the Siberian economy. But the average Nepman has quite strongly strengthened his position in Siberian trade capital. He has spread his shops throughout all the villages and towns of the vast Siberia. “In our domestic bourgeoisie, class struggle is noticeable… The average NEPman is not particularly fond of the provincial financial departments (oh, those taxes), but he treats the “NEP aristocrats” who snatch the lion’s share of his income with immeasurably greater hatred. Therefore, the average NEPman is not averse to helping the authorities put the squeeze on the NEPman shark” [11. L. 46].
The term "hip-peznik" requires some explanation: its root "hipes" comes from the word "hipe", which in Yiddish means "wedding canopy". In Odessa, since pre-revolutionary times, "hip-pezniks" were the name given to swindlers who worked in pairs with prostitutes ("hip-peznitsa"), posing as enraged husbands and robbing clients [1. P. 564; 38. P. 403]. "Hip-pezniks" of the NEPman era also worked in pairs and under cover. As we can see, we cannot discount the social and property contradictions within the NEPman environment itself, which was distinguished by extreme heterogeneity and economic pragmatism.
By the mid-1920s, the number of large private traders reached 180 thousand people. NEPmen-wholesalers actively influenced market pricing, facilitating either an increase or a decrease in prices. They were more effective than state and cooperative trade. Thus, at the turn of 1922-1923, the overhead costs of private entrepreneurs usually did not exceed 5-7% of turnover, while for trade cooperatives they reached 18.2%, and for state trade - 28.6% [28. P. 382]. Using connections among the Soviet bureaucracy, NEPmen received loans from branches of the State Bank. Private buyers of agricultural products offered peasants higher prices than state purchasers, which was noted in OGPU reviews [40. P. 630; 41. P. 94-95].
On March 12, 1922, Izvestia published Vladimir Mayakovsky’s poem “They once asked me: “Do you like the NEP?” In it, the poet called for people to learn business and accounting from the NEP bourgeoisie: “To the arena! / Go fight the merchants! / You need to learn how to use abacuses”; “Let the wrinkles of merchant thoughts be a ditch. / Absorb the merchant’s experience into your brain!” [15].
Since 1922, the Soviet authorities, having begun to revive the fair in Nizhny Novgorod, appointed the old Bolshevik S. V. Malyshev as the chairman of the Nizhny Novgorod Fair Committee, who defended the interests of the state and the trade organizations it had created, rather than private traders. The authorities supported trade cooperation in every possible way, which gradually covered all corners of the vast country and played an important role in the exchange of goods between the city and the village. Large fairs were revived in Irbit (in the Southern Urals), Baku, and other places. The heyday of the NEP is well represented in the novel by I. Ilf and E. Petrov, "The Twelve Chairs." At that time, the provincial priest Father Fyodor could dream of starting a candle factory, the owner of the "Moscow Bagels" artel Kislyarsky prospered, and others (like Polesov) were content with a metalworking shop. A lively atmosphere reigned both in Moscow's Sukharevka and in the Petrograd (since 1924 Leningrad) flea markets, where one could buy the most outlandish things.
Here are the impressions of the capital of that time by the writer S. M. Golitsyn: “The population of Moscow was rapidly increasing every day… Businessmen were coming, having learned that… one could get a good job and rake in a lot of money… Enterprising people were bringing… goods from the train stations, and finally, peasants from the Moscow region were delivering meat and dairy products, vegetables, and firewood on… horses. They were bringing goods to stores, state and private, and mainly to the markets: after all, the main Moscow trade was then carried out through the markets. They were selling all the items that had existed from the time of Rurik to the present day, items that could be put on, shod, put in a chest, a dresser, a closet; chests, dressers, and closets were also sold… In state stores… prices were cheaper… But [buyers] could run into rotten products. And the sellers in such stores often snapped back. But in private stores you were greeted with smiles, and the goods were laid out so picturesquely that you could admire them. Representatives of old merchant families traded... But the bulk of enterprising businessmen, whom the press dubbed NEPmen, were new people, or former clerks, or newcomers” [9. P. 121–127].
But especially after the abolition of the policy of "war communism" in the cities, the inviting signs of retail establishments were striking. As Vladimir Mayakovsky wrote:
“The shops stand with their windows wide open.
There are products in the windows: wine and fruit.
The cheeses are not stale (!), the lamps are shining.
"Prices have been reduced."
Colorful sketches of the market appearance of the “Nepman” Moscow of the beginning of 1922 were made by M.A. Bulgakov in the feuilleton “Trade Renaissance”:
"Here and there wooden panels began to fall off, and from underneath them dusty and dim shop windows looked out into the light after a long break. In the depths of the neglected rooms, light bulbs lit up, and in their light life began to stir: they began to nail, nail, repair, unpack boxes and crates with goods. The washed shop windows began to shine. Strong round lamps above the exhibitions or narrow lighting tubes on the sides of the windows flared up.
It is difficult to understand from what mysterious depths impoverished Moscow managed to extract the goods, but it got them out and with a generous hand shook out the looking-glass windows and laid them out on the shelves.
Kuznetsky, Petrovka, Neglinnaya, Lubyanka, Myasnitskaya, Tverskaya, Arbat began to stir. Shops began to spring up like mushrooms... State, cooperative, artel, private... After the confectionery shops, which were the first to light up everywhere, came haberdashery, delicatessen, stationery, hat, hairdressing, book, technical and, finally, general stores. Signs began to climb onto the bare walls in a colored wave, growing larger every day. In some places they were hastily made, sometimes simply painted on canvas, but next to them permanent ones appeared, according to the new spelling, with bright, arshin-long letters. And they were nailed down with huge, sturdy spikes. “For a long time, then… In the former Filippov bakery on Tverskaya, piled to the ceiling with white bread, cakes, pastries, rusks and buns, there are endless lines… The displays of the gourmet shops amaze with their luxury. They contain mountains of boxes of canned goods, black caviar, salmon, balyk, smoked fish, oranges. And passers-by always stand at the windows of these shops, as if enchanted, and stare at the delicacies without stopping…” [7. P. 286–288].
Prices in stores in the first two years of NEP were very high, scaring off the average buyer. Soviet banknotes lost their value: in 1923, a box of matches in Moscow cost from 0.5 to 10 million rubles, a pound of black bread cost 1 million, and three pickles cost 4.5 million. The situation was changed by the monetary reform of 1923–1924. A box of matches cost 2 kopecks.
Sometimes, for industrial goods in short supply (say, galoshes) at the Provodnik store on Myasnitskaya, huge queues formed, in which, in order to buy the coveted pair of rubber shoes, one had to stand for several days. In one of the photographs, you can see a queue ("tail") for kerosene after the flood of 1924 at one of the Leningrad stores that sold haberdashery goods. About the Leningrad queues of those years, the poet under the pseudonym Gavrila Rychag wrote the following:
“Both in LSPO and in Gostiny
Then behind the satin,
Then behind the batting,
Then behind the polka dot chintz,
Then for a couple of galoshes -
“There are all kinds of tails…” [23].
Along with the new advertising, old signs that retained the “yati” and “ery” could be found in the first years of the NEP in the retail establishments of the former capital. The streets of Leningrad became noisy: car tires rustled; tram wheels clattered on the joints of the rails; boys shouted loudly, running and selling newspapers; street musicians and singers earned their bread, as did junk dealers, tinsmiths, and sharpeners. In 1926, there were 50 underwear shops, 220 shoe shops, and 144 establishments selling ready-made clothes in Leningrad. Some private traders used contraband channels to obtain imports (perfumes, silk stockings, frames and lenses for glasses, etc.) [22. Pp. 12, 19, 55].
The story by the writer N.N. Nikitin, “The Lost Rembrandt,” first published in Novy Mir in 1935, begins as follows: “It was 1926. Legal millionaires paid hundreds of thousands in income tax. The income was large and obvious. The West was concluding concessions. Everything was favorable to luxury items. Antique dealers were in bliss…” [42. P. 190]. The historian I.B. Rabinovich recalled the appearance of Leningrad in the mid-1920s: “Everywhere there were new signs for shops, stalls, shoe, tailor, metalwork, and glove workshops – they filled every corner, every entrance, all the former concierge shops. This was the NEP spread out, these were traces of its short-lived triumph” [35. P. 70].
But this was only a short-term market thaw, allowed by the Bolsheviks. Even I.D. Sytin, with his vast experience in book publishing and bookselling, was unable to develop during the NEP years. The authorities could confiscate raw materials from private entrepreneurs for their own needs at any time and impose exorbitant taxes on them. The partnership for the trade in fabrics with the Turkestan region, created at the beginning of the NEP by the well-known pre-revolutionary entrepreneur N.A. Varentsov, who had been arrested by the Bolsheviks more than once, was closed by the authorities in 1924, after which he finally retired, worked as a consultant to the Supreme Council of the National Economy on cotton growing, in his declining years he began writing memoirs and died a natural death in 1947 [8. pp. 10–11].
In July 1924, a directive was received in the small town of Osa in Perm Krai, signed by the Secretary of the Central Control Commission of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) N. Yanson and addressed to communists working in the trade sector. It set the task for state and cooperative trade to “take control of the market through competitive struggle with private trade” [6. P. 19]. In order to increase the profitability of the city power station in Osa, which was in need of serious repairs, in 1924 the executive committee received a proposal to “obligate all traders to install electric lighting” in order to maximize the number of subscribers [6. P. 24].
In the first half of the 1920s, posters with the slogan "From NEP Russia will become socialist Russia" hung in the offices of responsible Soviet party workers and clubs. True, even then, workers wore red banners with the slogan "Death to private trade" at May Day demonstrations. One of the posters of that time read: "Save your hard-earned penny, do not buy from a private trader, do not enrich the kulak! Buy directly from the shops and warehouses of the Oil Syndicate, and where there are none, from the cooperative shops. Everything is cheaper and better at the Oil Syndicate!" And in the cooperative shops, announcements appeared like "Sale of everything to all citizens! Pre-war goods! Pre-war prices."
State propaganda tried in every way to create a negative image of both the rich urban entrepreneur and the rural kulak shopkeeper in the minds of the Soviet people – workers, peasants, employees. On posters, in satirical poems, humorous stories and newspaper essays, he was depicted as a greedy exploiter-"bloodsucker", a class enemy, a narrow-minded bourgeois with lordly airs, and in caricature drawings – as an overfed fat man ("pot-bellied") [10 ; 31. Pp. 52–53; 39. Pp. 222–230]. In the story by the writer A. Ya. Kapler's "The Return of the Battleship" describes the atmosphere in a private restaurant of the NEP era: "The hall was filled with low-cut ladies - diamonds in their ears, fingers covered with rings, sable and ermine boas thrown back on the chairs. The tables were covered with cognac and champagne in buckets with ice, mountains of snacks, and spirit lamps were burning under the hot dishes. Footmen in tailcoats were silently rushing around the hall" [18. P. 158].
The ostentatious luxury and dissolute life of the nouveau riche did not arouse the sympathy of ordinary citizens, which was reflected in fiction [49 P. 381–398]. In October 1925, according to information from the OGPU, the following conversations were taking place in the working environment of the lead bleaching plant No. 3 “Red Mayak” (Yaroslavl), which belonged to the local merchant Sorokin before the revolution: “The Soviet government only writes that the NEP workers will soon collapse, but in reality it turns out differently, they live and grow fat at the expense of the workers, who are still in poor material conditions” [40 P. 608]. Indeed, during the NEP era, wealth inequality again increased sharply, unemployment existed, and labor exchanges were in operation. But it was not only the successful NEPmen who lived well, but also the representatives of the upper and middle party and state nomenklatura, who, in addition to their salaries, received special rations, comfortable apartments, dachas, and could even receive treatment abroad at the expense of the state.
"The scum of NEP" also manifested itself in the revival of bourgeois psychology and life, which spread in the families of both NEPmen and Soviet employees. Even at the dawn of NEP, in 1921, Mayakovsky wrote a poem that is still relevant today, "About Trash":
"The storms of the revolutionary womb have calmed down.
The Soviet hodgepodge has become covered in mud.
And the mug of the bourgeois has crawled out
from behind the back of the RSFSR ."
On Christmas Day, January 7, 1924, in accordance with old Orthodox traditions, private shops were closed. As punishment, the Bolshevik authorities, who were conducting militant atheistic propaganda, fined 5,500 traders from 50 to 300 chervonets [29. Book 1. P. 282]. In 1925, the authorities closed the museum “Old Petersburg Society”, created in 1923 in the house of the merchant Stavrigin and objectively revealing the life of pre-revolutionary Russian merchants [33. P. 256].
In October 1925, the plenum of the Central Committee of the RCP(b) decided to introduce an absolute monopoly on foreign trade, which from now on could only be carried out by state organizations. At times, the NEPman traders were hampered by the notorious "price scissors" between industrial and raw materials and agricultural products, when a peasant had to give three poods of bread for 1 pound of kerosene. Overstocking, reducing the speed of trade turnover, also reduced the profits of entrepreneurs.
There was no more hated person for a NEPman than a financial inspector. Taxes on private entrepreneurs reached half of their income [5. pp. 113–132; 17. pp. 5–6]. The Income Tax Act of November 12, 1923 divided all city taxpayers into three categories: A, B, and C. Category C included, in particular, owners, co-owners, lessees, shareholders, and investors in commercial and industrial enterprises, as well as individuals engaged in commission, brokerage, freight forwarding, credit, and stock exchange operations. They were charged higher taxes and utility bills, and were deprived of the right to live in municipal housing, social security, free education, and civil rights. Category C included NEPmen whose annual income, for example, in Siberian cities was higher than 400–450 rubles. According to the Law of September 24, 1926, the lower limit of annual income for category B taxpayers was increased to 700 rubles.
On March 2, 1925, Pavel Tretyakov, a carpenter who lived at the Vavilovo station of the Samara-Zlatoustinskaya railway, sent a letter to I.V. Stalin in which, while declaring his commitment to the ideas of communism, he sharply criticized the socio-economic and tax policies: “Why are the taxes on peasants, artisans and traders so high? ... They impose so much tax on private traders that they do not have enough goods to pay for them, private trade ceases, the state loses its profitability, it would be better to take less than nothing ... In order to reduce the prices of cooperatives, it is necessary to open state retail trade in all busy trading places. Why do all the cooperatives with state trade have all sorts of little things, such as perfume, perfume soap, powder, lace, ribbons and all sorts of trinkets, but do not have the necessary carpentry and metalworking tools for peasants, artisans and other workers, we need them like bread ... "[37. [L. 48–48 rev., 49; 47. P. 132].
But instead of creating more favorable conditions for private entrepreneurs, who contributed significantly to the revival of the country's economy after the revolutionary upheavals and devastation, the Bolshevik leadership headed by Stalin, having taken a course in the mid-1920s to accelerate the construction of socialism, began to systematically oust the NEPmen from trade. First of all, the state began to interfere in the pricing process by directives. From February 1924, maximum purchase prices for bread were introduced and the issuance of letters of credit for bread to individuals was prohibited. In a number of regions, private traders began to be deprived of sources of financing. Limit prices were established for flour and baked bread [26. Pp. 3-17].
But the NEPmen, who were distinguished by their resourcefulness, established useful connections with the right people from state and cooperative trade establishments in exchange for bribes. According to information from the OGPU received in January 1925, the manager of the department store of the union of cooperatives of the Leninsky district of the Moscow province, Bukhalov, sold large quantities of products to private traders on credit with a 5% discount; in December 1924 alone, the private trader Minin received from him 4 sacks of sugar, 30 poods of millet and groats, and several barrels of sunflower oil for subsequent sale [41. P. 94].
The share of NEPmen in the urban population of Siberia, never exceeding 7%, had a tendency to constantly decrease in the second half of the 1920s. The largest number of private entrepreneurs during the NEP years lived in Omsk and Irkutsk, to which Krasnoyarsk was significantly inferior in this indicator.
The NEPmen tried to unite on a national scale. In a secret review of the political situation in the USSR for October 1925, compiled by the OGPU Information Department, attention was drawn to the initiative of the Krasnoyarsk market committee to convene a Siberian and even an all-Union congress of private traders. Inquiries about the desirability of holding it were sent to 33 market committees of different years in the country. The initiators of the congresses made a number of proposals to change tax legislation and trade practices, in particular: to co-opt competent private traders to the commission for determining the income and profitability of the trade business; to grant private capital permits for the import of imports and admission to wholesale trade; to equate the artels of private traders with cooperative organizations; to grant NEPmen voting rights; to give their children the right to study in schools and universities on an equal basis with other citizens [40. P. 588]. But the authorities did not allow the congress to be held. At times, Siberian NEPmen even expressed a desire to finance the development of schools.
The 15th Conference of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), which took place from October 26 to November 3, 1926, and noted the significant role of private traders in the area of trade turnover, pointed out the “need for special attention from the party and the state to issues of combating private capital,” primarily by strengthening control and increasing taxation [19. P. 308]. From the end of 1926, which became the last prosperous year for the NEPmen, private traders could not receive wholesale lots of industrial products from state syndicates and trusts without permission from local trade bodies; then private traders were generally prohibited from selling scarce industrial goods. And many NEPmen had to close their businesses.
Since December 1927, mass arrests of private entrepreneurs began, accompanied by the confiscation of their property [29. Pp. 403-418]. In 1928-1929, contrary to the interests of consumers, a campaign was launched to oust the NEPman wholesalers from the market for other agricultural products (meat, vegetables, fruits, dairy products). As a result, the declassification of the NEPman bourgeoisie accelerated sharply [26. Pp. 95-100].
One of the modern historians of the NEP, S.V. Sheikhetov, sums it up: “In life, Soviet private entrepreneurs were rather unsympathetic people. Greed, meanness, rudeness – these were the qualities that were most noticeable. The NEPmen did not have the traditions of charity and patronage that distinguished pre-revolutionary entrepreneurs” [50; 51].
Already in 1926, the share of private traders in trade turnover had decreased to 41%, although in Central Asia, due to local specifics, it was 67%, and in the Samarkand region a year earlier it had reached 90%.
Along with the tax burden and restrictions on the purchase of equipment, the NEPman bourgeoisie was oppressed politically. A NEPman merchant, to whom some civil rights did not apply, was a "disenfranchised person", a disenfranchised member of society.
The reaction to the oppression was the departure of businessmen underground, into the shadow economy. Among the NEPmen-"shadowy" there were even members of the party. The most colorful image of a shadow businessman of that time is one of the heroes of the novel by I. Ilf and E. Petrov "The Golden Calf": "Koreiko realized that now only underground trade, based on the strictest secrecy, was possible. All the crises that shook the young economy were to his advantage, everything that the state lost on brought him income. He broke into every commodity gap and took away his hundred thousand from there. He traded in grain products, cloth, sugar, textiles - everything. And he was alone, completely alone with his millions. In different parts of the country, big and small swindlers worked for him, but they did not know who they were working for. Koreiko acted only through front men. And only he himself knew the length of the chain along which the money was coming to him” [16. P. 411].
Smugglers who supplied imports to private traders flourished in the border regions during the NEP period. Shadow entrepreneurship contributed to bribery, including among a part of the Soviet economic and administrative apparatus, which did not disdain to "skim the cream" both from registered NEPmen and from secret bigwigs of the trade business.
1929 became a turning point in the final curtailment of the NEP. At the very beginning of the first five-year plan in the USSR, there was a shortage of consumer goods and a rationing system was introduced (1928). State and cooperative trade did not meet consumer demand, which had previously been largely satisfied by private merchants. It was then, on December 31, 1931, that the bookseller and public figure from Kashin N.P. Cherenin, author of the book “How to Open and Run a Book Trade in the Provinces” (Moscow, 1909), wrote with disappointment in his diary: “But before, it was like this: in any shop you buy what you want, as much as you want, what you need... Traders courted customers, beckoned to them: “Come to us!” And if you buy more, they will give you some candy as well. What can I say, how bad it has become!..”
By curtailing their entrepreneurial activities, the NEPmen evaded inflated taxes. The total debt of private entrepreneurs by January 1, 1930 had grown more than threefold compared to the beginning of the 1926/1927 financial year [45. P. 35]. The state was never able to completely confiscate their monetary savings. True, it was not easy for the latter to use them under the conditions of the rationing system and centralized distribution of resources. The owners of rural shops, forges and mills were subjected to confiscations in the process of the so-called dispossession of the kulaks.
State and cooperative trade organizations were never able to fill the huge market niche dominated by private traders. Moreover, the lion's share of capital investments was directed to the creation and development of heavy industry enterprises, while light industry chronically lagged behind. Even on the eve of the Great Patriotic War, huge queues formed in city stores for textiles (there was a shortage of calico, not to mention cloth). The authorities did not simply force out, but actually destroyed the so-called exploitative elements, including enterprising merchants, instead of using their experience in the sphere of commodity exchange. "Private trade was closed, and all traders were lequated. “They took away their property and sent them away” (original spelling preserved), recalled V.N. Evdokimov, the son of a merchant from Venev (Tula province), in his declining years, about the collapse of NEP entrepreneurship. His ancestors had been trading meat and manufactured goods in this city since the 18th century [52].
The fates of former NEPmen traders in the 1930s were different: some were repressed, sent into exile to remote areas of Siberia or even to forced labor camps, while others had to go into the shadows, lie low, and join the lifestyle of ordinary people, taking jobs in state trade stores or consumer-sales cooperative institutions.
Notes
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