Introduction

Abstract

This book is about the Communist Party in the city of Moscow between 1925 and 1932. For Moscow, as for the whole of the Soviet Union, these were years of transformation, when the broad promise of the revolution finally narrowed into the Stalinist political and economic system. The New Economic Policy’s mixed economy, which enjoyed its best years in 1926–7, was replaced from 1929 by a centralised, state-directed structure dedicated to the Soviet Union’s planned development into a major industrial power. Agriculture, which in 1925 was flourishing on the basis of a small-holding peasantry, was collectivised between 1929 and 1930, and by 1932 it was on the brink of its severest crisis in living memory. Both these processes saw the destruction of whole classes: in the cities the so-called Nepmen, small-time entrepreneurs or self-employed tradespeople; in the countryside the small-holding peasants, and especially the stratum labelled ‘kulak’, comprising the more successful peasant farmers. Politics also was transformed. The 1920s were not years of pluralism (the only legal political party was the Bolshevik Party), but they saw more open debate about major issues than would be permitted again for half a century. The last organised opposition to operate on a national scale was defeated by 1929.