ct with the peasantry. It was at this time that term “kulak” (literally “fist”) was coined for those peasants who refused to co-operate. It was the crime of being a “kulak” that was to cost over 5 million people their lives, most of them as we shall see, during the rule of Stalin. By 1920 the civil war had seen a Red victory at the price of an economy in complete collapse. It took a rebellion at the Kronstadt naval base (that was of course viciously suppressed) to convince Lenin that the continuation of War Communism would lead to disaster. “The flash which lit it up reality better than anything else,” he called it. The response was something that would show, that even someone as obsessed with ideology as Lenin, would make popular concessions and even go against ideology, if it was expedient to do so. In March 1921, with the approval of the 10th Congress of the Communist Party, Lenin announced the introduction of what became known as the New Economic Policy (NEP). The NEP was a retreat from the brutalities of War Communism and meant a partial return to capitalism. It was characterized by the abandonment of grain requisitioning, lowering of taxes and the resumption of local private trade. The government still controlled the “commanding heights” – large industry, finance, railways and foreign trade but many other areas were allowed back into private hands. A good comparison of a similar tactical retreat in Stalin’s time, can be seen in Stalin’s reopening of the churches in World War Two. For many years Stalin savagely persecuted the Russian Orthodox Church and actively encouraged militant atheism as state policy. However seeing the dire need of the people for true moral/spiritual invigoration after the Nazi invasion, he reopened the churches and even allowed the election of a new Patriarch. Stalin too, could be flexible if it was expedient to do so. Let us n...
