ABSTRACT
The vast majority of comrades who belong to the Comintern see Soviet Russia's New Economic Policy as merely a tactical maneuver on the economic front, a maneuver to which Soviet power has had to resort under pressure from the peasantry and in order to retain power in the hands of the proletariat. The task of economic subordination of the peasant economy to large-scale state industry is posed in unique fashion in Russia, as an agrarian country; it is posed in a way in which it will not be posed for Germany, Austria, or Czechoslovakia. In general, industrial, banking, and merchant capital played a dominant role in the prewar economy; they occupied the main command posts within the economy as a whole and subjugated agriculture to themselves. And if the proletariat were to take possession of all positions of capital in Russian economy in its prewar proportions, it would exercise complete sway economically over the whole territory of petty, nonsocialized production.
